Some January Highlights
New Year's Eve: We intend to go to Time Square, but realize we won't even get to Herald by the time it hits midnight. End up at a party in Williamsburg with what look like rugby players, some possibly French. Ended at a bar, the Bushwick Country Club, and involved some Russian literature.
January 2: Bored, I take the F into the Lower East Side and pick the middle barstool of Max Fish. A few sips into my first beer, a tall lady jumps into the seat next to mine, throws her ID toward the bartender, and says, “It’s my birthday and you are allowed to make me a drink of your choice.” The bartender checks her ID and realizes it is her 21st. She turns to me and says, “Do you like chocolate?” Of course. She pulls a bag of chocolates out of her purse and sets them on the bar. “Take some.” The bartender makes her some kind of orange drink that tastes like Sunny D if Sunny D had the bite of Diet Coke. “I came here alone on purpose,” she says. “I told my friends I’d be busy after dinner. I want to know what it is like to go to a bar alone.” That’s what I’m figuring out, I tell her. “Tell you what,” she says, “I’m going to sit here and talk to you for about three hours. Then we’ll probably be ready to walk around. We’ll get food, probably pizza, and then we’ll have one last drink. After that, I’ll take your email address, we will decide whether we had a good time, and I will go home and you will go home.” Her name is Gwen. I give her my email address. I won’t hear from her. I jump on my F train, her on her J. We deem the night worthwhile.
January 8: I am late for a reading in Williamsburg and, after a time-killing walk down Grand Street alone to admire the bars and lights, I end up at an unmarked gay bar and dance floor called Sugarland. I meet an adorable couple, one trying to work with the other on his English. While dancing with a girl, someone I shake hands with at the bar shouts “sandwich!” and I am in the middle.
January 9: Have the (potentially) cheapest meal in New York City, in Chinatown. End up at the Local 138, in the Lower East Side, where a friend Molly and I meet David, a worldly Englishman who works in with computer network security or the like. He is obsessed with Lord Byron. He asks us if we enjoy Bulgarian music, and tells a story of discussing Bulgarian music while traveling down the Nile River. Then we are paying cover to enter the Lower East Side Bulgarian bar/club Mehanata, where a Croatian-Bulgarian band plays original songs to a sweaty, packed crowd. We jump and sway our hands, and there is no way to look too nerdy when dancing to Bulgarian music. We accidentally leave the bar without making further contact with David, who has been talking to the band off and on, so we won’t see him again.
January 10: I assist Molly in recording a piece, about scoliosis, for the Missouri Review Audio competition. We walk down the street to meet some neighbors, have a drink, and play Meat Loaf on the jukebox.
January 13: I attend a presentation of the one-shot newspaper Panorama published by McSweeny’s. The presentation is given by novelist and McSweeny’s chief Dave Eggers. I am on a date with Kim, a professional snowboarder who runs her own company that sells snowboarding gear and clothing for women. The company is called Shredding Betty. I head into Local 138 and exchange embarrassing stories. I go home.
January 14: I attend a theatrical event that I would never be able to explain. I meet a housemate and her friend, who is certified as a VIP bodyguard, for a game of pool. He tells me of all the different ways to dodge attacks and break limbs without causing unwanted attention.
January 15: I am with a friend from the New School looking at art books in the Strand. We are talking about how many of the Annie Leibovitz photographs we recognize from popular culture. My best friend from college, Jordan, is in the city but not answering his phone. When we leave the Strand he is outside, admiring the Leica he has rented. He had to put almost $2K down as deposit for it. He calls it his speed. We go to dinner at Momofuku, a noodle bar in the East Village, and catch a glance of Mario Bitali leaving as we eat. We stop at McSorley’s for their famous dark beer, which tastes like a chocolate milkshake. We end up in the Lower East side, briefly at a private party in Menhata’s basement, then back to the Local 138. I listen to the stories of Jordan’s friends, silent and amused.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Is This Generation Drugless?
It's just something I wrote in my daybook. It was something about seeing those Animal Collective Kids up there all plain-jeaned and lean. I'm not making the pairing, music-drug. What's the drug of this generation? The internet?
Also...
I just finished a book called The Great American Writing Block by Thomas C. Wheeler, who wrote this while teaching in an open admissions program through the City University of New York, called SEEK, in 1979. "If we honored writing, we would honor ourselves," he says. Wheeler presents a method of teaching - though by demonstration instead of explicit direction - that has been effective in his classes. He frees his students to respond creatively to text in a way that integrates more response from the student and overlooks some grammatical/objectively incorrect pieces of the whole for examples of good writing. The method blends creative and expository writing. I had no idea I would find this interesting. And it turns out my thesis subject isn't even mentioned, which is why read the book in the first place.
Also...
I just finished a book called The Great American Writing Block by Thomas C. Wheeler, who wrote this while teaching in an open admissions program through the City University of New York, called SEEK, in 1979. "If we honored writing, we would honor ourselves," he says. Wheeler presents a method of teaching - though by demonstration instead of explicit direction - that has been effective in his classes. He frees his students to respond creatively to text in a way that integrates more response from the student and overlooks some grammatical/objectively incorrect pieces of the whole for examples of good writing. The method blends creative and expository writing. I had no idea I would find this interesting. And it turns out my thesis subject isn't even mentioned, which is why read the book in the first place.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Blu
Blu is the next great West Coast hip-hop artist.
That’s just the way it’s going to be. No one in Cali is close to him lyrically. He’s managed to capitalize on some supreme collaborations: with Exlie, who produced his debut album, Below the Heavens ,and Mainframe, the other half of the release Johnson&Johnson, a stunning work.
The years of East vs. West is over, sort of. In the first track of Below the Heavens blatantly borrows a beat from Ghostface's "Shakey Dog." Blu cites Common as one of his key influences and has also collaborated with such artists as Will.i.am and Flying Lotus, a key producer-player in creating what I believe is surfacing as the new L.A. sound – vivid, skating-slick production and, for MC’s, the poet’s range of rhetorical flies of the tongue.
And he’s surprisingly humble (“And I don't pack stadiums yet, I still rock em/ And they still spell my name Fu*%ed up on they flyers,” from “My World Is” off Below the Heavens).
Well, kind of (the next line is “It's B-L-U and if you see the E drop em It's like the dropped”).
Get it.
That’s just the way it’s going to be. No one in Cali is close to him lyrically. He’s managed to capitalize on some supreme collaborations: with Exlie, who produced his debut album, Below the Heavens ,and Mainframe, the other half of the release Johnson&Johnson, a stunning work.
The years of East vs. West is over, sort of. In the first track of Below the Heavens blatantly borrows a beat from Ghostface's "Shakey Dog." Blu cites Common as one of his key influences and has also collaborated with such artists as Will.i.am and Flying Lotus, a key producer-player in creating what I believe is surfacing as the new L.A. sound – vivid, skating-slick production and, for MC’s, the poet’s range of rhetorical flies of the tongue.
And he’s surprisingly humble (“And I don't pack stadiums yet, I still rock em/ And they still spell my name Fu*%ed up on they flyers,” from “My World Is” off Below the Heavens).
Well, kind of (the next line is “It's B-L-U and if you see the E drop em It's like the dropped”).
Get it.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Nick Moss and the Fliptops at Blues on Grand (Des Moines, IA)
Saturday, April 11 2009
In Des Moines there is an area that Iowans call midtown. It is located about one mile west of downtown, on the same street. Midtown is where everyone wants to be. It’s got the hip café, the swankiest wine bar, the best business lunch, the only vintage car dealer, and the shittiest apartments in town.
Blues On Grand is located right in the middle of midtown. It makes up the first floor of a freestanding edifice, which looks like a condemned apartment building, surrounded by always-empty parking lots. Its clear juxtaposition is to the building across the street: the brand new, all-glass Meredith publishing building, including its professionally cared outdoor gardens. The official Blues on Grand t-shirt reads, “Damn right we have the blues.” Blues On Grand represents the kind of fierce independence and variety of juxtapositions that make Iowa what it is. The bar is packed with the proud, everyday, chiseled Iowa man who knows that every four years he’s going to get to flex his muscles to the nation. Iowa may be the only state in the country where I can expect to do all of the following in one day with Iowa-bred peers: wear skinny jeans and a plaid shirt with a bandanna wrapped around my neck when it’s one-hundred degrees outside, eat vegan food, go fishing, listen to underground hip-hop and Coldplay and Mozart, shoot ducks, grab some ice cream from Snookies malt shop, go to an art gallery, sit in a coffee shop in the wee hours of the night, two-fist a peach wheat beer called Wheach with an iced yerba matte, and watch a girl buy suspenders with mesh stockings. When I head back to my old home outside Washington D.C. and tell my high-school friends I’m interested in microbreweries and knitting, they implode.
My dad and I walk up to the entrance at scheduled show time, on the dot. My family is prone to extreme punctuality. I think my dad was looking for an opportunity to practice after he and several hundred others were let go from Meredith. As we head inside, I can see my dad cock his head and stare straight into the glass building, right into where his office used to be. While he job hunts, he plays in a local band, an orchestra that makes him look young. For that and other reasons my parents decided to consolidate and stick tight in Des Moines until they could dig new jobs from any American soil.
My dad wanted to come. He’s kind of a regular here. He often brings his trumpet up on stage to jam with the staple locals. You could say my dad is a blues man. He started playing in the Memphis blues scene of the mid-sixties when he was sixteen. He had a band for a while, where he played trumpet and Rhodes organ, called the Fireballs, I believe. They cut something in Sun Studios that didn’t get bought, he said recently. He doesn’t talk about it much. His parents were Mississippi folk. From my experience, Mississippi folk don’t talk much. He was also an art-school hippie with a white-guy afro. Just last month I found my father’s photographs from his years as a student at the Memphis Academy of Art. I unfolded a poster, and there a slender man about my age, with a wild puff of hair and his hands resting on the hips of his seventies jeans, stood in an advertisement for the school. His shirt was covered in paint. Evidently, my father was the school model. This is the same man who would later share my barber. He would walk in, sit down, and point right at the two bald spots on his forehead split by the peninsula of thin hair between and coyly say, “Move hair here,” then pointing the tapered clump in the back, “from here.” The barber would laugh and take five minutes out to cut his hair.
Nick Moss is from Chicago, so to set the mood I ordered a Goose Island 312 because I knew it was a Chicago beer. It sponsored the first year of my favorite music festival, Intonation (now called Pitchfork Festival), where there was no blues. Inside, Blues on Grand is a friendly dump. The beer selection is great. It looks like any old basement-style gig house. Somehow its blue walls and blinding crimson Bud Light signs really invoke a blues bar level of comfort. There’s graffiti all over the men’s room, but a whole wall is devoted to debate over which city offers the best blues, some comments more ineligible than others. One scrawl shouts “Memphis has is tight, but Texas has it right,” while another says, “Feeling blue? Call me for a good time.” I peer into the poolroom and see a Blues Brothers movie poster above the arcade game Deer Hunter. The feel is most similar to a place across town called El Bait Shop, which serves fish tacos and a variety of microbrews and for live music offers mostly local Van Halen cover bands.
Very few seem genuinely interested in when the Moss concert is going to begin. Two guys sit at the table in front of us dressed in biker jackets, crew cuts, and unrestrained beer stomachs. One says, “I checked these guys out on the internet earlier. They sounded pretty good, actually.” The other grunts.
The band members are a great mash up of shaggy and clean. Moss looks like a former member of the Hell’s Angels gone stay-at-home dad. He sports a beard and near-mullet and awkwardly drags his guitar around his back and over his beer gut. He keeps his guitar situated high up above his belly button. He’s dressed in a large, boxy plaid shirt and baggy jeans. The bass player is a gorgeous, tall blonde with flowing hair and a leather jacket. The keyboardist, Willie, looks like he’s about seventy-going-on-one-hundred. When he chops through fast lines or sings a couple of his own tunes the pasted up front of his grey crew flops forward in an equally commanding and comical motion. The drummer is young and muscular and is wearing trendy clothing, including a beret.
Moss can’t get the crowd worked up before he starts. He’s been through several false starts. After a more traditional, “How y’all doing tonight?” to silence, he begins to make farting noises into the microphone and asks the crowd, “Long night last night? Bartender, is the coffee brewing?”
He kicks up the first song anyway:
“If I had a million dollars
I’d give you everything.
Just to hear you calling,
Sweet baby, one more time.”
Before I go any further, don’t get me wrong: he does not have a southern accent. Not at least the type you’d expect from Johnny Cash or Garth Brooks. He’s raw blues in his voice. Actually it sounds a bit like a nationally renowned St. Louis rock/blues crossover group’s vocals –the Black Keys’ – but more on the blues side.
Every set of lyrics is just downright hyperemotional (“Blood from my heart/ Tears from where I cried/ You’re the one who left me, baby/ And I don’t know the reason why”). When he solos his mouth moves like every note is a scream of his heart. By now I’m sure he’s a romantic lost cause. He must be channeling the challenge of finding a mate with that huge belly.
That’s about when he tells us that the bass player is his wife. He says it like this: “That’s my wife. She’s pretty good looking. But for the rest of the night, it’s my fucking show. Kate Moss on the bass everybody. Say hello to Kate Moss.” If that doesn’t establish the aura of Nick Moss, it have clicked when he turned to Willie and said, “It’s his birthday. He’s going to be 92 tomorrow. Not really, but he’s old as shit.”
Moss really is a good guitarist, but it’s not until halfway through the show that it shows. That’s when he breaks out the real west side Chicago blues. Until then it’s all a bit too tight to the point of crowded – B.B. King but not so hot. Dad’s foot finally starts tapping when Moss breaks out the Fender. Every time I drive into Chicago I feel surrounded by the color blue, and this sound is part of it: bigger reverberation, longer hang time, that airy white space in improvisation but still much grittier than jazz. Soon he’s ripping through the whole range of the guitar. The drums ride smooth on the hat. This is the sound of big-city Chicago blues, complete with a big steak, a beer, and baseball talk.
A whole new level of energy hits the band as it enters its comfort zone. Moss creates a well-prescribed tension in each solo, really stretching the white space until he unleashes a mass of rhythmic tricks. Ultimately, the sound is mostly better by comparison than innovational. Everyone is good, but they aren’t doing much but varying the usual. The lyrics are even a little sappier than blues already tends to be. And after a taste of the Nick Moss attitude in combination with knowing all of his sung romantic sorrow is a crock of fiction, it’s hard to follow for too long without thinking about the insincerity of the whole act.
Spectators each paid a ten-dollar cover fee to see this, but nobody seems to care who it is, just that it’s the blues. It’s a Saturday night, so a few college-age boys and girls are inside drinking pitches of Bud Light and starting mostly at the glowing, burnt-red Bud Light signs. I think they all just want the mood. They want to hear a big man in a plaid shirt get up there and throw around the phrase “sugar baby” and tease the crowd to no avail and lament that he’s not a rock star and pluck through their sorrow. If they want a scrunch-face bassist, a wise and quiet pianist, a ripped young drummer, and a big, self-indulgent, awkward guitarist who keeps his eyes closed when he plays, they got it. That sounds like a blues band.
Dad, a little down, entertained but only mildly impressed, is sleepy by midnight.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Moss has got some heartbreak of another sort to wrangle out of his soul and plow out of that belly, and maybe the next chord change will do the trick. But Kate Moss is very attractive.
As we leave he says to the crowd, “We’ve got an album coming out in two weeks, and advance copies are available. I always say that if you get drunk, we sound better.”
In Des Moines there is an area that Iowans call midtown. It is located about one mile west of downtown, on the same street. Midtown is where everyone wants to be. It’s got the hip café, the swankiest wine bar, the best business lunch, the only vintage car dealer, and the shittiest apartments in town.
Blues On Grand is located right in the middle of midtown. It makes up the first floor of a freestanding edifice, which looks like a condemned apartment building, surrounded by always-empty parking lots. Its clear juxtaposition is to the building across the street: the brand new, all-glass Meredith publishing building, including its professionally cared outdoor gardens. The official Blues on Grand t-shirt reads, “Damn right we have the blues.” Blues On Grand represents the kind of fierce independence and variety of juxtapositions that make Iowa what it is. The bar is packed with the proud, everyday, chiseled Iowa man who knows that every four years he’s going to get to flex his muscles to the nation. Iowa may be the only state in the country where I can expect to do all of the following in one day with Iowa-bred peers: wear skinny jeans and a plaid shirt with a bandanna wrapped around my neck when it’s one-hundred degrees outside, eat vegan food, go fishing, listen to underground hip-hop and Coldplay and Mozart, shoot ducks, grab some ice cream from Snookies malt shop, go to an art gallery, sit in a coffee shop in the wee hours of the night, two-fist a peach wheat beer called Wheach with an iced yerba matte, and watch a girl buy suspenders with mesh stockings. When I head back to my old home outside Washington D.C. and tell my high-school friends I’m interested in microbreweries and knitting, they implode.
My dad and I walk up to the entrance at scheduled show time, on the dot. My family is prone to extreme punctuality. I think my dad was looking for an opportunity to practice after he and several hundred others were let go from Meredith. As we head inside, I can see my dad cock his head and stare straight into the glass building, right into where his office used to be. While he job hunts, he plays in a local band, an orchestra that makes him look young. For that and other reasons my parents decided to consolidate and stick tight in Des Moines until they could dig new jobs from any American soil.
My dad wanted to come. He’s kind of a regular here. He often brings his trumpet up on stage to jam with the staple locals. You could say my dad is a blues man. He started playing in the Memphis blues scene of the mid-sixties when he was sixteen. He had a band for a while, where he played trumpet and Rhodes organ, called the Fireballs, I believe. They cut something in Sun Studios that didn’t get bought, he said recently. He doesn’t talk about it much. His parents were Mississippi folk. From my experience, Mississippi folk don’t talk much. He was also an art-school hippie with a white-guy afro. Just last month I found my father’s photographs from his years as a student at the Memphis Academy of Art. I unfolded a poster, and there a slender man about my age, with a wild puff of hair and his hands resting on the hips of his seventies jeans, stood in an advertisement for the school. His shirt was covered in paint. Evidently, my father was the school model. This is the same man who would later share my barber. He would walk in, sit down, and point right at the two bald spots on his forehead split by the peninsula of thin hair between and coyly say, “Move hair here,” then pointing the tapered clump in the back, “from here.” The barber would laugh and take five minutes out to cut his hair.
Nick Moss is from Chicago, so to set the mood I ordered a Goose Island 312 because I knew it was a Chicago beer. It sponsored the first year of my favorite music festival, Intonation (now called Pitchfork Festival), where there was no blues. Inside, Blues on Grand is a friendly dump. The beer selection is great. It looks like any old basement-style gig house. Somehow its blue walls and blinding crimson Bud Light signs really invoke a blues bar level of comfort. There’s graffiti all over the men’s room, but a whole wall is devoted to debate over which city offers the best blues, some comments more ineligible than others. One scrawl shouts “Memphis has is tight, but Texas has it right,” while another says, “Feeling blue? Call me for a good time.” I peer into the poolroom and see a Blues Brothers movie poster above the arcade game Deer Hunter. The feel is most similar to a place across town called El Bait Shop, which serves fish tacos and a variety of microbrews and for live music offers mostly local Van Halen cover bands.
Very few seem genuinely interested in when the Moss concert is going to begin. Two guys sit at the table in front of us dressed in biker jackets, crew cuts, and unrestrained beer stomachs. One says, “I checked these guys out on the internet earlier. They sounded pretty good, actually.” The other grunts.
The band members are a great mash up of shaggy and clean. Moss looks like a former member of the Hell’s Angels gone stay-at-home dad. He sports a beard and near-mullet and awkwardly drags his guitar around his back and over his beer gut. He keeps his guitar situated high up above his belly button. He’s dressed in a large, boxy plaid shirt and baggy jeans. The bass player is a gorgeous, tall blonde with flowing hair and a leather jacket. The keyboardist, Willie, looks like he’s about seventy-going-on-one-hundred. When he chops through fast lines or sings a couple of his own tunes the pasted up front of his grey crew flops forward in an equally commanding and comical motion. The drummer is young and muscular and is wearing trendy clothing, including a beret.
Moss can’t get the crowd worked up before he starts. He’s been through several false starts. After a more traditional, “How y’all doing tonight?” to silence, he begins to make farting noises into the microphone and asks the crowd, “Long night last night? Bartender, is the coffee brewing?”
He kicks up the first song anyway:
“If I had a million dollars
I’d give you everything.
Just to hear you calling,
Sweet baby, one more time.”
Before I go any further, don’t get me wrong: he does not have a southern accent. Not at least the type you’d expect from Johnny Cash or Garth Brooks. He’s raw blues in his voice. Actually it sounds a bit like a nationally renowned St. Louis rock/blues crossover group’s vocals –the Black Keys’ – but more on the blues side.
Every set of lyrics is just downright hyperemotional (“Blood from my heart/ Tears from where I cried/ You’re the one who left me, baby/ And I don’t know the reason why”). When he solos his mouth moves like every note is a scream of his heart. By now I’m sure he’s a romantic lost cause. He must be channeling the challenge of finding a mate with that huge belly.
That’s about when he tells us that the bass player is his wife. He says it like this: “That’s my wife. She’s pretty good looking. But for the rest of the night, it’s my fucking show. Kate Moss on the bass everybody. Say hello to Kate Moss.” If that doesn’t establish the aura of Nick Moss, it have clicked when he turned to Willie and said, “It’s his birthday. He’s going to be 92 tomorrow. Not really, but he’s old as shit.”
Moss really is a good guitarist, but it’s not until halfway through the show that it shows. That’s when he breaks out the real west side Chicago blues. Until then it’s all a bit too tight to the point of crowded – B.B. King but not so hot. Dad’s foot finally starts tapping when Moss breaks out the Fender. Every time I drive into Chicago I feel surrounded by the color blue, and this sound is part of it: bigger reverberation, longer hang time, that airy white space in improvisation but still much grittier than jazz. Soon he’s ripping through the whole range of the guitar. The drums ride smooth on the hat. This is the sound of big-city Chicago blues, complete with a big steak, a beer, and baseball talk.
A whole new level of energy hits the band as it enters its comfort zone. Moss creates a well-prescribed tension in each solo, really stretching the white space until he unleashes a mass of rhythmic tricks. Ultimately, the sound is mostly better by comparison than innovational. Everyone is good, but they aren’t doing much but varying the usual. The lyrics are even a little sappier than blues already tends to be. And after a taste of the Nick Moss attitude in combination with knowing all of his sung romantic sorrow is a crock of fiction, it’s hard to follow for too long without thinking about the insincerity of the whole act.
Spectators each paid a ten-dollar cover fee to see this, but nobody seems to care who it is, just that it’s the blues. It’s a Saturday night, so a few college-age boys and girls are inside drinking pitches of Bud Light and starting mostly at the glowing, burnt-red Bud Light signs. I think they all just want the mood. They want to hear a big man in a plaid shirt get up there and throw around the phrase “sugar baby” and tease the crowd to no avail and lament that he’s not a rock star and pluck through their sorrow. If they want a scrunch-face bassist, a wise and quiet pianist, a ripped young drummer, and a big, self-indulgent, awkward guitarist who keeps his eyes closed when he plays, they got it. That sounds like a blues band.
Dad, a little down, entertained but only mildly impressed, is sleepy by midnight.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Moss has got some heartbreak of another sort to wrangle out of his soul and plow out of that belly, and maybe the next chord change will do the trick. But Kate Moss is very attractive.
As we leave he says to the crowd, “We’ve got an album coming out in two weeks, and advance copies are available. I always say that if you get drunk, we sound better.”
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Clearing Out
I just trashed my dictionary. It was a full-sized hardback, a six-pounder.
Here’s a status update: I digg Wikipedia. Wikipedia searching does what looking through a real physical dictionary does. For every complaint about how the Internet isn’t the “real deal” because it doesn’t allow for associative thinking, I cite my last good Wiki-surf.
I’m moving soon, and books make up about 90% of what’s getting loaded into two cars. That is after I sell or give away all of my furniture, the part of my wardrobe that I gained too much weight in grad school to wear, hundreds of magazines I stockpile “for reference” (meaning to read the articles I pass up months later I get around to it), and anything else I can possibly miss (the Nerf guns will likely stay with me).
I’m moving East to fulfill a teenage dream: an MFA, the coveted and possibly useless degree for creative writers. I’m leaving my two degrees in journalism behind to become a poet. My friends and colleagues have expressed their concern, but I think the state of the economy and jobs market kept them from pointing me toward a crazy-house.
But first, I have to spend a month in Florida writing my thesis. I'll be in St. Petersburg, home of the Poynter Institute. I'll be in a condo a block from the beach. It has no private internet.
Note: if you, reader, need a couch, chair, desk, nightstand, dresser, book shelf, hutch, coffee table, or professional keyboard with amp, let me know.
Here’s a status update: I digg Wikipedia. Wikipedia searching does what looking through a real physical dictionary does. For every complaint about how the Internet isn’t the “real deal” because it doesn’t allow for associative thinking, I cite my last good Wiki-surf.
I’m moving soon, and books make up about 90% of what’s getting loaded into two cars. That is after I sell or give away all of my furniture, the part of my wardrobe that I gained too much weight in grad school to wear, hundreds of magazines I stockpile “for reference” (meaning to read the articles I pass up months later I get around to it), and anything else I can possibly miss (the Nerf guns will likely stay with me).
I’m moving East to fulfill a teenage dream: an MFA, the coveted and possibly useless degree for creative writers. I’m leaving my two degrees in journalism behind to become a poet. My friends and colleagues have expressed their concern, but I think the state of the economy and jobs market kept them from pointing me toward a crazy-house.
But first, I have to spend a month in Florida writing my thesis. I'll be in St. Petersburg, home of the Poynter Institute. I'll be in a condo a block from the beach. It has no private internet.
Note: if you, reader, need a couch, chair, desk, nightstand, dresser, book shelf, hutch, coffee table, or professional keyboard with amp, let me know.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Family Research
I've been doing a lot of research on my family, focused on my maternal grandmother. I am videotaping interviews with her now. I'll have one posted as soon as I figure out how to split it down to the right size.
In the meantime, I scanned in some interesting family photographs of my grandparents, mother, and cousins.
Aunt and uncle, 1945
My grandmother is one of these women
I don't have details on this one yet.
My great uncle, my maternal grandmother's brother, lived in Mexico for a number of years and wrote for Texas A&M. He regularly sent her letters, which I have scanned in and begun to read.
They look like this:
In the meantime, I scanned in some interesting family photographs of my grandparents, mother, and cousins.
My grandfather, 1934
Aunt and uncle, 1945
My grandmother is one of these women
I don't have details on this one yet.
My great uncle, my maternal grandmother's brother, lived in Mexico for a number of years and wrote for Texas A&M. He regularly sent her letters, which I have scanned in and begun to read.
They look like this:
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