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!