Disgusted

While waiting for John and mattio on the Lower East Side yesterday (we've moved from the Monday bar crowd to the early afternoon bar crowd. I think its time for a detox week.) I bumbled around for a little while, admiring graffiti, bikes, thinkin' 'bout stuff... And I happened upon a set of advertisements that absolutely disgusts me.

These ads for the SteelWorks Lofts in Williamsburg have pictures of steel workers from 60 some-odd years ago, with slogans like "Built by Williamsburg's Finest" and "They Work Harder so you can Live Better"

um...?

Sorry, can you try harder to take advantage of the working poor in your attempt to sell a yuppie paradise condo to MBA's and trophy wives who are pushing out those very working class folks? I'm not sure you've crossed enough lines yet.

Bicycle Musings

It has been far far far too cold to train here, which is sad, because that one difficult Monday at Central Park was enough to whet my appetite for more riding. So this has left me, as always, with tinkering. I was going to show you some pictures of my recent tinkerings, but my digital camera is, well, actually frozen. So just visualize all of this. Unmitigated geekery ahead.

The Raleigh is getting closer and closer to race trim. My dear dear friend has helped me acquire some much needed parts (some free clipless pedals that I'll pick up tomorrow) and some much desired parts (very inexpensive Cinelli Criterium handlebars). The goal is to have the more curvaceous bars matched with more modern aero brake levers and a properly long stem (I am very tall). This will give me many more comfortable and aerodynamic hand positions and let me stretch out like I ought to. The clipless pedals will link my feet to the bike and do all sorts of wonderful things in terms of power transfer and efficiency.

Malcom also sent me home the other day with a few lightly used dérailleur pulleys in order to spruce up the Raleigh's old VGt. Included was an arcane old pulley that uses bearings rather than bushings (little steel balls in grease rather than slippery metal just rubbing against stuff and hoping for the best, which is what most pulleys are) I cleaned and re-greased the little gear, and I think I'm going to put it in the Shimano 600 that's on the Raleigh now, just for kicks. It's heavy, but soooo smooth.

Same friend as scored me the bars and the pedals found me the Peugeot frame, which I picked up last night. It's a bit smaller than the Raleigh, and a worse frame in terms of the steel used, but it will definitely make for a fun fixed gear. It's a beautiful green color, and while it doesn't have the beautiful lugs that the Raleigh has, nor the light weight, it will most certainly be a beautiful machine put to good use. I'll post pictures once the camera thaws, I promise.

Jeff Lewis: kinda awesome.

Some thoughts very much in progress

Object-signifiers: Objects whose purpose (purpose?) is to define other objects and thus they are held to the same real-world rules as the objects they define, even thought they are not beholden to real-world rules themselves for any other reason save this intentionality. An electronic schematic is just lines on paper. If it has a short circuit in it, it is not a schematic in the same way. It gets relegated back to lines-on-paper status. Yet it is still somehow distinct from babel, gibberish. In a certain sense, the only difference between an object-signifier and it’s intended target is one of material. In this case, ink versus copper. In the ink, the electricity flowing through the circuit is (only) implied. What is the role of intention in all this anyway? Do signs exist in the absence of intentionality?

Direction of signification: And what does direction of intentionality (writing or reading, transmitting or receiving) matter? Must both transmission and reception occur in order for there to be signification? (re-read Peirce)

Location of translation: a place, physical or logical, wherein definitional acts occur to encourage the use of a particular family of signs. The legend of a map is a location of translation.

Justice

There's justice in this world, it just sometimes happens through jokes. I've recently made friends with the expert mechanic at a bike shop that I enjoy frequenting. He and I sit around, talk shop, he tosses me spare parts and expert advice. He's a really great guy and a veteran cyclist, and I enjoy our little conversations when they happen. Last time I saw him I was collecting the pieces necessary to rebuild my wheel. L was with me, and we started talking about our plan to build her a road bike around one of my old sub-par hubs. My friend the mechanic (we'll call him Malcom) digs around through one of his hundreds of parts-drawers and pulls out a pretty nice quality sealed-bearing rear hub and hands it to her. "Here," he says. "Merry Christmas."

So today I go to him to shoot the shit, ask him about rebuilding the VGt, and just say hello. L comes up in the course of conversation and I bring him up to speed. Malcom stops a beat after I tell him, as though trying to figure out something very difficult, and then goes, "A Triathlete?! He'll never have time for her!"

Justice comes into play again, in that tomorrow, I am picking up a free bicycle frame. It's an old Peugeot, probably a low-end paperweight, but I have this nice set of wheels that was a Christmas gift to L. She left them here because she couldn't fly home with them. Do I get them back to her somehow? Or do I bolt them to the Peugeot? Right now they're under my bed and make a terrible noise any time the bed shakes. I'd like to do *something* with them.

Good Behavior

The current draft of the story I wrote this weekend:

She was late. And that was familiar and reassuring.
Jason turned the coins idly in his pocket, wondering whether they were heads or tails and their denomination.

-heads or tails relative to what?

The wind kicked up his coat and, his other hand preoccupied with the luggage, he resigned himself to the whirlwind of wool.
Taxicabs were leaving taxistands, there were kisses goodbye, kisses hello, and amidst this every permutation of his current situation he felt strangely detached, as though he would not become the person waiting for her until she had arrived.

-heads. nickel.
He glanced down at the coin in his cupped hand. Five cents off and wrong by one hundred and eighty degrees. Damn.

This wait was good. He could recalibrate. Remember things like which side of the road was used for driving and how many miles he could drive over the limit before she took her hand off his thigh.
He took in his surroundings, reacclimating. He gave names to the things he saw, little nodes of familiarity. Terminals. Skycaps. That was the roar of engine noises. That was called the sky.
He fumbled with another coin.

-heads. Eisenhower
Dime. Tails.
Huh. Broke even.

Thus establishing himself in space, he moved on to time. History, to be accurate. It had been about thirteen months, and he struggled to conjure her outline up from memory. He started with her hands, wrapped firmly around the steering wheel, guiding her path to the airport. He began to work his way simultaneously up both arms to her elbows when his mind caught on an almost forgotten snag - a small scar on her forearm, from stealing apples through a barbed wire fence when she was twelve. It had bled for hours through her bandanna while she’d tried to hide the cut from her mother.
He tried again, starting from the feet up. Only to be thwarted again by a childhood of playground scratches located about the knees.
He stopped.

-quarter. tails.
Too easy.

Her scars were like town names on a map. He thought of where she’d been cut by the sprockets of her bicycle on a rainy trail in Oregon. He remembered cleaning the wound, gingerly wrapping her calf. He recalled gently unpinning her hair in the tent later that night...

He’d cast his eyes upon many maps in her absence, many towns and many names. She too, he assumed, had done her fair share of traveling, adding names, scars and memories.
He tried again, hands to elbows, feet to knees. Every inch of her body beyond these borders was impenetrable. Unimaginable.

When he’d left from this terminal months prior, the parts had been the same. But the individual pieces-the luggage, the jetplanes, the ticket agents-had all been different. His mind held the memory of an airport that no longer existed. In the same way, her body’s marks and memories were those of thirteen months past, inaccessible for want of existence.

-dime. tails.
Shit; wheat-penny.

Up ahead there was an aberrant spot in a long line of taxis: a steel-gray Ford, late and reassuring. The queue worked in pulses as the cars pulled up, let off, let in, and went out. The Ford advanced slowly and without rhythm. As it approached he counted the rust spots, let his eyes trace the scratch from the rivet of his jeans. There was an unfamiliar dent above the front right wheel. Nothing broken, just a change in topography.
The car slowed to a stop with a familiar sputter. She reached a long arm across the long bench of the front seat and let him in. She was wearing long sleeves and a turtleneck. He took his hand out of his pocket, finally patted down his coat, hoisted his suitcase. Where could he have gotten a wheat-penny?
He ducked his head down and got into the car.
She’d left her lanky arm laid out across the old car’s sagging seat.
He followed the sleeve up, up with his eyes to her face and said, “hello.”

The weekend upstate was fantastic. John and I developed a game. We call it "Danger Shots".

To play Danger Shots, you need, (1)a bb gun, (2)a target, (3)a bottle of beer and (4)a flask of whiskey. You set the target up so that the bullseye is a half inch above the top of the beer bottle. The object is to hit the bullseye. If your shot lands anywhere outside the inner target ring, you have to take a drag on the beer and then put it back. But if you get the bullseye, the other guy, specifically John, has to drink the beer and the whiskey. All of it. If you break the bottle in your attempt, however, then you have to down all the whiskey.

The game should never be played twice in a row.

You may also need health insurance.

Charity

I had this great interaction today, while running down the street to purchase a CMOS battery for the dying Mac G4 in the office where I am a staff writer....

Dude on street: Do you have a minute for the Save the Children Fund?
Charlotte: No, man, I'm sorry.
Dude: It just takes a minute, it's really important.
Charlotte: (slows to a stop) I know. Look man, I'm a freelance writer. I'm barely making rent.
Dude: (drops his sales act, pauses.) Me too. Good luck. (dude offers hand. I shake dude's hand) Maybe next time?
Charlotte: Next time.

Blogging Vicariously

Ha.
Jay sent me this link while at work. I am now letting other people blog for me, just on their own blog.

Writers retreat Part Two Redux

So the Writers Retreat #2 never happened because a certain someone, who was also supposed to be in attendance, decided to break up with me and run off with someone else (a non-writer, it should be noted) just days before.

Terrible, terrible way to deal with writing anxiety, in my humble opinion, but to each her own.

So, finally, the second writers retreat is actually happening this weekend, and it should be much fun. Be on the lookout for postings from the retreat, and eventually another collection.

Training

First training run today... a day at the office turned into me writing pieces from home (longer story there rife with exasperation, but I don't want to go into it), turned into me making my first training run since my accident.

I should say recovery run, because I'm trying to get back to the baseline of fitness I was at before I crashed and dislocated my wrist. But training run makes me feel more useful.

It was an unseasonably beautiful New York day, and after I sent in my articles, me and the Raleigh took the PATH to Christopher Street and I biked the 60 someodd blocks to Central Park for what would be the bulk of my run.

They say you never forget how to ride a bike, but that's only half true. The mechanics of the balance are simple for your cerebellum to hold on to, yes, but the intricacies of knowing the frame and its reactions to forces, of knowing how to maximize your output, of understanding weight transfer and agility... what little of that my brain and body had started to learn were, at least initially, nowhere to be found. I was clumsy on the bike, unable to even dream of the zipping through traffic I was doing just this past November.
Then there was my body's inability to adapt to the bike... I am consistently amazed at the simplicity of a bicycle, and how much modifying it amounts to adapting it to be a better mate to your body. Well, my body had totally forgotten things like how to gracefully mount and dismount (which affected only my pride) and where to place my butt on the saddle (which massively affected my power transfer until I figured it out).

So I got to Central Park to do as many laps as my body would allow. My legs were strong, if lacking grace on the pedals, and I felt reasonably confident, keeping a high cadence at a lower-than-usual gearing. As expected, though, my lungs gave out a third of the way in... I was gasping, trying to control my breathing while keeping cadence, other bikers passing me by. It was the same feeling of helplessness (though of slightly lesser magnitude) that I'd had when I got out of the hospital post-pneumonia, trying to do tasks that were familiar to me and being completely unable to sustain even the breathing required. But I powered through and completed the loop of Central Park, not once coasting, but spinning regardless of how low the cadence. By the end of my one single lap I was crawling, passed by a fast couple on ultra-light bikes with triathlon-style aero bars. (jerks)

The ride back down to the WTC PATH involved a stopover to drink beer with John, and over the course of the night I regained my familiarity with the bike, sitting back in the saddle, getting down in the drops, sprinting between taxicabs for fun...

Central Park was cathartic. I have a lot of work to do. At my worst moments I thought of the great times I know L's asshole-triathlete has gotten, but even as I passed places in the Park that were important to our relationship I managed to push all of that aside. I've been planning to train for months. This is mine, and I own this.

The bike is dirty, and my muscles are electric with that tension that pervades after a hard ride. It feels good. Both to be riding again, and to be following through.

I have a lot of work to do.

exasperation

If I have to write one more fluff piece of any kind this month, I just may break every pen, typewriter and computer that I own or have access to.


Just sayin'.

Fragment

I used to think, often, in terms of saving the world. Capital w. This was as young and bright and inexperienced in New York City, surrounded by the young and bright and inexperienced.
I still largely think that this is one of the few noble goals.

But as I sit here in my room, surrounded by the things that occupy my time, a half-assembled bicycle brake, a wounded old turntable in need of repair, shelves of half-read books, a drawer full of paragraphs on loose-leaf, a drawer full of screws and parts, I realize again what I've learned since then: wholes are just collections of parts, parts are just made up of elements.

If you can't fix that turntable with the attention due the world, you can't fix anything any bigger. And if you try to fix the turntable with the stated goal of doing so to fix the world, you will never fix either.

From the one to the myriad things and back again.

Labors of Love

Used to be, whenever my heart was tired, I'd find a project to occupy my hands and mind... Rewired a few guitar amplifiers in the space of a long distance relationship, gutted a bunch of houses when I was single... Labors of love.

This weekend was a busy one. An intense two-day recording session with the band garnered many hilarious photographs and led to some real hard work that's been a long time coming... some stellar takes, and really just a great time, tedious as recording can get. Interlude on Saturday night for John's birthday, which lead to some old friends reconvening on a rooftop in Clinton Hill, polishing off a bottle of wine. It was superb.

There was another labor of love this weekend, however. Having Friday off, I took my beloved 1979 Raliegh-Carlton Supercourse racing bicycle back to Bayonne and put it under the knife for some much needed repairs.

It's been a while since unmitigated geekery took place on this blog... Skip ahead to the next paragraph if you hate technical information.
I put some new tires on, a pair of Continental trainers -- up until this point the front tire was still the original from '79 (there are no words for how hard it was to get that front tire off. Except maybe "ouch"). I fixed a few odds and ends that needed fixing, like getting a real seat binder-bolt (instead of the manifold bolt from my uncle's '73 Porsche that had been keeping the seat post up until now), and I took off the fantastic but quite worn out rear dérailleur (a Suntour VGt) and replaced it with a sleeker, shorter-caged and newer Shimano 600. The Suntour is still the better piece, but is far too worn-out. Maybe I'll rebuild it for fun and put it back on. The major work however was taking a drill to my classic racing steel in order to mount a pair of Campagnolo Athena brakes, a very sleek set of brakes that, while slightly heavier than the originals, are %1000 better at being brakes.

So, my beautiful racing bike is now in sexy racing trim. And while she will never be as fast of a machine as, oh I don't know, say, a triathlon bicycle, the Raleigh is in great shape, quick, agile, and still manages to look classy as hell.

The same, however, cannot be said for me. Those keeping score from home might recall that an accident two months ago did enough damage to the Raleigh to keep it off the road, and enough damage to me to keep me off the Raleigh. And while we're both healed now, the bicycle is in much better shape than it's rider. Granted it's a pretty cold rain outside, but I was unable to keep my test run up for more than ten minutes before my stamina started running out. I knew this would happen, as cycling was my only regular cardiovascular-supporting activity...
Interestingly, though, my exercise regimen intended to keep my strength up while injured must have worked, because my legs are powerful as ever... dug in to a sprint and got the bike up to speed with a healthy cadence without much effort at all. It was just all the cold air in the lungs that I couldn't take.

So, the bike's back on the road.
And better looking and better riding to boot.

And not a moment too soon... I've gotten myself involved in a series of races coming up in April.

Spotless Mind

My housemates have been ill, one, then the other, staying at home watching whatsoever's been netflixed on the couch. And so, one, then the other has been watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And then I have been in and out with meetings and deadlines and band practices, and so I have seen Eternal Sunshine, which I have never seen before, piecemeal and in a distorted order. Fitting, I think.

It calls to mind complicated thoughts I've had about therapy and love and how the latter is so much more real than and dangerous to the former.

And really, I don't trust anything the former has to say about the latter.

And I probably never will.

When I think about the love I've had in my life, it's always been irrational... Love is a leap of faith. Love leaves you wide open to kinds of unhealth and pain and to a rational mind I feel like its often the first ballast to be cast off if it's not working...

fixing is an act of faith.

Coffee Break

I may hate the day, but I love love. And I was thinking, en route to get a cup of coffee during a bout of writers block, that there might be a pretty cool project in my head...

A few years ago I was on the streets in Soho, and for no real reason, wrote the phrase "I just called to say I love you." over and over again on a piece of paper, until the paper was filled, then started again at the top. This went through several repetitions, and i rather liked the look of the finished product.

This came to mind to me again as I was getting my coffee, and I thought, what if I have an audio project, where I ask people to think about someone that they truly love or have loved or think they love, and say the phrase "I just wanted to say 'I love you'" several times, as though they are saying it directly to that person's face. Call the person to mind, then say it. I would collect a bunch of these, then overlap them in layers so that at any given point there were at least four voices, saying, all in their different timbres, accents and sincerities, "I just wanted to say I love you."

How's about it, anyone want to volunteer?

----

In other news, handed in my first freelance piece last night and just received confirmation about payment happening soon, and, en route to the coffee shop, discovered that I have more money in my checking account than I had previously thought. So.

More at ease than previously, me.

I know its a stupid day. But it's a day that I used to do off the cuff things like have people secretly drive me across South Carolina to surprise a certian daughter of the confederacy. Today will most probably feel rotten.

Jay, last night, chastised me for even entertaining the notion that I might not one day get L back. He's probably right, and we toasted to "the meantime", but today will most probably feel rotten.

If you are a single friend, and/or a beautiful and firey woman, please seek me out today. That is all.

For all of y'all's listening enjoyment: George Strait - All my Ex's live in Texas

A Thousand Words

No post tonight, just some rough sounds I made during a break from work.

Sketch for a Song

For a little while now, since bringing my guitar down to New Orleans and playing with some cats on stoops and steps after the work day, I've wanted to record some acoustic stuff. I think I'm finally going to start doing that.

It's snowing in New York tonight. Playing this I just pretended I was in the fall warmth of the Smokeys in the evening after the leaves have started to turn.

When it rains...

Co-worker who also has a side-job called me up today because her (other) company needs someone to rewrite about 100 pages of ad-copy. Stuff about "project management expertise" for non-profits doing construction projects. I've yet to land the gig, but this is intriguing. 'Cause the Volvo needs a lot of repairs.

Does anybody have any idea how I would determine the going market rate for my services? Aside from hiring a freelancer myself?

Oak and Steel

My post below combined with thought of Calvino inspired a project in me tonight on my walk home from a Community Board meeting I was covering...

A mirror image story, one story on the left hand pages, one on the right, one about a boy in the city who finds his home slowly overrun by trees and plants, and the opposite about a girl who lives in the country and finds her home slowly overrun by wires and pipes. The stories mirror each other exactly, the boy and the girl seeking the source of this interesting intrusion for 25 pages or so, narrowing it down until they smack into each other.

Then the mirror stops, and on the final page the two are together, standing before a treehouse-skyscraper. "Look" says the boy, "Listen" says the girl,
and, their homes irrevocably changed and merged, they set off towards the tree-scraper together.

An adult's children's story.

Whispered Intelligence

I decided today that it's time to get serious about going back to school. The wanderlust and the fact that my brain has (finally) fully recovered from the hell I put it through commuting to New Orleans for a solid year mean that I have a hankering to go some where and be taught a tremendous amount of things. Originally the plan was to wait until L graduated so that we could be together wherever I ended up going. Now I'm freed of that (though one of the programs I'm really interested in is dangerously close to her stomping ground). Fact of the matter is, I'm not done learning. And not in that philosophical "we're always learning" sense. I've been reading my theory books again for fun. I miss learning, I miss the minds it puts me in contact with, and I miss what it does to the way I look at the world around me.

Problem is my sickness in the middle of my last year, and the subsequent crazy post- New Orleans depression totally floored my grades. Mayhaps I should finish up a few of my projects that were left hanging last year?

Jesus. I need a straight 9-5 job to keep me from these thoughts.

Hydro-pruf Sutra No.1

Came in across the cloud factories,
Volvo buzzing like a dented bearing in a dry cage.

Tried my hand at a blues song
and returned, promptly, to Connecticut

Four years like a lifetime of mistakes
created a joyous rendition

of couches pushed together like beds
and lullabies like theorists long dead
reciting what you've known all along
in merely better words;

tread lightly, for you are free.

"tried my hand"

In the Cathedrals of New York and Rome...

I hope the readership will excuse me if I nurse a hangover whilst making this post.

It always used to be part of my game plan, since way back when I was just starting high school, that my spiritual move from North Jersey to the City (which occurred when I started attending the Greatest High School on Earth, which is in New York City) would correspond with finding some cosmopolitan city-dwelling compatriots. My ideal girlfriend in those days was a sleek urbanite, also someone for whom my headstrong stubbornness and my occasional tendency to use North Jersey greetings like "Fuck you!" and "Where the fuck'd you learn how to drive??" would just be par for the course if not embedded somewhere in her own vocabulary. I primarily saw her as cultured, well read, chic -- a projection of all the things I hoped the City would allow me to become.

That was eight years ago. And permutations of it have cropped up since... I used to get remarkably frustrated that L couldn't deal with my tendency to express frustration in swear words. (That had an interestingly circular effect). L and Leah both wondered, often and aloud, how I could love someplace with so few trees. L only started to believe me about the beauty of the radio towers at night strewn across the Meadowlands right before she left me. I used to think, "damn. A city girl would understand this. she could look at these red-blinking lights, this suspended steel, these abandoned ferry terminals, and find beauty."

Lately, though, I've begun to realize precisely how wrong I've been. The City did make me into who I wanted to be. Spiriting up to my roof and watching the Pulaski Skyway continue to hang low over Kearny and Jersey City, or running the Volvo 100mph down an empty stretch of turnpike to try to take in all the radio towers at once, this is still my beauty. But the people I love, the women who I've been able to share who I am with, have by and large been rural or rural-sub-urban. And I've been thinking about that, and why that might be, and I realize that there's a counterpoint to that beauty out of decay and chaos. That counterpoint is L sitting on a beach the night we met, facing the ocean and saying to me only "Listen." That counterpoint is L on a North Carolina tobacco farm with the silt between the toes of her bare feet. That counterpoint is Leah in the New England snow, getting lost among the trees.

I love the city, and dearly. I owe to it the way I see beauty. I owe to it my patience with humanity and human development. And I owe to it my penchant for four letter words. But I am enough city for me. I need that balance in my life. That counterpoint is me, upstate at the farmhouse, banging away on an underwood typewriter. That counterpoint has been my patient partners in life who have forced me to look beyond bright light and abandoned steel, gasoline fumes and subway handholds. I truly need that element in my life.

So now, what to do with the phone number I got at the bar last night?

It's not that I've come home inebriated, it's just that every day is potentially fliff day.

That is all.

A few assorted thoughts

I'm not sure I've ever gotten better at writing in my lifetime thus far. I have, however, definitely gotten better at titles.

------

I have these dreams sometimes, where my body is falling apart in a very localized and decay-oriented way. There's always a similar sickly background feeling in all of these dreams, and in retrospect they all occur during dark times in my awake-life. Usually they happen very rarely. I can recall maybe four total in my life. Two of them have happened since L left me. They involve either my fingers or my teeth. Years ago I had one where a perfectly rectangular hole had rotted its way mid-way into my finger. I had one a week ago where I cut my hand on an ice-skate after convincing myself it wasn't sharp. The slash on my hand healed except for the corner of my pinky, which was a hemi-spherical void. Bugs were trying to get into it. Yesterday was a very good day. I played guitar with the band after work, my best guitar now out of the shop and in good repair, and after practice I had dinner with Jay where we talked about how great it would be to move to the south. After dinner I spent hours on the phone with Leah, then went to bed quite happy. Then, a dream that a chip in my front tooth (I have a few. I live dangerously) was growing worse to the touch, my tooth falling apart in my mouth. That dream then gave way to a really vivid dream about L, vacationing with her new partner and ignoring me, me seeing her but her acting like nothing was wrong. It ended with me racing to confront her in a little and underpowered Mercedes Benz 280D, which was running far too slow. I remember looking at the Tach as the little car tried to deliver me (ah the dreams of geeks). Then I woke up.

------

Put a new front brake on my bike today. A beautiful Campagnolo Athena. The rear, which I also have, won't fit on my frame, and this concerns me. A good friend and I are going to start race-training soon. He's putting together a series of races on Randal's Island. They'll involve obstacles, and I will be the slowest rider by far. I am looking forward to it a great deal.

------

I have another thought, about location and living and the city, but I will write it later. It my deserve a full post.

Believing is Art

So weeks ago, John and I were en route to the Ear Inn, that wonderful little spot in Tribeca where the right-most quarter of the neon "B" on the sign above the door has been blacked out to give the place its name. We were on our way there to discuss our plan to start writing and performing radio dramas again, and it was a wonderfully rainy night where the only idiots out were us and people like us. John is new to this city and a Bostonian by trade, so, as oft happens, our talk turned to neighborhoods, and the character and the rise and fall thereof.

And we're walking on the rain soaked cobblestones of northern Tribeca, walking on narrow streets between large hulking warehouses, colored by sodium lights. What is now known as Tribeca (wikipedia it. its complicated.) has been warehouses for more than a century. Used to store sugar, then art, then rich people. Its a usual progression, and John and I commented on that unexceptionally. But then, recalling a conversation we'd had about the death of industry, John asked, "where is art going to go?" (or something similar)

And it hit me. It's a really valid question. Art, John said, has followed industry. Old factories and warehouses are undesirable, and thus cheap, and so schmoes with a creative bent can afford them in order to do whatever it is that passes as that time period's creativity. That then raises the social cache of the area and the hip college students who want a piece of the action move in. These cats have more prospects and more spending cash, and so the "value" of the area goes up and up and up in an upward-spiraling feedback loop until it looks like TriBeCa or SoHo does today, the old undesirable real estate selling for (literally) $4mil per apartment. This is nothing new. But we're running out of dead industry in the US. It all left us in the Northeast about 40 years ago, and what little industry there ever was (comparatively) in the Southeast and Midwest has left over the past 15.

IN my mind there are two things that can happen, and perhaps both will. Perhaps John is right that art will become more rural. Places like Chapel Hill and Austin, virtually all of the mountainous regions in the Carolinas are testament to the fact that this can be. I disagree with John that this will lead to any more self-reflexivity. Nothing is more self-reflexive than, say, Williamsburg. Self-love is a problem in art everywhere all the time, and if anything I think small-town artist communities, where your neighbors see you as weird rather than chic is good insofar as it has the potential to keep art honest. Don't ask me what that means right now. But I think the other potential is that art within the urban areas will become increasingly residential and insular. Access to studio space will cost more and be more of a function of who you know. No one will be able to buy a storefront to create an edgy gallery. Think of it as patronage-lite. And so communities of art will become smaller and harder to find as the infrastructure that, in the past, allowed a degree of thriving is choked off by prohibitive expense.

Perhaps there is a third option. Art liberated from the need for such an infrastructure. The internet is, in this way, just a virtual version of the street art that proliferated in the early nineties, an art that does not need a shangri-la, but instead literally takes back its streets.

And perhaps this is among the healthier responses to the situation.
But it worries me, because its very nature precludes a certain kind of open artistic community.

Got a call for my first freelance assignment today. Have yet to officially accept it, but I think this technically makes me a hired gun.

I Dream a Highway

Went back to the academy for the weekend, to get my head out of the city and out of the past two weeks. Colleges are strange places... Locations that have survived for time spans in the neighborhood of centuries, but for every single one of those years, existing as a transient community. Found myself looking into the window of Eliason's old apartment to see if he was home. The college is an ever-changing map of people and various locales, always a map of memories more than of places, even before one leaves.

I've come to the conclusion that I make good ex-girlfriends. My ex Gwen invited me in to her Mardi Gras party, showed me the wonderful art she's working on for her upcoming thesis, and consoled me in the warmest way about L's leaving. Spent the whole weekend getting into misadventures with Leah involving 24 hour diners and late night sneaking around the campus. Talked to Ruth about tagging along with her to Uganda later in the year (more on that some other time)... It's really comforting to know that relationships don't really just go away unless you let them.

The weekend was full of mis(s)adventures. Among the more bizarre was the impulse purchase of a guitar, a Takimne copy of a Martin Drednaught that I haggled down to a decent price. It's a beautiful sounding big-bodied six-string that'll be great for finger-picking and the blues. Took that guitar forthwith to jam with several of Leah's awesome friends, a jam that lasted until about six in the morning.

By the time climbed back into my trusty Volvo and started the drive home, I looked out in front of me and saw a familiar sight... As Gillian Welch was playing around me, the reflection of my high-beams off the roadsigns mixing with the soft green light of my instrument panel, with empty curves of road extending out in front of me, I was brought back to where I kept finding myself almost two years ago. Late night, in the driver's seat, with only open country, horsepower, a tank of gas and relative freedom.

And maybe a guitar somewhere in the back seat.

Class Participation

I do all the work around here. So. Follow the link below. You should find, attached, two versions of Fiona Apple's song "not about love". Homework is to give both a listen, and then discuss the merits of each, picking a favorite, in the comments section below. I'm honestly at a bit of a loss. And this is pertinent to me because the band is starting to mix songs, so I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot...

Under the Rotunda - Fiona Apple

-Charlotte