news

Speaks for itself...

SFRC

:)

cheating

Hi, this is a cheater post because I've been busy. (More about that later.) So instead I'm recommending something my friend and colleague Zach Dundas wrote. This is so pretty! Nice writing, Zach!

xox

on language

Jeez, I was already sad about the death of William Safire. But now the magazine has apparently given his column to this guy...ugh!

movies

I've been posting some movie reviews on the KBOO Radio blog, since the radio show itself is now only once a month. It's not the most attractive website in the world, and it's confusing to navigate (at least for me), but the reviews should be appearing here, in case anyone's interested.

Secrets of Success

What's really going through the minds of professional motorcycle racers:

Recent Adventures

I have a bunch of photos to post from my recent trip to Glacier Park in Montana with my dad and our friend Patrick Goodall, but they're not ready yet. So instead I'm posting some photos from Saturday's two-stroke ride, an annual event perpetrated by the Sang-Froid Riding Club. This was my first time on a two-stroke! I gotta get one. They're weird but fun. They sound great and smell even better! You can't tell that from the photos, I guess, but if you ask anybody who was hanging around in Lake Oswego last Saturday, I'm sure they'll tell you it's true. If they can hear the question.

These were taken by Kenny Shinn, who let me borrow his friend Mona's bike for the day. Thanks, Kenny!

At the Sandy Hut, the launching point for all good rides.


On the Canby Ferry, with Dora, Tom Burnett, and Berkeley. (I don't trust my kickstand.)


Made it! All the way to Oregon City! Victorious.

terminology

I wish "locavore" meant someone who intends to eat everything in the vicinity.

8pm and I'm still reading the paper

But at least it's today's paper.

From Michiko Kakutani's NYT review of The Bolter, by Frances Osborne - I can't wait to read this book. (It's about the English "scandal queen" Idina Sackwell, the author's great-grandmother and my new hero, a rotten-girl role model famous for "lovers without number," dirty sleepovers and public bathing in champagne, among other things....)

Ms. Osborne notes that in Edwardian London adulterous affairs tended to be conducted between the hours of five and seven (known as a "cinq a sept") because it took women lots of time in those days to unbutton and unlace their layers of corsets, chemises and underskirts, let alone relace and rebutton them up afterward, so lovers scheduled their visits for just after tea when "ladies were undressing in order to exchange their afternoon clothes for their evening ones."

Starting to understand why the Brits can get so strict about their tea-time....

Not Writing

More about my favorite subject, this time from Will Ferguson in the Globe & Mail:

Not writing is the easiest thing in the world to do. And that's what an author means when she says she is “working” on a book. Working means “not writing.” Working means reading, working means “research.” Working means watching TV. Working means taking long diversionary walks. Working means perusing newspapers with an unnaturally intense interest. It means everything and anything except the actual act of writing.

Thanks RVB for the link!

Dang

I knew something felt kinda off this weekend, and I just figured out why: I missed a "top secret" Richmond Fontaine show at the Kenton Club on Friday. Dang! I'm almost never in town when they play, and the one chance I get... Well, maybe things will get back on track if I just keep watching their new video over and over and over....

Writing Is Hard, part 573

Here's why it always takes me so long to get anything done, as explained by Jack Hitt in the Atlantic:

If the story involves talking to people, talk to them as long as they will stand to have you around and then talk to them some more. Keep reading. Outline a structure to the piece. Set that aside for now. Realize you don't know enough. Go over all your interviews and research notes again, only this time, make a laundry list of all the great details, large and small, along with the best quotes. Look at that list a lot. Begin the process of re-reading all of your research. Bail out of re-reading all of your research by convincing yourself that what you really need is a long walk to think about "structure." Walk toward your shoes and look at them. Blow off the walk altogether. Descend into a shame spiral. Now, catch up on your HBO tivo'd backlog. After several hours, take another ride on the shame spiral. Lumber over to the desk and go over the interviews again. Make notes of your notes in tiny scrawl so that they can fit on a single sheet of paper. Look at the details. Write down the big ideas that form the superstructure of the piece. Realize you are a pompous git for thinking that ideas have anything to do with it and go back to that list of details. Set it aside. Read some blogs.

The next day, re-read the single sheet of paper with the notes of your notes and wonder, what does this shit even mean? Then outline a structure. Indulge in a nice long afternoon of intense self-loathing. Start to write according to that outline. Throw that draft away. Write a new outline. Go over your notes. Re-interview a few people. Realize, as if you hadn't realized this a thousand times before (most recently, a few minutes before) that your own big ideas about this story are pathetic, but this list of details and the more decent quotations from the interviews -- there's some pretty good stuff in there. Fiddle with writing a few more paragraphs. Microwave your cold cup of coffee for the third time. Go over your notes again. Yell irrationally at your spouse/child/dog/a bare wall. Now, kick the wall. Limp. Review all the transcribed interviews one more time from beginning to end. Paste a large sheet of paper to a wall and, standing up with a fresh cup of coffee in your hand, outline the piece in really big letters. Realize that you've misunderstood the point of the entire story all this time. Scream the word "fuck" really loud in an empty room. Do this about 40 times. Wipe off the flopsweat. Look at the notes on the single sheet of paper and realize just how brilliant they are, or moronic. Espy the grime on your bike chain -- it could use a good cleaning with some WD-40. Start writing the lead paragraph again. Set that aside. Find that single cartoon frame from "Peanuts" that you keep in a box somewhere, the one in which Snoopy is reading a publisher's rejection letter for his novel that goes, "Has it ever occurred to you that you may be the worst writer in the history of the world?" Read it and laugh. Later that day, read it again and not laugh. Feel really, really sad. Go over your notes one more time. Look at earlier drafts and passages and realize that maybe this stuff here is the lead, actually, and then if you follow that outline from seven outlines ago, it just might work. Re-read the last couplet of the first strophe of Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Look at those riffs in the earlier draft again and realize some are not that bad. Convince yourself that your bike chain really does need another good cleaning and what's that gunk on the inside of the rear fender? Read the latest draft-like substance and think that, with a little work, maybe this won't be too embarrassing. Feel mildly excited that there could actually be something here worth reading eventually. Look at the list of details again. Re-read the edited draft and start to feel better. Or, if not, set it aside and then repeat all of the above instructions, only this time, after each step, masturbate.

what have i been up to

Whenever anyone asks me what I've been doing lately, or even what I did all day today, my mind goes blank. So I'm writing it down. Maybe that will help.

I have an essay about crashing motorcycles in Ploughshares this month. (On the back cover, from guest editor Kathryn Harrison's introduction, it says, "In order to write our lives, we have to be willing to see them.") I also interviewed David Small, a children's-book illustrator, about his brutal and awesome graphic memoir, Stitches, for BookPage. And I wrote a short review of a decent little beach read set in Ukraine, Moonlight in Odessa, also for BookPage. The Lonely Planet Encounter guide to Stockholm is off somewhere in the gangly stages of production; I'll be answering author queries in a week or so, and then that'll be done. Meanwhile, I'm pitching a 555 motorcycle story to various places, fingers crossed.

I've also been getting back into movie reviews. I've done a couple of episodes now of "Movie Talk" on KBOO radio, hosted by Ed Goldberg and DK Holm. The first one was terrifying (it's online, in case anyone out there needs some schadenfreude). The second one was a lot easier, partly because I phoned it in from home. (Flat tire.) After both shows, I had this lingering anxiety I couldn't place. I think it's as simple as lack of control. I'm a slow girl in a fast medium: there's no time to tidy up the words as they come out of your mouth and make sure they're saying what you meant for them to say. If things come out wrong and you sound like a jackass, that's just too bad - you are now on record (in the minds of billions of KBOO listeners!) as a jackass.

If I were just talking to the fellas about the films we'd seen, maybe I wouldn't worry - although even then I get anxious if the conversation is rushed and I don't have time to fully explain myself. But the fact that the conversation is being recorded, and that it's going on record as my Final Statement about the films in question, freaks me out. Because it's definitive, I want it to be perfect. I want it, at least, to be an accurate reflection of what I think. And because I'm a slow-thinking person, that generally requires editing. Writing, rethinking, adjusting, deliberating, editing, rewriting. I don't want anyone to see what I think until it's ready. The fluid-but-permanent nature of radio makes me a little nervous. But that's good, right? And at least in the KBOO studio there is slim chance I'll come to any physical harm.

I'll be doing some podcast reviews as soon as I can figure out how to post them; will link to them here eventually. And our next show is next Thursday, Aug 20, at 11.30am.

Today I'm reading Fred Exley, A Fan's Notes. Bottom of the first page: "That the fear of death still owns me is, in its way, a beginning."

update

Hello, glob fans. (Hi Patrick!) Have any of you been swimming with killer whales lately? Because I have! Well, that's an exaggeration. But I did see a bunch of them, from a boat, 120 yards away. They were cute!


And very, very small.

I rode the Hawk up to Anacortes, Wash., for a week or so, to go to my cousin Michael's wedding and hang out with the fam. I'd never actually done a whale-watching boat tour before, but this one was great - maybe we lucked out. We saw two different pods, the jPod and the iPod if I remember correctly, totaling about 70 whales. All of them were sex-crazed and flirting, which if you're a killer whale involves flopping around on your back, waving your 'arms' and spitting up. Basically the same as humans, I guess.

(If anyone else is headed up there, we booked through the Mystic Sea Charter company, and it's not cheap, but the boats are small enough not to be obnoxious, the crew guys are cool, and the company has a helicoptor that goes around spotting whales so it can tell the boat where to go each morning. We were well into Canada when we saw our little gang here.)




I also spent a day in Friday Harbor oyster-shopping and drinking beer and talking about boys with my cousin Carrie, Michael's sister. It was a lot of fun at the time. We won't discuss the following day, except to say that riding motorcycles is a pretty good hangover cure as long as you're safely past the danger of needing to barf in your helmet. Also: Do not imagine that you can sustain yourself on beer and oysters for a whole day. It won't work; beer and oysters alone are not enough.

Looking back, I guess I'm not completely surprised I got sick....




Those are photos of lunch/dinner, consumed on board the ferry back to Anacortes. Other people ate more food later, but not me - oh no.

Anyway. More photos of the wedding and surrounding adventures posted here.

xo!

I'm in SeaTac

Hi Patrick. :)

Zoomy!

Wow, look at Paul Berman, writing about Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the New York Times Book Review:

Every last sentence in 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' offers a heroic demonstration of man's triumph over language -- unless it is language's triumph over man. The sentences begin in one person's voice and conclude in someone else's, or change their subject halfway through, or wander across the centuries, and, even so, conform sufficiently to the rules of rhetoric to carry you along. To read is to gasp. You want to break into applause at the shape and grandeur of those sentences, not to mention their length. And yet to do so you would need to set down the book, which cannot be done, owing to the fact that, just when the impulse to clap your hands has become irresistible, the sentence you are reading has begun to round a corner, and you have no alternative but to clutch onto the book as if steering a car that has veered out of control.

picture time

I've posted my 555 pics (barring a few really explicit ones from the river). Enjoy!

555

So, I just got home from this motorcycle trip. Some of you may have heard. Two weeks, Portland, Oregon, to Knoxville, Tennessee, on bikes that all had to be smaller than 500cc's, less than $500 and 1975 or older. The trip was (among other things) an amazing demonstration of the possibilities of organized chaos. There were twelve of us who went. All mechanics (except me). It wasn't a motorcycle ride so much as a problem-solving exercise. It was also a total blast. I can't wait to do it again! One night I started the campfire with a roman candle. Those things don't aim too well, so I also accidentally lit a guy's bike on fire. He was going to burn it anyway on arrival but we were still two days out of Knoxville.... I drank moonshine in two flavors, got tattooed all over, took one shower in two weeks, and earned a police escort into my campsite one night.

All together we rode about 3400 miles. Some of the scenery we encountered was pretty spectacular.


For anyone confused by the whole idea, here's a taste. There are two other segments posted, all recorded by Nathan, who shortly afterward took Patrick's DT out into the field and used it in anger, much to Patrick's delight.

I'll put up more photos soon, and will write further about this whole adventure, hopefully for money. Meanwhile, go back up there and watch that video again. That's good stuff right there.

xo

Knoxxed Out!

We made it! All the way to Knoxville on these crazy tiny bikelets...it was loads of fun. My feet are full of chigger bites and I'm sunburned and spaced out and totally happy. Check the photos on motonw.com. More coming soon!

xo

555 in Denver

I'm in Denver! Loads of bike work going on. Too tired to type much right now, but will try to update later. Photos, too. Meanwhile, you can follow us here: http://twitter.com/555pdx

xox

metrosexuality update

Of all the countries I've ever been to, Sweden has the lead (by a long shot) in the number of times I go, "WHOA, that's a dude!!!"

picture time

Photos from recent research trip to Sweden are up here.

smartypants

Back when I was getting my fancy big-city education, I had this class with Stephen Metcalf, which I loved partly because of the nerdy journo books we read (Paul Berman, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Murray Kempton) but mostly because of Metcalf's awesome vocabulary and labyrinthine sentence structure. He would throw down phrases like "Raskolnikovian garrett-dwelling troglodites" on a regular basis, all casual. It was impossible to identify, much less answer, any of his questions on first listen - they were paragraphs long, full of Chinese-box clause-upon-clauses, speckled with dangerous wormholes leading to alternate universes, and they were more likely to end in a closing parentheses than a question mark. They warped space and time - is that exaggerating? Anyway, he was a lot of fun to listen to, if intimidating to converse with.

All of which is just to preface a recommendation: Metcalf hosts the now-weekly Culture Gabfest podcast on Slate, and I stacked up a bunch of episodes on my beloved iPod before coming to Sweden. They're great - almost like being back in class, only with a tighter focus and without the enormous tuition bill or the expectation of intelligent response. And you can rewind. Check them out if you like hearing very smart people talk about the issues of the day and/or Tom Cruise.

eurovision

Hello. I'm in Sweden - therefore duty-bound to watch at least a few minutes of the 2009 Eurovision song contest on TV, which I did last night after dinner with my little old ladies. A Swedish opera singer called Malena somehow reached the semi-finals. She's terrifying! Check her out, if you don't believe me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I made a cameo appearance in Sunday's New York Times travel piece about Portland, which experts have called "a far cry from frugal" but which I actually thought was pretty good, given the territory and the audience:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/travel/10Portland.html

(That's right, I sent Matt Gross to a strip club. It's Portland; they're everywhere. Besides, obviously, I favor the oppression of women. In my defense, I also accompanied Matt to an art gallery on First Thursday, and to that Lizard Lounge free-good-beer party, and to Ground Kontrol and Backspace. And I'll have you know I pushed for the Magic Gardens over A-crop; they've got a huge burger there that's even cheaper than the steak. I think Mary's Club is still my favorite, though.)

OK. Back to work! Hoho.

mexico

Yo, neglected peeps: I finally put up some photos from the week I spent in Mexico for Damian and Ramie's wedding. Stories to come! (Eventually.) I'm off to Stockholm in the morning, for a month, for a Lonely Planet update. I plan to be just as devoted to regular glob posts as ever, so - fear not. Ha.

xo

oh boy

From a story in The Local, an English-language web mag of Swedish news:

"Swedish men have become more metrosexual and less masculine in recent times, according to a new survey polling both sexes on their opinion of the Swedish male..."

Doctor Costa's new book!

I can't wait to get this (and if you don't know who Dr Costa is, you need to go out right now and rent the movie Faster - right now! You'll like it, it's narrated by Ewan MacGregor) --

Today, during a emotion-filled ceremony at Clinica Mobile in the Jerez paddock, I launched my new book Grand Prix College. Many riders came to hold it, stroke it, make it feel welcome, appreciated and loved. Valentino Rossi, who had helped me write the book preface, looked at the cover and commented, �My brother looks better than me�. Andrea Dovizioso promised me that he�d read the chapter about him and horses during the night. Jorge Lorenzo wanted to read his own words about fear, remembering all about that interview, one night when fear was knocking hard on the door of courage. Loris Capirossi and Ingrid were moved by the mention of their young son Riccardo. Dani Pedrosa saw his photo in the book and started to read the chapter about him while the Clinica Mobile physiotherapists treated his injured knee. Roberto Locatelli read the pages about his terrible accident here at Jerez two years ago, telling how he was born to this world a second time. Nicky Hayden, after celebrating the launch of the book with the other riders, continued treatment at the Clinica after his recent race crashes. Andrea Iannone, Raffaele de Rosa, Chris Vermeulen, Bradley Smith, Danny Webb, Marc Marquez, Pol Espargaro and all the Rookie Cup �baby� riders smiled to the photographers from the Clinica truck steps to celebrate their book, their hospital and their home. The book is available in Italian, English and Spanish: I�d like not just the children, but also their parents to read it and understand all that passionate young hearts can do to put the coldness of reason into perspective. My feelings that came from hidden places inside me and guided me in writing this book can now mix with the feelings and emotions of those who read it.

some thoughts

By way of explanation, or an excuse, or just a nice couple of sentences...here's James Wood on Geoff Dyer, from the April 20 New Yorker:

It's always easier not to be writing than to be writing, and at least by not writing one is keeping alive the option of at some point writing again. But, as soon as one is doing absolutely nothing, the intolerability strikes one as being not so much a freedom as a prison, walled on every side by limitless possibility....

It's been weird here.

The little motorcycle, symbol of freedom etc., ran away, or was rolled down the hill, or took itself to church and never came back, or something, while I was out of town, and I felt so strange without it that I've been more or less paralyzed these past two weeks. That's one theory. I might also have Mexican pig flu, or something even worse that we haven't yet read about in the news. Probably it's just allergies. (I live in a park now, beneath a volcano, in case you didn't know, and every living thing in this park is bent on spewing horrible sneeze pods all day long.)

In any case, our worries are over: the missing bike has been found. A friendly neighborhood policeman called me this morning and reported having found it tucked in behind a giant bus in a church parking lot about ten blocks from my house (and right next door to Jack's...hmm!). It hadn't even been too badly thrashed - looked like someone tried to hotwire it through the headlight, failed, gave up and walked away. Or, possibly our troubles go deeper, and the motorcycle was seeking the kind of comfort and redemption one can only find in the Parking Lot of the Lord. All I know is that when I went to collect the bike it was surrounded by kindly church ladies making sweet cooing noises. They waved and waved as I rolled it away.

I doubt I'll ever know just what the poor Hawk went through during its time with Jesus. I only hope it found some answers.

Anyway, that's my excuse for not having written here lately. It's not that I don't love you all, especially you, Karl. I've just been sad. But now it's all better! Stay alert; news is on the way.

xoxo

still busy!

So I went to Mexico. Did we talk about this? I forget. Anyway, full update with soundtrack to come - this is just a note to my few remaining adherents (hi Karl!) that I am, in fact, still alive and will now be in the same place for three whole weeks, typing devotedly for your enjoyment. Meanwhile here are a couple of teaser pics:

Busy!

Hey y'all,

Here's a quick link to some more photos from Panama. Meanwhile, I've been moving into a new apartment in Portland, and then had a wedding to attend out east, and two upcoming trips to plan, but never fear: narrative highlights from the panamania will appear here soon. Watch this space!

whoa

And you thought Mexico was supposed to be dangerous...

Between that and this guy, I'm already getting nervous about my research trip in May....

in panama

Once upon a time, in Panama, I lived in a hut by a little red chair...


And the first thing I saw every morning was pretty much:


Now I'm back in the land of green vegetables and undamp air and keyboards that work, the land where you just go ahead and flush your toilet paper right down the toilet along with everything else and never wonder where it ends up, the land of airports rich with magazines and food, the USA. I miss my island paradise, even though it gave me dreadlocks and scurvy. I will report all details of the trip "very soon," but first I must eat salad and vitamins and wash all my clothes and dry off.

I am very tan.

xoxo

I have showered.

comarca de kuna yala

I accidentally got dreadlocks. Oopsie!

Note to self: next time, bring shampoo.

Photos and full report coming soon. (¨Months!¨) Back in fetid cesspit for the moment, but hopefully not for long....

xoxo
blecky

not so pretty

Panama City is a fetid cesspool. Yeay!
Currently plotting escape...details soon.

xo

¡panama!

Dudes! I´m in Panama. So far I have eaten shark; attempted to surf; ridden out a deadly apocalyptic disaster epic rain/wind storm that knocked out all the power and clogged the main road into town with dead trees; taken a three-hour Spanish class; lived in a bamboo hut; been sunburned; met a pretty convincing version of The Dude and an Argentinean chef who looks like Mikhail Baryshnikov; been attacked by a moth; showered with bats; and collected three mundane bug specimens all of which are harmless and available on the homefront. So the Bug Chart I had planned to assemble is pretty sparse as yet, but on the other hand, the Bug Chart is pretty sparse as yet.

Am currently living at a Spanish language school (on-campus dorm! kind of) in Boquete, a little mountain village full of coffee and flowers and rain. The night we got here (I am traveling with a dude called the International Crocodile, a name he got from a one-eyed drunken stranger), a massive and chaotic storm attacked the town - everyone lost power, and it didn´t come back on until last night (three days later). But folks were generally cheerful about the situation, and candlelight makes even a soggy bed in a damp cinderblock room seem fairly cozy. The current plan is to brush up on the español and then arrange a trip to the San Blas, which, if you look them up online, you´ll discover are ludicrously perfect-looking desert islands surrounded in unrealistically blue sea. I´ll upload some photos later on but basically, from what I´ve seen, just imagine the prototype of the palm tree/white sand/turquoise water/cute hut/walk across it in three minutes type of island, and you´re pretty much there.
More soon!
xo

update!

Sorry, glob fans, for that extended absence. I blame, in this order, the holidays, the altitude, and the shock of suddenly not being grossed out by the government. Also I've been traveling a lot. School ended in mid-December (so now I have a big fancy expensive degree in a dying field, hooray!), and from NYC I flew to Stockholm to rescue my mom from the Swedish holidays.

My first night in town, we visited the Creepy Doll & Potato Hospital:



After which we needed to cheer ourselves up, so we scoped out the xmas window displays at NK. NK is a huge department store and a Stockholm landmark, and its holiday window displays are usually over-the-top animatronic craziness, but apparently they too have felt the impact of the recent economic downturn:



For xmas eve itself, Mom and Mormor and I drove up to Härnösand, north of Sundsvall, to hang out with Aunt Kristina and Captain Joe the Singing Sailor. I took some video of the singing at the dinner table which I'll upload when I figure out how to do it without breaking the internet.

After Sweden I spent a couple of days in Colorado at my parents' house. Their front yard has been infested with dog-sized horses. These things are vicious and terrifying -- check it out:


Mom and Natalie could barely restrain this one from attacking an innocent child:


Here's the boring, boring view from my bedroom window in Colorado:



Sigh.

Next I flew to Portland for New Year's Eve. The boys met me at the airport, and we hired an executive car to take us to dinner at the Magic Garden (not a Chinese restaurant). The burger was delicious, but I felt overdressed: not only was I the only girl in there with clothing - I had suitcases. Later there was a party at Patrick and Clockey's house, then a brief outing to a bar to hear Thor play DJ, and then a final stop at PK's loft for some kind of weird orangey liqueur that made me feel all refreshed. I woke up early in my own little apartment feeling great, and especially pleased that my suitcases had somehow followed me.

I miss Portland! Home of motorcycles and motorcycle boys.

Now I'm back in Colorado for two weeks or so. Went skiing with the family, conquered the mountain, destroyed my knees, had a blast. In four days I'm flying to Panama for a month. I'll be posting as much as possible from there, but I don't really know what that will mean, so hang tight, legions of fans (hi Molly!), and wish me luck.

xo

eek

Whoa! Sorry, glob fans - I got lost in the space-time continuum. I have many updates for you! Back soon!

It's probably nothing

Does this happen to you, too? When you're getting ready to go on a big and maybe scary trip, do you suddenly start to notice all the many different ways in which your body is falling apart? I'm sitting here thinking about this Panamanian adventure in February (more on that later), and I realize I've been really sleepy lately and my bad tooth still hurts and one of my feet seems slightly broken and I get these headaches - brain tumor probably - and my right eye is kind of itchy and I never did get that mole checked out, plus then there's all the fainting.... I mean, seriously. In this condition, odds are slim that I would even survive a cab ride to the airport.

Lucky for me, I get to do some cushiony home-style travel first: Sweden for Christmas, followed by a couple of days in Colorado for Christmas II, then New Year's Eve in Portland, followed by a little more Colorado, just for fun. After that I'll either be in pieces or restored, and ready once again to court the most mundane/exotic illnesses of the world. Details soon!

It's raining mush!

i like cheap

My esteemed colleague Broke-Ass Stuart's book on living cheaply in New York has just come out. Here's an interview I did with him and his lovely gf back in February or so, when he was finishing up the research.

Q&A: Broke-Ass Stuart

Five bars in four hours: It's a slow night for Stuart Schuffman. The bouncy 27-year-old from San Diego is wrapping up months of research on his second book, Broke-Ass Stuart's Guide to Living Cheaply in New York. Due in November, it's part of a series published by Falls Media. The first book, which covered San Francisco, evolved from a zine Schuffman published in 2004, a gleefully impolite guttersnipe's survey of cheap-at-all-costs entertainment and food.

Schuffman's slogan is "Young, Broke and Beautiful," but you need to be only one of those things in order to appreciate his mission. He treats an evening of bar research as a scavenger hunt, with a list of likely venues in one hand, a reporter's notebook in the other and a digital camera in the pocket of his winter coat. ("It's not as warm as it looks," he says of the coat. "But I got it for $10.")

Tonight's quest begins when Schuffman gets off work, around 11pm (he had a part-time job at a sushi restaurant). At Peter McManus Cafe we find $3 pints of Bud. At Flight 151, an aviation-themed bar, Schuffman wins a drink in the hourly trivia contest, but the lousy jukebox outweighs the free beer. ("Power to the people!" he says. "Just don't let them pick the music.") At Rawhide, a black-windowed gay dive, we miss the gogo dancers but dig the cozy vibe. Finally, at an Irish pub — one of two places we try that won't make the book because they lack a sub-$4 pint — Broke-Ass Stuart sits still long enough to answer some questions.

So how broke are you really?

I'm fucking seriously broke. It's not just PR talk, dude, believe me. [His girlfriend nods.]

How did Broke-Ass Stuart first come about?

It started as a zine. I was working at a candy store in North Beach in San Francisco, and a guy from my neighborhood growing up came in. I was at a point in my life where I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. So this guy and his fiancee come in, and his fiancee gives me her card, and it says "Travel Writer." I was like, "I wanna be a travel writer." So I decided to become one. I did a little zine. Really little. One issue. And I did it for, well, the initial investment was like $50. I made a bunch of copies, and I sold them really quickly, so I made more. They sold quick too. So I did a Volume 2 about a year later, which sold even quicker because by then people knew about it.... After that I decided I wanted to do Broke-Ass Stuart, but I didn't want to do it all myself, so I had to find a publisher. And I found a publisher on Craigslist.

Really?

Heh. Yeah. Sometimes you get the breaks and sometimes you don't.

How long did the first book take?

Well, it was cumulative. All the zine research went into it, you know. So it's hard to say: three years? or four months? I dunno.

What made you decide on New York for the second book?

Well, I wanted to, you know, "expand the brand." And New York seemed like the next logical city. Because if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!

How do you even make the rent in New York on the income of a waiter/writer?

Well, living with your partner helps. But we've had to move four times since we got here. We've found all our apartments and roommates on Craigslist, too.

How do you find leads and compile your lists of places to check out?

I use Yelp a lot. They're sort of a dorky crowd, but you know. My ideal is to find a place on Yelp with one dollar sign and like one review, because that's gonna be a good bar. The places people consider cheap here — if the beer is $4 during happy hour, that is not cheap.

Is there anything you like to splurge on?

What do I splurge on? [He turns to his girlfriend.] Not a lot, right? I eat out. I don't cook, I always eat out. So my money goes to food. But even when I eat out it's still pretty cheap. I mean, you could stay home and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and save a shit-ton of money, but we don't do that. So my money goes to booze and food and rent, and that's really it. Since I've been here, like nine months, I've bought altogether maybe six articles of clothing. Seven. [Pause.] But I still look fly, I mean ... you know ... when it's not too cold out....

Whenever I do get money I spend it on travel. Plane tickets. Or if I get a chunk of money I spend it on shit that I need. I've just now got some money coming in, and I'm gonna buy a new pair of jeans, and I'm gonna hopefully buy like a nice cell-phone. Because my cell-phone FUCKING SUCKS, I hate my cell-phone. But I mean ... the way I grew up, my mom doesn't cook. My parents go out to eat three meals a day. When I'm not in town, they probably eat, like, cereal. My dad eats cereal, if possible, every meal. That motherfucker loves cereal. Dude, I love cereal. You know what? I love Cookie Crisp. Oh my God. [Pause.] When I was growing up, my house was like the center of it all, for my whole neighborhood, all the kids, and part of it was because my mom bought sugar cereals. [The cereal talk continues for a good 15 minutes; Broke-Ass Stuart and his girlfriend debate various brands and preferred levels of sogginess.]

OK, so there must be times when you're beyond broke: do you have any kind of a fallback, an emergency cushion?

Well, it seems like when I really need it, something comes through. And I think if someone was gonna, like, cut off my arm to settle a debt or something, my parents would help me out.

scenery

Went for a walk the other day and spotted the site of my next apartment:

Wow! NYC was an awesome place to be last night. I watched the election results come in on a big TV at a bar in Gowanus/Park Slope in Brooklyn, with a bunch of classmates. The bar was packed (it was our Plan B, after Plan A turned out to be a complete madhouse and we couldn't get in). All the giant TVs were showing CNN. (Was anyone else surprised to find out that Anderson Cooper is a person? I always thought it was the name of a bank or insurance company, like Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch or something. I guess I should watch more TV.) The roar that went up when they projected Obama's victory was incredible. Jet planes taking off! I was really shocked - I've never felt anything like it, especially not anything related to politics. Everyone around me started crying, hugging; the bartenders all did shots.

We stayed until after Obama's speech, then went out into the streets, where the scene was equally amazing. Universal elation. Nobody was home in bed. I walked along Fifth Ave and up to Fort Greene, and on every corner people were clustered together in bouncy little knots, laughing and cheering and doing little victory shimmies. Every car that went by was honking; girls hung out the windows yelling. The whole way down the street, people beamed at each other, we all did, every single person grinned ecstatically at everyone they saw, like we'd all been given super high doses of the same medication and it was totally kicking in. People don't smile at each other that much on the streets of New York, generally speaking.

When I got up to Ft Greene, a huge street party was rocking the main intersection - there was a band, people were dancing. It filled up the whole street. I stood at the edge for a bit, still totally enthralled. Usually, seeing masses of people all in the grip of the same emotion freaks me out. But this was different. This euphoria felt hard-earned and deeply rooted, somehow volatile, and edged with a grim understanding of how terrible the same scene would've looked if things had gone another way. People were thrilled and overjoyed, yeah, but it was a complicated joy, and you couldn't miss the underlying whisper saying it was about damned time.

Accordion Crimes

The last time I saw the Dolomites, their lead guy, Steve, who plays accordion, was frying bits of chicken in a barrel on stage at Satyricon. This was three or four years ago. It was way past 2:30am and the door guy had already turned on the lights. People were fading out and heading home, but Steve would not give up. If I remember right they were playing "Why, why, why, Delilah." It was awesome. He started throwing chicken at the people who were still there. (No one is too picky at that hour.) The set finally reached its sad end when he began to light things on fire; even Satyricon back then had limits. Afterward I remember drinking purloined beers on the sidewalk outside the club and learning (and then instantly forgetting) a sentence or two in Gaelic from Max, the Dolomites' fiddle player at the time. Although now that I think about it, that could've been a different show....

All of which is to say I was worried that when I went to see the current iteration of the band last night at the Zebulon (or is it just Zebulon, no "the"?), I might not get home in time to go to class the next day. My fears, it turned out, were unfounded. The show started right around nine thirty, and I was home by midnight. (I felt vaguely disappointed by this.) Steve has been living in Japan, apparently taking really good care of himself: he looks great. (He looks like some early, rejected version of the Pirate Johnny Depp, washed ashore and rescued by a Tokyo clown school run by kabuki bellydancers, or something.) Most of the songs had Japanese lyrics, or so he claimed, with occasional shouted choruses of hilarious simplicity ("Blah blah blah! Oh my god! Holy shit!", for example, and I'm only partly paraphrasing there). Everyone danced like maniacs. No chickens were harmed.

Here they are on MySpace.

I am in a Cone of Obliscence.

misc

This weekend, after many postponements and a whole lot of inadvisable back-burnering, I finally sent all 370-odd pages of the LP Sweden guide to Australia, where it belongs. Just got an email confirming that the maps have arrived, too. Hooray! I'd leap into the air and shout, if only my leg muscles hadn't completely atrophied beneath this laptop.

Anyway - so that's done, at least until the edits come back. I can now get back to worrying about grad school, with accompanying bursts of panic about the murky gloom that awaits me immediately afterward. Am currently revising an essay about how my very immature lifestyle choices are in fact somehow artistically or creatively or socially productive. My main argument is that the people who made all the smart moves - buying a house, investing in stocks, planning for the future - are suddenly going, "Holy crap! Recession!," so maybe those of us who were too busy stealing good dialogue from the barflies at the Sandy Hut to invest in anything bigger than a lottery ticket will turn out to be winners after all. Haha. We shall see how that one goes over.

Meanwhile, I've been reading a lot.



These are some of my required books for this semester (others are waiting optimistically on the bedside table). A few are from last semester, and there are six books in the stack that have nothing to do with school. Any guesses?

Speaking of reading...I nearly fainted in the bookstore the other day. Keep in mind that I faint at the drop of a hat. Still. For my class on polemics I had to buy a copy of Against Love, by Laura Kipnis. This mission sent me deep into the bowels of The Strand, which normally I'd find the pinnacle of happy Friday-night activity. However. Against Love, it turns out, is filed under "Relationships." It's not an inconspicuous row of shelves hidden discreetly in a corner, either. No. There's a Huge Sign, with big black letters: RELATIONSHIPS. Implication: Bad At; Hopeless In.

I couldn't find the book right away. So there I am, frumpy little dame in her 30s all alone on a Friday night in Manhattan, staring in desperate panic at the shelves of The Most Embarrassing Section Ever to Appear in Any Bookstore. I felt woozy. Suddenly the whole room seemed to be full of vaguely attractive men, all of them staring at me, like, Jesus, there's a one-way ticket to Sadtown. The world went fuzzy at the edges, and I had to duck over into Self-Help for a minute, take a few deep breaths and calm down. "Relationships." The horror.

In other news, I went to a free screening of the Swedish vampire movie, "Let the Right One In." It was excellent - bleak, weird, icy, hilarious in that typically Swedish way that's always also uncomfortable. I hadn't thought of the Swedish sense of humor being a perfect match for a horror film before, but it totally is. Anyway, go check it out. Good times.

Vikings always match

Many people believe economics and gender politics were to blame for the extraordinarily low birth rate in Sweden during the late '70s. But sometimes I wonder if there might have been other reasons:

http://pics.yemii.com/swedish-dance-bands.html

Props to Margo for the link. Keep scrolling down...it just gets better and better.

Update!

Greetings, neglected legions. Busy times in Beckyland! Some disjointed updates for you:

On a recent mission to watch the Indianapolis Moto GP race, I tromped out to this Williamsburg bar that usually shows the races on a big screen on Mondays. (Better late than never.) Well, as often happens, one thing led to another, and before long I was invited to Florida (or Long Island) with a blinged-out local retiree who said he was scared of motorcycles but that if he ever got one, it would be 100 percent chrome. He looked like an older version of James Caan - white polo shirt, gold chain, pinkie rings, thick and tidy wads of cash. He told me about the '57 Chevy he used to drive up and down the street we were on (Driggs); the car had seven layers of black paint on it. "Bulletproof," he said. His friend had a red one, same deal but nine layers.

He asked me if I wanted boys or girls; at his age, he said, he was probably past that point anyway, "but I would be willing to try with you." At some point during the evening I told him how old I was. "I usually go for younger women," he said. "You don't mind if I look around, do you?"

They called the race, due to hurricane, but not before Rossi had made his way to the front. "That's your guy, right?" said James Caan. "You sure got some power."

On Saturday night I went out for drinks with my pal and colleague Leif Pettersen (go read his blog, Killing Batteries), who turns out to be allergic to me. He was a good sport, though, and helped me avoid doing any real work until almost four in the morning.

As for my other adventures this week, let's just say losing two of my four ponytail hair-tie thingies was the least depressing but most representative consequence. The world is small and mean, and the city is so big. It's all left me in a weirdly unsettled, trancelike state, the perfect mood for reading Joan Didion, which is lucky because The White Album was one of the week's reading assignments. The pace of school is picking up, and I'm a shockingly slow reader. (I savor.) My list of boyfriends has expanded to include George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, for anyone still keeping track.

For Friday's class I get to write 50 to 200 words about why I'm special and the rules don't apply to me. I sort of think it goes without saying, but whatever.

Found this today at the very end of Harper's magazine; I like what the semicolon does to it:

"In space, the earth's shrieking could be heard; Mars's soil, said chemists, will support asparagus."

Scenery for the Curious

Here's the view from my temporary hut in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY, USA, where I'll be staying until this last semester of school winds up in December.


Here's the living room/book cave -- and right behind that fan in the window, there's a GIGANTIC spider hanging out on the other side of the screen (but for how long???).


And here's a pic (bad, but I like it anyway) from a couple of weekends back, when Brenda came to visit and we went to the farmers market that happens every Saturday right outside my door.

tourist time

This week, while waiting for my living situation to sort itself out, I played New York City tourist. Fun game! My first night here I just walked around the neighborhood, people-watching. The sunset killed, but I had no camera. Next day I went to the Whitney to see the exhibit on R Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the buckyball (among other things) and all-around cool cat. The display included tons of his drawings and plans, all of which have hilarious annotations scrawled all over them. He was a funny guy. Here's a sketch comparing his "4D" house to the "tailor-made archaic contraption" most folks live in:

He also invented a three-wheeled car (the Dymaxion car) that could parallel-park in two square inches, held eleven people and got around 35 miles to the gallon while hitting speeds of up to 120mph. And this was in 1933.

Recently my grandpa sent me photos of the army hut he and Granny lived in when my dad was a tiny munchkin. It was basically a particleboard cube, so small they could barely all fit inside at once, but housing was scarce at the time and they took what they could get. Meanwhile, Bucky was marketing self-contained home kits that cost hardly anything, went up in a day, and could be transported anywhere cheaply. Orders poured in, but the things never got made. What gives? And what about his floating cloud cities? or the gigantic pyramid community outside of Manhattan, or the geodesic dome over Manhattan?

None of the really cool stuff ever gets invented. We are lame.

Anyway. I also went to Film Forum one day and spent the whole afternoon watching French crime films: Un Flic and The Sicilian Clan, both starring my boyfriend Alain Delon. Pretty great.

Yesterday I hung out at MOMA, which I'm starting to love almost as much as Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The big exhibit now is Kirchner and the Berlin streets - I love his angular prostitutes, all sleek and vivid. I bet they'd be fun to hang out with. They look cool:


Also spent some time in what I call the Freaky Germans room, with Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz - the Grosz they had up is SO super yucky, it's a portrait of an old man and the skin on his head is too thin and shiny, you can see veins and blech, it's just gross. Great, but gross. Like the old hacking dude in Prizzi's Honor - extreme nightmares. I love Otto Dix but he's scary; his self-portrait at MOMA is plastic-zombie creepy. Photos of him in real life make him look pretty rad, but the painted version gives you chills, man. Christian Bale in saranwrap.

Mostly though I just walked around and looked at the city. It's huge! I walked past the UN by accident, so now I know where to find a police officer if I should ever need one. Jeez. Later on the doorman at a fancy apartment building tried to get me to buy his Honda Interceptor (red), but it looked awfully shiny and new. I doubt I could afford it, much less ride such a thing. (I miss my little Hawk, though. She is chilling in Zach's garage. And the racebike is chilling in pieces in Jack's garage...more on that later, no doubt.)

I'm dragging my rucksack to the apartment today - the place is in Fort Greene, actually bordering Fort Greene Park. It comes with a nameless fish I'm allowed to kill if things go badly. Updates and photos once I get settled in.

I am in a cone of uncertainty.

pdxoxoxo

It's 8am on a sunny Sunday morning and a crazy still-drunk dude is walking down the street screaming the lyrics to "Broken-Hearted Savior" outside my window. Oh, Portland. This is the packing-up-and-cleaning-out weekend - I fly back to NYC early Tuesday morning. At which point I'll have to dig around in my storage unit and hope I left my analytical brain in there somewhere. Hasn't been that long since school got out, but it feels like years. Years! I'm actually kind of excited to swap my hectic summer social butterflying for a fall & winter of Extreme Reading. I just hope I still know how to do it. And that I can shake off the guidebookian habit of writing everything in 30-word blurbs, with a lot of extra u's and l's.

*

Now it's Tuesday morning. 5:23am, Portland airport. Hope I remembered everything. Spent yesterday evening sitting on the deck of Zach's new apartment, which has a view over the entire kingdom of Portland and all its adorable landmarks: everything from the Made in Oregon sign to the tram. (The tram is so exciting! Portland as paperback book cover! It doesn't look real.) I french kissed the entire city, and my motorcycle, then napped on my couch for a few hours, and here we are. May post a PDX Summer Fun Roundup later on.

I am in a cone of silence.

So long, pal

My old rodeo horse died. He was eighteen million years old! So it's not sad. But still.

I'm looking for a good picture of him. In the meantime, here are some pics I took awhile back of a giant horse eyeball:




And here's where he spent his retirement:

I am SO BORING!

Hang in there, legions of fans -- update coming soon.

xo

typing is hard

In case anyone's wondering why I haven't been globbing much lately...here's some LP math for your morning's entertainment. Current project allows Your Author five and a half normal weeks of writing time to produce about 71,100 words. By "normal weeks" they mean they're calculating this as if you get weekends off (ha!). This means producing about 2,500 words of sparkling prose a day. Many of those words are phone numbers and things like "open noon-3pm on alternating Tuesdays from June-August but only Sundays and every other Thursday the rest of the year" -- not too taxing creatively, sure, but tedious to arrange. Especially when you're getting the info from a reindeer-mauled notebook or a used cocktail napkin and you have handwriting like mine.

The other part that makes the math a bit weird is that, really, you don't write most of the book from scratch. It's an update of what's already there, so some of the text is going to stay as it is, if it's fine that way. The basic early history of Sweden, for example, hasn't changed much since the previous edition. (Bad example, though, as LP has a "new style" for its history chapters, meaning significant rewrite.) Anyway, what we're really counting here is not so much words written as words prepared. Or something like that.

Anyway. Yesterday I wrapped up a big chapter, which allowed me to do an accurate where-I-stand word count. Uh-oh! The scoop: I've been home and writing for 15 work days, by which I mean Monday through Friday, days when regular people work when they have real jobs in offices. One of those days was a holiday (July 4th!), so let's call it 14 work days. In 14 workdays at 2500 words per day, I should've finished 35,000 guidebook words. That's a lot! So how many do I really have done? Get ready:

25,783.

Ouch!

What this means, of course, is that (1) I'm freaking out a little, and (2) in the margins between today and tomorrow I need to crank out 10,000-odd words. Plus today's 2500! Whoo!

I'm already tired just looking at that!

OK. I'm off to inject some coffee and look around for an easy chapter that's already perfect...

sweden recap

As promised...a brief wrap-up of Sweden, form of list:

• Days in country: 38
  
• Kilometers driven: 7818
• Same distance in miles, according to an online converter: 4846.695299451205
• It sounds cooler in miles!
• Kilometers of trails hiked: probably about 100
• Kilometers of city sidewalks explored: 4846.695299451205 (not counting when I was lost)
  
• Peed in the woods: many times
• Non-adorable cottages seen: two (plus one that was just so-so)
  
• Elk spotted: one
• Reindeer: hundreds
• Australians: only one!
  
• Pairs of shoes annihilated: one and a half (I've been limping)
  
• Hotdogs eaten: one
• Herring for breakfast: five times!

What? Where am I???

The last little bit of my trip was spent in Harnosand with the whole family, as described earlier. Sample photo:

GB and Mini-GB. Dang, that chick is small!

Best quotation of the trip, taken from a report about reindeer, their history and uses:
"The intestines made nice toys for the kids."

When I flew back to Portland, the boys picked me up at the airport in a minivan. It was supposed to be a van full of cute boys, but by accident they had instead filled it with cute girls. Oh well. There was also beer, and just enough room for my luggage, so I was pleased. We cruised around for awhile, attempted to look at the sparkly lights of Portland from Mt Tabor Park, were denied by Johnny Law, retreated to Beulahland, had one beer each and all went to bed. (Not together.)

A couple of days later, John G and Sean came in from SFO for Margo's Awesome Goth Wedding and we immediately went out for drinks. I was still jetlagged and waking up at 3am every day, which meant things started to look weird and woozy by the time the bars closed, but it was fun. (It also made me wonder how much time can pass before you have to concede that what you've been calling jetlag is really just your personality.)

JG and I went to Powell's. I love Powell's. I bought four books. Because if there's one thing I need, it's more books. One of them was Kevin Sampsell's new book, the ickily titled Creamy Bullets, and as I was carrying it around the store, there he was. I saw him see me holding his book, and I didn't know what to do - it was already autographed, and I've only met him once a long time ago, and I just sort of froze. Looked away. Awkward.

The other things I bought were Gary Lutz's Partial List of People to Bleach, which I keep hearing about (mostly from Kevin Sampsell! who published it), and a Paul Berman book (for skool), and this book called Motorman by David Ohle, whose new novel The Pisstown Chaos (which I just started) might be the weirdest thing I've ever read. Planning to review it somewhere so I'll save the details, but if you're impatient and like reading weird things, pick it up.

And that's all for now. More guidebook typing awaits!

pdx

Whoa! Sorry, glob fans, if you were starting to think I'd been trapped in Newark Airport this whole time. I wasn't, I've just been busy. I'm all nestled into my little Portland apartment, now with real art (in frames!) and grown-up furniture. Most of my stuff is in storage, and I have to say it's pretty sweet to have a crashpad so uncluttered.


Still noisy, though. See those windows? Huge loudspeakers in disguise. Broadcasts of the 28th Avenue Street Noise Show begin at 6am and go until about 3am. My favorite segment is the one called "Local Homeless Guys Frighten Drunk Hipsters for Cash," which comes on around 2, but otherwise it's quite peaceful here.

Anyway, I'll be in town until the end of August, typing away at LP's Sweden guidebook and other secret projects.

Speaking of Sweden...update and photos coming later today. Honest!

airport life

Newark Airport is full of tiny birds!

If you ask me it doesn't seem like a super nice place to raise a family. (Even a tiny bird family.) But, then again, when your alternative is to build your nest outside the airport in Newark... OK, I admit I don't know much about Jersey, but Newark I'm pretty sure is no milk-and-honey paradise for the small and winged. (Is it?)

Also, airport people eat messy fried food. Crumbs everywhere!

Plus: man, it is pouring out there. Smart birds.

Anyway, I'm headed home; full trip debriefing to come in a day or two, with jetlag and added pictures!

Attacked!

I'm in Härnösand with the fam, including Mom and Dad, Karl and Natalie, miniature niece, Mormor, Moster, and Captain Joe, the singing sailor. Lots of eating, sleeping and wine. Also chocolate. Today K & N and I took a walk up a hill to get a closer look at this huge windmill, but we failed. Reason: Sniper attack! Sweden is not at war. However, just in case, a zillion Swedish youth were hanging out up there, living in tents and wearing camouflage, hiding in the forest and firing little BB-type projectiles at each other. They had military vehicles and convincing rhetoric, but the guy we talked to said it was just "gaming." (Clearly I'll need to investigate this further.) Anyway, it was a little scary when one of their guards aimed his machine gun at our heads, but eventually his boss came over and yelled at him ("DO NOT AIM YOUR WEAPON AT CIVILIANS," in English), then raised a hunter-orange flag and led us through the war zone, past the camp, and on our way to safety in the village below. No casualties.

Karl took pix, so if he sends 'em I'll post them. (Hi, Karl!) (He's sitting ten feet away.)

Heading back to Stockholm tomorrow, then Portland on Sunday. So long, Norrland!

Abisko

Before that, though, I did some research on some of the walks listed in the old guidebook around Abisko. They were pretty good!


Further evidence will be uploaded shortly.

I peed in Finland.

Pretty much unrelated to Sweden

Two of my stories just came out, on the same day:

A profile of Firewater's Tod A

and

A review of Personal Days by Ed Park (he's funny! go see him read in Portland, Portlanders, and then tell me how it was!)

OK. Back to Arvidsjaur.
(No, I can't pronounce it properly either.)

Picture Time

OK, I've added a few pix to flickr -- you can look at them here. Hooray for rain!

Det Blåser

It seems the weather gods did not receive their copy of my itinerary, which very clearly stated that I would be taking today off to go hiking. It did not include a request for gale-force winds (what's a gale, anyway? just how forceful is that) and sideways rain that turns into snow when you get to the trailhead. None of that stuff was in the memo, but here it all is. Hrmph. A boring afternoon of typing, instead. Lucky me, I'm staying at a B&B (two nights in a row! temporary heaven) that has a nice cozy living room and the free-floating Internet.

This morning I did brave the weather to check out Atoklimpen. It's a crazy-looking mountain, traditionally a Sami holy place. ("Ato" means "that there" - a mountain too sacred to be named!) There's a little cottage and a grass hut at the foot of the hill. The cottage looks humble but secretly wields massive political power. It was built in the 1920s, back when the nomadic Sami were forbidden to build permanent structures. They were only allowed to live in tents. They built it anyway, and the fight over the cottage eventually changed the law. Hut power!

The place is still used for corralling herds of reindeer; I took a little stroll along a pathway past the cottage, which was low enough to escape the wind and rain, and came across a mini-herd. More baby ones, hopping around. You're supposed to let them graze in peace and not go too close, but from far away the babies looked pretty cute.

Oh! Most exciting news of the entire trip so far, and I almost forgot! Yesterday, I saw a moose. Up close! It trotted across the highway right in front of my car, at a leisurely pace (but still too fast for me to pull out my stupid camera in time). I think it was a girl: no antlers. It glanced over at me on its way by, then disappeared into these woods:


P.S. A moose! It was not an elk! Sweden gets confused re moose and elk, partly I guess because "moose" translates as "elj" (because I guess moose are called elk in Britain?). Which makes me confused, too. But dang it, I know what I saw. Moose!

Teleportation!

Cavemen, revealed at last!

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travelstories/article/pacificnwkitsch_0608/

Update!

Oh, Swedish beer! How yucky and unbeerlike thou art. Sigh. I bought a can of it at the grocery store (and already the Swedes among you are wailing, "But that's not real beer!" I know, you're supposed to get the good stuff at System Bolaget, but this is regular old Carlsberg 3.5% beer, it should be beer, like I'd have at home, except it has extra flavor of "ew") this afternoon to go with my sandwich for dinner. I'm staying in a pretty little farmhouse in Järvsjö, because I didn't feel like staying in Hudiksvall ("Happy Hudik!" it's called), and because I have a looooong way to drive tomorrow so figured I'd get a head start. I didn't know if this place would be open (turns out it's always open, the guy said, even when he's not around, his neighbors let you in and you leave your money under the pillow in the morning - tooth-fairy honor system) so I stopped for supplies just in case it was going to be a picnic-and-nap-in-the-car night. No worries there. I'm in a big red wooden barnlike house, in a room with one of only two double beds I've ever seen in Sweden (the other is in the room across the hall - usually they're just two teeny beds lined up), with french doors that open onto a little deck that overlooks a wide green river valley dotted with pretty red houses.

Oh, and below the deck there's an immaculate garden surrounded by a tiny red picket fence. Lilacs at the corners. Come on, Sweden. Let up a little.

Yesterday*, in Gävle, which rhymes with a Swedish cussword, for the first time ever I watched the MotoGP while in Europe! (On TV.) It was totally weird. First, I was the ONLY person watching - possibly the only one in all of Sweden; the bar was the only bar in town that seemed to have any televisions at all, which normally would please me. This bar is part of an awful chain called O'Leary's that I tried to eradicate from the previous edition for its pure cheesy obviousness (it would be like reviewing Denny's, except O'Leary'ses are easier to find). But I guess it has its purpose. On the Sunday of the GP race in Mugello, the Gävle O'Leary's opened at 2pm. The race started at 2pm. I waited around the corner until 2:01pm, all casual, then went in, probably looking like I had to pee. The barmaid was sort of mean, but the Hives guitarist in the kitchen understood "motorcycle race" (I don't know the Swedish for race! I know track, but that didn't help), and he knew which channel to put on. I bought a beer and they left me alone. Yeay! But it was odd watching the action without any skreeky boy sound effects around. The silence of the bar made me feel like I had to be quiet, too.

The volume on the TV was up, at least. Hearing the broadcasters in Swedish was funny but sort of disappointing; they never sounded excited about anything. At most, they'd go "oj" (pronounced "oi!" or "oy!" depending) at the really dramatic moments. It took them almost a whole minute to replay Rossi's maneuver into the lead. But there was a better than usual focus on the mid-pack battles. And there was only one commercial break, and all of the commercials in it were motorcycle-related (no Harleys). After the race, you got to see way more of the post-race shenanigans than we normally get. It in fact takes ages for the press conference to come on, because you see everything in real time: riding back to the pits dodging crazed fans, giving and receiving high fives, spraying the champagne, all that. When Rossi and Pedrosa did their mother-tongue speeches, a translater did a voiceover in Swedish. Not as sexy.

* actually a week ago!

OK, now it's Tuesday night. I'm at a hostel in Tänndalen. (I'm not calling them youth hostels anymore. Most people in them are even older than I am. In Swedish they're called "wanderers' homes," which I think sounds nice.) My view through the bedroom window today is almost an exact copy of one of my grandfather's paintings. (A specific one.) Slopy brown hills mottled with leftover snow. In front of that, trees for miles. I think I'm looking at Norway; will check the map later. Since I arrived in Tänndalen, three people have asked me if I was going to Norway, their eyes full of hope and yearning, as if Norway were some mythical beauty forbidden to them. (But they're so close! They could just go!) I'm going eventually, I tell them. (It seemed heartless to admit I'd popped in for five minutes last week.)

Update: Now I'm in Åre. It's a ski-resort town, completely abandoned except for a few dedicated mountain bikers. (This is the kind of mountain biking that requires a dirtbike helmet, knee pads and shinguards; you ride up the ski lift carrying your sturdy little bike, then you ride down at insane speeds on these twisty little tracks full of obstacles like sideways bridges and steeply pitched boulder fields. I've never seen the likes of it before.) Hostel bedroom window has yet another staggering view: trees, mountains, occasional cottages, Icelandic ponies arranged on the green green grass. Today is Sweden's National Day: June 6. It means that on the radio, they play only Swedish music; also, almost everything useful is closed. Same as July 4th in Amurrka, pretty much: listless people sit in their yards on plastic chairs, turning pink, eating and drinking things they never otherwise would, in appalling amounts.

Yesterday was even better. I woke up in Östersund (where the sea monster lives! allegedly) at 7am or so to the sound of inebriated college-aged people dancing in the backs of huge trucks while being driven around the city. It's not something you hear every day, so I had to peek outside and make sure that's what it was. Yep. Traditional Swedish graduation ritual. Loud!

By the time I'd showered and eaten breakfast, dozens of the sad pale creatures were collapsing in little patches of shade from heat exhaustion and too many alcopops. And in bikinis, too!

Anyway. From Åre, I drove to a teensy little hostel in the village of Björkvatten (hard to find on the map - gravel road, etc). This route led me through - yes! - Norway. Instantly, a guy passed me like I was standing still. (He didn't give me the thumbs-up I'm used to getting when this happens. Strange.) The pavement improved, and the house/church dynamic shifted: red church, white houses. Also, SPE, the mountains were definitely cuter.

Photos coming up.

Björkvatten's hostel was abandoned when I got there. A note on the door said (I think), "Welcome! Cyclist to Rm 3. Rooms free! Come back later." The grammar eluded me and I couldn't tell if that meant I should come back later or the warden would be coming back later. (On reflection, it clearly meant the warden, but I was tired.) The door was unlocked, which meant I knew I had a place to sleep regardless, so I relaxed, sat at the picnic table on the lawn and read for a while. The cyclist showed up. No warden. Eventually I just picked out a bed; the cyclist reported that the warden showed up at thirteen minutes past one a.m., but I heard nothing. She was there when I woke up, though, so I got the world's tiniest cup of coffee before hitting the road again.

More Norway! This was the most extreme example yet of its superiority: Sweden, gravel road, major potholes, rickety houses. Cross the border, and voila, buttery pavement shaped as if specifically for motorcycles. (I highlighted it on the map!) I actually drove for about 5km down the wrong road just because it was such a perfect road. (Also because I missed the turn.)

Later I went a km or two out of my way to pass through a place called Kyklingvattnet: "chicken water." Mysterious! Saw it on the map and had to investigate. Turned out to be a pair of scraggly-looking houses. No chickens in sight. Hmm.

Also had my first reindeer sighting of the trip! It was right around the Stenenjokk mine, in a landscape that looks totally fake, like some crazy George Lucas planet. (Again, pics coming soon.) The reindeer were a little too far off to photograph, but it was a huge herd, and there were baby ones. Aww.

This is a very Twilight Zone time to be traveling in Sweden. Tourist season doesn't start until Midsummer ("right now everyone is at home in their gardens," one guy told me). Everything I drive past is closed. But it's so warm and sunny out that it's hard to believe nothing is going on. The weather says "summer" but the calendar says "hibernate." If Sweden were a bear it would be very grouchy right now. Meanwhile, museums are closed, roads are under construction, the hostels have dust bunnies. Gangs of snowmobiles loiter in people's yards, totally bored, nothing to do in this weather.

I'm now in a hostel in Saxnäs. Just ate my first hot meal in recent memory, not counting one grillad korv in Ljusdal. (I haven't seen an open grocery store for miles - Swedish miles! - and I ran out of supplies yesterday. Hungry Becky!) Tomorrow: Tärnaby, where the hostel isn't open yet but a new-ish B&B place is waiting for me. Onward!

språk

"Beach volleyball" in Swedish is "beachvolleyboll."

update, with photos!

Today, since I was so close (Idre & thereabouts), I drove across the border into Norway for a few minutes. Immediately the speed limit went up by ten, and all the o's were crossed out.

Here are some of those pictures I promised you:

^ The morksuggan! It's saying, "Keep Rattvik clean." And implying, "Or else."

^ Cat shaved like a poodle. How did they get it to sit still for this?


^ All of the houses are cute. (This one's cheating; it's historic. But still.)

^ See? Normal house, totally cute. Look at the tiny, tiny hut in the middle. Aww.


^ Even the hotdog stands are cute.

^ Cute bike.

^ One of my lunch stops.


^ A bear!

Best Swenglish Ever

From a youth hostel information email:

"You can also order dirnks and snaks from our blobby bar. "

Mörksuggan

Sunlight! So tiring! Haha. I am in Rättvik, in the Swedish heartland, close to where they make those little painted Swedish horses. Everything's still irritatingly cute. Weather is insane. It's sunny and warm from like 4am until around 11pm, maybe 10:30. Very discouraging. Today I rebelled and spent a Whole Hour sitting on the hostel's front lawn and reading a Novel Unrelated to Work or School in Any Way. It was great. Otherwise, been pretty busy.

Notes of scale:
40 Swedish kronor = about 7 American dollars
cost of tank of gas = 400 kronor
tanks burned through so far = 3 (it was full when I started)
kilometers driven = 1551
kilometers left to drive = untold zillions (I've really barely started)
where I'm sleeping tonight = Rättvik
where I'm sleeping tomorrow night = Sälen
cans of RedBull consumed = only 3!

Readers' poll:
What do people who aren't guidebook writers do when they're on vacation?

Just curious.

Have realized I generally dislike exploring cities and towns of medium size. You have to go through them too quickly to be able to perceive any of their personality, which makes it seem like they have none. I have to take particularly excellent notes in medium-size towns because the second I leave, I forget everything about them. Right now, for example, I can't remember one single thing about Karlstad, except for its cool name. I'm not sure if it was Sunne or Sala whose main square was a parking lot. Wait, no, was it Askelsund...? I mean, these are places I've visited within the past week! But there are so many of them. And after about half a dozen they start to blur and smudge and fade. If I drove back through Sala or Sunne or Askelsund now it might look familiar or, equally imaginable, it might no longer exist at all.

Not to be completely solipsistic.

(I guess that's redundant.)

Anyway, Rättvik left an impression on me; I remembered it from last time. It's tiny, sleepy. Can't remember where I stayed, though - probably a campsite along the way, or maybe this was one of those nights when I slept in my car. But I remembered the long bridge and the ace konditori and the gang of feral kids hanging around the train station.

I hadn't realized until yesterday that it is also the home of one of my favorite critters, the Mörksuggan. Hard to translate. It's something like 'dark sow' but that name isn't cute enough to describe the critter's rotund, fuzzy-tailed, pointy-eared, ghoul-eyed darlingness. It's a little wooden carving thingie, painted black. It rocks gently on its little pointed feet. Margo has one. They look sort of like Moomins. Anyway! Apparently the artist was a local, and the library had a big exhibit about him. He was primarily a painter, and did some things that I believe were etchings, but none of us could come up with the precise word in English, and now I've forgotten the Swedish word (it's upstairs on a note). Forgot his name, too, but I bought a book about him, in Swedish, and the three librarians attending to me were so pleased that a stranger had exhibited interest, they gave me another book ("a gift from the foundation"). They were really excited. I was, too, enough to subject them to my poor, crude Swedish. Which I guess they dug, bless them.

Anyway. Still no wifi, but - pictures of mörksuggarna to come, along with, of course, the shaved cat, some caged bears, and many adorable (but totally unaffecting) pastoral country scenes. Stay alert.

Hej!

Hi there, legions of fans. Apologies for the recent neglect. I'm in Sweden. Uppsala, to be exact. I flew in yesterday, arrived at 8 in the morning, grabbed my rental car (a Skoda, for those of you who pay attention to types of cars; small and grayish-blue, for the rest of us) at the airport, and dived in head-first to my summer job. Uppsala: conquered. Yesterday I walked my ankles off museuming. This country really knows how to do museums. Then today I drove around to all the old iron-forge villages. Very pretty (oh but for a motorcycle on these roads! Course, then I'd never get any work done).

Every time I come to Sweden, especially in spring, I realize I'd forgotten how incredibly pretty the landscape is. Everything is ludicrously green, and practically all the buildings are either cute and red or cute and vanilla or, in the cities, cute and tan. The cuteness is overwhelming. There's also a very particular feel to being here, something to do with the humidity plus the uniformly soft smell of the handsoap...I know that sounds odd, but it's true. (They use the same handsoap in every public restroom in Sweden, plus in my grandmother's house.)

This afternoon I drove through the town of Film. One-word review: picturesque! Seemed wrong to take a photo, though; all I have is a digital.

Also saw a cat shaved like a poodle.

Details and photos coming up.

Northline

Willy V's book just came out! (Dang, Powell's made me think it wasn't out until this weekend.) I have been waiting all week and am annoyed that I didn't just go look and see if they had it at the bookstore, because they probably did. You can't trust the Internet! (For reals about the waiting, though! It is going to be my finally finished-with-the-semester present to myself!) Anyway, I'm going over there right now!

Meanwhile...here's WV's playlist on the New York Times book blog.

Also, check out this sort of funny/creepy thing I found the other day: a blog post in which someone psychoanalyzes my review of WV's novel The Motel Life.

Book review!

Turkish author Asli Erdogan is speaking in NYC over the next couple of days. I wrote a review of her latest novel, The City in Crimson Cloak (Soft Skull), but I got too distracted by homework to do anything with it, so instead I'll start a new trend and make my glob vaguely timely. Here you go!

The City in Crimson Cloak
by Asli Erdogan
Translated by Amy Spangler
$14.95
Soft Skull/Counterpoint

People fend off death in all kinds of ways, usually after they've done their best to court it. Take for example Asli Erdogan's heroine, Ozgur, a stubborn Turkish girl who throws herself into the slums of Rio de Janeiro and refuses to leave, though she knows the city will kill her.

We know it, too. The novel introduces us to Ozgur on the last day of her life, but even if it didn't say so on the cover, you'd be able to guess from the fever-dream intensity of her language that this girl is not long for the world. Erdogan packs her small novel with sensuous, hypnotic and hyperrealistic evocations of Rio -- squalor, heat, paranoia, drugs, noise, corpse-lined streets -- that make Ozgur's dark attachment to the city convincing. She hates the place, but she's transfixed. The fragmented story never clearly explains why she's there to begin with, but one thing you know right away is that she's not the kind of girl to walk away from a fight. And in Rio she finds herself an epic battleground and a gargantuan foe.

Ignoring her mother's long-distance pleas to come home, Ozgur lurks in her spartan room, smoking, fuming and writing. She's out of money, and she's lost touch with her friends. She's an angry girl alone in a dangerous city. Going home would be too easy. Worse, it would be a concession to the rules, an implicit acknowledgement that young girls should behave themselves, that certain places are simply unlivable, that there's no point in struggling against the way things are. Instead, with a thin notebook as her only weapon, Ozgur sets out to tame the city, to remake it according to her own vision. The novel she is writing serves as correction, accusation and lament.

"I wrote," Ozgur explains, "because I could find no other cover, no other protection against death in this city which puts a value on human life of ten to four hundred dollars per head."

The book is short but not slight. Ozgur/Erdogan writes as if she wants to grab the reader by the collar, shake him awake and then slam his face into each metaphor to make sure he gets it. Sometimes she almost loses control of language: "The violence that had grown in her heart like a stalagmite ever since she'd begun to live in this city frequently took over the reins to her being," she writes early on in the book. But the mixed metaphor actually fits here -- in a city as physically and spiritually chaotic as Erdogan's Rio, you can believe that a geological feature might seize the reins and drive a person headlong into disaster.

The stories Ozgur records in her notebook are, she tells us, "just phenomena that I've selected to replace reality, lies to lick my wounds... A few glimmering twitches in an ocean of darkness. Tremulous, plain, enchanted..."

Before long, fiction ripens into prophecy: the things she describes begin happening to her. Ozgur started writing in order to tame the city, but inevitably, the city takes over. Erdogan, a Turkish human-rights activist who has served on the PEN American Center's Writers in Prison Committee, might not have intended her second novel to be an allegory for the creative struggle, but reading it that way is no stretch.

Setting an Example

It's good to know Sweden is focusing its energy on the really important things....

Meat

Mmm. I just ate a tiny, tiny slice of salami that contained:

• 90 billion milligrams cholesterol
• 40 pounds sodium
• 875 hectares fat
• 1 pinch arsenic

Which for some reason leads me to wonder: when people invented the term "heart attack," did they intend it to mean an attack upon the heart, or by the heart? Like, was it understood to be some form of revenge? Just wondering...idle curiosity....

DN.se

I was looking for an article about my friend Jennifer in Dagens Nyheter, but instead I found this. Whoa.

Scandal update!

There's a good Thomas K interview on World Hum. Here's a highlight -- sound familiar, anyone?

What’s the worst thing about writing guidebooks?

For me, it’s the fact that as a writer you are set up to be a hack. Sure you can drive yourself insane over doing all of the research and writing and you can take on a few thousand dollars’ worth of personal debt to get close to researching everything, but there is only so much that someone can cover and cover honestly—especially over and over again if it’s your career.

And the best thing?

The research stage is never dull. That’s not to say that it’s all good times, exotic cocktails and memorable sunsets, but you do get accustomed to an extremely high level of stimulus in daily life. For me, at least, it became an addiction. I think that’s what really brings the writers back time and time again. However, like any addiction, it is painful when you are without it and, in this case, must spend the following months in solitude, typing up reviews in templates. After my first book, a fellow guidebook writer confided, “I always forget how painful it was to write the last book just in time to sign on for a new one.”

Here's a better one

A fellow copy editor/guidebook author I know has posted about Thomas K's book on her blog, sounding pretty darn reasonable -- and incidentally making me suspect (not for the first time) that I'm a chump for never taking free hotel rooms: check out Zora's blog post.

Scandal! Intrigue! etc

One of my fellow LP scribes wrote a book and is suddenly getting all kinds of attention! Sample news story here.

What do you guys think???

Getting in the mood

Between reading assignments, I've been planning the research trip for my summer job of updating Lonely Planet's guidebook to Sweden (I'll mainly be covering the north, which I love). In plumbing the depths of my laptop for probably outdated map notes, I found the text of a miniature coffeetable book I wrote for LP that never came out (the series was canceled, alas). Generalizations abound, and most of the book was, if I remember correctly, researched during wine-fueled late-night conversations with friends, so it may need some salt -- but here are a few tidbits. (I know...old text + old photos = a weak glob entry, but hey, I'm on deadline.) Enjoy.

Lagom är bäst
Lagom is a Swedish word that doesn't have an exact equivalent in English. Like ordning och reda, it encapsulates a philosophy. Lagom has to do with balance and moderation - roughly speaking, it means 'not too little, not too much, but just enough.' But it doesn't carry the sense of restraint or deprivation that a similar word in English might. To understand the idea of lagom, one has to realize that excess is undesirable, that 'just enough' is the perfect amount and that nobody in his or her right mind would ever want more than the lagom amount of anything, whether it's money, snaps or butter on their hardbread. Under the darkest possible view of lagom, one might infer that Sweden strives for mediocrity, that ambition is selfish and normalcy is success. But for the most part lagom simply implies a distaste for overindulgence and greed, an appreciation for balance in life, and an urge to maintain equilibrium in all things. Exaggerating the definition of lagom, after all, wouldn't really be lagom.

Stockholm runs like a well-oiled machine. Public buses are clean and go everywhere, including late at night, and are never off-schedule by more than a minute or two. Same goes for the subway (Tunnelbana). There's a certain amount of collective agreement about the proper order in which things should happen that tends to keep the city running smoothly, at least for the most part.

It's also a society that emphasizes efficient use of resources. Environmentally friendly practices have been built into the city's infrastructure to the point that recycling is almost effortless. Locally grown produce, fish and game are relatively accessible and used whenever possible. Hotels and youth hostels provide sorting bins for guests' garbage. It's an expensive city, so waste of resources holds little appeal on a practical level. And Stockholm's famously clear water is such a visible and important element of the city's beauty that ecologically sound behavior makes perfect sense.

But there's an interesting dark side to this characteristic Swedish trait of conserving resources and behaving efficiently. Part of Stockholmers' reputation for chilliness toward strangers - sometimes even borderline rudeness - may be linked to their fondness for efficiency. People don't tend to waste a lot of time on social courtesies. Visitors from other countries often mention being taken aback by this. Swedes don't typically chat with strangers on the bus, for example, or apologize if they bump into someone on the street. But this restrained attitude isn't intended as rudeness. More likely it's based on a realization that deep friendships are, in fact, seldom formed with random passersby asking for directions or the person who happens to sit next to you on the bus.

One related theory argues that land-partition reforms beginning in the late 18th century ended up destroying village communities, leaving the Swedish people with a sense of isolation and self-reliance. This is reflected in such oft-cited proverbs as 'Alone is strong.' Swedes also tend to resist owing each other favors; situations that might produce indebtedness, such as buying rounds in a bar, are usually avoided. It may be a mostly socialist country, but in certain aspects it's every man for himself.

Ordning och Reda
It's hard to spend much time in Stockholm without hearing this phrase, the ubiquitous Swedish expression that translates roughly as "order and method" or "order and organizaton." Even if you don't hear it, you're bound to leave with some understanding of what it means. Ordning och reda practically defines the typical Swedish personality and way of life. Much more than just an expression, it's a neat and tidy three-word philosophy that most people apply to their everyday lives without even thinking about it. The basic idea is "a place for everything and everything in its place," but the concept extends far beyond mere objects. In the home, ordning och reda translates to a noticeable lack of clutter. Shoes are neatly arranged by the door, furnishings are sparse, and anything untidy is hidden away. But in a larger sense, when applied to the outside world, it refers to the proper way in which things ought to happen.

Get a Queue
One excellent example of ordning och reda is the queue system. Stockholmers line up for everything. There are places in the city where it's perfectly normal to see people standing in line in order to take a number from the queue machine so they can stand in line. The worst offense anyone can commit on Swedish soil is to jump the queue, particularly if you happen to be shopping at System Bolaget, the state-run liquor store. Stockholmers themselves will elbow past little old ladies on their way to take a number from the machine, but once they have it, the pecking order is written into the heavens and cannot be altered. (It can, however, be sold for profit; travelers have reported seeing early birds hit the queue-number machines as soon as a business opens in the morning, then sell their places in line to people in a hurry.) No matter what sort of business you hope to conduct in Stockholm, the first thing you should always do is look for the queue machine and take a number.

Writing on the Wall
Even Prince Eugen scribbled on walls; the painter prince's frescoes grace City Hall (Stadshuset). Graffiti in general hasn't reached quite that level of government approval, but some of Stockholm's most provocative underground artists have become local heroes. The best-known among them is Akay, whose work with graffiti and poster art evolved into larger projects, like setting up a miniature Swedish summer house (complete with picket fence and laundry line) on a traffic island between two major highways. His efforts to reclaim public space for the public, using guerrilla branding techniques that promote an idea without actually selling anything, have won Akay international fame and appreciation.

wkw is cool

...and so is DL. I was too far away to ask questions or take any pics, and I have 90,000 words to read and write this week and am lazy, so here's a link to one guy's review of the talk. Possibly more later.

wkw

Check it out! I think I'm going to faint:
http://www.cinematical.com/2008/03/14/wong-kar-wai-in-soho/

Outlaws in Pajamas

Eastwood wakes to the sound of pan pipes. He looks around....

Just tonight, I think maybe, For a Few Dollars More might be inching its way ahead of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. I mean, come on, it has Klaus Kinski in it. More twitching per second than has ever been captured on film before or since. It has also the toothless, rubber-lower-jaw old guy who is always, always a railridin' hobo, here playing an old-timer who's against trains. It has the world's most excellent (what do you call it?) footprint-off/bitch-slap combo. It has Eastwood, the tramp, shamelessly courting both Angel Eyes and Indio. And it has that eternal cigarillo, resourcefulness, manliness, a shield, just long enough to fit beneath the brim of his hat when it rains - a quality I love beyond reason and that, I admit, I may have mentioned before.

Anyhow. The first time I saw this film was during the Grindhouse Film Fest in Portland - sitting by the inimitable Sam Dodge Soule III - and his pal Dicky Dahl, whose name appears in the editing credits on the new Gus Van Sant film, Paranoid Park, about which more later - and when I saw it then, the film was HUGE but very, very pink. Smelled of vinegar at fifty paces. Not terribly macho I guess, but that kind of pink is easy to overlook once you get into it, and considering the grindhouseyness of it all.

Well, I don't know which I like better, when you get down to it. Still got a crush on Eli Wallach (the Ugly), but Indio is so sexy...and he's almost as hot in A Fistful of Dollars, which is pretty sweet but lacks the balls-out, fists-in-the-air glory of the second film, in my opinion.

Listen, mister, why'd you choose my place to commit suicide?

Even the Bank of San Francisco isn't that well protected!

I was worried about you. All alone, with ... so many problems to solve ....

Toupary

I am no longer in a bad mood.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours in the company of this guy:

(skip ahead to the 2-minute mark if it's boring to see him all shirtless)



Yep. Went to a screening of director Christophe Honore's new flim, Love Songs, and both the director and his main muse were there. I wanted to see the film anyway, because I really liked Dans Paris, the only other movie I've seen by Honore. Both movies are sort of eccentrically romantic, and sad, and weird, and of course extremely pretty to look at. Best of all, they're musicals. A lot of the dialogue comes across in these sweet, mumbly, nonchalant little songs, and something about the silliness of it (and, admittedly, the fact that everything sounds good in French) rescues all the precarious moments from ever seeming overwrought. So, as I said, I wanted to see the film anyway. But I also wanted to see Louis Garrel, because I wanted to find out if it's really possible for someone to look like that. And I'm sorry to report that it is. Alas. I'm ruined for life.

(He was also funny; during Q&A he referred to himself as a sex toy, and when some girl in the audience asked him, incredibly, to "sing for us," he amended his earlier statement to sex toy and marionette.) (But he sang anyway. Badly, on purpose.)

On a side note, I've decided that the French have to be beautiful, because otherwise they'd be invisible against a city like Paris. Man, that town looks good in anything.

The Parts Left Out of the Seattle Book, pt I

I'm in a lousy mood today, for some reason. Not that it matters.

The newest edition of the Seattle guidebook hit shelves recently, I'm told (haven't seen it yet, can't be blamed, folks, especially not for any mistakes you might find while say casually flipping through the color map section for example, not that you'll find any mind you), and it includes a nifty new feature: "Local Voices." Interviews with people who actually live in the city the guide is about. Yep. Some of mine didn't make the cut -- too dull for the Mid-Life Global Nomad demographic, I reckon. Bit flimsy on the service-journalism angle, too -- where to shop and eat and so forth. No, that's mean; really they just re-did the page count, and some of my intarviews didn't fit. Anyway. Here is one. Technically it's owned by LP, since I sold it to them for cash money, but I don't think they'll mind if the four of you who read this blog get a look at it. Enjoy:

Teh Lord Teh, IT consultant

A mild-mannered tech consultant by day, the young computer genius and weapons collector known as Teh Lr0d Teh represents Seattle's fringe culture. He hangs out at Teh Wetspot (www.wetspot.org), a BDSM community center in Lower Queen Anne. He is also a compelling argument in the case against the stressful, mind-degrading nature of work in the tech industry.

This interview was conducted entirely online. Please excuse the prelude:

'i hear lonely plan8 iz totally luztig 4 j00r bl00t. if tehy dont tap teh l33t-language audience they will go out of business. so you must turn to l-r0d t3h 2 save teh publih8ion. have you written anything about teh prevalence of kink sess in seattlul? note to teh editors: PH33R MEIN WRATH.'

What do you do for a living? I’m starting a Megacorporation/Nonprofit/lulz gorganization called 1-800-GOT-MEAT. We collect roadkill and donate it to local hick bigots for only a nominal cost. I get to play with meat all day and watch hicks salivate at gore. And I get to help the children - always my primary motivation in lyfe.

How long have you lived in Seattle? It depends on your definition of 'lived.' A week ago I thought to unleash the unifying power of roadkill, and since then I’ve felt exhilarated, overflowing with constant spiritual and erectile arousal. I’d say that I hadn’t really lived since then. So, a week.

What neighborhood do you live in? i just moved 2 seattlul proper (i live on teh wetspot'z bondage bed)

What's the best thing about your neighborhood? An overabundance of Ewok meat

How has the city changed since you moved there, and what do you think it will be like in five years? There were less Slaytanic cults when I moved here in 2000 BCE, but now they openly lust for blood. This is good for business, and my capital coffers have been overflowing. In 5 years I predict that ALL LIFE ENDS.

Any tourist traps that are worthwhile? There are several traps in my backyard that would work on tourists just fine. And if by worthwhile you mean beneficial for the children, then yes.

Dylan Ropes a Wild Turkey

No, that's not some kind of advanced yoga move; it's a scene from the coolest movie I've seen recently, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. It came out when I was 2 and James Coburn was hot and Kris Kristofferson had chubby little baby cheeks, believe it or not. Sam Peckinpah directed it, so death pervades, of course, as well as rivers of blood in a color I like to call Raimi red. Bob Dylan did the soundtrack, and he plays a shifty, knife-wielding outlaw pup who calls himself Alias.


It's a story about getting old and going straight, selling out to the Man and feeling crappy about it but doing it anyway because the world is moving on and you're too worn out to keep fighting. Salty old gunslinger Pat Garrett takes a job as sheriff, and the first thing he has to do -- the thing they hired him for -- is to bring down his pal Billy the Kid. The whole movie's a vast, gorgeous, gritty, epic love poem to the crumbling myths and disappearing rawness of the west; if you don't believe me try watching Slim Pickens' slow, gutshot walk to die at creekside without getting choked up.

It also has one of the best mini-odes to a willing dame ever grunted by a greasy barkeep:
"She got a ass on her ... like a forty dollar cow ... and a tit ... I'd like to see that thing filled with tequila."

Like I said. Poetry.




Moving on...

Pet peeves for today:

I hate it when people say things like "one of our finest novelists," or "among our best young actors," as if they are part of some mysterious corporation that owns the talent and creativity of artistic types. Annoying.

John Graham hates it when, every time someone looks through binoculars in the movies or on TV, the edges of the screen are blacked in to form the shape of two conjoined circles, like the eyeholes in a pair of binoculars. Think about it. When you look through binoculars, do you see the view in two conjoined circles? No, you don't. Through the magic of technology, you see it just as you would without the binocs, only closer. Amazing! (I'm watching the Oscars right now and a goofy little montage just reminded me of that.)

Also, straight from the supermarket checkout-line tabloids: I hereby ban the suddenly ubiquitous and totally barfy use of the term "bump" for preggy bellies. So disgusting.

Speaking of checkout-line tabloids, another outrage:
Here's the cover of the Feb 21 issue of Rolling Stone. Headline: "Britney Spears: Inside an American Tragedy." Hmm. Is Britney tragic, really?

And then, in tiny print over to the side, stuck between SHERYL CROW and ZEP TOUR UPDATE: "Heath Ledger." Yes...ever so much less tragic a loss than Britney's pop starlet career. (I mean, I know it's a music magazine, but still.)

Well, getting back to the realm of the indisputable: A very smart fellow recently gave me a list of Dylan songs I need to get in order to further my enlightenment. Now I know this may sound crazy, but I'm told you can "download" songs of music from the World Wide Web these days. Can this be true? I've had no luck with it so far. If any of you clever young people out there can tell me how to do it, I'd be much obliged.

misc

Heard on the television yesterday:
"Ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for sex." I think that's good advice.

Today somehow I cut myself on the lid of a travel mug. See? I am fragile. I only seem tough.

This is old, but I love it (and it's relevant, in a way: cows, death). The website, Artliberated.org, is sort of a watchdog group defending art against the prudes of Scandinavia. It hasn't been doing much lately, though. Here's another pretty old case, probably only funny if you've seen the ubiquitous Kosta Boda glassware cramming every souvenir shop in Sweden and distributed equally among all citizens whether they like it or not. Fair's fair.

More later,

On the other hand...

There are two things I love about Valentine's Day:

Margo and my grandma. :)

OK, three things: Mom, too.

Thanks, guys!

VD Special

I've always hated Valentine's Day, but until last year I never had a legitimate reason. Now that I do (thank you, former teenage boyfriend, who ditched me that night to seduce someone cooler, and even borrowed my camera to blog about it afterwards!), I can enjoy hating it unreservedly. For many years I marked the holiday with a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine, because like Valentine's Day it was fake, cheap, pink, vile, bad-smelling and would rot your guts out. I am far too old for that now, and besides, the shop on the corner didn't have any. So this year I'm eating ramen (pink packet) and an apple (Pink Lady) while fantasizing about the long-dead PDX writer John Reed (pinko!). So far, so good.


Friday night was much worse. I watched a DVD (for research - swear), and when I ejected the disc, Bridget Jones's Diary was on TV. (The dorm dads hooked up my cable while I was away for Xmas, which required them to move the TV clear across the room and string up an elaborate series of wires, so I guess they mean it.) A more spineful person might've turned off the television and continued with her studies, but not me. I was sucked in. Bridget Jones. Too sick-making. Worst of all, it was the kind of all-American TV station that interrupts its movies with commercial breaks. Following are the types of products advertised on a Friday night to people watching Bridget Jones's Diary:

• champagne
• designer perfume
• yeast-infection goo
• vaginal lubricant
• Doritos.

Okay, TV people. Here is a tip I will give to you free of charge. Women who are at home at 10pm on a Friday night watching Bridget Jones's Diary do not as a rule need vaginal lubricant. Not unless it comes in one of those fancy holiday gift packs with various interesting accessories.

The champagne is fine, of course, although if you really want to know, whiskey would be better. As for the Doritos, well, yes, obviously.

More of Becky's homework

I have a lot of homework to do tonight. So, by way of stalling, and to appease the slavering hordes of dedicated readers and fans (hi Karl!), here's a record review I did awhile back. It's about Richmond Fontaine. (Gasps of amazed disbelief from the audience.) Hush, you. Anyway, I think I've reverted, since writing this, to having The Fitzgerald be my favorite RF album -- but I still really love that mariachi song at the end of 13 Cities. The whole thing is great, really.

Also, for my legions of fans in the UK, Willy's new novel is out: it's called Northline, also the name of an early song he wrote, and the girl in it, Alison Johnson, is the name of another song he wrote. And there's a video, I just found:



Anyhow. Read on, legions of fans, and buy the record or the book or even both. You won't regret it.

Richmond Fontaine
13 Cities

Say you're hitchhiking. It's hot. You've been thumbing rides all day and not a bite. You're about to give up and throw yourself across the yellow line when an old guy in a pickup stops. You get in. He cracks you a beer, says "Relax, kid, let me tell you a story." He doesn't ask where you're going; he knows it doesn't matter. He tells you a story. When your beer's done, he hands you a fresh one. The story gets a little better, a little sadder.

That's how it feels to come home at the end of the day and put on Richmond Fontaine's 13 Cities. Somehow the record comforts and relieves you even if you don't have any beer. Maybe it's because things aren't ever likely to get as bad for you as they are for the people Willy Vlautin writes about. RF's singer-songwriter is a master of the sad portrait. The band's 2005 album, The Fitzgerald, featured Vlautin essentially alone with a guitar, telling quiet stories in his humble way, with the ragged voice of an old barfly and the intonation of a 6-year-old. On The Fitzgerald most of the stories end badly. It's a beautiful album, but no comfort to a fragile soul.

13 Cities is not so brutally sparse and grim. That's not to say it's cheerful. With one exception, Vlautin's songs are as melancholy as ever; but this time he's not alone with his sadness. The band—Vlautin (guitars, vocals), Sean Oldham (drums, vocals), Dave Harding (bass), Dan Eccles (guitars) and Paul Brainard (pedal steel, piano)—recorded this album in Arizona with the Tucson band Calexico. The expanded cast of musicians lightens the mood considerably. All the joy on the record comes from the music, which provides on most of the songs a heartening counterbalance to the vocals.

The record opens with "Moving Back Home #2," announced by a Mexicali-style trumpet flourish. It's a fast-paced tune; the drums push it along, and it sounds happy, at least until you catch what Vlautin is singing: "I'm living in my mom's basement again / I come in at 4 am / She gets pissed / Gotta be up at 6 / We get into a fight / So I go out again." For a different band, the juxtaposition of a jaunty tune with lyrics about a hopeless loser who gambles all night might be ironic. But Richmond Fontaine is never ironic. It's just that Vlautin can laugh at himself, or his former self, and at the mistakes he's made and keeps making.

But he doesn't laugh at the other characters who stumble through his songs: toward them he is always kind. Vlautin's people are gamblers, drunks and wrecks, immobilized by circumstance or crushed by the weight of bad luck. But they're not bad people, and the songwriter holds out hope for them. He leaves an escape hatch, a way to imagine that, if things go right, maybe one day the people he's singing about will be better off. But it won't be easy.

In the slow, shuffling third track, "$87 and a Guilty Conscience That Gets Worse the Longer I Go," the narrator turns his back on a friend who's holed up in a motel room with an underage hitchhiker. To rescue the girl, he calls the police, then feels terrible for betraying his friend. Nobility is seldom noticed or rewarded in a Vlautin song. Another example is the harmonica-laced ballad, "Fell Into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona," about a young house painter whose crew picks up a Mexican day-laborer: "We worked five days straight, then we didn't pick him up / and I knew that the kid had never been paid... I didn't show up the next day / I ain't shit, but I ain't that way." The claustrophobia in the song has nothing to do with physical space: though wide horizons stretch all around him, the music closes in and the narrator repeats through clenched teeth, "Get me outta here, get me out get me out of here."

Relief comes in the instrumental interludes, like "El Tiradito," a relaxed and sprawling breather that lets the desert scenery roll gently by in your mind. Then its steady ka-thunk eases into the ominous next track, "A Ghost I Became," about a guy so disenchanted he vanishes into the landscape.

Near the end there's a break in the gloom. "Four Walls" is a tiny moment of pure romantic exuberance that reveals all the previous sorrows as mere artifacts of passing bad luck. We don't need anything, the singer tells his girl; nothing bad can find us here. "We'll just lay around," he says, and the guitar tones rise up like church bells. "And our hearts will sing," and the bells ring faster, louder, until at the peak of their clamor he finishes the sentence, "like mariachis" -- and it's like church just let out.

Granted, the album ends on its saddest note, with "Lost in the World," but by then you already know—the band has already told you—that things might turn out OK after all.

#1 Blog Fan

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Click on Karl

2007, so far

Here's another thing that grosses me out: the use of the word "skin" to describe things like cell-phone covers or the background of a MySpace page. Bit too Cronenbergian for me. I love Cronenberg, but I never, ever want to touch anything that's been in any of his movies, Viggo Mortensen excepted.

Last night I went to a fancy art museum and saw this crazy Syrian movie (free! because I am a student-level patron of the arts) called Sacrifices that made me want to call in Samuel L Jackson and have him do his famous Pulp Fiction number. The recurring "punch line" in the film is that someone says, "What?" and the person they're talking to says, "What 'what'?" Over and over; it's like 90 percent of the dialogue. After a while, even though the movie was very beautiful and strange, the what-saying got on my nerves. I was like,



Anyway. Everyone else on earth has been doing top-10 movie lists, but I can't be bothered to narrow it down that much. Internet space is infinite. So here are the 2007-release films that I actually saw in 2007 and liked, vaguely in order but not strictly so. I'm not writing much about any of them because other people have done so a lot better than I could, but arguments are of course encouraged.

• Lust, Caution -- starring my only real boyfriend (sorry, Brando; sorry, Hutz), Tony Leung Chiu Wai (the pic is from In the Mood for Love, though; and probably it's really Wong Kar-wai who's my boyfriend after all; when I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I hope it turns out he directed it).

• No Country for Old Men
• The Host
• Children of Men
• Grindhouse -- I liked the Rodriguez half (Planet Terror) a lot better than the Tarantino half (Death Proof), but maybe because I haven't seen the longer version of Death Proof; it supposedly rules. Even the shortened version was pretty sweet, and holy hooch, Kurt Russell! Yow. But the girls' conversations I thought were draggy and inane (unusual for QT). Allegedly the timing is better in the longer version; there are pauses, etc.
• Margot at the Wedding
• Sweeney Todd -- I want to be in a Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter sandwich. Mrs Lovett's dream scene of a happy goth picnic on the beach is my favorite part, esp when his hand creeps over to her knee for a second, then hastily retreats. So sad. But at least he tried.
• The Darjeeling Limited -- Watching Owen Wilson unbandage his face in the mirror as his brothers look on is excruciating. It's audible. Gross. That whole scene is a weird combination of suspenseful, tender and scary; the rest of the movie is so perfect and beautiful, and suddenly they're peeling the facade away, just for a second, and you get a peek at this poor wounded naked thing and it's just heartbreaking. Well, I thought so anyway.
• The Lives of Others
• Romance & Cigarettes -- Kate Winslett is the coolest dame. I've loved her since she peed in the desert with Harvey Keitel all those years ago. She goes all out in this one, too.
• Dans Paris -- no living boy should be allowed to be so cute, not even a French one. It's just ridiculous.
• Lars & the Real Girl
• 10 Canoes
• Paprika -- I really liked the scary dream music in this.
• Rescue Dawn
• Avenue Montaigne
• Waitress -- the best of the oops-I'm-pregnant movies.
• Helvetica
• Charlie Wilson's War -- Have read a bunch of negative reviews of this, so I'll concede that I might've liked it mainly because I saw it on my most-fun vacation day in Portland, palling around with Bradford. Motorcycles, lunch, weaponry, beer, then a matinee -- it's possible my judgment was clouded, but at the time I thought this movie was a lot of fun.
• This Is England -- tiny skinheads! So cute.
• Juno -- I think they actually speak leet in here once or twice.
• Knocked Up
• Red Road
• Shoot 'Em Up
• 28 Weeks Later - there went my crush on Robert Carlyle.
• Night of Lust -- dug up out of the California soil by Seth & his Simple Farm Boy, screened in NYC at the Pioneer Theater. Ancient pulp-crime story spliced together with utterly non sequitur closeups of French boobies. Everyone but me and two icky dudes walked out twenty minutes into it, but that's okay.
• Day Watch -- not as good as Night Watch.
• The Golden Compass -- I know, I know. Everyone hated it. It's probably terrible. But I went on a night when I was desperate for sparkly escapism, and it did what I needed it to do. Also made me kind of want to read the books, for what it's worth.

Here are the movies I didn't like:

• Death at a Funeral (I don't think anybody else saw this)
• Into the Wild (just calm down, alright Eddie Vedder? Jesus.)
• Jindabyne
• Mystic Ball (death to hippies)
• The Jane Austen Book Club (icky-sticky girl stuff, but not that hideous until the last 30 seconds, when to my surprise it turns into a bodysnatcher-zombie film)

I've also missed a lot of movies I should've seen, including Eastern Promises. Still haven't made it to I'm Not There, or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, or There Will Be Blood. (Maybe today!) Last year, when I was freelancing at Willamette Week, I saw 74 movies (not counting older stuff and things I watched at home or at the beer theater). (Oh how I miss the beer theater.) My favorites from 2006, since nobody asked, include The Science of Sleep; Don't Come Knocking; Russian Dolls; Kekexili: Mountain Patrol; and Night Watch.

And as long as we're in a reflective mood, here are some memorable live shows I saw in 2007:

• Shock Troops (Cocksparrer tribute band, feat. the former teenage boyfriend on guitar, and he looked right at me during "Teenage Heart"), Ash Street, Jan 13
• The Shotgun (sadly disbanded), Tonic Lounge, Jan 17
• Hunches & Black Lips at Dante's, Jan 18
• Daniel Menche (astounding!) at Doug Fir, Jan 21
• Tragedy & Defect Defect in Gresham, Jan 27
• Polysics, Dante's, Jan 28
• Dagger of the Mind (first glimpse of the teenager's Shakespearean power-metal band-- also known as that time Becky fought the hooker on the kitchen floor), Simmhut, Feb 9
• 2 Ton Boa at Rotture, March 2
• Dagger of the Mind at Monkey Pub March 24 & Wetspot (teenager gets his naked butt whipped, likes it) March 25, Seattle
• DJ Dieselboy, on a boat, Hudson River, NYC, Sept 2
• Marcellus Hall, Lakeside Lounge, NYC, Dec 8 (see below)

As for books, lots of what I read from 2007 were comix. Some good ones:

• Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White by Taiyo Matsumoto
• Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine
• The Salon, Nick Bertozzi

In the fiction category, the winner was of course Willy Vlautin's novel The Motel Life. And I really want to read the new Junot Diaz book; his short stories are excellent.

I am now officially tired of thinking, despite this being a remarkably shallow, analysis-free glob post; also I have to go finish a graphic-novels review that's due tomorrow.
So long.

What'll it be?

I couldn't sleep last night, and the reason for it made me remember why I started this glob way back when. Given that the world might kill me at any time in any number of boring ways (cancer, traffic accidents, heart disease), I thought it would be fun to court the weirdest and least likely methods of passive self-destruction. It makes me feel better about the ways in which I'm actively self-destructive: motorcycle racing, for example. (I mean, if I've already been infected by the mad cow virus, which I might be, perhaps via contaminated contact-lens solution, which can happen, by the way, I read about it on the Internet, then why not go ahead and take some risks, seeing as how I'm doomed already?) The best part is the suspense: incubation periods on some of these things are immense.

Anyway, lately I've been certain that the radiator in the room above my room is going to come crashing through the floor/ceiling and crush my head while I sleep. This is unlikely. But no part of the building strikes me as being terrifically sturdy. And my radiator struggles daily to unbolt itself and walk across the room; I have to assume the other radiators feel the same way. If it does happen, it'll be a nice echo of one of my favorite books from childhood, Flat Stanley.

I'm also terrified of/fascinated by deep vein thrombosis. The words alone: deep vein thrombosis. I fly a lot, and every time I'm on an airplane, if I can't fall asleep, I spend the whole time with the ominous voice of a cheap TV announcer in my head making echoey pronouncements about deep vein thrombosis. Days later I worry that I picked it up on the plane and any second now it'll drop me.

Fun girl!

Over Christmas break I got some information from my dad about food poisoning. That's another good one. Who hasn't had a little bout of food poisoning, right? You barf your lungs out, crap your guts out, think you're at death's door, and then you get better. Usually the only lasting effect is that you never eat at that restaurant again. However! Did you know that sometimes, the food-poisoning bug sticks around, lurking in there somewhere, unnoticed for decades? It's true -- it's even in a story by the Associated Press, which I would quote for you except that doing so violates copyright laws, probably. Anyway, the AP says scientists have found links between E. coli and kidney failure, salmonella and arthritis, and campylobacter and a "mysterious paralysis" 10 to 20 years after an episode of food poisoning.

That's right: paralysis. Exciting, isn't it?

Campylobacter, by the way, is the most frequently diagnosed form of food poisoning, infecting up to 4 million people a year. Of course not all 4 million of them will end up mysteriously paralyzed 20 years later. It's a gamble. Unfortunately, my research has failed to determine whether the odds are better or worse than those for mad cow, bird flu etc. We'll just have to wait a few decades and see how it turns out.

Not that I think this is really a fair comparison, but only about 88,000 people were injured in motorcycle accidents in 2006. Most of them were also not paralyzed. The main difference here is that one group is going to have to explain that what happened was they ate a chicken sandwich.

How cool is that?

Travis Bickle's mohawk is a wig!

It's true - I've seen it with my own eyes, a little stripe of fur in a glass case along the wall, right next to the denture-looking chunks of plastic Marlon Brando wore inside his face for The Godfather. Just a few of the many revelations this past weekend at the excellent Museum of the Moving Image. (Looking for the link just now I see that George Romero Himself will be there in February. Sweet.) I was surprised and a little disappointed to learn that Method Acting doesn't include hair and teeth. I mean, jeez, DeNiro, I thought you were supposed to be committed.


Brenda drove in from Boston on Thursday night. I met her at the New Museum.... Admission is free on Thursdays, and it's a good thing, too; the knowledge that I'd given them no money was all that kept me from spontaneously combusting out of sheer annoyance. Exhibits included a crumpled-up plastic bag on the floor; pieces of cardboard glued together into the shapes of houses and painted white; and a pile of thrift-store clothes we weren't even allowed to try on.

Maybe I was just in a bad mood. I'd had a cold all week. To be fair, the bookstore is outstanding.

We consoled ourselves with cheap falafel and a trudge through the rainy streets in search of entertainment. And guess who we saw? No kidding: Marcellus Hall! Right there on the street corner. But I didn't notice him until too late, and besides he was surrounded by girls, so I just swooned internally a little bit and kept on walking. We found the Bulgarian disco, where Eugene Hutz (my boyfriend) of Gogol Bordello sometimes DJs on Thursday nights, but it was too early, so instead we went into the Cake Shop because it looked warm. The Cake Shop is a cake shop but also a microscopic record store and occasional indie-rock venue. I got a hot toddy in the World's Largest Coffee Mug, and Brenda got a slab of cake the size of a minivan. The guy next to me kept staring at the cake; later he told me he had quit smoking three days earlier. Maybe that explains it.

We flipped through the CDs (you remember those); they had a copy of the Starvations for three bucks, but I already own it. Then we went back to Mehanata, the Bulgarian bar, but Hutz was not there. It was hilarious anyway. I love watching people dance. It reinforces the wisdom of my policy never to do so myself (barring extraordinary circumstances and/or tequila).

Next day we drove out to Queens and dug the Museum of the Moving Image, which restored my faith in museums (though shook it a little in the acting department). It was fun to be driven around. We ate lunch in Jackson Heights, at the famed Jackson Diner, an Indian buffet. Jackson Heights is basically fifteen ethnic neighborhoods crammed into two blocks. You can go from Ecuador to Bangladesh to Mexico in five seconds. The Jackson Heights Historic District (much bigger than two blocks) was a planned community starting around 1917; it's famous for its giant brick apartment buildings with fancy manicured private gardens. They look like the older dorms at Reed.

We explored a bit, then ditched the car back at my place and took the subway into Manhattan. Friday is pay-what-you-want at most of the museums, so we hit the ICP and the Whitney, both pretty good. The big draw at the Whitney was the Kara Walker retrospective, and it justified the hype. The mood in the museum was all very serious, and you weren't allowed to laugh even at the parts that were funny. Back in Brooklyn Heights we met Brenda's friend Amy and went to a place that had -- believe it! -- Rogue Chocolate Stout on tap.

I spent the rest of the weekend reading comix for a review due this week and finishing John Reed's book on the Russian Revolution. School started Tuesday. And here we are.

A Mystery Solved, A Grudge Relinquished

Some of you know about my many ridiculous grammar-based hangups: peeves too petty to explain, futile boycotts, anonymous edits scribbled in anger on innocent restaurant menus. Well, as of Sunday morning, I have one less such hangup. The Sunday Times contained an obituary for Carl N. Karcher, 90, founder of Carl's Jr Hamburger Chain. Carl's Jr, I'm now ashamed to admit, topped my list of hated restaurants not because of its infamous six-dollar burger ($4.19 when it first came out) but because of that irritating and (I thought) just plain wrong apostrophe in its name. Operating on the principle that nobody knows how to use an apostrophe, I figured there was a guy named Carl Jr who owned the restaurant but couldn't be bothered to hire a copy editor. Wrong! Here's the key paragraph from the obit:

"He opened the first Carl's Jr -- named 'Jr.' to distinguish it from his full-service eatery -- in 1956."

Damn. Good old Carl! I take back all those awful things I said about you, buddy. RIP.

Becky

Can I Help Who's Next?

Done with school! Well, almost. For this semester. I have one paper left to hand in - it's due tomorrow, so obviously, no need to rush. I'm writing about polyamory, specifically as it has been interpreted by the young and hip: which is to say, vaguely. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as "the custom or practice of engaging in multiple sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of all partners concerned," but most folks I've talked to tend to stop reading just before "with." Seems to be a handy way to avoid commitment and simultaneously get credit for brave experimentation in an unorthodox lifestyle. But it's an unwieldy subject for a news article, that's for sure. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I was thinking the "characters" would be strange and entertaining, but ... so far, not really. Anyway, you won't be seeing this one posted online. But it will get done. It's practically done already. (I don't feel tardy...)

In other news...I'm taking suggestions for things I should do in the city before the onslaught begins again. Let me live vicariously through you! It's not just a blog, people: it's your blog. (Glob, I mean. Not blog.)

Well, actually it's my glob. And I do have a couple of mini-outings to share, but am too tired and poly-grossed-out to report them entertainingly tonight. For now, a highlight: I went to see Marcellus Hall play at the Lakeside Lounge last Saturday. He has a cool name and uses it well. I first saw him in his old band, Railroad Jerk, which played Satyricon in like 1947, and I went with Gordon because the band was on Matador, which at the time was good enough for us. They were great. (The sarcastic bio on the Matador site describes RRJ as industrial folk, or gangster folk, or a "unique blend of traditional Irish folk, mainstream r&b, classical jazz, reggae, delta blues, '60s psychedelia, European techno-pop, Appalachian hillbilly, California surf and post-punk industrial wall-of-noise grunge dirge." I would dispute the grunge and the reggae and possibly the Irish folk, but the rest is pretty dead-on.) Marcellus Hall at that time was a tall and skinny red-haired Adonis-type figure who played guitar and harmonica and did the splits on stage. A full-grown man. The splits! Without ever once cracking his cool facade, and yet also without being a smartass who was making fun of us and/or rock and roll. He was a fine thing, and his song lyrics were brilliant, literary, wicked little poser-seeking missiles. But what I liked best about him was his pronunciation.

I saw his next band, White Hassle, in Stockholm four or five years ago. White Hassle started when the two main guys from RRJ got kicked out of their rental house and forced to live in the vacant lot next door, using only scraps of tin and buckets of nails to live. (The first album, anyway, sounded like that. By the time I saw them they were back to being pretty suave.) They had a great song involving Sophia Loren and two pals getting shanghaied onto a cargo ship to serve under a tyrannical captain. And one about echinacea. After that show, I was having a beer with their guest guitarist and Marcellus Hall was watching a Swedish girl write something scribbly on the wall. "It's her dissertation," he said. I never talked to him, though; too shy.

Anyhow, as of last Saturday, he looks the same as always. His songs are maybe even better, and not only because they make fun of things like cell-phones and email. ("We'll be turning our phones off," he warned the crowd, "so if you try to text us during the show...") The drummer in the new band is called Jimmy the Hat. Even the way Marcellus Hall pronounces Jimmy the Hat is cool. I read a review that said he did the splits during the encore, but I must've looked away at the crucial moment. Or maybe that person was just being metaphorical, because verbally at least, MH always does the splits, plus somersaults, backbends, handstands, you name it, if it's a gymnastic contortion, one of the lines in one of his songs has resembled it. He won't sacrifice a word for a rhyme; he'll just stretch and scrunch all the other words in that verse into crazy shapes until two words that kind of rhyme line up. It's always funny and it never sounds forced, it just sounds like the way he talks. Or the way he probably would talk, if a person would ever actually go up and try to talk to him.

Well, hopefully no music writers are reading this, because it's one of the worst examples of music writing I've ever seen. Sad, sad. Marcellus Hall deserves better, but he's not going to get it, or anyway not tonight. I'm off - more soon. Down with polyamory!

Update!

When I am queen, I will also ban the expression "It is what it is."

Goals

When I am queen, I will ban umbrellas and Christmas music.

That is all.

Some updates

Thanksgiving break turned out to be a mean linguistic trick: they meant "break" as a verb. Five books and assorted news articles to read, three papers to write...hey, why not, we have all week! Not that I'm complaining, really. It is what I'm here for. I'd feel ripped off if I'd paid them all that money just to tell me I should relax and keep doing what I'm doing.

Anyway, constrained by homework I didn't go to Boston as planned, to hang out with PK and friends, which is a drag, because an email message earlier had indicated that all of the friends would be tall, intelligent men. It figures.

Instead I stayed here, did some writing, some reporting and some reading: two cheery little uplifting books about the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl; one about the government-vs-academia battle over contemporary artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe; the section on libel in the AP stylebook; and my favorite, "Work and Other Sins," by my next boyfriend, Charlie LeDuff. Until becoming a stay-at-home-dad recently, Charlie wrote for the New York Times; he used to hang out in bars, talk to people and write about them. Made it look easy. Also, in one of his press photos he has this outrageous pirate mustache, and you all know how I feel about those.

Speaking of Boston, below, finally, are some photos of my trip there awhile back. I went for the weekend, to hang out with my friend Brenda (see earlier post on the cocktail tour). To get there I paid fifteen bucks at the dodgy-looking "Fung Wah" ticket window and stood in what I hoped was the right line for the bus. I had expected the legendary Chinatown bus to be a rickety old death machine spewing poisonous fumes and filled with squawking chickens in bamboo crates. But no. It was your average tour bus. Halfway up it stopped at McDonald's. Sigh.

Boston is cool! I'd never been there before. The whole thing is a museum, and Brenda is the best tour guide ever. We started in Charlestown, all red brick and twisty little cobblestone streets, gaslights and everything. It's so cute it looks fake. At the top is the Bunker Hill Monument, marking the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first big fight in the Revolutionary War. Paul Revere started his midnight ride from Charlestown. It's also home to the beginning of The Freedom Trail, but we drove back to Boston proper and picked up the Trail there instead. Shorter walk. The Freedom Trail is a red stripe painted onto the sidewalk (or bricked in, sometimes) for tourists to follow from one historic site to another. Neat idea! Ironically, not everything along the Freedom Trail is free, so we didn't go into all of the historic buildings, but we did use the public restroom in Fanouiel Hall. Which is pretty free.

The most important thing I learned in Boston, however, is that cider donuts are the best food on earth. Cider donuts!!! I'd never heard of them. Brenda took me to a farm stand for breakfast. I don't think we have quite the same things on the West Coast. Some of those U-pick joints on Sauvie Island are close, but the Boston ones are more established. AND have cider donuts. Fifty cents each, and they were still warm when the guy handed 'em over. (This was also the first real Boston accent I heard. Holy crap! They are hilarious!) Then we beelined for the hot cider, which was unlike any hot cider I've ever had before. Dad would've fainted. It was that good.

Predictably, we bought apples. And some coffee. And, I admit it, I got another cider donut on the way out.

On the advice of Rob via Patrick, we checked out Bukowski's Tavern, where on the menu board we saw that you could order Deep Fried Cheese Logs. I think if it had been an hour later, there's no way you could've dragged us out of there before we'd had a cheese log each. But sadly, we had just eaten lunch, and could only appreciate it in the abstract. But we'll be back. We did stop in and have a beer at Sullivan's Tap, another Rob/Patrick recommendation. I had a pint of Sully's Light. Seemed appropriate. It's a long skinny bar, kinda sporty. On the TV they were showing news footage from out in front of the bar, taken on a different day. Weird.

The weirdest moment of the entire weekend: we'd stumbled across a war protest while crossing Boston Common. Later, on the way to the library, we ran into it again. It was a pretty huge parade, and we stood for a while watching it go by, halfheartedly checking out dudes. Then, from the little mini-stage next to us, someone with a microphone who had been sort of droning on for a while said, "And now, let me welcome Desmond Tutu!" Brenda and I simultaneously: "WHAT?!" Yep, it was him, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in life, mere feet away. He seemed to be ten million years old, very small and by far the most adorable person among the hundreds of protesters we could see. He said a few words about Jews, which were (probably for the best) blurred by the bad microphone and the crazy wind, and then he did this little hopping dance on stage and yelled "PEEEEEEEEEEEEACE!" over and over.

We couldn't top that.

Next day we drove through Lexington and Concord, saw the homes of Louisa Mae Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson (my boyfriend), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Brenda's boyfriend -- or is she more into Thoreau? I forget). We stopped at another farm stand and got supplies for a picnic, which we had on the banks of Walden Pond (actual Walden Pond! pretty cool). The weather was gorgeous, so we walked around the pond (more of a lake). Two different women were swimming in Walden Pond. This was October, late October. Although the weather was gorgeous, it was not swimming weather. One of the women had on a wetsuit; the other seemed to be German or Nordic, based on her accent. Tough broad.

Other things of note: all the important stuff during the revolution took place at taverns. I'm not saying that's how it should be; I'm just telling you, that's how it was. Also, Brenda pointed out this one house along the battle route - the owners had redone the siding, but they'd had to leave a diamond-shaped hole in the new yellow siding, because way back when, a stray bullet from someone's revolutionary weapon had lodged itself there in the side of their house and was now a historic item that could not be messed with. (I'm paraphrasing.) So there you are. That's what it's like, living amid history, right there where it all went down.

Anyway, it was an excellent trip and I can't wait to get back there. Boston is really pretty and seems like a fun little place to hang out. Here are some pics; I'll put more up on flickr or something and add the link later. Too tech-challenged to do it now.

Brenda took this one: it's the street John Kerry lives on!

The Freedom Trail.

Walden Pond...

Replicas of Thoreau and his Hut.

Cliche but true: the autumn leaves out here are mighty pretty. I was a little early to catch them in their full glory (or rather, they were a little late), but it was still almost ridiculously autumnal.

Pic for JG

In case I never emailed it...

My 'Hood

Belated pics of the Boston trip will be up soon, but for now, here's one of a pretty corner in my neighborhood. The whole area looks like this! Especially in the fall. A girl could die of cuteness.

So Long, Norman

http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/1904

From the Times obit:

"Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always terribly affected by the fear that they’re not as good as they thought and why are they doing it, what are they up to?

“It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist. And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago — that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.”

Another Homework Assignment

Here's me being lazy again: this is today's homework, a not very journalistic account of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, as assigned last Wednesday in my reporting class. Written in twenty minutes, and it reads like fifteen. First prize to anyone who can identify the "nut graf"!

[a headline would go here, if I could think of one]

Not everyone loves a parade, it turns out.

“I’ve never really been into them,” an Australian woman said to her companion. “This kind of reminds me why not.”

The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade starts at 7pm. It was only 5:30, but that was OK. All the good stuff happened before the floats set sail.

Sixth Avenue was fittingly gray and windswept. Atmospheric, if not quite spooky. People started to line up behind sidewalk barriers, but by 6pm the cops still outnumbered spectators two to one. A group of six adults convincingly dressed as senior citizens on a bus tour walked by in matching purple Columbia Sportswear jackets, all clutching maps.

“I’m keeping my eyes open," said a flannel-clad girl sitting on the curb, "because I know my sister’s in New York and it would be so cool to bump into her here.” Her boyfriend, who was using sticks of stage makeup to draw on her face, looked around at the gathering crowds and was silent.

An elegant gray-haired lady walked up to them: “What’s going on?”

“It’s a parade,” the boyfriend said.

“Is there some organization that’s putting it on?” asked the lady.

“No, it’s just…the Halloween parade.”

“Well,” the lady asked, “is it a gay parade?”

The boyfriend paused to think about that.

“Sort of,” he said.

The lady nodded and said she’d be back after some shopping. When she left, the couple giggled and re-enacted the exchange.

More people crammed in against the barriers. Defying the odds, Facepaint Girl's sister appeared, reeking of booze. Familial screeching drew the attention of bystanders who had nothing else to look at and were bored. The drunk girl seized the makeup kit and applied crooked gray lipstick. She showed her sister and her sister’s boyfriend the lighter she’d just scored at a bar, no cover charge, they were just giving them out, free.

“Do you ever picture yourselves as skeletons?” she asked the audience at large. “Picture yourselves as skeletons! It’s the weirdest thing! We’re all just skeletons!”

A guy on a motorcycle roared down 6^th Avenue, nearly flattening a small dog. It looked intentional. From the other end of the leash, the dog's owner glared. A scraggly band of five Celtic pirates marched down the street, in the wrong direction. Still no sign of the big parade.

A crew of twentysomething cyclist dudes in knit hats appeared, carrying buckets of beercans. Girls surrounded them instantly. The dudes consolidated their buckets and upended the empty one to make a pedestal, onto which they allowed a girl in a pink tutu and army jacket. A pair of toe shoes hung around her neck. “Are those functional?” one dude asked, looking up at her. She disclosed that she was a dancer in real life. The dude asked if her toes were "all jammed." She said yes, adding that his interest in the subject was odd. “I’m attracted to people with injuries,” he explained.

Watching this, the Australian woman cheered up. “Fascinating,” she said. “Young American mating rituals.”

A flurry of activity to her left caught the crowd’s interest: several cops were moving the sidewalk barrier further into the street. Sweet! Better view. No, wait. Now they were moving it back to where it was. A minute later they moved it again. More cops appeared, along with some guys dressed up as Department of Transportation workers. The problem: a pothole, about five inches across, right there where people would be standing.

Walkie-talkies summoned a couple of DOT trucks. Cops adjusted the barrier yet again. One DOT guy got out of a truck and bashed in the edges of the pothole to stabilize it. Another DOT guy shoveled loose black asphalt into the pothole from a truck. A cop in a white uniform walked up and asked the ponytailed officer guarding the pothole what was going on.

“The captain came over, and he wants us to fill this hole,” she said.

“He decided to do this last-minute, huh?” the other cop said, shaking his head.

With the pothole-management procedure complete, the barrier resumed its proper position. The crowd cheered. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” said one DOT guy.

Everyone went back to waiting patiently. Still no parade, but folks were calm.

“Next year I’m going to walk around selling little plastic bags for people to pee in,” said Facepaint Girl's boyfriend. “And grilled-cheese sandwiches.”

Finally the parade started. Boredom crept in along with the cold. A few acts earned applause, including a group of zombies who performed the dance from the video of Michael Jackson’s hit song “Thriller.” Another highlight was a guy wearing Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. “Oh, see, I should’ve worn that,” said one of the bucket dudes, whose only costume was a new beard his friends declared hideous. “Last year I went as ‘Whistler’s Mother.’”

It's OK not to love the parade; on Halloween, the society is the spectacle.

someone's cranky

Here is a partial list of words that, after two months in Critic School, I would be pretty happy never to hear again:

dialectical
Brechtian
authentic
moral
ethical
marxist
stalinist
clearly
sort of
like
mimetic

There are plenty of others, most of which end in -ic, -ist, -ism, -al, -ian or -ization. They make me visualize hatcheting the skulls of those who utter them (except for Susie, who can say anything she likes). Another possibility is that I am just an intolerant hag and need to lighten up. But I prefer to blame the language of academia, for now.

More globbing soon! Back to the books....

Still Not a Grownup

Today was my first birthday in years that wasn't planned by the various members and associates of the Sang-Froid Riding Club, but I think it went pretty well. I kept it mellow, had to go to class, etc. After class, went on my date with Tony Leung, although he wasn't actually there - he looked great, though - he plays a bad guy in "Lust, Caution," and the whole movie's just shattering, so afterwards I walked home in a sort of emo haze. Then I drank a chocolate beer and am now considering going to bed. Exciting! Hey, at my age, that is a party. Anyway, I dug it. More soon.

Friday night study break

Apparently I have two lifelines.

It's true.

I had my palm read Friday night, and that's what the woman told me. She was under the impression that I was in my late 20s, and when I whispered to her my actual age, she looked disappointed. "It's not too late," she said, letting go of my hand. "You could still choose the other life," but she didn't look like she meant it. Then again I'm not sure how skilled a professional she was; it was my left hand, and I kept waiting for her to mention the fact that my ring finger basically forms a triangle with the rest of my hand, which is unusual, but she never did. So I'm not too worried about the rest of her forecast. And besides, it was free. You get what you pay for.

She was the middle sister of three long-black-haired dames lined up at this bar called the Garage. I ended up there because I'd been out for beers with some kids from school, at a funny German bar called Lederhosen, which has an enormous mural of Alps-ish scenery filling the walls of the entire back room and serves beer in 1-litre steins. "Oh, I'll just stop in for one" goes from self-delusion to honest goal at a place like that. It was fun. Afterwards, several of us were standing around outside the bar pretending to smoke cigarettes when it started to rain. It was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit, but it rained anyway, really ferociously, and all but two people in the crowd had umbrellas with them. Amazing! How had they known it would rain? There'd been no indications. Or had I missed them? I'd been studying. Anyway, it poured, and as we walked toward the subway a couple of us were trying to decide if we should continue to bar-hop despite not knowing a single thing about a single bar in the vicinity. It kept raining as we stood there deciding, so finally someone said "How about that place there" and we scurried in.

It was the Garage, and while getting beers I was pulled into conversation with a guy who later ended up dancing very closely with one of the three dark-haired ladies at the bar. Then the band started up. My two colleagues, a girl and a boy, and I retired to a table with our drinks. (One girl had deserted pre-beer, citing an understandable preference for a steaming rather than a frosty beverage.) Eventually the fellow, a DC newsboy who wears a sportcoat like a good old-school reporter should, suggested dancing. There was already some going on. We joined in. One of the three dark-haired ladies at the bar demanded that the band play "Stormy Weather," and the band obliged. The drummer was hot. They all are, I guess. I crept to the ladies' room. When I came back, my colleagues were embroiled in conversation with the leader and oldest of the three. She was a trip. They were all triplets, in fact, no no, just sisters, no, it turned out they weren't probably related at all by blood, but the three of them together made for an odd and very New York style of night. The oldest one ordered the middle one to read my palm, and that's how I found out about my complicated future. Although it's just as likely, I guess, that they were studying my hand to create opportunities for groping around in search of a wallet or something. You never know; it could go either way.

Eventually they left, and later, so did we.

OK then, skewl is krewl

I was gonna post some of my homework assignments, not just to torture you but also because they're the main reason the glob updates have been so rare and skimpy (although this is more due to the millions of pages of daily reading than to any writing assignments). But so far my papers are all kinda blah ... simultaneously pretentious and not-very-smart. Here is an example, since I'm more inclined to take a walk outside than sit indoors and type on a Saturday afternoon. A real glob update, recounting the exciting adventures of a few overeducated and under-rested grad students in the big city on a Friday night, will appear soon. For now, I present...my homework.

Les, I put a few big words in there for ya!

(And yes, I know the thesis is a little crazy; the prof seems to be fine with that.)

[title would go here, if I could think of one]

Suppose you were allowed, without fear of discovery or reprimand, to sock George W Bush in the teeth. You'd probably do it. We all probably would. And Bush isn't the only likely victim in this fantasy. Think about the people who, every day, send you into a spitting rage: your ex, your boss, your personal trainer, that guy who just cut you off in traffic. The late-shift barista. Your copy editor, or, if you are a copy editor, that writer who resists all understanding of the apostrophe. "You hate your boss at your job," the Flaming Lips sang on Bad Days, "but in your dreams you can blow his head off."

Even perfectly reasonable people sometimes have the urge to bestow violence upon the deserving. In real life, of course, we can't do any such thing. Common sense and the social contract are there to stop us. But we can go to a movie and watch somebody else do it.

Action movies are best for this. For example, several scenes in the otherwise forgettable new gangster-cartoon movie Shoot 'Em Up will resonate with those of us likely to flunk out of anger-management class. In one scene, the film's post-apocalyptic hero, Smith (Clive Owen [author's note: aka my boyfriend]), decides to steal a fancy car purely because it's parked illegally in a handicapped-parking space, the implication being that anyone so insensitive deserves to have his car stolen. Seconds later, Smith is enraged again because the driver in front of him consistently fails to use his turn signal when changing lanes. When the sloppy driver then throws a discarded paper cup out the window, Smith explodes - he speeds up and, still driving the car he removed from the handicapped space, bashes the litterbug right off the road. Social contract? What social contract?

Movies let us do the things we wish we could do in real life, whether it's shooting bad guys or bedding good guys. "You're sorta stuck where you are," the Flaming Lips song continues, "but in your dreams you can buy expensive cars, live on Mars and have it your way." Movies make it easy to rob banks, steal cars, smash through plate-glass windows, fly, flirt, win every time. In this way they make life tolerable. Some movies offer hope, some release. A film like Shoot 'Em Up leans toward the latter. The ersatz satisfaction achieved through vicarious violence holds at bay a vague but persistent sense of despair that creeps in when we start to ponder our helplessness in the face of quotidian evil. Inside the movie theater, you get to fight back. You don't have to suppress your anger and act like nothing's wrong. You're allowed to break free of all those civilized constraints. You're supposed to, in fact. You're supposed to laugh when Shoot 'Em Up's antihero corrals a mother who's beating her child and gives her an instructive spanking. You're supposed to cheer when he interrogates and then assassinates a once-decent politician who has sold out and become a hypocrite. It's about time somebody taught those people a lesson, isn't it?

Of course it wouldn't be practical to go around arguing that all politicians who violate their own moral codes should be shot. A person could get into trouble. So we hoard our fury, our disgust and disillusionment, all of our messy and irrational feelings, until we're in a place where expressing them is appropriate, where they can't do any harm.

Inside a movie theater, people become invisible. There's a magical transformation that starts when the lights fade. It turns an ordinary human into a weightless observer, a bodiless pair of eyes. The same sensation often occurs in foreign cities where, wandering unfamiliar streets, you recognize no one, no one recognizes you, and the inability to understand the language isolates you to the point that you start wondering if you can, actually, still be seen. When you're in that state - an invisible, floating perceiver - actions have no consequences. You can do anything you like. It's easy to be brave, because there's no risk; you're not even really there.

The problem is that when we come back to ourselves at the end of the movie, we find that we have left our rage behind. It's been spent, exorcised. Watching a good movie - or even a bad one if it's exciting and involving enough - is cathartic. But catharsis purges. Aristotle believed that watching violence on stage drained the viewers of their own turbulent emotions.

Partly that's what we want from movies: to be relieved, tranquilized. Purging angst through drama sounds like a fine idea if we're talking about cases like road rage, bullying and petty annoyances.

But is it wise to habitually jettison anger? When the urge to fight back is so easily worked out and smoothed away inside a darkened theater, is there anything left in us for the real world? What if films are taming our spirit of outrage and lulling us into submission? In other words, do we really want to let Clive Owen take care of the bad guys for us? As tough as he is on screen, Shoot 'Em Up's Smith can't do much about our real bullies. Dictators, terrorists, secret governmental endorsements of torture - these things are beyond the reach of silver-screen avengers.

It's tempting to declare helplessness in the face of such enormous evil and continue fighting our battles in an arena where we know we'll come out as winners. And the movies do help us get through our days without going mad. But given the state of the world, shouldn't we be a little mad?

BBLPC / George Clooney vs the Hawk / Sk00L iz Kul

The BBC bought Lonely Planet! Here are some excerpts (not made up, I swear) from what our boss fella told those of us scattered about in Lonely Authorland:

"It's a highly astute and exciting move that will unleash transformational opportunities ... the very beginning of a whole new journey for all of us ... we are keen to engage with you directly in as many ways as possible."

Oooh - that sounds dirty! But maybe fun, too - especially if everyone in the company suddenly starts affecting a posh accent.

In other news: One recent night I spotted a little red Honda Hawk parked on the street outside my apartment building, and I realized - with something like horror - that it gave me a much more visceral thrill than I would've felt if I'd merely seen George Clooney or Brad Pitt. Today on the walk back from school I saw another one, gray, and I waded through a band of Chinatown moppets leaving kindergarten to get a better look at it. Every time a bike of any kind goes by, I practically break my neck to check it out. Can you say addiction? I knew you could.

Misc updates: I guess I never wrote about my grad-school orientation. I won't now, either - it's old news. David Carr from The New York Times came to speak, and he was very weird and hilarious. Advised us to abandon sleep and do everything, even if it means doing most of it poorly. Hmm. Well, it is NYC...

Some of you probably don't even know what I'm doing in New York in the first place. Well, half the time neither do I. But I'm out here temporarily, getting a master's in journalism at NYU, in a program called Cultural Reporting & Criticism. (Sorry if I'm repeating myself here. Feel free to skip ahead to the juicy parts. Oh, wait...sigh.) It's all about writing cultural commentary, New Yorker-style essays, better and meatier reviews of books/films/etc, and articles about things happening in life that aren't "hard news." My aim is, basically, to write the same kind of stuff I was writing before, only better, and more often, and for more than ten cents a word.

So far there's been more reading than writing, as we're supposed to get a feel for how we fit into the ancient hallowed tradition of criticizing other people for a living. The first few things we read were from the 1840s (Margaret Fuller). Since then it's been people like Dwight MacDonald, George Orwell, Randall Jarrell (famous for his poems, but I like his essays better), Pauline Kael, Norman Mailer (my neighbor, by the way, here in Brooklyn Heights - how's that for posh?), Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Greil Marcus etc.

We got our first writing assignment back on Friday. Disastrous, to a man. The whole class was scolded with almost comical severity. (Meaning that it was so harsh it would've been funny, except that The Controversial Katie Roiphe can actually be kind of scary.) Yep, we suck. All of us (that's the only good part). Overall, Results were Very Disappointing. Rewrites are due this Friday, and I think it's safe to say that everyone is terrified.

But hey, at least someone's reading our essays. Nobody reads essays anymore.

Anyway. Here is a picture of the sign on my apartment building, where I sleep and type and in front of which I can usually be found sitting on park benches reading ancient literary critics:

It's an old hotel, almost certainly haunted (see? it says SPIRITS right there on the building!).

And here are some trembly nighttime shots (no tripod, sorry) from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, two blocks away:


Doesn't it look fake?

The benches on the Promenade are usually full of people making out. Gross.

This Just In

Word on the street, as of an hour ago, for those of you who need to keep up:
Sea salt is the new harissa.
Pomegranate is the new sea salt.
Lavender is the new pomegranate.
Pomegranate is so over!

Ultimately, it's really all about tea.

My Date with George Clooney

Alright, fine, I'm exaggerating. I haven't actually gone on a date with George Clooney. But he's filming the new Coen Brothers movie right around the corner, starting tonight, so it's only a matter of time. (OMG, what am I going to wear?!?)

In other famous-hot-guy news: Clive Owen for President! I just went to see "Shoot 'Em Up," the second movie this year in which Clive (my boyfriend) plays post-apocalyptic midwife during a raging gun battle. This one's a little funnier than "Children of Men," though. It's an insanely ultraviolent live-action comic book, basically, and it goes so far over the top that it ends up on the very, very bottom - you know, where all the fun stuff happens. But here's why my boyfriend Clive should be president, even though he's British: his character, Smith, is the ultimate Liberal Superhero. Check it out: He hates litterbugs and careless drivers; he loves dogs; he protects helpless women and babies; based on his constant carrot-munching, he's probably vegetarian; he's anti corporal punishment, pro gun control, and against rich white jerks driving luxury cars. He's perfect! But instead of whining feebly about these issues on some useless television news program like your average modern-day lefty, Clive is out there living in the world, fighting for justice, stabbing the bad guys to death with carrots or machine-gunning camera-sized holes in the backs of their heads, or even hurling them toward spinning 'copter blades in midair while parachuting away from the scene of a pretty unambiguous left-leaning political statement. All he needs is a cape. And maybe some tights.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I have to hand in a paper about the movie and the world and my reactions to the movie in the context of the world and so on. Wish me luck.

More to report soon - updates on the Brooklyn Book Fair (pretty much as thrilling as a blockbuster action movie!), "Night of Lust," the Holy Greil and (once I get security clearance) some very exciting motorcycle racing news.

Picture Time

My poor old eyes are temporarily tired of looking at words, so for now I'm copping out and globbing photos only. Here are a few from my first two weeks in town.

View from the window of the hotel where I stayed the first couple of nights, at the Gowandus edge of Park Slope:



Below, the only slightly less glamorous view from the window of my apartment in Brooklyn Heights:


A random street close to where I live (there are much prettier ones even closer, but I keep forgetting to bring my camera with me when the light is nice):


On the way back to Brooklyn from school:


And finally, a bunch of scenes from my commute -- I live just a couple of blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. Sweet!

Little girl in the big city

So far so good, man. Been here more than a week and I have yet to be mugged, lost, or trampled beneath the shiny-shoed feet of excited stockbrokers. My new hut is pretty awesome. I have my own little studio apartment, without the annoyance of a kitchen, but with a fridge - an implicit endorsement of eating only uncooked snack food at all times. (There is a microwave down the hall.) The building is an old hotel in historic Brooklyn Heights, two blocks from this waterfront promenade with awesome views of the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan skyline and Statue of Liberty. It's the nicest neighborhood I've ever lived in. And the subway practically stops in my basement.

I "moved in" on Saturday, which entailed dropping off my suitcase and backpack and getting the mailbox key. (Send cookies!) Then met up with my friend Brenda, whom I've known since about 5th grade or so, and a friend of hers who lives right across the street from me, it turns out. We went on a little tour of the irritatingly named DUMBO neighborhood, then headed to Chinatown and some Lower East Side wandering. Stops included Moby's tea shop, a Vietnamese sandwich joint and a place that serves only rice pudding.

That evening Brenda and I went over to Williamsburg to hang out with our friend Damian, aka Mr Handsome, aka DJ Dieselboy (he's famous!). I've known Damian since kindergarten. He still looks the same:

(I'm the one in the Ernie shirt.)

Damian has this awesome loft in Williamsburg and an adorable girlfriend who cuts the hair of famous people. He travels the world as a highly sought-after drum-and-bass DJ. And he's from Rye! Hilarious. Anyway, he took us out on the town in a fashion that I won't be able to replicate ever, probably, or anyway not until I win a couple of lotteries and hire a fashion consultant. First we had dinner at the coziest little Italian place, somewhere on the Lower East Side (I think). After that it was time for the cocktail tour. We followed him obediently, and he led us into...a tiny, fluorescent-lit hotdog joint. Hmm. Then he disappeared, apparently to make a phone call. Confusion reigned...until the back of the phone booth opened up and, voila, there was a fancy cocktail bar on the other side. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me since I arrived in New York. A secret bar, entered through a phone booth! Can you beat that?

Plus, the cocktails in there were tasty as all get-out.

The place is called PDT, for Please Don't Tell. Oops. After that, we went to Death & Co., another very fabulous cocktail lounge, where I had something called the Cinder - tequila something something something, with smoked sea salt on the rim. It was excellent. Smoked sea salt! Are you kidding me? I wanted to order something like a WD40-infused PBR-and-sweat margarita, to combat the weirdness, but then I thought they'd probably be able to make it, which would just be too weird.

We finished off the evening back in Damian's hood, at a cafe thingie that I really want to go back to, but can't remember the name of - but it had the best dessert on earth. Will investigate further.

Next day we all met up for brunch - it came with a salad! (Says the bumpkin, amazed.) Brenda and I explored junk shops and stared at area hipsters. Williamsburg is where the Hipster Shuttle from outer space crash-landed back in 1986; the few starving and exhausted hipsters who arrived on Earth in the shuttle, much like Gremlins, multiplied and became hideous when exposed to a combination of beer and college rock. They of course went on to infest the nation and the rest is history, but this is the neighborhood where it all started. Sort of thrilling!

That night, after a dinner of expensive pizza and a failed attempt to replicate the previous evening's cocktail bonanza, Brenda and I and my friend Snively (from college, a million years ago!) accompanied Damian to work. He had a gig at a rave on a boat that started at midnight and sailed until 3am. It was awesome. Each beer cost twentyfive dollars, but we got to ride the boat free of charge, heard three DJs (Damian was best), floated under a bunch of bridges and circled the Lady Statue herself in the crazy hours of the night. Pretty fun. At one point we floated toward this featureless concrete building. "What's that big slab of concrete over there in the middle of the river?" I asked Damian. "New Jersey," he said. (I'm still not sure.)

I had my first class on Tuesday. My professor said all the right things; so did the one today. (The profs are Susie Linfield and Katie Roiphe, respectively, if anyone's interested. The third class is a nuts-and-bolts reporting class taught by Alyssa Katz.) It's like they've been reading my diary (not that I keep a diary, and not that I'd write about work stuff in it if I did) and figuring out what to say in class based on their efforts to bolster my spirits, just me, personally. Our reading lists are excellent, too. I ordered a bunch of the books from Powell's, but picked up the rest at Shakespeare & Co by the NYU campus, and the guy at the checkout there said, "Wow, you're going to have fun!" It's true. All the books I've kinda wanted to read for a while but never had an excuse to make time for. In today's class (called The Cultural Conversation, which means we read a bunch of really old critics and essayists and sort of follow the thread through the eras up to now) I realized that the exciting part was being in a room with a bunch of people most of whom were really, really excited about the process of constructing sentences. It's been a while since I've talked about words and language in that way, and I guess I've missed it without realizing I did. It's also fun just to geek out on journalism in an arena that's purely theoretical. You can talk idealistically without appending something like "...but of course no one wants to hire that kind of writer" to every sentence.

Anyway. Sorry for babbling on and on, particularly when I'm talking about sentences and writing. Hypocrisy in action. Oh well - it's Friday night, I'm tired, I think I'll go read for a while, maybe daydream about what the Portland boys are doing, or rather the ones who aren't busy racing tiny motorcycles on the salt flats at Bonneville, because I already know what they're doing, and I am jealous as hell. Oh man do I have a lot of reading to do. Hooray!

Ten Hours in the Portland Airport

Dispatch #1 from New York!

It took me longer than I expected to leave Portland. Possibly symbolic. For reasons both chemical and circumstantial (in preparation for my 6am flight, I'd stayed up until 3am abusing the hospitality of Beulahland and most of my internal organs - that's the chemical part; and even though I then managed the herculean feat of packing my last bag in half an hour and waiting downstairs in bleary-eyed readiness for a cab to fetch me, said cab never showed up - that's the other part), I missed my early flight out of town and had to reschedule for a midnight escape. But I couldn't hang out in my apartment until then, because the new tenants (Zach's mom) were excitedly planning an Ikea-fueled decorating mission that day. And I didn't think Beulahland would be too happy to see me back so soon. So around 2pm I set out for the airport in hopes I could jump onto an earlier flight. Which, of course, I couldn't. Boo. Hence the post title. But PDX is a fine and dandy place to work, it turns out. Has wifi, squishy chairs. All it lacks is a place to comfortably nap.

Anyway. I typed a bit and, the minute I got on the plane, fell into a mini-coma that lasted pretty much all the way to LaGuardia. Woke up, fetched luggage, caught cab to temporary lodging at the edge of Park Slope in Brooklyn. I haven't been to NYC since I was about sixteen. From a cab, the Statue of Liberty (Lady Tyranny) looks like a tiny little cake decoration. A nice brownish musty fog made the whole Manhattan skyline look painted on - the Empire State Building, totally fake. It was cool to see, but I didn't really feel anything until we went down into this underpass and came out and, kabamm, all at once there it was: the Brooklyn Bridge, mere feet away, out-glamming in real life every painting that's ever been done of it. I'm planning to walk across it tomorrow. And frequently thereafter.

No big adventures thus far, but I will attempt to report the cleaner ones of the many that are sure to occur. And some of you, I'm sure, will simply be relieved to be getting a small respite from the all-motorcycles all-the-time content of this blog. (Such a boring girl.) Cheers!

Road Trip

I know what Hunter Thompson said, but the truth is still that when the going gets weird, it's best to leave town. I'm about to do just that, again, about which more later. But first some updates.

What happens on the roadtrip stays on the roadtrip - that's the rule, so if this report seems a bit skeletal, you know why. But I think there's probably enough low-level-clearance information available to keep folks entertained.

I've been wanting to ride a bike down to the Bay Area for, oh, three years. Even contemplated doing it on my GS450 back in the day, for one of the Lonely Planet author workshops in Oakland, but a wise counselor suggested I'd need all my internal organs in pristine, unrattled shape in order to properly destroy them at the workshop, which turned out to be true. It would've been a brutal ride home, my liver taking up both saddlebags, etc. So I waited and waited, and finally this summer a window opened up. Well, kind of. I was supposed to be dutifully whittling down my 250-page Seattle city guidebook into a 29-page section of a different guidebook. But how long could that take, really? I knew the coordinating author wasn't stressed about it, so I decided it would take two days and that those two days could follow a 10-day road trip, dang it. I owed my pals John and Sean a visit. I didn't get my big road trip last year thanks to mangled hand-knee combo (see gore pics). And once again I missed going to Sumpter with the fellas in May because I was in Sweden. So - carpe moto.

The timing was perfect, as two friends also wanted to ride down that week. The Italian Cowboy owed his Frisco friends a visit, and Jack was headed to Laguna Seca for the MotoGP. Jack's a pro at this road-trip thing and knew all the good roads, so we tailed him.

But first there was racing. It was Vintage Days at PIR, which meant four races for me (I think - it gets blurry after about a lap and a half). Made my fastest lap times ever, and on the last race of the weekend I only got lapped by the two fastest guys, as opposed to the usual lapped-by-half-the-grid thing. I do tend to place myself in the best possible spot for watching the end of the race. Plus, the innocent or optimistic might be persuaded to believe I came in third. Haha.


Anyway. Two long, hot days of racing, then one day of trip prep...we were set to leave for SF Tuesday morning. On Monday I went outside to find that the back tire of the Hawk was 100% flat. Oops! I feared the wrath of the Italian Cowboy, who was all in a rage to leave town that minute if not sooner and get as far from Portland as possible. "I wanna go NOW, Becky! I just wanna ride!" So, I hustled, finished whatever LP chapter I was on, threw together my packet of maps to mail to Oz, took a wee nap, packed in 10 minutes and zipped over to Vicious Cycle first thing Tuesday morning. And once again the World's Best Motorcycle Shop rescued me, the damsel in distress. Thanks, guys! Tire plugged, I zipped over to the meeting point, where precedent for the rest of the trip was about to be set: Jack & Becky enjoy three or four leisurely coffees, after which Italian Cowboy rolls up late in cloud of angst. Hooray! Time to go!

First day was kind of boring, straight down I-5 to vegan sandwiches in Eugene, then a mini-jag over to Drain (99 to 38 to 138, I believe) and back to the highway. I'm pretty sure we stayed in Grants Pass that night, but can't remember getting there. I know it was late when we rolled in, and we stayed at Motel 6 and had to eat at Denny's because everything else had closed. One beer each in a karaoke lounge, where we discovered that Grants Pass is the secret Capital of Karaoke. All the residents are rock stars. Tell your A&R peeps to check it out.

^ Requisite road-trip bike-porn shot.

Grants Pass also has a whole bunch of totally weird, large ceramic clothed-animal sculptures (mostly bears) decorating the city sidwalks. If you're into that sort of thing.

Next day we took 199 to Cave Junction and went up to the Oregon Caves National Monument. Did the tour, Cowboy enraged. ("I just wanna RIDE!") Found out about the Oregon Cavemen, who had parties in the caves during the '50s. They'd dress in fur, carry clubs, grunt at each other and drag their cavewomen around by the hair, while in the background DJs spun Thog rock by the Troglodytes, Randy Luck, Tommy Roe, Jerry Coulston and the Hollywood Argyles. (OK, I'm making that last part up. But how awesome would it be?) Anyway. The weight of so much rock overhead turned us primal - an uncharacteristic lust for cigarettes being the least dangerous urge our gang experienced - and we resolved to wear bear costumes for our next foray into the caverns of rage.

We continued south on 199, then turned off onto the road to Happy Camp. Very pretty. At HC we turned left onto 96, then did a smidge of 263 to Yreka (home of the famously nonexistent palindrome bakery), where we declared ourselves done for the day and found a hotel. Ten seconds later it started pouring rain. Sweet!

Yreka is a damned strange town. Cowboy had scouted around a bit, so after the ritual beer-and-pizza-devouring we wandered over to this place called the Jolley something something, identified by a neon skull and crossbones, at which point begins the section of this tale that is classified. Sorry. I can tell you that I saw the naked nether regions of more than one strange man, collected a brand-new alias by accident, almost got married, fended off Jaeger shots, met the nephew of someone famous and then forgot who the famous person was.

From Yreka we took Highway 3 all the way down to Weaverville and on until it met the 36, aka Becky's Favorite Road Ever. (And I didn't even know the half of it yet!) We took the awesome, awesome 36 to Fortuna, a creepy little town with a good Mexican restaurant on the main drag. Then we headed south, doing a tiny smidge of the very gorgeous but chaotically surfaced Lost Coast road before Jack took pity on our sportbike suspensions and we continued south along Avenue of the Giants (which parallels 5 and is much much nicer). Bypassing a number of likely hotels and petrol stations in Garberville, we continued to a mythical youth hostel we'd heard about in Leggett. Sources described it as "cool," which turned out to have been most likely a typo for "closed." There was no hostel, it was dark, I was out of gas and so was my bike. We called some hotels in Garberville but all seemed to be booked. Panic began to seize our heroine.

Luckily the Italian Cowboy had seen a likely-looking camp compound a few miles back. So he scouted us out a cabin, which turned out to be awesome. The Bear Room: bears everywhere. Huge bed. Outdoor kitchen. Beer at the shop. I drank half a beer and passed out in my clothes, happily.

Next day we did the drive-through tree, then took the excellent, curve-a-licious Hwy 1 to the coast and southward. Had breakfast/lunch in Fort Bragg, which to me is where it really started to feel like California. Maybe just because it was a coastal town but, unlike on the Oregon coast, the outdoors were room-temperature. And the diner had organic everything.

We rode south along 1 for a while, then branched off inland on the 128, which someone had told us was awesome. It was just average most of the way, but then suddenly toward the end it lived up to its rep - at my favorite part, it turned into the motorcycle equivalent of a black-diamond mogul run, say Mirage up at Monarch, a narrow, twisty line snaking tightly up the hill and back down the other side. Cool. Turned my legs to jelly.

That let us out at Cloverdale, where we hopped on the 101 for a bit, then hopped off at Healdsburg-ish and took a mystery road to Jenner to get back on Hwy 1. And that took us all the way into town, via the Golden Gate Bridge, which turned out to be Not At All Scary despite my worries. It was actually totally awesome - we hit it in perfect afternoon light, very romantic. Then Jack led us (quite sneakily) to Lombard, San Francisco's crookedest street, brick-paved and very steep. So the little Hawk is now in ten thousand Japanese tourist photos.

Following Jack partway, I motored over to the Mission District and found Sean's apartment. Success! Parked, changed, went out. John led us on a beer tour of the 'hood, then we climbed Bernal Heights Hill to see the view (and because, well, 50,000 squats in one day just didn't seem like quite enough exercise, you know?). We took the slide on the way down. Fun.

Next day we slept in, went to hipster breakfast joint, then drove around looking at the city. After all that riding, it was awesome just to be driven around. We checked out a bicycles-and-beer fest in Golden Gate Park, then the Presidio and Legion of Honor and various neighborhoods before meeting a friend of John's at the Parkside, which has a dreamy outdoor patio. Then we ate cheesesteaks, then the boys ate a second cheesesteak, then we took naps and watched a movie. Went out that night to Li-Po and the Buddha Bar, finishing at Ha-Ra's, home of my new favorite old-curmudgeon bartender, Karl. He's grouchy. "Didn't you see the sign on the door? We're closed," he growled when we walked in. Next day we drove out to Treasure Island, took some pix, and then met the Cowboy at the Zeitgeist for MotoGP. They wouldn't turn on the sound and it wasn't that great a race. We met my friend Tom (coolest guy on earth) at Vesuvio for beers, then crossed the street to Specs (coolest place on earth) for a few more. Tom pointed us to a good Italian restaurant, Capp's, so we had a huge dinner, dropped off John and went to Delirium for a bit, then back to Sean's. Later I found out the Cowboy was hanging with Devendra Banhart at Delirium one night. Didn't know who he was, though. Thought he was just some dude who looked like Jesus.

Next day (Monday) John and I split a six-pack at Dolores Park and admired the view. Some parts of it more than others. (See pic below.) We spent some time poking around in bookshops on Valencia, including the McSweeney's pirate shop, where John got mopped. Had beers and popcorn at Lucky 13, then went to Zeitgeist and met Jack and Cowboy to plan route home.

Highlight of the trip home was Stewart's Point Road, a mysterious and easily missed branch off Hwy 1 between Plantation and The Sea Ranch (whatever those are) that starts out looking like a badly maintained driveway and ends up in race-track heaven. I'd felt clumsy all morning and most of the afternoon, but this road made me feel COOL. Perfect orangey sunset lighting up this buttery road, perfectly proportioned corners you could take just as fast as you wanted to without a scrap of anxiety. It was epic. We stayed somewhere in Cloverdale, which I don't remember at all. Ate breakfast at the Owl Cafe, I think. Then went north on 128 and over to Hopland to connect to 175, which we'd heard was awesome. It was pretty good, but it led us into claustrophobic traffic and oppressive heat around Lakeport. We took some small road up to 20, then 20 across the lake (through Lucerne!), to Williams where we hit the 5 for an 80-mile slog up to Red Bluff. Ate lunch at a Mexican place in Red Bluff, and then hit the second half of Becky's Favorite Road Ever: 36. Yeay!

It was rad. Everyone should ride this road. And quick, too, because it looked as if they were about to flatten out its rollercoastery beauty. Major drag.

We took 36 all the way back to the coast, possibly foolish since it was 5pm when we started on it in Red Bluff. Oh well. Hit some serious fog along the way, which was COOL but scary (couldn't see ten feet, no exaggeration), and then it got dark and sort of, um, moist. Not exactly raining, because rain doesn't stick to your visor like this stuff did. I couldn't see a thing, so followed the Cowboy's taillight very slowly into Fortuna. Here we realized that we were of course hideously late for finding a hotel room, once again. Still creeped out by Fortuna, we decided to try Eureka. (While there, I got a text message from a friend asking where we were, and I got to reply, "Eureka!" Easily amused, I admit.) Anyway. We ended up plowing north up 101 to Arcata, where we found the very last room available that night for less than $300. It was small and icky and in a Motel 6 - smelled like a geriatric ashtray - but across the street was a food store that was still open at 11pm, so we stocked up, watched TV and passed out. Yeay!

Next morning, bagely breakfast in Arcata, foggy slog up 101, epic battles against the wind along the Oregon Coast, me plastered to tank in order to keep Hawk from flying away into the ocean... ate lunch somewhere, took 38 to Drain, got back on the 5 all the way up. Jack mildly injured in vicious Wasp Attack. Cowboy's bike overheated 10 miles out, jeopardizing our greatly anticipated homecoming beers at the Sandy Hut, but he limped it in and we got there safely and all was well.

One work day, and then, you guessed it, another 160 race. My bike crapped out of the first race, but I finished the second one, and am now - drumroll - a Graduated Novice. Which means: no more green shirt! Awesome.

More trip pix:

^ Becky on the Lost Coast Road, courtesy of Jack.

^ I'm pretty sure this was on 36.

^ Jack on the Lost Coast.

^ The drive-through tree near Leggett.


^ Interfering with the scenery on Highway 1, somewhere north of Fort Bragg.

^ Later along Hwy 1 - there's a point where it stretches out a bit and the scenery takes a turn for the bleakly cinematic. Fog machines, etc. Nice.

^ Italian Cowboy approaches the city.


^ Jack

^ Drew and JG at the Parkside.

^ Sean
View from Treasure Island.

^ Mission Dolores Park, tactfully excising crotch of nearly-naked sunbather dude from the frame. You can thank me later.

poor little becky

Note to self: Trying to be material for your own fiction might not always be a good idea.

Misc

Alert readers Les Svenson and Patrick Leyshock win today's prize for pointing out that the Indian (see below) is, in fact, not a Euro motorcycle. I'm sure the rest of you were all just being polite.

In other bike news, I successfully completed my second-ever 160 race awhile back (sorry for lack of updates - blame the bosses), and even better, I did not come in last. I did get lapped, but not until the end (of course, I can't count, so when they went by me I cursed and mentally kicked myself because I thought it was only lap 3 or so). I felt sure I was about a hundred miles behind everyone, but when we got back to the pits it turned out that there was one guy behind me! He must've been having bike trouble. Still awesome, though.

Just got home late last night from a visit to Denver to check out my little brother's offspring (see below again). Early photos led me to nickname her The Burrito, but now she's grown into more of a wiggly pink drool machine. Cute, but dangerous. (My favorite combo.) At 5 months old, she's already pulling hair, spitting in faces, delivering knuckle sandwiches and trying to gnaw people's arms off - imagine what she'll be like at 15. What a scrapper! She's huge, too - weighs more than I did at a year old. (What doesn't, though.) Seriously, she's very adorable, charming and well-behaved - or maybe I'm just a sucker for a pretty smile. Less motivated than ever to dabble in that whole enterprise myself, though, especially because I'd hate to break my perfect record of never having changed a single diaper. Her uncle Mark hasn't either, and I'm not doing it until he does.

Anyway. I departed babyland for mapland, and had better finish getting my bearings. Mapland can be a treacherous realm for the incautious. Wish me luck; if I can pull this off, I'll post some highlights and warnings from Seattle guidebook research in a few days.

(Becky)

Stockholm Update - By Request!

As promised, then postponed, and later demanded - may I present to you the Stockholm update.

Well, I flew out for my late grandfather's retrospective gallery show. Aside from being my hero in the realms of wild imagination and creative driving, he was also a journalist and an artist. A selection of his work was hand-picked by some of his colleagues from Dagens Nyheter, the main Stockholm daily, and displayed at the gallery of another colleague and friend, Gun Joslin. Gun's art studio is amazing, crammed with canvases and supplies and maps and masks and, uh, stuffed herons...snakeskins...I thought it was the coolest room I'd ever seen, until I got to go inside her actual house. Holy crap. The place is a living museum. Her husband was an anthropologist who wrote books about the Asante people in Ghana before it was even called Ghana, and her house is full of African masks, carved wooden figures, paintings, photos, all kinds of stuff. She had a story about every piece, including two wooden thrones, one for the king (elected) and one for the queen (elected for life). In the foyer we were greeted by a human skull tacked to the wall with, hilariously, ping-pong balls in its eye sockets ("He had a sense of humor," she says). Lined up next to it were the skins of armadillos, crocodiles, an iguana, and a couple of somethings nobody could name. One of the armadillo-like critters was there because Gun's husband - who was against frivolous hunting - had been forced to kill it to stop it from eating one of his employees. (Please do keep in mind that I'm filtering all of this through my feebly grasped Swedish, so apologies if I get any of the details wrong!)

As I understood it, my role in the whole gallery-show enterprise was to keep the snack table well stocked and my parents from killing each other. I can't take credit for the latter, as I think they were actually doing fine on their own. But I did open a few bags of chips.

Mostly, though, it was just cool to see so much of Morfar's artwork displayed in a gallery setting, and to meet some of the people who came from all over Sweden to check it out. There was - perhaps unsurprisingly - a heavy motorcycle theme to most of the conversations I had. Several of the guys in attendance owned or once owned motorcycles; one of them, Lasse, used to have a Norton Dominator that he and his bride rode all over England and Scotland on their honeymoon during the '50s - five suitcases, two up, for two months. And they're still married. At some point, my friend Jennifer's dad, Mats, asked me if I could name ten European brands/makes of motorcycle. I got nine --

MotoGuzzi
Ducati
BMW
BSA (Dad came up with this one)
Norton
Triumph
Indian
Vincent (Black Shadow!)
and Husqvarna (Swedish - pandering to the crowd, yep)

-- and then I added KTM but wasn't sure where they were made. Austria, it turns out, so I passed the test after all. Sweet!

One day while we were running errands, I made Mom go with me to the KTM store, right next door to a Dainese outlet. She was cool about it.



Later somebody scrounged up a couple of other Eurobike brand names, including a Czech one called Jawa. In hindsight it seems incredibly easy to name ten, but at the time I was pretty impressed with myself.

Later on during the weekend, I met some friends of Jennifer's who ride motorcycles. The guy rides a gigantic blue-and-yellow Harley and is in the Yggdrasil MC. Yggdrasil, in case you don't know, is the World Tree, a gigantic ash that forms the axis connecting all the realms in Norse mythology. The name derives from old Norse words meaning terrible steed. Awesome! Jennifer wrote my favorite-ever description of hanging out with Swedish Harley dudes - this is from 2003:

When going out with my friend Helena who is living with Ulf, a Harley Davidson club member, the evening is talked about as a "helkväll" in swedish ("a total night" if you translate it but that sounds kind of stupid). It usually starts with a nice dinner (they´re both great cooks) and lots of bikers and loud rock music at their house. Guys bring their own beer in plastic bags and show off their skull tatoos. By 10 p.m. a dark van with scary symbols pulls up and everybody head for some hard core club outside town where plenty of heavy silverwear, jeans, boots, beards and breasts are displayed. Occasionally the celebrity popstar E-type is picked up along the way, the van circles around the city and stop outside fashionable night clubs, where Ulf gets out to manifest his power by just standing and looking with arms crossed. Bottles of scotch are being passed around and the evening continues around 2 a.m. at "O-baren" at Sturehof. The ultimate goal is always, no matter who you are or where you´re from, to get in to Spy Bar at Stureplan, which you do if you are "somebody".

Apparently I just missed going to a gigantic Harley ralley up in Norrköping - would've been something to see. I also never met E-Type. Sigh.

There wasn't a whole lot of leisure time on this trip, but Dad and I did take a day to check out the Modern Museum, my favorite. (See gushing post from Xmastime for more on that.) There was a special exhibit of work by Karin Mamma Andersson, who paints the rooms and landscapes you see in your dreams....

(None of my favorite ones look very good online, but here's an example.)

Another day we took a ferry out onto the archipelago - it was basically a mail boat. It stopped at even the littlest rock that possessed a mailbox, making a several-hour loop all the way out to someplace no one's ever been to called Ljusterö. Pretty neat way to get out of the city for a while. On the way back, on the section from Vaxholm to Stockholm, we took a restored, old-fashioned steamer built in 1908. It cornered like a tank and rattled your teeth out every time it backed away from a dock, but man, it was cool.

Here is the hut I picked out for myself in Stockholm's archipelago:



















One of the docks we stopped in:



Typical Swedish spring weather:




On another day off, we went with Mats to check out the local outpost of anthroposophism, which I don't think any of us succeeded in pronouncing correctly the whole time. Try it. It's not easy. Strega helps, and we had some of that afterwards. But anyway, the place is interesting. The philosophy - conceived by Rudolf Steiner - is distinctly odd, but the architecture is cool (even though the colors sort of gross me out), and there's a little organic food shop where you can get all kinds of neat stuff. We ate lunch at the cafeteria there and had a nice walk around the place, then went to Mats's cabin for coffee afterwards.





Above: Two of the Hobbiton-esque Steiner buildings.



















Above: A view from the anthroposophists' beach.
Below: Chez Mats.




















The anthroposophist compound also happened to have really cool playgrounds:



















...and a good time was had by all.

Kram,
Becky

Slower Becky

Long-overdue update #1: Carb Cleaner Makes My Head Feel Funny

"So, you did Novice School on a bet and now you're back, huh?" says a guy in line for registration Saturday at PIR. Yep. I'm too distracted by the girl in the distracting half-shirt to tell him this (she has a pierced navel and baked-on abs), but I wasn't even supposed to be here today. The bike I'd planned to race, the one Patrick is calling his Enabler Bike, currently resides at two or more different addresses. Each time I go near the thing I leave it in more pieces than the previous time. Getting it all the way back together and running was prettymuch beyond me. So I figured I'd just volunteer this weekend (May 19-20) and race next time.

Patrick's bike (note lack of engine)

But then along came the deal of the century. So I am now the proud owner of a "cheater bike" (not like you can tell, with me on top of it), cute and red and theoretically pretty fast (although again...). Picked it up a week before the race. (Thanks, Les!) And voila.

In Saturday's practice sessions I realized I'd gotten even slower than I was in Novice School, especially through turn 7. Lame.

On Sunday it was pouring down rain and I slid gently off the track into the lawn during the morning warmup session (turn 4). Ended up with a few acres of land decorating my bike, but it seemed fine. Someone told me later that the bike had never been crashed before. I hope it liked the experience.

Then when it came time for the first race, I couldn't get the bike running and missed the whole thing, disappointing my legions of fans (sorry guys!). Turned out I had a dead battery, but still. Not the coolest. Ladies' book clubs don't get all tarted up to go to the races every day, you know.

By Sunday afternoon, everything was charged up and ready. The rain was sheeting down, but I stuck to a solid 35mph or so and managed to stay upright all the way around the track enough times to see the little checkered flag. Hooray! My first official finished race. I also didn't get lapped, but only because the race was shortened from 7 laps to 5 (thanks to rain and overall lateness). Sweet.

As we loaded up the bike to go home, my friend the Italian Cowboy noticed that the forks didn't move. At all. Which is not ideal, from what I gather. So apparently I'd ridden the whole race with seized forks, and still not crashed. Awesome. Plus now I have something I can blame for my ten-minute lap times. ("Bike felt weird," etc. Uh-huh.)

Anyway, sorry I haven't been more thorough in my racing updates. I'm working on a larger story about it, so will keep everyone posted etc etc etc.

Sweden report coming up next.

Hälsa från Stockholm

Hej allihop,
Jag är i Sverige hos mormor. Strax kommer nytt rapport om motorcykel, morfar med mera. But I cannot spend another minute on this laptop without pitching it out the window. Glacial interbot connex + powered by hamsters, etc etc etc...hej då!
More soon,
Blecky

Even Faster Becky!

I'll have more to write about this weekend's race experience, but for now, here's a post about it on WW's website. Mom, please stop reading when you get to the Sunday part, OK? Trust me, it's for your own good.
Love,
Becky


Triage at the track! Luckily this wasn't my bike, but I'm pretty sure Patrick was the most popular guy at the track that day.

The awesome, post-apocalyptic ride I borrowed -- thanks, Zac C!

Faster Becky

Jeez, it's been ages. Sorry, you legions of fans. Thing is I haven't traveled anywhere, other than the odd bridge tower, a couple of rooftops, some really strange bars in alternate dimensions, and that uncomfortable and rarely visited place where theory and practice collide. (They have a McDonald's there now. Depressing.)

But I'm about to start updating the Seattle guidebook for Lonely Planet, so I'll be heading up north a bunch in the next month and a half or so. Not particularly exotic, you say? Patience, doubters. All the normal stuff goes in the book; I'll save the good bits for you guys.

Meanwhile, please note my new nickname. My brother and sis-in-law had a kid, Clara, by all accounts the most adorable child who ever was born. And because Aunt Becky is the sister of Clara's dad, in Swedish my title is now Faster Becky. (As opposed to Moster Becky, the sister of Clara's mom. Still pretty cool, although I might be spelling it wrong.) This nickname coincides handily with my recent, possibly insane decision to race vintage motorcycles this spring. (More on that later, but suffice it to say that the nickname is optimistic; I mean really, I cain't hardly get any slower.) Anyway, can't wait to meet the little tyke, but for now, here's a picture.

Snow Day

Woke up to snow this morning - finally! Very happy about that. (Anything but RAIN, jesus.) Figured I'd finish up some work before going out to play, but then I got all absorbed in what I was writing and effectively missed ALL the fun to be had all day long. By the time I got done and started looking around for someone to play with, everybody else had work to do. Curses - foiled again! How is it that even though my schedule completely reverses itself every 24 hours, I'm still always off-sync? Oh well. At least I got to watch a guy crash his car into the side of my building. (Not very hard. He just backed up and started over.) Nobody fell down on the usually deadly sloped part of the sidewalk outside my window, but I have high hopes for tomorrow. Camera's ready.

Apologies to all my loyal readers (hi Karl!) for the lack of updates lately. Mostly it's because everything I've been doing worth writing about is semi-illegal. (Just kidding! ...um, kind of.) So instead of describing that and getting you all worried, I'll wrap up the Sweden trip report.

No better way to start than with this, the best piece of wisdom I received on the trip -- from the excellent and totally rad Captain Joe up in Harnosand: "Go always to the glass with cheer, but never to the bottle with sorrow." It's a good rule, I reckon. (Especially because it doesn't specify how often the cheery get to go back to that glass.)

Captain Joe, the singing yachtsman, was without a doubt the highlight of the holidays this year. He kept us all in good spirits, and I don't just mean snaps. He's an awesome singer and taught me a couple of sneaky toasts I plan to use on unsuspecting boys down the road. Not to mention the traditional Swedish drinking songs. There's one that's a parody of the very formal Santa Lucia song -- it involves a pig, a julbok (sort of Xmas goat type thing) and St Lucia playing poker in a barn. Another one sounded kind of raunchy (I'm not always that quick on the lyric translations) involving scantily clad forest nymphs approaching the singer with glittering hearts. Or something like that. I think it was an Evert Taube song.

Anyway. "The holidays" really is a more apt description in Sweden than it is here. You can't just call it Christmas there, because crikey, it lasts a month! First there's Lucia Day - when, as everyone knows, all the young girls put burning candles on their heads and prance around the house distributing pastries. Not a bad way to cheer people up in the mid-December gloom. Then there's Christmas Eve, the biggie, when you eat; then Christmas Day, when you eat leftovers; and then, for crying out loud, there's something called Annandag Jul, which translates literally as Another @#!$%! Day of Christmas.

After that everyone needs a holiday.

I think there's yet another followup-to-Xmas day something like two weeks later, but I had gone home by then and was beyond caring.

Before we went up to Harnosand, I sneaked off for a day at the Modern Museum, my favorite in Stockholm. It's free now - even better. It's the home of Robert Rauschenberg's goat-in-a-tire, but that one must've been on tour or something, because I didn't see it. The coolest thing was that they had my new favorite painting by my new favorite artist, a guy I'd become fascinated with just a few days earlier while packing up my grandfather's books - Oyvind Fahlstrom. (Two dots over both the O's.) He's weird and great, and this painting is a huge mess of comic-book panel type things, but not in a rip-offy Lichtenstein way. Hang on a sec, let me try to sound a little more shallow and badly educated while I talk about this art stuff....oh, whatevs, it's only a blog, right? Anyway. I also saw some hilarious performance-art videos by a guy called Kjartan Stettemark, who looks vaguely Allen Ginsberg-ish and used to dress up as a poodle and interfere with public life...to put it mildly. Good stuff. Need more like that! Then there's the old sperm corner, I like to call it, an installation consisting of a bunch of little glass sperms swarming the corner of the room, something undoubtedly profound but also just sort of funny (by Kiki Smith).

Anyway, I love Moderna Museet. Especially when it's free.

Another cool thing we got to do: After dinner in Gamla Stan one night, Mats (Jennifer's dad) led a bunch of us over to Berns, this super-opulent old music hall that's been turned into a trendy Terence Conran design restaurant (but is still an opulent old music hall outside the dining room -- 16 Horsepower has played there) to have coffee upstairs in the famous Red Room. It's where the disgruntled writers and artists used to gather to bitch about the establishment and mock the monarchy. August Strindberg's first novel (imaginatively titled The Red Room) was based on his experiences hanging out here. It was officially closed when we got there, or reserved or something, but Mats got us in, so we were able to continue the monarchy-mocking tradition -- especially good as we were mostly writers and artists. Heh.

We also spent some time analyzing the Swedish psyche that night, but I'm still not sure I have a good handle on it. An endlessly fascinating topic, though, at least to me.

OK, I'll wrap this up with some cute Swedish expressions I've learned and hope to incorporate into everyday conversation.

Not sure how this came up, but the word for skipping rocks is "throwing sandwiches." (An alternate version has it as throwing the kind of small pancakes typically eaten on Thursdays, but I can't remember what they're called.)

If you're acting wild, acting up or just being goofy, you're "full of 17."

And if you get the last little bit in the bottle of beer or wine or whatever -- which I seemed to always do -- they say you "got the boy" (fick pojken/killen).

Hey, one way or another....

Meanwhile...

While I'm getting Sweden/Colorado pix organized and otherwise procrastinating, all you loyal readers should keep yourselves entertained by reading this hilarious interview that I managed to stick my nose in, by the most excellent Jason Simms.

Back in the Land of the Free! Well, the semi-free. The slightly less expensive, generally speaking. Actually, I'm sitting at the Denver airport and the wifi here costs as much as a cheap Swedish beer ($7.95, boo!!!). So I won't post this until I get home.

I spent Friday at Karl and Natalie's for breakfast and an all-day nap. Denver had a snowstorm Thursday night, so I was rerouted via Fargo and my bags spent the night somewhere else. But they made it to DIA eventually, so I picked them up this morning (Saturday) on my way out to Portland. Handy.

I think this is the first time I've ever had my luggage lost in both directions on a trip. Sure hope all those Xmas presents I bought for everyone make it through. Haha.

Good to be home. More updates and some pixtures are on the way. Stay tuned!

Becky

Tänk på döden

A cheery message for the holidays: "Think of Death!" I spotted it yesterday above the wrought-iron gate of the local cemetery here in Härnosand. Pics to come eventually; my stolen interbot connexion's kinda shaky at the moment. But I found the message compelling enough in these dark times to post it right away. Bah humbug and all that,
Love,
Becky

GRAFFITI = NOT A CRIME!

God Jul = Merry Christmas, Stockholm style.

Probably unfair, but still funny

I was doing research, honest, when I stumbled upon this. Now does anybody wonder why I've never hooked up with a Swedish guy? :)

Borat on Sweden

In case not all of you keep up with the Stockholm dailies:

Borat on Princess Madeleine and the new Swedish prime minister

I still haven't seen the movie, but the clip in here at the antique shop is eerily reminiscent of how I spent last week.

Stockholm Rock City

Sweden is impervious to rock and roll. It's sad but true: if you want to shake your booty in Stockholm, don't go see a rock band, unless you want to get the kind of looks ordinarily reserved for public nose-pickers, puppy-kickers and people who jump the queue at the liquor store. On this trip, what with night falling at 2:30pm, there's been a lot of sitting around sipping glogg and lighting candles. The urge to hibernate is fierce. But sometimes you just have to cut loose. So, in a fit of homesickness, I crept out Thursday night to see the Thermals. The show was at my second-favorite rock club in Stockholm. It used to be a System Bolaget. There are pix of Howlin' Pelle and the Raveonettes on the walls. When I arrived, the openers, DAP (Destroy All Planets), were on their last song. When they finished, I bought myself a $7 Swedish lager and waited for the rock.

Pretty soon a very tall handsome fellow approached. I could tell he wasn't Swedish, because despite being under 40 he actually spoke to me. "We came here all the way from Germany to see the Thermals!," he said. "I have seen them maybe like five times!" He and his buddy already had tix to see the band again in Cologne on the 19th. They were even more excited about being there than I was.

The Thermals sounded awesome, not that Sweden noticed. For half the set, no one moved at all. The singer's eyebrows outdanced everybody. Luckily, this worse-than-Portland deadness did not ruin the show -- mostly thanks to the Germans. Two songs in, they started to twitch, and their dancing quickly escalated. They hugged while pogoing! Difficult to do. After a while, one Swedish guy started jogging in place next to them, and it was officially a three-man dance-off. A ring of frosty Stockholmers stood around the dancers, looking nervous. Cartoon thought-bubbles over their heads said, "Why can't these people stand still and behave?" But the Germans kept on dancing, and the other guy kept on jogging in place. On the last song, the only punk-looking girl in the room finally moved her feet. Yeah! Partial victory. Or maybe she was German too.

"I've never seen a crowd like this," said one of the guys from Cologne, distraught. But the band didn't seem to mind. I talked to the drummer afterwards, and he said the band was psyched that people showed up at all; it was their first time in Stockholm, and at 10pm there'd been nobody there. Better a crowd of statues than an empty room, I guess. But still -- I fear for this land. Didn't the Swedes once pillage monasteries and go berserk on foreign coastlines? Didn't one of their parties once get so out of hand that revelers pelted the guest of honor to death with the bones leftover from dinner? (Yes!) Now they seem to have grown so meek they won't even dance for fear of jostling someone. What went wrong? Are Stockholmers really going to stand by and let themselves be out-danced by Germany?!?

P.S.

For a better-edited review of the show, go here. (And thanks to the best-ever high-school yearbook staff for the editing! You guys RULE. xo)

Just how polite ARE these people?

These signs are all over Sweden:

Looks sort of uncomfortable....

In a semi-related note, the local paper just reported that public-transportation buses in Stockholm will soon be fueled by human waste. Awesome!

It's nearly 2pm here in the Stockholm suburb of Tyresö, and the sun just set. Weird! Half the people I know would never see daylight if they lived here in winter (although most of them probably wouldn't miss it). So far it's not too cold or snowy, which is good, because all of my warm clothes are in my checked bag, adrift someplace between here and Chicago.

Every time I come back to Sweden, that old joke gets less funny. You know: how is Swedish toilet paper like John Wayne? They're rough and tough and they don't take shit offa nobody. It's slightly less effective than using, say, a magazine, or giftwrap, or something laminated. I guess they export all the good stuff.

This morning Dad and I made our mandatory first stop at System Bolaget, the state-run likkker store. It used to be (and in some places still is) totally Orwellian; you had to take a number, wait your turn, stand at the counter and hand over your order sheet, like at an old or really formal library. The clerk would frown disapprovingly, then vanish into the booze labyrinth to report your excesses to the king and, eventually, fetch your meagre stash. Most of the System shops now are just like normal liquor stores in the states, except three times as expensive and arranged on sleek blond Ikea shelves with museum-quality lighting. Some of them are even open for a few hours on Saturdays now! Hot.