Today is my birthday, and it has already been beyond splendid. I am so happy about today. Today makes me very happy.







!!!

Word Juice

So I'm sitting in the office, drinking a fresh cup of coffee (or as I like to call it, "word juice"), writing up a few little pieces for the paper's daily web updates. Listening to a digable gal I just met on the radio. Wearin' a t-shirt 'cause it's warm.

Life's pretty OK. And a there's a lot to update y'all about. Like the giant leaps forward that the band is making. Like how I'll soon be starting a job working alongside Jay as a private investigator (I know, right??). Like how I might be an extra in some photoshoot.

But earlier today, I was hanging out in my favorite bike shop, shooting the shit with Malcom as I was re-lacing a wheel and changing out an axle, talking guitars, life, women and bicycle racing, when I realized I was late for work. So I ran downtown, wheel strapped to my back, wolfing a slice of pizza on the way. The last two bites tasted awful, and the whole day I've been smacking my well-lubricated lips, quite concerned that I ate a significant amount of bicycle grease.

Accelerate

Today is a sacred day for two reasons.

First, it is April Fools Day, the most high holiday of my friends from academy. They are on the west coast now, yes, but I'm half expecting to leave my apartment today to find my door cardboarded over, or at the very least to receive a few forged e-mails. So watch out.

Second, today R.E.M.'s new album drops. Growing up, R.E.M. taught me what indie rock was. They painted pictures of a south I had not yet seen, they said to high-school-frosh me "there is a world where crazed yet mellow guitars create beautiful landscapes where Michael Stipe is busy weaving threads, but Mike Mills will invite you in for a glass of lemonade." And I liked that. I was a guitarist reared on Hendrix and the blues, but R.E.M. was this wonderful alternate sonic possibility, constructed of blends and arpeggios. I went through the entire discography voraciously. I was about done with the then-last album, "up", when "Reveal" dropped. I dug the singles, but the album felt like someone else trying to be R.E.M. After hearing the singles for "Around the Sun", the last album (in the current issue of SPIN, guitarist Peter Buck refers to it only as "the Last Record") I didnt even buy it. I felt it was an important if bittersweet facet of growing up... Watching my heroes lose their touch, slide into the inevitable loss of inspiration and energy that befalls all who don't burn out. I tightened up my guitar strap and started rocking harder with Maxwell's Demon, to do my part filling the void thus opening in the world. I didn't look back, it was too painful. I just learned how to play half of "Reckoning", that's all.
Well.... A little bird sent me a copy of the new "Accelerate", due to drop today. Popped it in last night, and, damn--the boys are back. Now I'm not going to go off the deep end as some reviewers have. This is no grand return to the IRS years. There're still relatively few post-punk Four-on-the-floor, we're-gonna-knock-down-half-the-buildings-in-Athens drum beats (do check out Horse to Water, though). Buck's arpeggios are back (thank GOD!), but not as frenetic as they once were. The production clearly cost what all the albums from the IRS years cost combined, and I would like more Lo-Fi to match my favorite sonic landscapes. But all that being said... damn, this is good! Mills is on point as ever, returning to his off-mic backup-vocal-cries, Buck is getting his tone dirty again, not just distorted, and Stipe finally sounds like he's having fun again.

It's a good day for music.

There has been very little sleeping of late.

The Maxwell's Demon album is almost finished.

Fear and Trembling.

T.S. Eliot was once asked if all the pain in his life was worth his becoming one of the great poets of the English language.


He answered, "No."

Well... shit.

He Died From a Love of Poetry

All You Ever Wanted

That band you love, my band, Maxwell's Demon, has just leaked a few pre-mastered songs.

Check 'em out.

+ On the Run

+ Fireproof Safe / Tin Airplanes

+ Confidence Man

Geeks in Motion

So in line with my new habit of exercise and nutrition (did you know that creatine improves mental function as well as muscle structure and is sorely lacking in most vegetarians?) I have, of course, been keeping the machine well-tuned. Last night I purchased an old Brooks saddle, a beautiful vintage piece that, while heavy, is far more comfortable than my last racing saddle and is the piece that would have originally come with the bike. Last night I also purchased two modern lightweight rims which will hopefully get laced to two older Dura-Ace (Shimano's top of the line) hubs. They will be, in short, among the lightest damn wheels I can make out of non-carbon components. My modest goal at the moment is to tackle the central park loop in 20 minutes, and both the bike and myself are rising to the task.

NOTE to any visiting geeks: I'm looking for a cheap and effective way to build some sort of wheel fairing for the front wheel, for aero considerations. And by cheap I mean made out of tape. Any ideas? Anyone?

It's 2:39AM. I just received a call from a DJ at my old radio station 200 miles away, on whose board I no longer serve, asking me what to do since the automation computer we use at night had gone down.

Woke me up.

It was a really great feeling to get that call.

Is This How Men Mark Time?

I work two blocks away from what used to be the World Trade Center. Every day, as I pass the site, I see a new batch of tourists lined up against the gate. Families from Europe, buses of school kids from Texas... And in pondering what it could possibly mean to them, I can't not reflect, somewhere, on what it means to me.

It blows my mind that, of all the people in my life, precious few knew me when the towers still stood. Jay and I walked among the concourse's huge wintertime "PEACE ON EARTH" debating high school philosophies, but that's about the only note of continuity. My life as I know it now started the day we all walked down from school to 14th Street, the furthest south we could go, and started loading trucks with equipment for rescue workers. September 13th. That day starts the long list of defining days of my adult life.

When I pass the site where the buildings once stood, I continue to feel a sense of loss. But the life that had them in it is a life that no longer feels like mine. And so the loss is vague. Nondescript.

And if that's what goes through my head, then what are those tourists thinking?

How Have I Survived Natural Selection?

You've probably figured out by now that I love to tinker. It's philosophy manifest, for me... inquiring into and toying with the way that things interact with each other and produce results. Like most heavy-readers, I have, for the majority of my life, related to my body primarily as that thing that holds my brain six-or-so feet off of the ground. Lately, however, that has begun to change, as I've turned my tinkering towards that machine inside of which my brain resides.
It's in this spirit that I decided a few days ago to run a little experiment... I decided to, by any means necessary (within the bounds of my vegetarianism) get %100 of my recommended daily value of protein for a period of four days. Through consumption of eggs, yogurt, delicious protein shakes and disgusting protein shakes, I managed to meet this goal for the past half-week, and I am absolutely stunned at how much more energy I have and how much less taxing exercising has become. I mean, it makes total sense; but wow.

With this newfound energy and the increasingly temperate weather, I've decided to revisit two old activities, running and climbing. I have a date tomorrow at a climbing gym uptown with my buddy Eli, who has promised in turn to ship his bike up from the great state of South Carolina and ride Central Park with me. This entire concept of the body as more than a brain-stand is wild.

---

Easter was fantastic. Rebirth. Church with family (which was wonderful, and I think I need more of it in my life), wonderful brunch in the City with family, thoughtful note from L, and at the end of the day, a brief catch up with an old crew-mate from New Orleans who was visiting her parents in Manhattan. Had some Abita beer (best beer on earth) and some wonderful conversation, about religion, radicalism, politics, people, sanity, creativity... It's hard to believe that she and I only really spent three days together down in the ninth.
Also, post-brunch, came upon a flea-market with a woman selling old nineteenth-century magazine prints. I found one depicting my pseudonym-sake, Charlotte Corday, and bought it on the spot.
A good day.

Happy and Blessed Easter, everyone.

responsibility

Leah is in DC visiting friends. She just txt'ed me to tell me she's on her way to the anti-war protest going on down there today, and would try not to get arrested. Digging around in my brain for my response felt like leafing through a heavy old book whose spine was about to break and all I managed was "legal number. sharpie on arm."
Which, as she pointed out, was silly. Her mom's a lawyer.

Why did I give up marching in the streets? Is it like I've told myself and others, that the media and political forces in this country have learned how to properly obfuscate and ignore masses of people, render the political weight of a collection of white bourgeoisie meaningless (which is quite a feat if you think about it), and that as a result protest has become masturbation for the socially conscious, a way to feel effective whilst kept at a safe distance? Have I really become that cynical? What about, as I used to tell people as I engaged in graffiti and banner drops, as I said when me and L and a handful of others marched between humvees and armed troops in Savannah, the idea that creating an environment in which resistance is visible even if completely ineffectual at least gives hope or support to those who might find a way to be effective. That putting anti-war stickers on a recruitment post in the night will at least send the message that the citizenry is neither united in support nor passive, even if we are somewhat powerless. Is there truth to that? Because if there is, then I just got tired. And I'm not sure that's acceptable.

New Orleans was the maturation of my feelings about direct action. Sort of a "shut up and just do it" approach. Eschewing ideological bullshit and just getting done work that needed to get done. Putting my money where my mouth had always been. And now that I don't have the freedom of being a student, I am locked into a lifestyle that prohibits me from that sort of work. I get paid to write about other people's work. Marching in the street past the occasional seat of power, demurely requesting policy change is the option of choice for people in my position. So what am I doing in my position? Two questions: is protest better than nothing? Well yes but (question two) how did I ease myself into the position wherein those are the only two choices? If I'm serious about all of this, it should be my job, not a hobby. But therein lies the hard part... living responsibly and eating at the same time. hmm.

thoughts

The last time I left
the Barrio
I went forthwith
to the Carolinas.
Throttle the weight
of my throat
117th to Mt. Pilgrim Church Road -- Direct.
twelve hours through the night,
so much faster
than the 4,5,6,J,M,Z or L
the poetries of the city
melting under the empty howl
of an engine in the night.
"I could never live in the City,"
she says,
calling two weeks later
with disdain for her south,
longing for New York
and its forgiving altars.
A,C,E, to PATH into Jersey City,
And I know exactly how she felt.

And a quote from my reading at lunch today, The Hacker Manifesto:

The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world united.
...where education teaches what one may produce with an abstraction, the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced.

Campy as it is, from a theoretical standpoint its thus far quite interesting, at least when paired with pizza and root beer. Marxism taking into account the interesting properties of information-as-commodity (lack of natural scarcity, for one), something I've been toying with a bit lately.

the LFWML

So today is one of those beautiful almost-spring days that reminds you what spring is about and gives you time to get ready. Spring is about re-birth. In a lot of ways. For someone with as many constant tinkering projects as myself, spring thus also means fixing all that crap you broke over the winter. Volvo needs a massive tuneup, and its getting to be the kind of weather for rolling up one's sleeves. This was the thought I had today as I passed a street corner where there was a van with it's hood up. Then I looked over a few parking spaces and saw three beautiful old motorcycles. And I thought to myself, "yeah... oh man, that would be great. little motorbike, ultra fuel efficient, take to the open road." Its everything I want in my life right now: freedom, tinkering, speed and unnecessary danger. And for the fourth or so time now i just thought, "I could sell the volvo. Sell the volvo and buy an old Honda bike." (I am in love with BMW R-Sports, but I'm being realistic.) Then I recalled the LFWML -- the Loose Federation of Women in My Life. The LFWML has been pretty against the motorcycle as a concept for a long time. The head of this campaign is my mother who shattered both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident in her youth. My parents never expressed any of the usual parent ground rules--you know, speeches about sex, drugs, alcohol, fiscal responsibility, civics, etc. Rather, my mother just always said, "Never ride a motorcycle." So of course the first time I had a girlfriend whose father had a pair of dirt bikes I insisted I be taught. There are a few members of the LFWML who are OK with the motorcycle idea. But there's definitely a supermajority against it. Was out with B a few days back and pointed to an R-Sport on the street. "See that?" I said. "It doesn't matter," she replied, "because you're never getting one."
But when I finally do, I'm sure everyone will relax. It will be a machine belonging to me. It'll spend most of its time in pieces.