The Rumor About the True Things

Because these are often fun

2010-09-22T00:00:00.002-04:00

Back

2010-07-23T16:17:00.003-04:00

It's been a while. Things are largely the same. I've been working on cultivating a legit blog (i.e. sans-nom-de-guerre) but, well even if that had been working out I couldn't very well tell you about it now could I?

Brooklyn is boiling hot, and I just got back from a 75-mile ride and am craving the biggest slice of pizza on earth. I just wanted to check in. I was ruminating on this, this morning, from Giorgio Agamben's state of exception:

"It is certain, in any case, that if resistance were to become a right or even a duty (the omission of which could be punished), not only would the constitution end up positing itself as an absolutely untouchable and all-encompassing value, but the citizen's political choices would also end up being determined by juridical norms."

and it led me to do some thinking about this. So that's going on.

Additionally, I sent my first wave of submissions out today, to the Paris Review. Which is perhaps the biggest leap of all time, but who knows, right? cross your fingers.

Awesome people doing awesome things

2009-10-23T17:41:00.004-04:00

Cranksgiving is almost upon us. Every year, NYC bike messengers (and other bike-riding folks) compete in a race to grab food from various supermarkets throughout the city. The food is donated to local charities, the victor is victorious, and it is generally just an awesome thing that happens. Maxwell's Demon had the pleasure of helping to throw a pre-party for the race back in 2007, at the now-defunct Last Resort Art Space. Check out the website for more information, and/or to pledge a donation.

She became the line he had in his head just before sleep, that he thought he would retain and now it's gone.

2009-10-13T23:52:00.002-04:00

I've been on the cusp of a creative endeavor for a little while now. I've had a desire to encapsulate the year or two of my life spent on the road between many cities and several hearts, and its been coming together in my head as a basis for an album, most likely acoustic music. I've been inspired greatly by watching Kay's brother perform with the talented Kelly McFarling. Anyway, I keep finding scraps of paper in my pockets, with nothing on them but the names of cities I've recalled in a moment of inspiration or exasperation. Scrawled on the backs of receipts, movie tickets and metrocards.

Raleigh
Hartford
Bayonne
Charleston
Richmond
New Orleans
Charlotte
Fair Bluff
Williamsburg
Exeter
Savannah

Like Clockwork

2009-09-17T19:07:00.005-04:00

It's autumn again, and that means a few things. The trees are starting to turn, I have an insatiable desire to read and reflect, and there is, right on time, more Califone in my life to spill out the windows of a speeding volvo at night. Califone has scored a film by frontman Tim Rutili, entitled All My Friends are Funeral Singers

Enjoy this as much as I do:

Funeral Singers

favorite line so far: "What will I do without the weight of you?"

2009-08-28T21:07:00.003-04:00

When I was in school, my sophomore year, in a small dorm room in a labyrinthine dorm, I had a very unexpected visitor. My door was wide open, it was parents' weekend and a friend and hallmate walked by with her family. I invited them in, and she introduced me to her mother and step father, both of whom were tremendously friendly. Her stepfather wedged himself into the small room last, shook my hand happily, and said, "Hi, I'm Ted."

With the passing of Ted Kennedy, I find my thoughts split, constantly empathizing with my friend and the loss of her stepdad, who i was allowed to glimpse for a split second as a jovial person in my minuscule abode, and mourning as a part of a country where too few leaders stand up even a quarter as much for liberty and equality. You will be missed, Mr. Kennedy, by a country that continues to need people like you.

2009-04-27T23:59:00.002-04:00

That last post wasn't supposed to pop up, it was supposed to be a draft.

In any event. Getting frustrated by the book project. I just came over to the computer desk from the writing desk because even though I am continually making progress, the book is becoming quite difficult. The premise needs some serious tightening up, and I just don't have the outside perspective from which to tighten. My fear is that it's just too disjointed to work as I want it to, at least with out the story becoming seriously implausible. The problem is, my heart is in the story. Even when my brain cant get in. And its wearing me out, keeping me from smaller projects. I tried to work the premise out on paper tonight, and I think I just have to return to it in the morning and see if it actually helped anything.

I just love these two characters too much to shelve the project. Gah.

Have a meeting with a potential Armchair / Shotgun distributor tomorrow, hopefully that'll go better.

Dislocated.

2009-04-23T20:52:00.003-04:00

So I had some little bones popped back into place in my wrist today. Which is awesome. And with that I'm almost back to %100. Tomorrow I'm swinging into Jersey to finally (finally!) pull the dashboard off of the Volvo and fix all the rattling. Dislocation is the theme of the hour.

Down

2009-04-13T12:21:00.004-04:00

So this weekend was Tracklocross: First Mud Part II, mattio et. al's beautiful clusterfuck of an alleycat, a checkpointed, semi-off-road race around Randall's Island, in the mud and rain, wherein you are allowed to choose one: gears or knobby tires.

At the last minute I decided to take the Viner, my sleek road racing bike, rather than the Raleigh, my old crit bike. The major impetus was my desire to have a modern drivetrain, or, conversely, my fear that shifting a friction drivetrain in the mud would throw chains and just be unplesant (see: last year's Nyack and Back). So I threw the Raleigh's bad weather wheel (a dura-ace low flange hub laced 2x to an Aerohead with a 25mm slick) on the viner and set off.

I should note that I set off in the car, because I left with an hour to get to the race... MY birthday party was the previous night, and I was up until 5am drinking beers. Totally, totally race-ready.

It was downright cold and rainy. I was wearing three layers when the race commenced. There was a running start to the race, and though I was thoroughly bleary, my legs felt damn strong. I grabbed the Viner from where I'd propped it against a tree, hopped on, and pedaled off. I settled into a good cruising pace (about 20mph) over potholes and puddles, and found myself about mid-pack at this, the start of the race.

For those of you unfamiliar with Alleycat racing (like myself), the idea is that there are checkpoints that you must reach, but no course. Its up to you to find the most navigable route. I knew the island less than most, so I figured, at mid pack, I'd follow the leaders. We began crossing a narrow wooden bridge. I overtook two competitors, and was coming up on Corey, an old messenger who'd been talking a big game all week. The bridge was ending fast. I zoomed around Corey, who was spinning way too small of a gear for the terrain, and angled myself for the left turn off of the bridge to the first checkpoint. I looked up off my path and noticed that the leaders had all gone right. That didn't make any sense... had anyone gone left? I looked further up the left most trail. Nobody. Hmm. I began to wonder what to make of that, but then flicked my eyes directly in front of me.

A traffic bollard, a big, metal, traffic bollard, was directly in my path. My hands were on the flats of the handlebars. I couldn't get them to the brakes in time. BAM!!! at 20mph directly into the bollard. The most jarring feeling, as my shoes disengaged from the bike, and I thuded hip-first to the pavement a split second before the Viner. I shouted something about being OK to someone who had shouted something inquiring the like, paused, and picked myself off the buzzing floor. I picked up the Viner, looked at it dumbly. Crashing a beautiful machine into a stationary object always evokes the oddest mixture of adrenaline and shame. I spun the front wheel. It spun.

Body check: standing? yes. good. moving? yes. good. Pain? I looked. My jersey was rolled passed my elbow and the elbow was bleeding quite a bit. deal with that later. My hip was throbbing. Roll up the jersey, that's bleeding. Wrist? Wrist. My left wrist was still holding on to the bars when I went down, and now its starting to swell. OK. only a few minutes more use I'll get out of that.

This whole time an identical process in my mind is running bike check. Bike check is harder. Still a bike? yes. good. Wheels? yes. wheels.

Somewhere in the whole awkward and also cotemporal process of mounting the bike, I began to hear a hissing noise. I was losing air to the front tire.

I was only a quarter mile from the start, but something in my brain said "checkpoint. get to the checkpoint."

And so the race became not about my competitors, but about covering as much ground before my tire deflated or my wrist locked up. Somehow, to my adrenaline soaked brain, this made perfect, rational sense.

***
I got about another half mile. I was disoriented and in increasing pain, and then the tire flatted. Still wanting some form of race out of my weekend, I shouldered the bike and ran back to the starting line, finally slowing to a walk for the final 1/4 mile. That's when the adrenaline wore off and I began to actually take stock.

I spent the remainder of the race siting next to mattio, wrapping my wrist in shop rags and cleaning my wounds. In the end I sprained my left wrist moderately, my left ankle very slightly, and tore up my right elbow and hip. The bruise on my hip is pretty impressive.

The Viner also took quite the blow. The wheel is fine. Needed a minor truing. (I build good wheels, everyone. see?) The carbon fork developed stress cracks all along its upper joint and needs to be retired. The frame, my cherished Italian steel racer, was also bent, with the headtube (the tube the fork runs through) getting pushed inward, bending its joints with the top and down tubes.

Terrified that this would weaken the boutique steel beyond ever racing again, I contacted anyone and everyone I could with regards to fixing it. Malcom offered to help me braze new tubes into the frame, the bicycle equivalent of open heart surgery. Or, more appropriately, a skeleton transplant. Finally, Dave Perry at Bikeworks, was able to bend the headtube back out. He says that as long as I don't race on coblestones, the damage was light enough that the Viner should be fine.

So the bike and I are healing at about the same rate. My sprains are all but healed, and the road rash is clearing up. I need a new fork, but not a new frame, and I'm feeling pretty damn lucky to have gotten out with so little damage. Gonna use the Viner's down time to solve a few problems I'd been having with it, have been using my downtime to great ends... for instance, the Williamsburg bridge is GORGEOUS if you take the time to walk over it...

So, you know. Wear helmets, pay attention, Ride steel frames and let me build your wheels.

Mattio once imparted to me the overly-campy saying, "don't race what you can't replace." I think I get that now.

:-)

2009-04-07T11:45:00.003-04:00

First off, it's my birthday. Which is wonderful. So happy to be alive.

I woke up this morning, unexpectedly, at 4:06, the minute of my birth. My mom said she woke up at 3:50.

What a beautiful day.

Second, Armchair/Shotgun submissions are rolling in, at a rate of about ten a day. My job at the moment is to anonymize them, loading them into our shared online folder with a number rather than an authors name. (which I am presently doing while singing along to R.E.M.'s Murmur)

This means that I see a lot of the first and last lines of our submissions. And some of these last-lines indicate that we've struck the right tone...

for example:

"But wouldn't you know it, the whiskey comes back out my nose."

This is so much fun. Why did we never start a literary magazine before??

Damnit.

2009-03-25T13:00:00.001-04:00

At least its good bicycle weather.

Imminent death of the MTA predicted. Film at 11.

Fran Lebowitz

2009-03-25T11:32:00.003-04:00

Kay's expert camera work:

A completely separate excerpt from a 1993 Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER:
Young people are often a target for you.

LEBOWITZ:
I wouldn't say that I dislike the young. I'm simply not a fan of naïveté. I mean, unless you have an erotic interest in them, what other interest could you have? What are they going to possibly say that's of interest? People ask me, Aren't you interested in what they're thinking? What could they be thinking? This is not a middle-aged curmudgeonly attitude; I didn't like people that age even when I was that age.

Watching

2009-03-19T13:29:00.003-04:00

I've been in a bit of a mood lately. Money's been tight, and with that the eternal existential questions... am I doing something that makes me happy? What makes me happy anyway? And Kay handles these sorts of things differently than I do, and so we had a bit of a tiff, so last night I just decided to hop on the Raleigh and see what happened. I wandered around Brooklyn for the greater part of four hours, discovering my favorite part of all cities: the background. I wandered up and down the waterline, watched the tugs move barges by night off of Red Hook; found where the Chinatown buses sleep; found old sailor bars and new construction. I watched cop cars race down the FDR from a vantage point on the promenade, and the cars looked like rubies around the neck of Manhattan. The Raleigh struggled over the cobblestones of Dumbo and I listened to the power plant crackle on a silent street. I climbed into vinegar hill and found myself looking at the stark Commandant's house of the Navy Yard. Worked my way around the yard and up Kent into Williamsburg, trading bridge for bridge.
I don't simply watch, anymore.
When I had the money and reason to take the Volvo southward on a regular basis, to North Carolina or Louisiana, or up to Connecticut, that was time when there was nothing to do but watch. Watch the scenery, watch the tach, watch the gas gauge, pull over to rest the eyes.
Its true that the subways are where I get the best writing and reading done. But there's nothing to watch. I think my brain has been too concerned with problems and solutions, lately, ignoring the world in which those both exist and the adventures it can inspire.
I think its time to undo some of that.

2009-03-15T11:54:00.002-04:00

Kay's been sick for the past few days, so I've been taking care of her. So yesterday, when she decided to sleep in for most of the day, I came home and decided to just wipe the slate of my day clean, to just sit home and relax, read a little bit, play around with spare parts, write a little bit.
In putting away a few bicycle parts, I just aimlessly started playing with spokes and hubs until I realized that I had the right parts to make a wheel. So on a whim I laced up a quick front wheel, 18 spokes, radial, with the spokes in pairs... Its not terribly durable, I'd imagine, but a test-flight revealed it to be very quick and pretty stable. Which is awesome, considering its constructed entirely out of parts I found in the garbage or salvaged off of broken wheels. Also, there are now only 42 spokes on my racing bicycle, not one more than is needed. Its nice to know every spoke is where it is on purpose.
After that I settled in to do some Armchair/Shotgun business... Submissions have started coming in, and the reading process is proving to be worth the stress of setting this thing up. Between that and the fact that a friend of mine who is a phenomenal writer paid me a compliment on some of my work, I'm beginning to relax a little, creatively, which is nice for idea-flow.
God bless lazy Saturdays.

2009-03-03T17:32:00.001-05:00

Kay: Did you know that the New York Times has launched 2 local online sections? One is on Fort Greene. It launched yesterday.

me: Ouch. Welcome to the right side of the tracks.

2009-02-26T14:00:00.000-05:00

The rim receives
its shape from the tension
of the spokes.
Or rather,
its shape is mirrored
by a shape in strength,
an invisible physic
to resist the ever-present
science of change.

I stood on the rooftop
last night, Jersey City
unfurled like an old man's
story.
And I played
the part of the pages,
holding still just long enough
for something to happen.

Coffeeshop thought

2009-02-25T11:52:00.001-05:00

"do you like milk in your coffee?" is so much more intimate a question than "would you like milk in your coffee?" There's almost something post-coital about it, something morning-after. How do you take your coffee, in general? We might do this again.

2009-02-23T14:16:00.002-05:00

A scattershot update. It's been a crazy set of weeks. Apologies for not posting the VGt how-to. I'll seriously get to that ASAP. Let's break it down:

Job. The job situation has gotten worse as well as better... while I am no longer writing under the same (truly terrible) editor, she got me pulled off of the one beat I really enjoy, the WTC reconstruction beat. It's been time to switch gears for a while, and I think its time to start looking for some disposable employment... a thing I can do for a while to make some cash, then leave without marring my resume too much. Especially if Grad School is in my future? yeah.

Bike. Speaking of disposable, I have this thing against expensive racing wheels... I think they're dumb. And given that I find wheelbuilding to be a truly relaxing enterprise, I've been working around the concept of disposable race-wheels. Generally, they're half-spoked front wheels with a good tubular tire made from scavenged wheel-parts. I can underbuild them to be light as I weigh in at 140lbs soaking wet, and with a good tire they handle quite well. As for the disposable part? I finally cracked my so-built front wheel, sprinting down Broadway with traffic, drafting a toyota, when I hit a large metal plate in the road. I limped it home, but the rim is cracked. Time to build new wheels.

Projects. Armchair / Shotgun is really happening. The website will be more than a splash in a few days, and submissions will be due April 2.

Life. Jay might get a dream job at Slate... Everyone cross or uncross your fingers for him as your luck-tradition sees fit. Few people deserve it as much.

2009-02-04T17:37:00.002-05:00

Not that any of you care, but after more than a year of sitting in my spare parts bin, i finally learned how to break down and re-build my bike's old Suntour VGT derailleur. I'll probably post a how-to over on How to Break Stuff. It's just so rewarding to solve a month-old mechanical problem.

ugh.

2009-01-30T02:07:00.001-05:00

The All Night Write (write all night!) was not supposed to go down like this, writing an overdue article for very low pay... I need to step it up a notch and get to bed, lest I sully the glorious idea.

of mind and body.

2009-01-28T11:07:00.011-05:00

An interesting conversation has been taking place about competition between mattio through No One Line, and the curator of Velophoria, a very well written blog about bikes. The latter writes:

My worst self sometimes comes out in competition. I tend to become very “all or nothing,” and to take losing -- and winning -- much too personally. Which is why I’ve stayed away from racing so far. If I trained for racing, I would likely take the whole thing ridiculously seriously, all out of proportion to my low level of experience and talent. And all because I can’t stand to perform one iota less than my ultimate. And – to give the full confession -- because I hate losing more than I love winning.

To which M chimes in,

For me, competing is still me with-and-against my body, and "against other people" is just the context... I view it as being more about controlling/stewarding/applying my body. I also take consolation in combining two facts. One is that compared to nonriders that I know, I am in amazing shape. God-like. I can ride a bike all day, climb hills, and sprint a bicycle over 35mph. The other is that I am the weakest of sauces compared to professionals, who are freakish in their physiology and ability. In a spectrum that broad I simply must conclude that a victory of mine, no matter how well executed, is in a large part due to the random or at least haphazard combination of other riders present.

This conversation (to which my contribution has just been little practical advices of likewise little consequence) has started me thinking the question that so often becomes my mantra: Why do this?

When I graduated from school, I was still recovering from a bad bout of pneumonia that had followed me home one day. In the hospital, the doctors had said the X-ray looked like the lungs of a long time smoker (22 year old me who had never had a cigarette), and three months after being cured, I was still winded after running up a flight or two of stairs. I decided to take advantage of my youth and whip my lungs back into shape by force. I started running, which has always been a low-level hobby of mine, and I slowly became more and more enamored with the thought of a bicycle.

See, I grew up in urban New Jersey, where the main afterschool activity was bumming around on hardtail mountain bikes, starting trouble by stringing out across side streets to slow passing traffic, drag racing at slow speeds up the shoulders of highways, and using every kind of incline as every kind of jump.

Meanwhile, down in my grandfather's basement, and later in the stairwell of my apartment building, lived a thing of beauty: my father's mid-70's Bridgestone Kabuki. That bike was a thing of legend. If my father was Moses, it was his staff. If my father was King Arthur, that bike had been pulled from a stone. I knew every story: about how he had changed a flat tire at the starting line of the five-borough bike tour, about his tours up to Martha's Vineyard with my uncle John, drafting semi trucks the whole way... I knew about how he would drag race messengers in Central Park, and I knew that the proper name for 42 x 28 was "alpine gearing", before I knew there was a 42 or a 28. The bike exuded speed. As I grew, it began to fit me, and taking it our for a spin was like borrowing the keys to a Ford Mustang... It was scary and I wanted one.

So there I was, graduating, running on half a bank of cylinders, wanting a bike. Needing a bike. Fast on a bike was my birthright, was in my blood. And if I was going to make my lungs work again, what better way than a glowing, legendary machine that I couldn't resist? I started looking at modern bicycles, with their ergonomic drivetrains, exotic blends of material, thousands of gears and stealth fighter paint jobs. But then I found the perfect bike, a Raleigh just a few years younger than my Dad's Kabuki, exuding speed in all the same ways right down to the archaic shifters. This bike would do no work for me save amplify my legs and test my lungs. And I liked that about it. We became friends.

So how does this fit in? Well I started riding literally in competition with my own body. For-keeps style. And my first night out on the Raleigh, hammering away in the least graceful manner on a 52x13 top gear, I became so giddy with speed that I thought to myself, "well I simply must race." Competition was ancillary to the thrill of speed and the desire (in fact the need) to massively improve my body. I took my bike everywhere. Rode it to work, rode it out to play, rode it to gigs; I was slow, and my lungs felt like a limiter-screw turned too tight, but that was the point. Every day at the edge of my envelope was a day my envelope got larger. That was my only motivation. That and the pure joy of traveling at car-speed but still being able to hear, smell, taste the world around me. The only thing better than a convertible is a bike. I wanted to race, but only as a means of getting faster and healthier.

About six months later, I had a terrible breakup. Regular readers will know, my partner of many years left on a whim to marry someone else, and everything suddenly got very dark. In such a situation, everything either goes away or gets ugly. My riding got ugly. The man she left me for was (and I imagine still is) a triathlete, apparently a fairly successful one. Me, with the paper-thin frame and bum lungs, atop the 1979 steel clunker of a racing bicycle, I got ANGRY. I had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove. My legs were strong, my lungs were on their way, and I was going to train until I was razor sharp, and chase down everyone who could stand in as a proxy for that homewrecker. I, who had never seen my body as much more than a six-foot brain-stand, was going to become As Fast As Possible (all caps). It was silly. But the all or nothing instinct had been awakened.

In the course of a year, I gained about 20lbs of muscle, and got my lungs in what is most likely the best condition they've ever had. I started outrunning all of the casual cyclists I knew, and I started staying on the wheels of the racers I knew. I was fast. I was a good climber. I even got offered a spot on a team. But I was terrified to race, even when I finally did.

And it took reading the postings above to realize why... it wasn't about me and my body anymore. It wasn't about building and encouraging a holistic machine. The purity of it was gone, replaced by a drive to be the best, because I erroneously thought I had something to prove.

Malcom, and old racer and my bike-wrenching mentor once said to me something that an old guitar mentor once said to me: "It's supposed to be fun. If it's not fun, stop doing it, come back when it's fun again."

Racing is fun, last place or first.

I think I have a Criterium to register for.

2009-01-26T16:21:00.003-05:00

Just went for some hill-sprint training with mattio in Brooklyn Heights... a 50ft. rise in the space of a block (.2 miles) (about a %5 grade), he climbed it about 12 times, me about 8 or 9, freezing our asses (and fingers and toes) off, cracking jokes in between ragged breaths. It was a hell of a lot of fun, took about an hour including short breaks, and has me feeling pretty damn confident about racing this year. And something about the way this new bike transfers power has me climbing and sprinting in all sorts of fun ways.

2009-01-26T12:46:00.003-05:00

I find myself trying to write a wedding announcement for two kids who have known each other ten months, met at the beginning of '08 and have been "inseparable" since, who say that after a month they are "still" madly in love. And I feel like someone watching a car crash about to happen.

Am I cynical here, or correct? or just wounded? or all three? The words she was saying in the brief phone interview were almost word for word L's dumb excuses for leaving me to marry someone new.

But also, in a lifetime measured in decades, what can we glean in months?

More importantly, how do I bite my tongue for long enough to write an announcement?

Most importantly, how did I get so damn jaded?

New Bike Day!

2009-01-25T10:46:00.004-05:00

New Bike day.

It's new bike month over here. With the Viner now complete, we of course needed to find Elias a bike. And what a bike we found. An internet-friend of mattio's (and member of the inimitable fixed.gr forum) was selling a well-used but very nice Bridgestone RB-1. The RB-1 has a bit of a cult / cultish following, as it was designed by the maestro of Rivendell cycles, Grant Peterson. It was also a mass produced hand-built steel racing frame, in an era when racing bikes were aluminum or boutique steel (much like the viner, whose frame dates from the same era), sporting an eclectic mix of componentry. If the hype is to be believed, the RB-1 has a multitude of amateur race wins under its belt (chain?). It's a good frame of good steel, with classic racing geometry. And Elias now owns one. We spent the day cleaning it, setting it up, fiddling with shifters (always fun) and then taking a loop around prospect park. E is in love with it, and those kinds of new bike days always make me happy.

What also makes me happy is the Viner. Having gotten used to (and ridden some long and hard rides on) old fluted cranks, quill stems and 1970's frame technology, everything about the Viner just seems... solid. Stiffer. The cranks are more responsive. The bike turns on a dime. The handlebars will duke it out stroke for stroke with the bottom bracket shell in a sprint. The whole vehicle feels more like a coherent machine and less like a fast amalgam of parts. I love the Raleigh dearly, and will still ride it lots, will most likely race it again too. But the Viner is just a whole different animal.

So three beautiful bike now grace our apartment. We're fast running out of room.

2009-01-22T13:29:00.004-05:00

Seymour Duncan is such a phenomenal company. They manufacture guitar pickups, and my beloved main strat, "Ella", has been decked out in duncans for years now. I while back, the neck position pickup on Ella died (constant gigging takes its toll), and I recently received a replacement as a gift. I wired the replacement up, and it sounded awful. Scooped and tinny, like something inside the pickup was mis-wound.

Well I just got off the phone with a friendly tech-support dude named Scott, and he was just like "huh. yeah that does sound weird. what kind of pickup do you need? OK, here, just send the one you've got to this address, and I'll get you another SSL-1 asap."

Awesome. Just plain awesome.

Choruses

2009-01-22T01:23:00.007-05:00

Sometimes I forget that I wanted this blog to include bits about songwriting... In this latest round of band-work, I've had two songs that I've really worked on. The first is called "Raleigh", and it's pretty straightforward garage-rock song with a cool half-tempo pseudo-chorus. I call it a pseudo-chorus because there are no words to it, there are only lyrics in the verses. It's a concept I've been consciously playing around with for a little while now, and I like the idea, especially in a song where the verse lyrics repeat or reference similar themes. I first tried it for Life During Wartime off of B-Sides and Rarities, where the section that would have been the chorus was instead replaced by a noise guitar line. The verse lyrics rely nicely on each other without having to fall back on a chorus for a main theme:

We spoke our poetry with mouths full of sand
'cause we were both a little seasick from the boys in the band
and if all the great poets are geniuses and fools
then I'm a bastard out there, trying to play it real cool
because if poets are talkers and if talk is still cheap
we should be rolling in money or at least just back on our feet
instead we're brake pedals groping for the floor.

(pseudo-chorus)

You said "baby, that's exactly what I need"
and I said "we'll keep bumping heads if we both stay down on our knees"
because, if givers are takers and if taking's still cheap
then we'll run out of excuses just like we run out of ink
because if all the great lovers are innocent and cruel
then we're the greatest of stories acting like the biggest of fools
we should be brake pedals groping for the floor

There, I felt that a chorus would take away from what is a song with two manic verses in conversation with one another, a structure that would be better augmented with manic guitar squeelees. If a chorus is supposed to be the part of the song that serves as the topic sentence (i.e. the "in case you forgot here's what we're talking about") then this struck me as a sound way to go about it -- leaving it out.

Back to Raleigh. Raleigh is a fast-paced garage-rock song about a very sad thing. The choruses were thus left empty to let it breathe.

If these memories of Raleigh won't let me sleep
Come take back his city
come and take it from me line by line
by line by line by
line up your suitors in chevrolets
and lie on me for days
if I'm missing from Raleigh how can you sleep

(pseudo-chorus)

Knee-deep in the city can't get no sleep
erase your face from the street signs
time and time and time again
line up my suitors on subway trains
to try to take away this pain
500 miles from Raleigh feels like 3 feet

(pseudo-chorus)

And if these memories of Raleigh won't let me sleep
then come take back his city
come and take it from me line by line
by line by line by
line up your suitors in chevrolets
and lie to me for days
You said there's no one in Raleigh how can you sleep?

There, the pseudo-choruses work to keep the energy of the song and the topic of the song together. I'm very agitated in the verses, but the non-choruses are more reflective. Alternate meaning: there's nothing but this (the verse) to say.

The problem that I'm having is that this has kept me out of practice for writing good choruses. Both musically and lyrically. Not really a problem, but an unexpected turn in my songwriting, and its starting to play havoc with the second song I'm working on, whose verses are very sparse and need a (as yet unwritten) chorus for context. I think my next task is to learn to wield the chorus usefully again.

Complete!

2009-01-15T16:25:00.003-05:00

175mm cranks, buttery-smooth top-shelf modern drivetrain, wonderfully shaped handlebars; Time to hunt some sprinters.

Excerpts from New Years Resolutions, 2k9

2009-01-13T18:45:00.003-05:00

- exceed personal landspeed record.
- close out a bar in a non-native city.
- Get Fucking Published (or at least finish a manuscript)
- Build a Treehouse
- the all-night write (write all night!)
- Fire a large caliber weapon
- Finish a bicycle race in the field sprint
- Overdress

Sesame Street Greatness

2009-01-13T01:26:00.003-05:00

Milk Crisis(courtesy of Micah)

Yip

How Crayons are Made

Winning the Internet

2009-01-12T22:21:00.004-05:00

Elias just called me over to his desk. He said, "I just won. I won the Internet." Ordinarily, such a statement would perplex me. I was not perplexed at this moment, however, because on his monitor was the following.

This is what happens when you win the Internet.

January

2009-01-06T11:39:00.002-05:00

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

- William Carlos Williams

2009-01-05T12:32:00.003-05:00

Today began the long, slow process of getting my lungs and legs back to race-strength -- a process complicated, I'm sure, by the fact that I was only at race strength for about two or three weeks last season. But mattio and I have our eyes on a criterium in Connecticut in March. Matt is fast as hell, he's just sharpening his edge. Me? I have to re-forge the whole damn blade. So late this morning, I slapped the tubular wheels onto the Raleigh, donned my Dad's old wool jersey, and hit Prospect Park.

Now, as far back as I can remember, I've performed poorly in the cold. I get this pain under my tongue, and my breath seems less... effective, for lack of a better word. It used to happen whenever I exerted myself, but that's long since past... I've never been able to get around it in the cold, however. This past Christmas Eve I was talking to my cousin, the jock of the family, and she was describing something similar, saying she had cold-induced asthma. So maybe that's it? Regardless, I've decided, for the meantime, to try to push through it. My lungs were definitely the limiting factor today, and I'm coughing now as I type this, but it ultimately felt very good to get some miles on my legs, reawaken the ten pounds I put on them this past summer. So we'll see. What's the worst that could happen, purposely egging on a possible asthma?

After a few go-rounds, including what would have been a very successful stalking of a carbon-fiber bicycle up the prospect park hill, had my lungs not given out at the apex, mattio broke off and did his thing, and I headed for home. The whole way towards which was spent trying to figure a way to mount a camera with a remote shutter release on my handlebars or helmet, so that I could post all the wonderful sights I see on my various training routes.

Cheers.

Also, this.

2008-12-26T17:39:00.001-05:00

bell rock jingle rock bell

Happy Christmas

2008-12-26T02:44:00.004-05:00

About this time each year, there would be huge letters outside of the World Trade Center. They were big and silvery and would spell out "Peace On Earth".

I dont know what became of those letters, but in their absence, we seem to have forgotten.

May we all have the peace we need.

Yoko Ono took out an ad in the times last week... "War is over, if we want it."

Happy Christmas.

The Quartet

2008-12-15T13:38:00.004-05:00

The trials and tribulations of our beloved Maxwell's Demon are the basis for a short film written by Nick Miede and Zach Zangl for submission to Sundance's ProjectDirect. While Nick says a final cut is still in the works (possibly featuring an end-scene with your very own Maxwell's Demon as 4/7's of the Castro Septet) here is the film as submitted to Sundance. Nick and company, thank you so much, this was so much fun and it looks great!

Period Great.

2008-12-12T00:14:00.002-05:00

When dear friends from Academy ask me how life goes in the city, I invariably tell them the same thing. "Great." Not exclamation-point-great, that's the great that comes with a record contract, a book deal or a gallery show, or at the very least a car that doesn't squeak from every joint (Kay knows this dude's girlfriend). But period-great is the kind of great that goes with playing multiple gigs per month, writing in one's spare time, and knowing that your car could still smoke 95% of cars on the road, noises nonwithstanding. Usually, each November, I get sunk in an "I'll never be an artist" or an "I'll never do anything that matters" stink, where the very act of thinking calls forth mental groans and huge gaps of the existential variety.
It's December, and I still have the wintertime blues a bit. Too many of my days are spent writing for way less money than is OK and watching shows on Hulu, not enough of my days are spent building things or writing for free. But by and large...
The band has been writing new songs at a surprisingl voracious pace, and they are sounding better and better by the week. I'm finally writing the songs I want to, getting to lyrics that exorcise the year's demons, and garnering the much coveted praise of my often-more-prolific bandmates. Recently, when those "you're not amounting to anything" devils raise their heads and taunt me about that novel project I still haven't written, I push them aside to start hashing out lyrics. I'm letting my creativity flow where it may with the knowledge that thats all I can ask of it. And I think that's what a lot of it is about. I hope.

Stormy Wednesday

2008-12-04T11:11:00.002-05:00

So Kay's brother is in town this week, coming over from the opposite coast and playing a few gigs with his girlfriend Alice, in town from France (the other opposite coast). We've been spending some time with them, and they're great fun. So after practice two nights ago I went over to Williamsburg to catch their gig. They were playing folk-rock stuff with an excellent backing band, two old friends of Kay's brother's.

So a beer or two after the show ended, the musicians were walking back to their instruments and playing along quietly with the jute-box. I'd been talking shop with the guitarist, and after a while, picked up his strat while he was playing around on bass. The bartender must have liked what was happening, because he cut the jute-box, and we launched into a rendition of Stormy Monday. I have not felt that musically "on" in the longest time. The other musicians were incredible, and we just flowed into the song like we'd been meaning to do this all night. After Stormy Monday, The guitarist and I switched, and played a few tunes, eventually the events at hand coaxed Kay's bro and Alice to come back up and polish off a second set. It was awesome.

Met a bunch of wonderful people, friends of Kay's brother from Duke, including a budding screenwriter who works at an auction house to pay for his writing habit, and this wonderful cat from rural North Carolina who studies international law and moved to NYC for a woman who left him. (we had a good long talk about South Carolina girls, as well.) It was also kind of nice to hear some real drawls again.

Last night, I saw Jay's side project, Predator Raw, Bushwick's finest stoner-metal quartet to date, and then caught up with Kay and company, and spent hours drinking and coming up with band names like "Custer's Last Band," and "Fiddle Bighorn".

2008-12-01T11:39:00.003-05:00

I finally finally finally got a new cell phone. No more dropped txts, no more "wait, really? you called me?" and most importantly, no more waiting literally 5 minutes for the phone to boot up and find a signal, only to reboot again at random.

My phone finally kicked the bucket upstate, so I ran to Oneonta to get a new phone. The woman at the wireless store asked me for my number, and i realized that its a pretty unique thing to our generation, that our phone numbers stay with us. They become part of where we're from. I'm a 201. My whole gang of friends from way back in the day is made up of 201's. I hang out with a group of 860's, who got their phones back at school, and I date a 757.

heh, just think its kind of cool.

Witness

2008-11-30T02:18:00.004-05:00

Back on-grid but not for very long. Upstate, today, some Jehovah's Witnesses (isn't Jehovah technically spelled with a Y? Whatever, this is the sort of questioning that leads to things like the climactic scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark) came by the house to spread the meaning of life as they so understand it.

And those two people were freezing their asses off, going around rural New York engaging in what are probably, on the whole, a series of borderline-stressful interactions, in the name of something they believed in. And it got me thinking. That's rare. At the very least, those two people are trying.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T12:21:00.002-05:00

Woke up this morning to Kay leaving the house to go to work, and I realized that I have a lot to be thankful for. Good friends, supportive parents, a good roommate, a roof over my head, a functioning auto, a passion for art, and a wonderful girlfriend, who is faithful, loving, brilliant and patient.

And you know what? After the way this year started out, things could have be a lot worse right now. I spent last thanksgiving in North Carolina with friends that I will probably never see again, and that will always strike me as very sad. But I have a wonderful family here in brooklyn (and Manhattan, Ruby, you count too), and I wouldn't trade them for anything.

Also, I'm grateful for the little things. Like the fact that I was virtualy unharmed by teh large glass lamp that fell and shattered on my head last night.

There's a lot to be thankful for.

Power to the People

2008-11-25T18:48:00.002-05:00

Also this: http://www.votemalik.com/

Malik Rahim, former black panther, founder of the organization with which I served as demolition crew lead and work-site assessor post-Katrina. The organization became a shadow of its former self after Malik and a lot of the early members had to take time away, but from my experiences with this man, he would make for a hell of a representative. Also, proud to see the line between activist and politically involved diminish. That's the way it should be.

2008-11-25T18:33:00.002-05:00

Work is getting frustrating. My editor is actually competing with me to cover stories. And since she is also the one who does most of the assigning, she wins. And she usually wins at the last minute after I've already made the necessary preparations. Instead of covering Police Commissioner Kelly's unusual press conference about security measures for lower Manhattan, I'm writing a fluff piece about the opening of a Daycare center. Add to that the fact that she routinely keeps me out of the loop, even when it has to do with additions to my own stories, and its just not working out. Frustrating all around.

2008-11-24T10:17:00.002-05:00

So yesterday, I had an experience with an awesome thing, that I can't tell anyone about 'cause that awesome thing is going to become somebody special's Christmas present.

Also was woken up by my land-lord today because my downstairs neighbor, who knows how to get shit done, got him in to look at the heat and the very noisy pipes, and so he came up to make sure things were OK upstairs. Aside from a jarring start to the morning, it should provide me both with heat, and the chance to get to know my neighbor (who I already like) better. We're in the midst of some re-arrangements at the APT, getting the band equipment out and finally setting up the study/living room/library, so... its like getting one's car back from the shop.

2008-11-21T10:29:00.002-05:00

At John's recommendation, I picked up a copy of The Mandarins by Simon De Beauvoir last night, and promptly stayed up until three or four in the AM tearing through its pages. Still a long long way to go, but it has that delicious writing style that I'm used to from, of course, Camus. There's something to the pacing of French literature of that time, something to the way that great events and small events are held in equivalent import, that appeals to me in every way as a writer and a human being.

Of course maybe its just a predilection of the French language peeking through via translation, in which case I should really try to learn French...

2008-11-20T12:23:00.003-05:00

The heat is on, but its not hot. Damnit it's cold.

Anyway, had a show last night at the Charleston in Williamsburg. I liked it because the raw brick basement in which we played had no stage whatsoever, and it brought me back to the days of playing at school, loud, raw, and having a bad-ass time. Despite our technical difficulties (the amps are finally feeling all the pressure of this constant gigging) several people said the sound was even better than our Red Star show a few weeks ago (which had astounding energy and turn-out). We started out by drawing the crowd with a Song we haven't finished writing yet, one of my new ones called "Raleigh". I set up the guitar for my playing style the other night, getting the action and intonation just right (making harmonics a piece of cake) as well as raising the G-string to make my bluesy bends easier. All in all, it's paying off in spades. Our regular bassist is on hiatus while he deals with some higher-education stuff, so we have a friend sitting in in his place. He's been really good so far, surprisingly good actually, but its very disconcerting not to have the bass played by someone who I've shared the stage with for years... I find myself less able to rely on cues from the bass... I'm sure that'll improve with time.

Also of note regarding the Charleston, free pizza with your beer! Fantastic!

***

I have a meeting tonight with a few cats about starting a lit journal of some sort. If it goes well, this could keep my brain and heart satiated until Grad school, and then I'd only have to worry about my wallet (but lets not talk about that one).

***

Wow this is cold. I'm going to go bundle up.

2008-11-19T16:38:00.003-05:00

The G-chat I come home to:

Ruby: Charlotte. we need to get some guns.

me: oh?

Ruby: and motor boats. and get in on this pirate party

me: i mean, this all sounds right up my alley

Ruby: it is a total bonanaza out there.

Fall

2008-11-19T01:19:00.002-05:00

So it's fall in this part of the world, so I did a little fall-cleaning to the template. I'll tweak it occasionally, but... I was getting tired of all that green.

Anyway, lots of things going on with the band, lots of things afoot in my creative life. I'll blog about those soon. Sorry for the delay in posts, but lately I've become fully engrossed in reading theory again, pouring over State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben every subway ride I take. It feels so good to stretch out my brain again.

I'll write more soon.

Faith and the Absurd

2008-11-13T14:39:00.003-05:00

Just because I've been thinking about the post-war intellectual scene... A paper I wrote in late 2006 on the Plague by Albert Camus. I have not included citations because I don't want to get into the formatting...

It is a truism to remark that, in times of disaster, the true nature of humanity is brought to the fore. Such a remark is an oversimplification and, what’s more, implies a natural state of being that underlies normal human affairs, waiting to be discovered once said affairs are interrupted. Good students are taught to be wary of such claims. Nevertheless, as is oft the case, a truth underlies the truism: disaster brings the ever-present realities of the human condition more directly to our attention. At the most basic level, we are all subjected to the absurd—the certainty of death and the uncertainty of meaning. In a situation where our ever-impending death becomes all the more pronounced, or alternately, in situations where the normal human affairs that keep us distracted from this truth are stripped away, the individual is faced with the realities of the human condition, the reality of the absurd. It is this situation that Albert Camus presents to us in his 1948 novel The Plague, a book that borrows from earlier works of existential philosophy, and lays the groundwork for Camus’ later more theoretical works. I wish to situate The Plague (qua book) and the plague (qua phenomenon) in the scope of existentialist thought. So doing serves not only to expose the novel’s philosophical aspirations, but allows an illustration of otherwise dense topics through individuals, albeit fictional, with whom we can relate. This short essay will attempt this task by discussion the two sermons1 given by Father Paneloux in The Plague. After a brief summary of the first sermon, I will analyze it according to the Sartrian notion of bad faith. As Paneloux’s second sermon is intended to amend the first, after its summary, I will present Camus’ later idea of metaphysical rebellion as a possible response to Sartrian bad faith.
Paneloux’s first sermon takes place during the onset of the plague that has befallen the French-Algerian town of Oran. It comes as the climax of a Week of Prayer, an ecclesiastical bid to do battle with the epidemic. The thesis with which Paneloux begins his oration is one of what may be called a traditional Christian moralist sort: “Calamity has come on you my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it2.” The priest then goes on to cite the appearances of plague in the past and the religious meanings they were taken to have. Thus we have the plague ravaging Egypt in the book of Genesis, we are told of an Italian plague understood as angelic justice, and of the Abyssinians zealously welcoming death-by-plague as a road to divine salvation. This plague, he implies, ought to be understood no differently. The people of Oran are being taught a lesson ,“the lesson that was learned by Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Job and Pharaoh…3” In short, the plague was a punishment for their sins, a collective punishment for collectively ignoring God and going against His ways. And yet, the learned Jesuit contends, this very punishment gives one access to God’s will. As His wrath is coming to the people of Oran due to their lack of faith and obedience, the Plague can be seen as a lesson in faith that should be, in some sense, welcomed by the pious:
[The Plague] gives us a glimpse of that radiant eternal light which glows…in the dark core of human suffering…[this light] reveals the will of God in action, unfailingly transforming evil into good. And once again today it is leading us through the dark valley of fears and groans towards the holy silence, the well-spring of all life. This, my friends, is the vast consolation I would hold out to you, so that when you leave this house of God you will carry away with you not only words of wrath, but a message, too, of comfort for your hearts.4
Thus, the plague is judgment manifest, a judgment that the citizens of Oran must, in a certain sense embrace. The salvation Paneloux preaches can come about only through internalization of the verdict he claims is latent in the epidemic. Innocence in the eyes of Paneloux’s God can come only through admission of guilt that the plague signifies.
A similar mechanism arises in Sartre’s elucidation of the notion of bad faith, found in his 1943 text Being and Nothingness, specifically in the bad faith of the critic. The critic, as defined by Sartre, is an individual who demands sincerity of an Other. The critic demands a confession of the person who offends her sensibilities. This confession is not the confession of an act, however, but a statement of identity—an ontological confession. The critic demands that the offending individual admit to being the offending individual as a means of reconciliation. Sartre’s example is Homosexuality. The critic demands that an individual who engages in acts deemed homosexual identify oneself as “a homosexual”. Furthermore, this so-called sincerity, this identification as the personification of the offending traits is, from the point of view of the critic, a positive and necessary step towards a renunciation of the offense. Of course, this is a contradiction, and one that serves to establish a Hegelian dynamic of power—the subversion of a slave’s freedom to a master’s will.5 Sartre illustrates:
Who cannot see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a statement such as, “He is just a paederast,” which removes a disturbing freedom from a trait and which aims at henceforth constituting all the acts of the Other as consequences following strictly from his essence.6

Just as Hegel’s Master is unable to become fully self-conscious due to his failure to recognize the agency of the slave, the critic is in a state of bad faith due to his demand that the Other nullify the threat of her freedom. An individual so classified (i.e. a self-admitted “homosexual” or a “pederast”) has made of himself a permanent Other, denying the possibility for mutual recognition, for the essence he has claimed is of a different species than the essence of the critic. By bringing this state of affairs about, the critic undoes the threat of the other at the expense of the realization of human freedom.
What Sartre’s critic does with “homosexual”, Paneloux’s sermon does with “sinner”. To Paneloux’s reasoning, the plague is to be understood as brought about by the sins of Oran. By the vehicle of his sermon, he hopes to bring this realization about in the minds of its citizens. Sartre references the saying, “A sin confessed is half pardoned,”7 and Paneloux is invoking the same. For the priest, this is an interpretation of Christian forgiveness—recognition of oneself as a sinner and subsequent trust in God’s response. Yet the mechanism is the same as that of the critic. Paneloux, faced with the absurd as manifest in the plague, demands that the citizens identify as sinners. Threatened both by the human freedom to ignore God, and (more importantly), the chaos and irrationality of the reality of the plague, Paneloux turns to bad faith. As Camus later writes, the absurd is the confrontation of the human need for order with the irrationality, and terrifying unpredictability of the conditions of the world.8 One such response to the absurd, then, is such a turn towards bad faith.
Paneloux’s Second sermon, however, represents a change in the man. Some time after the delivery of his first sermon, the scholarly Jesuit (who, distinct from a parish priest, has less day to day contact with the world outside of his studies) becomes involved in Rieux and Tarrou’s sanitation squads. In this capacity, Paneloux comes face to face with the symptoms and fatalities of the plague. This exposure sparks a change in Paneloux, a change that reaches its climax after he and Rieux witness the death of the Magistrate’s small son. In the aftermath of the small boy’s suffering, Rieux lashes out at the priest, negating the implicit demand of the first sermon, shouting, “That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you [Paneloux] know that as well as I do!”9 Rieux-as-narrator informs the reader that this event and the conversation that followed had a profound effect on the priest, who invited Rieux to his next sermon.
Right from the onset of Paneloux’s second sermon, we are informed that he has ceased referring to his listeners as “you” and instead speaks of “we”. He goes on to say that, in the months since he last spoke, they had come to know the plague better. What he claimed in his first sermon, he still holds to be true. His thoughts, however, had “lacked charity,”10 and in this second sermon his change of emphasis is be key. The task of the Christian, he explains, is to find the good in all situations, including such suffering as the plague. The good Christian ought to take what is before him and learn what it has to teach him. Indeed, a child’s suffering is reprehensible. Paneloux specifically cites a child’s innocence. And this presents a contradiction, for how can a Christian believe in a Christian God, and yet recognize the truth of innocent suffering, of needless suffering? All must be believed, or, alternately, all must be denied. The citizens of Oran “must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing.”11 Indeed, if one holds that God can control the plague, then one must assume that He wants it to be. And if He wants it to be, then the believer must learn from it, must accept it, must will it, as well. This is the only consistent manner of dealing with theodicy, the only consistent way of believing in God.
Indeed, we find ourselves back at the absurd. Rather than circumventing the absurd, as in the case of Sartre’s bad faith, we have a confrontation with it. The absurd—that dissonance between our desire for order and the harsh irrational reality in which it finds itself—is acknowledged. Rather we find ourselves dealing with another mode of amelioration. Camus specifically references the “All or Nothing” six years later in The Rebel. Again hearkening back to the Hegelian struggle for recognition between master and slave, Camus focuses on the act of rebellion when the slave refuses his role and demands treatment as an equal.
Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts (“because this is how it must be…”) an attitude of All or Nothing… The rebel himself wants to be “all”—to identify himself completely with this good of which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally recognized and acknowledged—or “nothing”; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him.12
The slave, aware that the previous order did not treat him as an agent, as a mutually recognized other, prefers death to its return. The moment of rebellion makes an irrevocable change. Indeed, Camus continues a year later in The Myth of Sisyphus, “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.”13
Paneloux, in his second sermon, has found himself face to face with the absurd. His understanding of God—his ordering principle of the universe: the belief in the plague as justified punishment—stands in strict juxtaposition to the world as he sees it—irrationality: the death of M. Othon’s son. Forced, as he himself expresses it, to choose between all—the absurd—and nothing—nihilism. Either what he holds to be true (God and his having witnessed needless suffering) are true, or he can hold nothing to be true. In having to confront this choice, he becomes a figure of rebellion.
And so he makes his choice, and chooses to accept what he sees. He and the citizens of Oran must accept the existence of the absurd. Nihilism he rejects offhand, for who, he asks, can believe in nothing. And yet the absurd is a dissonance—the very notion of its “acceptance” is not intuitive. Nevertheless, Paneloux seeks to trust the absurd—to learn from it, and to derive from it some semblance of meaning. But Camus tells us, both subtly with the Jesuit and explicitly years later in Sisyphus, that we cannot trust in the absurd as though God; we cannot make the absurd our God. The absurd is not a thing, an object from which we can derive answers or meaning—it is the very clash between our desire to find such a thing and the world that denies us our quest for order. It is a relation that exists within the human mind vis a vis its desires and the outside. It does not exist outside of the mind. It is a struggle between the mind and its environment.
…I must admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction ( which must not be compared to immature unrest). Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements…ruins the absurd and devalues the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only insofar as it is not agreed to.14
And yet such an exorcism is what Paneloux attempts to do. He agrees to the absurd. He looks to it for meaning. And so his rebellion leaves him unfulfilled. He, like Camus’ reading of Kierkegaard and Chestov, attempts to fashion a God out of the absurd and thus to circumvent the problem again, simply one step deeper than the relatively superficial circumvention found in bad faith.
All or Nothing: Tarrou explains, “When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either loose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose faith, and he will go through with it to the end.”15 And so Paneloux does not die in bad faith. He is consistent and authentic with regard to his beliefs. However he doesn’t die with a sense of meaning. Waiting for meaning from his acceptance of the absurd, he dies with none. Camus calls it philosophical suicide: thought having negated itself to transcend itself in its very negation.16 It is a leap of faith, and as such, philosophically untenable. Paneloux’s recognition and amelioration of his own bad faith was necessary, but insufficient. He still failed to create his own meaning, looking instead to the absurd as God.
It is in this way, then, that Camus’ early novel foreshadows the explicit philosophical moves he makes within the existentialist tradition. To speak in terms of bad faith is not enough, for it does not address the reality of the absurd (or, perhaps more appropriately, the absurdity of reality). Sartrian existentialism runs the risk of philosophical suicide—the acceptance of the absurd and therefore failure to create meaning for one’s self. The existentialist project must therefore look beyond the internal self-coherence embodied in bad faith, and must look to the all or nothing implicated in metaphysical rebellion against the absurd in order to properly address the issue of meaning. Though both thinkers develop such concepts over several decades, the nascent beginnings of this process start to unfold in The Plague.

2008-11-12T15:39:00.001-05:00

So far, best November on record. But I've been reading Agamben and missing my studies and within a year it'll be time to start applying to schools again...

The sketchy top two right now are Duke or Yale.

And I hate New Haven...

2008-10-19T20:16:00.002-04:00

Plus Side: Got to go on a 50 mile ride with George Hincapie and 50 other people on high end bikes, hung with the pack, out-climbed some folks, got invited to train with a pretty good team and redeemed the usefulness of Reynolds 531 Steel in the face of Carbon Fiber, not to mention made a lot of great contacts for branching out into bicycle-magazine writing.

Minus Side: it was ass-cold outside and at the edge of my envelope to hang with the pack. And now, the next day, I feel sick.

Discipline

2008-10-09T00:39:00.002-04:00

The two main themes of this year for me have been discipline and strength. Right now I'm only interested in the latter as it's helped me to achieve the former. And I'm not interested in the former in terms of the discipline of others... I'm focusing here on self-discipline.

Discipline, for me, has always been a counterpoint to chaos. I don't like ordered lives, but (and? so?) I try to live a disciplined life in a vacuum of order. (I think there are a lot of people like that, and a lot of people who have the opposing mindset, people who structure their lives so that they can be wild within it.) In any event, I feel like this year I've finally taken discipline head-on as a goal.

The wildly irresponsible manner with which L left me at the beginning of the year made it impossible to even get out of bed. But I had responsibilities, an album to finish, work to do. And so the year started off with this intense struggle to bring order to the chaos my life had become. It failed more than it succeeded, but it set the tone, so to speak, let me practice focus. The I left my job for a more structured job, thinking that would lend me some of its order. It didn't, and my methods of work and motivation didn't match with the job, so, live and learn... I left. During the job, however, I started to take the idea of racing bicycles and, more generally, of getting in better shape seriously, so I started exercising, finding and testing my limits, watching what I put into my body for the first time in my life (again, successes and failures abound), but I started thinking in a more disciplined way. When I left my job, I went back to writing, but with a renewed sense of purpose and a much more disciplined attitude. When I talk to mattio, now, about training, I think about it in the same way as I do writing assignments. I hold myself to training and writing schedules. Very loosely, but, that's the point: if they're my schedules, they can be changed at my will. But they're still schedules, and they help me feel productive.

I've never understood 'mind over matter' quite so much.

2008-09-28T10:58:00.002-04:00

First bicycle race today. In the wet.

Wish me luck.

----

supplemental:

When I started, I'd two goals: the stated goal of not coming in last, and the actual goal of finishing without injury or severe damage to the bike.

Out of a field of 24, I came in 16th.

I had a few moments on the hills where I questioned why in the name of all things holy anyone would do this to their body,
And I mismanaged my on-bike food intake so that I started getting ridiculous stomach cramps around 10 miles from the finish, but I did it. And I know I can do better.

So while I don't want to so much as *look* at the bike for the next 48 hours, I'm hooked.

Oh, and Mattio got 3rd.

2008-09-24T12:33:00.002-04:00

When after many years, you learn to see the world through the eyes of another, you forget to see on your own when those eyes are suddenly shut, when that connection is suddenly severed.

Oftentimes I *still* feel as though I am learning to see for the first time, re-learning what it is to let my eyes wander among the stars or to feel grass under bare feet, to listen to wind. Love is a connection to more than that one person, its a connection to the world. And having found out that part of that was a lie for so long, it's still tricky to connect to the world.

Sorry for airing that publicly, it's just been on my mind.

wheels

2008-09-22T20:00:00.003-04:00

I haven't blogged about the bike in a long time, and that's because, largely, it's been perfect. I have a secret steel racing bike project in the works, building up an early nineties steel frame to become a modern racing machine, and that's been keeping me from obsessing over my beloved Raleigh, plus I've just been *riding* the damn thing a bunch, getting my legs all fast and whatnot, learning to corner better, getting out in the nature. But in a recent fit of organization I cleaned my room and my desk and came upon the set of tubular wheel that I'd bought a few month back for virtually nothing. The wheels are gorgeous Mavic GL 330's laced to early Shiamano 600 hubs (tri-color era 7 speed, for the geeks in the audience), and they weigh even less than my self-built-for-speed clincher set. So it's been kicking around the back of my head that I should glue some damn tires on to them and go for a ride.
That's right, glue. Tubulars are what they sound like: tubular tires that get glued on to the rim. The disadvantage is that the glue sticks to everything, needs to dry, and kills braincells 'till it does. The advantage is that the tires are perfectly round. That means no sidewalls. Which means, in theory, they handle like a dream.

Well.
I did it today on mattio's stoop. And they are incredible. The bike is twitchy in an amazing way. I just think about a direction, and the little criterium frame is already mid-swoop. The wheels look so much less sleek than my hardy clinchers, blending in perfectly with the 30 year old frame. But that just makes their speed even more amazing. Did I mention they even weigh less?

* * *

Today was a wildly productive day in ventures that make me no money. In addition to the bike wheels, I finally fixed the brakes on the volvo and I started talking out a really exciting new radio project.

If only I hadn't gone grocery shopping, I'd have broken even.

incendeary comment # 1

2008-09-18T21:09:00.004-04:00

one of my opinions on Hillary Clinton...

women who traded in their feminism to marry investment bankers felt like they had a chance to redeem themselves in a karmic sense by voting for an otherwise moderate candidate.

A piece from this weekend

2008-09-17T13:33:00.001-04:00

When I first met Louis Palmer, a Swiss schoolteacher spending the week in New York, he was in the midst of a predicament familiar to most automotive New Yorkers -- he'd woken up to find his car wedged tightly into its parking space, a small tan sedan having parked within inches of his bumper. I watched as, with a mix of determination and consternation unique to urban drivers, he wrestled with the steering wheel for a few minutes, weaving the vehicle back and forth, trying to find an angle advantageous to his situation. Eventually, uttering the traditional expletives under his breath, Mr. Palmer stepped out of his car to assess his options. It appeared that he was, in fact, stuck, and so there was only one thing left to do: he reached back inside, pulled a lever, and then carted the rear half of his car out of the way and across the street.

Mr. Palmer's is a decidedly unique car on a straightforward, if equally unique, mission -- to prove, by means of global demonstration, the viability of solar-powered travel. Mr. Palmer and his Solar Taxi have thus far logged 27,500 miles over fourteen months in their trip around the world, powered only by the sun.

Mr. Palmer and his support team arrived in New York City on Friday, September 5, where they were made guests of the country's first green residential high-rise, Battery Park City's Solaire. "Sustainability brings a lot of good people together," said Mike Gubbins, Director of Residential Management for the Albanese Organization -- the developer behind the environmentally designed Solaire, Verdesian and Visionaire residences -- who offered Mr. Palmer's team lodging for the duration of their stay. Over the past week, Mr. Palmer and his Solar Taxi have played chauffeur to New Yorkers big and small, from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to Battery Park City residents and this reporter. "I call it a taxi because I always give people rides," Mr. Palmer explained, estimating that he's had about a thousand different people in his passenger seat since his trip began. The point, he emphasized, is to demonstrate to the world that solar-powered vehicles are well within reach. "We have an energy crisis and a climate crisis; I want to show that we have a solution. It is affordable, it is reliable, and it is ready."

Indeed, there are fewer ways to prove that a concept has matured beyond the drawing board better than putting it to the most rigorous test at hand. And if that concept can thus be shown the world over, all the better. And thus far, by Mr. Palmer's estimation, the Solar Taxi has excelled. "In 14 months of driving, we only lost two days to breakdowns," said Mr. Palmer, elaborating with pride, "It's a Swiss car, with Swiss technology. It still runs like a Swiss clock." And, from the passenger's seat, at least, the car is an impressive work. As alluded to earlier, the Solar Taxi is made of two components: a three-wheeled car, not too much bigger than a SMART, attached to an approximately fifteen-foot long trailer lined with solar cells. The two-part nature is intentional, Mr. Palmer said -- the car can function independently from the trailer for 150-250 miles, depending on speed, allowing it to function as a perfectly small city car, temporarily leaving the unnecessary bulk of the solar panels behind. A full recharge of the batteries, Mr. Palmer said, takes about six hours. When combined, the two units weigh approximately 1500lbs -- a little more than half the weight of a Mini Cooper. Speaking easily over the engine's low whine, Mr. Palmer also pointed out that the Solar Taxi generates power efficiently enough that, to compete, a gas-powered vehicle would have to travel about 270 miles per gallon. And though the engine can only push the car a little past 55mph, its lightweight and torquey nature made for a quick and confident bout around Battery Park City. In fact, amongst the CD player, sporty seats and dashboard-mounted calculator, gauges and dials, the only concern of note on such a sun-powered day was that the Solar taxi lacks air conditioning. But then again, so does this reporter's beat-up old Volvo.

The fourteen months spent on the road seem only to have confirmed Mr. Palmer's conviction that affordable solar-powered travel is as possible as it is necessary. "The most surprising thing," he said of his travels, "is that, everywhere, there is so much awareness that something must be done." Though this particular vehicle has been sponsored by Q.cells, a German company and the world's largest producer of solar cells, Mr. Palmer believes that a commercialized version of the vehicle would be very affordable, saying that construction of the car and trailer cost $10,000 and $6,000, respectively.

The immediate future holds yet more travel for Mr. Palmer and his team, who, by the time of this printing, will have left New York City for Boston and Montreal. Nevertheless, he intends to return. "It's New York," he responded simply, when asked what brought him here, "when people see the car, they shout, they scream, they wave -- people don't do that in any other city." Next time, though, he hopes to have more cars: Mr. Palmer is planning a solar-powered race around the world, for which there are already four more cars in the works.

Those who can do...

2008-09-17T01:26:00.004-04:00

It's been an interesting week or so. Have begun reporting and writing again, am recalling the familiar problems of editors and deadlines, the traditional string of coffee cup after coffee cup. But nothing particularly noteworthy to write about. Rather, I've been thinking a lot lately about learning and re-learning.

I think it's a Zen concept, the notion of starting out at something and progressing past mastery until you are a beginner again, and then repeating. Wherever it comes from, I like it and believe it. There is nothing I would say I've mastered. But of the things I am quite good at, all follow this cycle. And maybe because it's an artificial kick-start to such a cycle, the act of teaching always makes me think of this notion. Kay and I went upstate this weekend and we brought the bicycles along. For the past few weeks now, we'll go out on the road, either upstate or in the city. And as I try to impart on to her what I've learned from the year or so that I've been riding seriously, it makes me answer questions that I already thought dealt with. I'm taking everything from "this is how you change a tire" and "this is how to pedal efficiently" to "why the hell would anyone want to burn away a meal to travel at 25mph?" Every opportunity for teaching is an opportunity for self examination in the task at hand. In fact, any skill differential seems to bring such questions to the fore. When I meet a novice guitarist, I recall why I play. When I meet a master guitarist, I question the direction I wish to go.

Teaching and learning are just two words for the same concept, of momentary transference across a skill differential.

2008-09-11T15:32:00.000-04:00

I posted this a year ago.

Notebooks are interesting. We surround them with airs of privacy. We lock them up. We stash them away. Blogs, at least, are more honest: open to the world, commanding "read my thoughts".

I always entertain the fantasy of a youngish grand-daughter, or a great grand-daughter, opening a wooden box in the attic of her parent's house to find all of my notebooks. To get to know me, a forgotten ancestor, as a real person, a poet, with failed dreams, realized hopes, weaknesses and terrible handwriting. It's this hope that keeps the privacy alive: if we write as though we wish no one to read, then what we write is for once honest and flawed, truly worthy and ready to be read.

There's one notebook that stands out in this fantasy. It's red and its small and its simple and the paper is perfect--It's my journal about my experiences as a student in New York a few September elevenths ago. I wont write anything about it here. I cannot finish the journal. I wanted to get it all down. to chronicle the day and the days that followed, and the weeks that followed, and the months sliding into war. I didn't want to lose any of it.

It took four or five years to get to the morning after. As I go, the narrative slowly starts to sputter and stop. Nietzsche once wrote something about the absolute necessity of forgetfulness in human relations. And no matter how I try to save that terrible day, a greater more primitive portion of my brain pushes it under, pushes the book aside and keeps its thick pages blank.

When she opens that book, my great-great-grand-daughter, what kind of truths will she find in that flaw? What kind of history will write with ghostly ink on my empty pages? What words will she have for my inexplicable speechlessness?

Quarantine

2008-09-06T16:03:00.003-04:00

Computer viruses are getting smarter. Used to be a time I would just jump into the registry and wrestle the sum'bitches with my bare hands. Nowadays, they're besting me. The laptop went down yesterday and is in shambles. Looks like I'll be able to save the vast majority of the data, but I'm largely off-line and knee-deep in coffee.

Goddamn assholes, the people who write these programs.

Booking

2008-09-05T02:05:00.003-04:00

Had a long-awaited, much needed beer (or two) with John tonight, who is winding down (or cranking up?) the editing process on his second novel, largely at the behest of the "bludgeoning" the manuscript received from his agent. We talked at length about a great many things, including the notion that once a work of art is complete, it no longer belongs to the artist but rather, each interpretation belongs wholly to each interpreter.

John noted that something cosmic must be at work as he just wrote his first poem as I am beginning my first novel. (We were two beers in) I feel dubious about my first foray into what I'll call long-form-fiction, but so far I've had an absolute blast researching the book. Its all the fun of research with none of the downsides. My plan is to have the first draft of the first chapter done by the end of the month. We'll see. Maybe these here internets will keep me honest.

2008-08-28T15:11:00.003-04:00

The nice thing about buying a trash can is that, when you come home, you've already thrown out the receipt.

I've been buying a few office supplies because, last week, I quit my job. The goal now is to find part time work with my hands (like at a bike shop or behind the controls of a radio station), and spend the remaining days of the week writing freelance. It may have made more sense to have set that up before-hand, but it just felt like the time to take the plunge. Wish me luck / say a prayer.

I've also started putting pen to paper on a novel I've had kicking around in ym head for a year. So again, luck / prayer.

* * *

A whole bunch of folks went upstate last weekend. Made some wonderful music, played games, lounged in what remained of the summer sun. Took Kay and her Batavus out on my favorite 6-mile circuit. The ride was so much fun, as was the subsequent swim we all took later in the day, then when I put on my running sneakers yet later, I had a dark and dangerous idea...

Sign up for a triathlon?

I know, I know, they're the jerks that brought us the $60 water bottle cage. But if drinking, bullshitting and food are each great on their own but an all-out blast together... you see where I'm going with this?

Dangerous stuff.

2008-08-20T13:52:00.001-04:00

I am too tall for this city -- I just slammed my head on scaffolding.

And all I want to do is ride bikes with you And stay up late and watch cartoons

2008-08-20T10:50:00.003-04:00

So Kay and I took a much needed break from the city this weekend and set out in the ever-dying volvo (odometer has stopped working... ?) to her parents' house in Virginia.

En route, I was examining the beany babies in the claw-game at a late-night I-95 rest stop in Delaware, when I heard "what the hell are you doing here?" Turning around, I saw Ruby who was on his way to his parents house in the great state of South Carolina. So, each suspecting that the other had been lying in wait at the Delaware House until someone they knew came along, we spent quarters on all the cheesy amusements before getting back on the road. On the road, Ruby decided it'd be a fun game to bombard the Volvo with pickles, until quickly discovering that the pickup in which he was riding shotgun had no, well, pickup. Anyway, it was great to have picked up (see what I did there? eh?) an additional traveling partner, someone to stay in cell phone contact with and spot speed traps, until we parted ways around Richmond.

Meeting Kay's parents was, for all the nervousness that surrounded it, great fun. They're smart, witty, and enjoyed showing baby pictures. They make fantastic pasta dishes. I ate better than I have all year.

And tucked away inside the garage was Kay's Batavus, a Dutch-made mid-range racing bike. Which, of course, meant that we took several trips to the near-by beach, wearing towels like capes and aviator scarves, me on the Raleigh singing "Tony's Theme" at the top of my lungs ("I am Tony, super bicycle Tony, I'm racing
Spitfire turn and pop a wheelie, burn and evil chasing ... To-ny! To-ny!") with Kay atop the Batavus looking like a flying ace in Jackie-O sunglasses.

And the Volvo made it back with both the Raleigh and the Batavus in tow, in time for next weekend's upstate adventures.

2008-08-15T11:28:00.005-04:00

I've been tinkering with a lot of things lately and making a lot of art recently, so I haven't been making anything even rhyming with a substantive post. So maybe I'll fire up the camera and make some posts about tinkering and art.

Georgia on my mind

2008-08-12T14:02:00.003-04:00

+ An excellent Slate piece about the Georgia situation, courtesy of Kay: (here)

+ Also good, also from Kay, the Belgravia Dispatch: (here)

I'm sorry. I'm just venting.

2008-08-12T12:24:00.002-04:00

UNPAID INTERNSHIPS ARE THE NEPOTISM OF OUR TIME!

How are you supposed to break into creative fields when all the spots are reserved for people who can afford to live in the city / metro area uncompensated for 40 hour weeks?

Maybe marrying rich *is* the right idea.

2008-08-11T13:24:00.002-04:00

A New York Times slide show of the Georgian conflict (here)has got me in a funk at the moment. For obvious reasons, not the least of them being that while all this suffering is going on in the world, I am buying bicycle parts and sitting behind a desk typing up reports for institutional investors. I feel useless. Sure, I could marry some rich jack-ass who would sweep me off to the peace corps (fanciful idea, right?) but even that's a sort of vacation, you know? Hang out at NGO bars and then return to normal life in the states. And the only easy way out of that, the easiest institutionalization of that life is the objectifying distance of the reporter, the foreign correspondent, held at a distance by your telephoto lens, giving up doing for the catharsis of telling.

Its so easy to see what needs to be done. It's so hard to be able to do it.

Isolationism: Gentrification's baby cousin

2008-08-08T09:35:00.004-04:00

So, in unfortunate keeping with the classist advertisements for the SteelWorks Lofts in Williamsburg, I happened upon another disgusting apartment ad while on my way back from a (totally fucking awesome) Black Keys show at McCarren Pool. This time around, the message is even worse. The adverts for 72 Steuben, at a time when the housing market has driven the city's largely white new influx of residents to move into "new" neighborhoods (places like Bed-Stuy which New York Magazine has labeled the new Hipster Enclave and the New York Times has called a "frontier neighborhood" despite its hundred year tradition as a seat of African American culture) reads simply: "Don't Just Live in a Neighborhood, Belong."

Ad-speak for "move to Williamsburg: live with your own kind."

2008-08-05T01:49:00.004-04:00

Roommate got mugged (is OK, if shaken), suspicious possibly (probably) armed dude walking down the street, and when I went out to move the car earlier in the night, the whole neighborhood was more still than I've ever seen.

Something, somewhere, went down tonight.

Imminent death of the net predicted

2008-08-04T17:10:00.002-04:00

Film at 11.

Malwebolence, the New York Times Magazine piece on Trolling.

I have my own thoughts on this, but I'd be interested in hearing comments first.

Awesome Thing of the Week No. 1: Suspect Device

2008-07-31T09:52:00.004-04:00

The BBC has this report, today, on the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera Mechanism, in addition to being an awesome band name and potential X-Files episode, is the first known mechanical computer. Various sources say that a devices of similar complexity did not start appearing for another thousand years.

from Wikipedia
The mechanism is the oldest known complex scientific instrument. It has several accurate scales, and is essentially an analog computer made with gears. It is based on theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Persian and Egyptian astronomers. Based on the shape of the Egyptian letters used in the manual of the instrument, it is estimated that it was constructed around 150 to 100 BC...Consensus among scholars is that the mechanism itself was made in Greece. All the instructions of the mechanism are written in Greek.

Per the BBC article, a sophisticated X-ray system has allowed researchers to map out the device's 29 surviving gears. High resolution imaging has aided in reading the devices inscriptions... apparently it used the Olympic (pan-Hellenic) games as a reference point.

"The Olympiad cycle was a very simple, four-year cycle and you don't need a sophisticated instrument like this to calculate it. It took us by huge surprise when we saw this.

"But the Games were of such cultural and social importance that it's not unnatural to have it in the Mechanism."

-Tony Freeth, of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Culture

2008-07-29T10:56:00.005-04:00

Back in New York, tanned and relaxed, despite a few job woes. Kay and I have begun reading the Brothers Karamazov together, which has rekindled my love for Russian literature. I don't really believe in genetic dispositions, but as the descendent of many slavs, there's an extent to which the philosophical manic-depressive acceptance so pervasive in what Russian literature I have read (and its not nearly enough to be making such a generalization) just feels like home (ha!).

We went to see The Last Mistress on Sunday, as an on-the whim decision in a rainstorm, and were pleasantly surprised. Its a very beautifully-shot film based on a 19th century French novel about the tribulations of a reformed libertine. It's paced like a novel, which is a little off-putting, but the acting is superb. Rococo France usually bores me to no end. This held me in rapt attention. It's only playing through the end of the week at the IFC theater, but I'm sure there are other ways to get a glimpse of it.

We also saw Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra at the MoMA. Which was fantastic on so many levels. The extent to which film of that time was still very much theater was in full swing, by which I mean huge, choreographed dances, a sense of scale built around a fourth wall, orchestral grandeur... and Claudette Colbert is simply amazing as a cheeky 1930's era Egyptian queen. Add to that amusing anachronisms, like how whoever someone is supposed to represent, they're white and speaking in the Hollywood Accent, and the film represents a time when movies weren't supposed to be virtual reality, but theatrical storytelling. Also represents a time when there was a monolithic white America, but lets not call the kettle black, here.

So, add to that the fact that I'm listening to several live bootlegs of the Archers of Loaf right now, and I feel like a paragon of culture.

Hot Mess of a Debut

2008-07-27T13:28:00.002-04:00

Coke Machine Glow reviews our album!

But getting to the goddamn music already (... phew), let’s start with some reference points: R.E.M., the Wrens, and the Replacements all come to find. I’ll get to R.E.M. more later, but if Let It Be is a classic of teenage anxiety, and Meadowlands is the same, only replace teenage years with middle age, then B-Sides and Rarities takes place in the world of noise and nakedly honest emotion that pops up during the decade where youthful optimism morphs into a very adult reckoning of the real world. (That is: the twenties.)

Also, you can now purchase our album from our myspace at myspace.com/demonofentropy

2008-07-25T22:26:00.002-04:00

The ocean was like glass off the coast today, and as evening set in, a school of dolphin swam in close to the shore on their way along the coast. So my brother, father and I scrambled the Kayaks and pushed off from the beach, paddling out to meet them. I was the quickest and angled myself into the school, who began surfacing all around me. Very careful not to paddle too deeply, I matched their speed and kept up behind a pair of dolphins that kept surfacing regularly. As my dad and my brother caught up, the dolphins spaced out to allow us into the school, somewhat, and we traveled about a quarter mile with them when they started playing, slapping their tails on the water and leaping fully out of the water five feet off my boat, turning in mid air to show their bellies while I tried to slap the water in return in an attempt to make contact. We continued this for about another mile or so and the whole time I kept thinking, "cool! they're doing with me what I'm doing with them!"

2008-07-20T21:16:00.001-04:00

...The quiet calm of just listening.

The best advice I ever received on a beach...

"Just listen."

Live-blogging my First Ocean Swim this Year

2008-07-19T16:59:00.004-04:00

4:49pm(est) - so far it seems that the water has not affected the keybo__

***

2008-07-19T16:38:00.001-04:00

Also, looks like we (Maxwell's Demon) may have another gig happening at Pianos, opening for The Darts on August 5! Take the Edge off Tuesday!

2008-07-19T11:01:00.003-04:00

I'm twenty minutes outside of Raleigh on my way southward. I have the Raleigh (which I like far more than the city of the same name) in the back of the car. It's humid as hell. This is my first time south of Bayonne, New Jersey since January. And I'm realizing that I'm going to need to learn to love the south again.

That old plan of setting up shop in Boone is sounding better and better.

for Love of the Machine

2008-07-14T11:24:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between the work we do on things and the attachment we feel towards them.

As I've mentioned before, my bicycle's on old criterium racer (short urban race courses) from a time when water bottles were hung from the handlebars. Accordingly, there's no place to attach water bottles to my frame. After some research, I found a nifty little device designed for the dark art of cycling, triathlon. It's a double water bottle holder that hangs down from the seat. In the as-aerodynamic-as-possible world of time-trialing/triathletics, the idea is that putting the water bottles behind your ass will keep the round, already-aerodynamic objects from interrupting your slipstream. For me, it was a nice way to avoid drilling my frame without putting three pounds of water over my front wheel (and thus affecting handling). I should mention that the apparatus cost me a pretty penny (at least what I'd made that day). So my second ride out with them, I'm about to climb over the Manhattan bridge when the harsh terrain of Fulton Street (first paved street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant of the 1800s and apparently untouched ever since)knocks a pivot bolt loose and the whole apparatus swings precariously over my rear wheel until i get to the Manhattan Bridge and flag down a fellow cyclist to ask after his toolkit.

Testament to NYC's bike culture, this guy pulls over immediately and digs through his pack for the tools I need, making small talk as I work. It quickly becomes apparent that getting to this one little bolt will require taking the damn thing apart, and I give the dude an "I'm really sorry to be taking all of your time" look, and he just smiles. "This is why they call triathlon an executive sport," he says. "Guys are so rich they never need to work on their stuff. They just buy a new one."

Likewise, I was reading a book in the local Barnes & Noble, the other day while waiting for Kay, entitled "The Need for the Bike". It was by a french book publisher who has been an avid rider and follower of racing all his life, composed of little vignettes about cycling. Phenomenally well written, I recommend it. Anyway, he does a bit about the difference between racers and mechanics. To unjustly simplify, racers hate the bike, it is the source of their pain; mechanics love it deeply as a thing of beauty.

A few nights ago I was repacking the bearings on what I call the Raleigh's race wheelset -- very light, quick clincher wheels that I built a little while ago, wheels that would definitely hold their own in a cat 4 or cat 5 road race (if paired with a quicker rider than me). If you've never repacked bearings, it's not a pleasant or particularly fun job. You have to take apart the wheel hub, remove about 18-24 ball bearings caked in old, grimy, gritty grease, clean each of them, clean all traces of the old grease from the hub, repack the hub with new, very sticky, very messy grease, plop the bearings back in and reassemble the hub, all while straining your eyes to make sure not a single speck of dust gets in there with them. Then you have to adjust the hub to spin freely without any play along the axle. And as I was doing this, I started wondering how many riders in the whole Tour de France peleton had done this since their first ten-speed. I was holding a wheel that I had built, knowing that if my front end was wobbling later, it'd be my fault. Knowing each spoke and bearing that'd carry me downhill in excess of 40mph.

That's why I dig my mechanic buddy Malcom. He's a racer. Damn fast. But he has the look of a man who now cares for the machines he used to abuse. It's a balance.

Our ability to act upon the world is what makes us human... but it's the old Hegelian thing: if we just get what we want, without having to go through the motions of bringing it about, we're the same as servants who bring about only what they're told to do.

Incorrect

2008-07-11T09:28:00.002-04:00

“Every technological advance we’ve made in the 21st century and throughout the 20th has come from the United States of America.”

-Sen. John McCain

+ The Internal Combustion Engine / Automobile (Germany)
+ The Jet Engine (Germany / Italy / Great Britain)
+ Radio Communication (Italy)
+ Sonar (Great Britain / Germany)
+ Binary computers (Germany)
+ Radar (debatable, but largely Great Britain)
+ Radiation Therapy (Britain)
+ The Maser, predecessor to the Laser (USSR)
+ The Helicopter (France)
+ The Modern Ballpoint Pen (Hungary)
+ The Three-point Seat-belt (Sweden)
+ Anti-lock brakes (France)

2008-07-08T23:28:00.001-04:00

Young cabbie on Bowery and Delancey compliments me on (1) my bike and (2) my aggressive turn signal as I wait to turn onto the Williamsburg Bridge.

Open Source Government

2008-07-02T10:12:00.004-04:00

Military Lawyer De-Bugs the Court

Obama's network gets bottom-up

2008-07-01T10:06:00.004-04:00

In other news, Damien is back in town from the UAE, if only briefly. This past weekend we had a gathering of the whole clan up at his parent's house in Westchester. Like all such gatherings, the activities vacillated between the extremely civil (delicious food, delicious wine, many toasts, white linen shirts) and the bacchanalian (3am wrestling matches by torchlight, delicious whiskey, dancing until four), punctuated by moments of pure childish fun, like swimming out to cliffs and jumping into the river. D leaves for the middle east again soon, but its very good to know that they heyday of these sort of family gatherings is far from past.

The next day, Kay trained up to join me, and she and I head out solo to an old hiking spot that D and I used to do once or twice a year, called Breakneck Ridge (technically we do Mt.Taurus). It's on the
Hudson River, on the border of Duchess County, a few miles north and on the
other side of the river from West Point. Lots of fun rock obstacles (its an absolute blast to do with a set of climbing shoes) and a phenomenal view of the Hudson river. You know, grab some sandwiches, ditch the car on the side of the road and just go. Kay and I went a little off course on our way down and found the
remains of an old set of cabins in the woods, and these strange stone buildings from the 1910's. Walking along a trail that had been partially rerouted due to an avalanche a few years back, we came upon a stone wall that D and I hadn't found before. It'd been breached by one of the boulders in the avalanche, creating this great post-apocalyptic affect (We've been watching too much battlestar galactica). So naturally we go through the breach and through a field up on to an elevated mound, like the kind you'd build to put a railroad track on, except this one is overgrown and has tire ruts. So Kay and I hop up onto it and follow its curve into the forest. After a few minutes, we were face to face with an arcane stone building, bricked up and sitting in the middle of the elevated right-of-way, in the middle of this forest. We're approaching it from the rear, and suddenly the whole forest seems eerily silent. We get to the building and work our way around the side. There's a bricked-up window with bars over it, only the bricks have been blown out, by the looks of it from the inside. That's when I started thinking "this is the point in the movie where no one hears from us again." We edge around to the front of the building, where there is a metal door. Above the metal door is a coat of arms involving some beavers and windmills (*not* swastikas, as Kay would later insist)and above the coat of arms is emblazoned "ERECTED 1913". The door itself is the most interesting part--It's clearly missing several locks, and has a bar welded across it. on the bar is a small square of metal, painted bright red, on which was welded "15". It was inexplicably creepy. Definitely unspace. We continue on our way at a quickened pace, past a closed gate at an intersection in the right-of-way, where there are fresh tire-tracks. We duck off the right of way and find our way to a trail system that I am familiar with. Somehow, we still manage to stray off course a fair amount, and find ourselves on a very well-maintained trail through some dense forest, surrounded by the remains of old stone farm buildings. We finally make it back to the road, about a mile south of the car, and hike along the side of the road, tucked close against the shoulder as cars speed by us doing 65, 75 mph. All of a sudden we hear this snarling growl-bark-snort of some creature from the reeds next to us and we jump back into the road, and start running, leaving the beast behind and contending with BMWs on the open road.

I am sore and it was awesome.

2008-07-01T10:04:00.004-04:00

It really does feel as though L is a wholly and completely different person. I was waiting for something like this -- when she left me it was like someone had thrown a switch in her brain. She won't return any calls. The scariest part about the whole thing is that I just don't know who she is. People say things like that a lot. I really mean this one.

It's not me, it's you.

2008-06-30T09:17:00.001-04:00

L's getting married. In August.

2008-06-27T11:38:00.003-04:00

The show was phenomenal.

Phenomenal.

The album looks fantastic, and a lot of people who are often hard to please have been offering us a fair amount of praise on a job well done. I know it's been a while, but we've all been breathing about a week-long sigh of relief. Maxwell's Demon, B-Sides and Rarities is a reality.

The release show at the National Underground was sweaty, packed and noisy, with everyone primed to go by our phenomenal friends in the band Pieces (who consistently amaze me).

Check out these vids from our awesome party (drink a beer as you watch, you'll feel like you were there):

Confidence Man into Life During Wartime. Dont miss the great band banter at 3:10

An excerpt from On the Run. Look at that crazy devil on lead guitar!

Love is a Destroyer

and the big finale by popular demand,

Four Square

If you think that rocked, come out and see us at Piano's on July 5th.

The Radiated Library

2008-06-18T10:41:00.004-04:00

Jaylinked me to this utterly fascinating piece in the Times.

Much to my dismay I cannot find any of Otlet's works for sale in English, and can barely find them for sale (or for free, for that matter) in any other language. Interwebs? Help me out here.

Michael Buckland's Otlet Site

An interesting bibliography

Doesn't break any Dad rules

2008-06-16T10:47:00.003-04:00

Spent Fathers' Day upstate with my folks and my grandfather, playing boccie and pinochle, cursing, and generally having a fantastic time.

While in town at a farmers market with my mother, she made a suggestion that I liked--namely that when the lease in Brooklyn runs out in a year, I spend the summer upstate. It would cost almost nothing, and would be remarkably relaxing, to get a job waiting tables in Cooperstown and spend the remainder of my time reading and writing hundreds of miles away from any big city. I just may do that.

Anyway, my father performed an emblematic act of dad-hood when, as I was getting ready to leave for the city, he looked at the bent and dented hood of my Volvo and decided to pull it back into shape using, almost exclusively, his bare hands. That's the spirit of fathers' day, right there.

---

Took the bike upstate with me, where the terrain is absolutely brutal and challenges the gearing on the little Raleigh. I rolled into the first downhill I found at about 20mph. I went into an aggressive tuck, and was very quickly catapulted to 41mph. My highest gear, about 105 gear inches, was completely useless, and all I could do was tuck and coast. I kept a pace of about 25mph on the flat roads, ducked around the neighboring village and came back up the hill from the another angle. The uphill was just as relentless, with my smallest gear (65ish gear inches) quickly becoming equally useless torture. I made it though, and that ridiculously painful loop should serve nicely as my benchmark course for a while. I hate to say it, but I'm beginning to understand why modern bikes have 7000 gears.

2008-06-13T00:57:00.002-04:00

Question to be asked: Do you love ideas--passionately, with your life? Does this thought keep you from sleeping? Do you feel that you are risking your life on it? How many philosophers would retreat!
. . .
Sade: "People decry the passions without thinking that it is their flame that lights the flame of philosophy."

-two excerpts from the notebooks of Albert Camus

2008-06-11T17:33:00.003-04:00

Then I must be greater than Daedalus: for whereas he only made his own inventions to move, I move those of other people as well. And the beauty of it is, that I would rather not. For I would give the wisdom of Daedalus, and the wealth of Tantalus, to be able to detain them and keep them fixed.

-Socrates, on argumentation, in Plato's Euthyphro

2008-06-11T08:20:00.004-04:00

More album work.
Yesterday, our best friend Damien's father, a professional photographer of note, had a wonderful photoshoot with us, trucking around Bushwick and "East Williamsburg" shooting frame after frame, shouting interesting encouragements (Damien makes so much more sense now) and buying us beer. It was a wonderful experience, and great to see a man I already respect in his element.

This album work is becoming interesting, though, and not in the way I mean when I'm talking about, say, guitar amplifiers or bike wheels. There was a time, not so long ago, when this album was my final tie to the city. I was madly in love, and it was clear though not always spoken that, when the album was done and we had played it out a little, I had a pressing obligation southward. As we rapidly approach the end of the project, I find myself feeling a whole strange bunch of emotions at once, not the least of which are recapitulations of the abandonment I'm now aware of again. And I don't trust my long term plans anymore; and it's rubbing off on my relationship with Kay when I have more than every reason to trust her blindly; and I'm not sure what to do next (with my life); and I'm getting really, really tired of L's enduring legacy being one of distrust and uncertainty.

How do you afford your Rock and Roll Lifestyle

2008-06-09T09:44:00.003-04:00

It is HOT in Brooklyn today. Manhattan's not great either. It almost makes the fact that our hot water is inexplicably inoperable a non-issue. It's probably time to bite the bullet and try to afford a small air conditioner. It's a sticky New York summer, punctuated by the rattle of decades-old fans, adorned with every imaginable smell. I'm used to spending at least a month of the summer in a more southern direction where, even if it's hotter, its so much less dense. This will be my first all-New-York summer in some years. I was dripping sweat during breakfast. And it's only June. Oy vey.

It's been busy times in the music business over here. Maxwell's Demon's first full length LP, B-Sides and Rarities, came back from the mastering engineer on Friday. It was a pretty great scene, me, Jay and mattio jumping on our bicycles and riding out to Greenpoint where we met face to face for the first time with our mad scientist of a mastering engineer. He characterized our recordings / mix as "needing a lot of work", but recognized that that's sort of "what [we] were going for". We get that a lot. (function of recording in the 3'x3' of Hangover Studios)
Anyway, the master sounds pretty phenomenal. He primarily masters for vinyl, and, accordingly, much of the digital harshness of our pro-tools recording has been magically washed away. The instruments blend in a warm way, all audible without competing for attention. That night we had a show at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, and just killed.

This album is becoming a busy proposition. Tuesday we're gathering to have photos taken for our press-kit, and kibitzing about album art. (Tangentially, did you know that firefox v2.0 spell checks Yiddish? Neither did I until right now!) And now that we're approaching the completion of this year-long project, we're all getting the itch to start writing again. One of mattio's newest songs, "Love Song for Liam" has become a favorite at live shows, and there's this wave of momentum building to start jamming and writing again, all of us working on brand new songs out of the sound we forged over the past twelve months of recording and gigging. It's very exciting.

Kay left for Berlin yesterday, leaving me a care package of increasingly hilarious envelopes to open each day (she just finished the Raw Shark Texts). She also charged me with updating my resume while she's away so that we can embark on JobHunt 2k8 together when she returns. Along those lines, I started talking with my uncle and old employer last night, about the possibility of returning to a freelance position in Lower Manhattan. We'll see if i can juggle both jobs for a little while, but it'll be really nice to start reporting again.

A Morning Person

2008-06-06T10:28:00.003-04:00

When the day's been good by 9am, you really can't complain. Woke up this morning at 6:30 (thats 0630 for those of you in the military) ate a little bit of food, then suited up and clipped into the bike for a brief ride with mattio. After my old friend dragged me around a couple of laps worth of prospect park, I broke off and rode back home, showered, had some coffee, selected a book off the book shelf and got on the train. On said train, I began reading said book, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, a collection of speeches and essays by my favorite thinker, Albert Camus. Now, after a while, reading said book on said train, an older gentleman who had sat down next to me a few stops earlier, reading the NY times, leaned over and said, "Excuse me, may I ask what you're reading?" and so began a conversation, about Paris, where he had lived in the 80's and which I had never seen, about the post-war European intellectuals, how important they are to our current situation today, and how they've fallen out of favor with the current intellectual climate. He told me about a community theater he's been volunteering at in midtown and a book he's been working on; I told him about my desire to start writing for a living again. We exchanged e-mail addresses, I got off one stop past my stop, and thought, this has been a good day, and it was 9am.

Out of gas

2008-06-05T12:10:00.002-04:00

New York by bicycle is unlike any New York I've ever seen. If you haven't done it yet, you just have to take my word for it. On short spurts, you're going about as fast as a car or a non-rush-hour subway, but you're out in the wide-open. If there's a radio on somewhere, if some cat's practicing trombone in a fifth floor walk-up, or whatever, you hear it. If a bakery is just opening, or if someone's car has just overheated, you smell it. And the sense of geography,of how all these disjointed pieces of city make a whole unity. It's pretty fantastic.

Went out to the Kissena velodrome at the ass-end of Queens after work yesterday to see mattio race. (As an aside, I want to bring back the -drome ending and start calling EWR the Newark Aerodrome.) Kissena was a goddamn trek, even with the assistence of the 7 train (I cheated and took the train on the way out). But I brought the Raleigh with me, and in between races, when they called a weather delay on the track, mattio had me fly his wing around the big banked, swoopy turns. The R caught 25mph with extremely little effort, and I quickly came to realize what phenomenal speeds a good rider could get a tight little track bike to on a good velodrome. And mattio did well, getting three second place finishes, looking strong and confident on his new Felt track bike. It was a fun time, and after a few post-race runs around the track on the Raleigh i was feeling dumb enough to feel up to the ride home.

At this point it had begun to rain, but it was a warm night so I hitched myself to the wheel of one of the racers who was riding back to Bushwick. On the long ride that followed, we kept a casual pace and made good conversation, getting lost here and there (it is Queens after all). At about the Brooklyn line, however, I realized that my throat was closing up from thirst. I'd ridden out without any food, water or cash. By the time my companion pulled off in Bushwick, i'd completely bonked, my body running on zero fuel. By the time I was ten blocks from home, I was barely able to hold the handlebars steady. Even today my legs feel like jelly.

It's making me question plans that I had with my good buddy A to try to ride up to the alma mater on a long weekend.
If I'm going to keep this up over the summer, I'm going to need some place to stash a water bottle on my ancient racing bike.

The Greatest Generation

2008-06-04T08:41:00.004-04:00

Woke up this morning to the following e-mail from my father:

c-
Please forward this to all of your like-minded and like-spirited friends, if you wish. Thanks to all of you for being an integral part of making obama's nomination and likely his election happen. We, at your age, had all of the passion but not the power to make this kind of change. it's long overdue that this kind of opportunity for can occur. tonight alone is monumental, but there's more to do. we're happy to be part of it.....again....
-d

From his generation (my father was growing up in the sixties) to mine. It's truly nothing short of astounding to see a country unified in something they believe in, not just against. And to see the population actively supporting a man who is brilliant and nuanced? Why thats just too much for my hardened little heart to bear. This morning I actually feel pretty OK about being an American.

I'd also like to point y'all towards this:

Michelle Obama tells it like it is

and then suggest my dream ticket, Obama Obama '08. Say it out loud, it sounds even better.

2008-06-03T11:20:00.001-04:00

Things that I have crashed:

+ car
+ snowmobile
+ three bikes (one twice)
+ kayak
+ sled
+ checking account
+ another car

Liability

2008-06-03T10:54:00.003-04:00

A few nights ago, we were entertaining casual company, trading stories and drinking things. And when I got to a story about driving a snowmobile 65mph across a frozen lake I said something in Kay's direction akin to "You probably wouldn't like this, but..."

Much to her credit, she later took me aside and gave me crap about my aside. Lots of "Look" and "I'm not that kind of girlfriend", lots of "I'm never going to tell you what to do."
She was right of course, to be miffed that I just assumed her role as such, and I appreciated what she said greatly.

But I appreciated last night even more greatly.

Out on a ride around the borough (which would culminate in a wonderful roof party in Williamsburg), I was riding on my bicycle somewhat... stupidly. I was riding faster than I was paying attention, and I found myself faced with a car. So, like any fast-acting limbic system, I jammed on the brakes. On my new, more powerful brakes.
The front wheel locked up, and the whole bike kept rolling around it. that is to say, as I quickly dimished my speed from 20mph to zero, the rear of the bike bucked up and over the front, and I, still clipped into the pedals, went with it. I hit the ground, somehow, still half clipped into the now-inverted bike, and over the next few nanoseconds unclipped and summersaulted forward, ending up in a somewhat lounging position on the blacktop, the bike aside me. Testament to the borough, the car peaced out. I took a breath, stood up, brushed myself off, noting the one gash on my elbow, picked my bike off the deck, clipped in, rode off, both myself and the bike in far better condition than we'd any right to be.

So anyway, I get back home later that night and relate this to Kay. She has that look that appears on one's face when they eat horseraddish or their own previously-spoken words. Thinks for a second, and then very diplomatically just goes, "so, how many more things are you going to crash?"

Also this:

2008-06-02T00:47:00.002-04:00

2008-06-02T00:19:00.002-04:00

muh. Terrible few days of a fever that morphed into a throat infection that morphed into a cold. But three house-bound days with a healthy dose Battlestar Galactica and Daily Show reruns seem to have been quite the cure. Still frustratingly unable to hop on the bike, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, living in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the past month has been an adventure. In the world of New York real estate, where trendy white neighborhoods expand their boundaries, quite literally, as real estate agents start establishing "East Williamsburg" and push Clinton Hill across Classon Avenue, I've become very cognizant of the fact that, after my stop, there are usually no white people left on the train. In the very way I live, I'm living on an edge of sorts: I only go east of Bedford Avenue when biking to Bushwick.

I've been exploring my own neighborhood, the little corner of Bed-Stuy that's become home, and I like it a lot. Tons of families out every day, a School and a Library right across the street, I've a downstairs neighbor who's director of a marching band and whose two-year old son is learning the drums (with a full kit(!)).

And the apartment itself is coming together pretty wonderfully. Elias and I have two big common rooms, one of which has a couch and a big computer/movie setup and a drafting table, the other of which is turning into a study. We just finished painting it today... it's where a newfound 1940's era radio console sits, as well as my desk and as many bookshelves as we can find. Between the painting and the writing desk I built last week, its all very reminiscent of a long conversation Kay and I had while we were both sick and house-bound... when you build the things you use with your own hands, you feel so much more on top of your life and in control of situations. And as I look around my newly painted study with my newfound health, I'd say that's a pretty accurate description.

2008-05-27T21:34:00.003-04:00

Also, I feel like the following is substantive, and not emo:

after extensive experimentation, it appears that riding not in padded bicycle shorts is far less likely to lead to, er, discomfort, than riding in padded bicycle shorts.

The more you know.