Nothing to say.

See above.

Just a reminder

Freedom is not contained in any object.

What I've been reading

Just finished a John LeCarré kick: went through The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People, A Small Town in Germany and The Perfect Spy. Next up is Spook Country, most definitely not a John LeCarré book.

Sanity

If a neat desk is the sign of a sick mind, I'm far more sane than anyone has ever given me credit for being.

Not getting paid sucks

Especially when you've worked hard for two months. I'm not sure if the fact that the place which wanted me to work for free was shocked--SHOCKED!--I would mind not being paid is a bit of black comedy or just par for the corporate course.

Rock is dead

I'm not much for deep thoughts on here, but one has been bugging me lately, so I might as well write it down.

I've been reading about the decline in CD sales for the past few years, and I've watched it, as the Tower Records stores on Broadway and in Lincoln Center closed. I've also read the reasons given by the RIAA, none of which ring true to me. As far as I can tell, the RIAA is doing what all monopolists do, which is to protect its control of scarce assets at all costs without paying attention to what's really happening.

Which is what? It's not all piracy. The music industry has survived all of the technologies which were supposed to kill it. Piracy isn't the problem. I think what's happening is much simpler and much more basic. I think that rock and roll, the dominant musical form of the past fifty years, has run its course.

If you put aside all of the 'I'm in love'/'She broke my heart'/'I want to party all night long' songs, which are a constant, the social and political thrust of rock and roll, which came of age in the mid 1960s, seems to me to be a victim of its own success. The social mores which rock and roll attacked have fallen by the wayside, and while we don't live in the utopia which some envisioned during and after the Summer of Love, we live in a country which is much more socially tolerant and open than it was. Legalized discrimination is mostly a thing of the past, and the social institutionalization of that prejudice is, IMO, fading. The restrictive sexual mores of the 1940s and 1950s are certainly gone, and we are much more willing to talk about the other "dark" sides of life some social conservatives wish to ignore. The Vietnam was was ended, and most of the country has now regained it senses with respect to the disaster in Iraq. I actually see the frantic conservative backlash against the changes wrought in the U.S. since the end of WWII as a sign of the success of those very changes, the last desperate gasp of a generation and a mindset which will quite literally be dead in twenty or thirty years.

But I think that's only half the battle. I think the real problem for rock and roll is that the symbols used by the musicians to signify freedom and rebellion against the social norm have all been normalized and co-opted themselves. There are tattooed and pierced corporate lawyers who ride Harleys on the weekends. Skateboarding, once a dangerous sport practiced by punks and losers on the fringes of the culture, is now a multi-billion dollar a year industry filled with professional athletes. The fact that these athletes are covered in tattoos and jingling with jewelry doesn't detract from that fact they're as co-opted and corralled as was the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, surrounded at all times by lawyers and publicists and image consultants. And so any group which points to these symbols as evidence of an outsider status, or uses them as a tool with which to question the standing social order, only points back to that order. Skateboarding these days is about as rebellious as being an accountant, and riding a Harley just means your Wall Street firm gave you a nice year-end bonus.

Beyond this, the behavior of Zeppelin or Keith Moon, once so shocking, is now barely worth a raised eyebrow. If you're the child of a baby boomer, there's a chance your parents have done more drugs and had more sex than you have. With the gradual acceptance of twelve step programs and rehab facilities into our national conversation, and the willingness to see drug addition for what it is, drug- and booze-fueled behavior is no longer a stand against the Man, but merely the sign that someone has a problem they need to face. Trashing a hotel room does not mean you're channeling the spirit of Rimbaud. It means your lawyer will make a lot of money negotiating a settlement with the hotel chain and you will make a sheepish PSA about the problem of addiction.

Or, put more simply, all that shit is now boring. And boring is the death of any art form.

That said, what's next? Where does the next social earthquake come from? I don't know. Certainly not rap and hip hop, which is a commodified as a Gap ad. Between 1998 and 1990 Public Enemy released two albums which are, I think, the highest point of hip hop's ability to combine artistic and commercial success, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. But Public Enemy's strident brilliance gave way to gangsta rap, which provided an easy to use template for both artists and record companies to latch onto. Once set, the form commidified quickly. Punk, officially dead since 1987, has finally been rendered safe by Green Day and friends and now gets spit back as pop-punk, a term unimaginable twenty years ago.

I don't know where the next Big Thing is coming from, but I think I have seen the end of the Last Big Thing. Motor's off, and I'm just waiting for the wheels to stop spinning. I'm just wondering how it will end. Will rock morph into something else, something new and frightening and full of promise? Or will it be supplanted by something I can't imagine and end up like the Rat Pack in those famous ad-libbed concerts in Vegas, basking in the limelight and unaware they're singing at a funeral?

Pointedly ironic

My favorite sign in New York, on 34th between Fifth and Sixth.

Can't make this shit up.

Street go boom!

So, I was working right next door to the steam explosion in Manhattan yesterday. It was my first day on the gig. I've heard of hazing the new guy, but this is silly.

I was on the fifth floor. There was a noise like a jet engine, which the bunch of us noticed at about the same time, which led to several simultaneous cries "what is that?" I looked out the window to see a huge geyser coming out of the middle of the street and people running like hell down the street to get away. The first thing to go through my head was, "shit, someone bombed the subway." Of course, the bunch of us all gather near the window, looking down--nothing dangerous about pressing your face up to glass when something large is exploding near by. For second it looked like one of the buildings next door had come down. In hindsight it was just the mud mixed in with the steam, which looks remarkably like the pulverized concrete dust which was everywhere on 9/11. I think it was about then my heart moved up into my throat and decided to stay there for a while.

Someone with a clue started yelling to evacuate the floor, which we did, which led to one of those weird scenes which reminded me more of 9/11: hundreds of people calmly going down the emergency stairs, all with the same question ("what's happening?") and the same answer ("I don't know"). Out on the street it quickly became clear that this wasn't a terrorist thing: there was no smell of something destroyed like there was on 9/11, there was no debris raining down on us and you could hear the steam continuing to force its was out, like the neighbor's leaf blower turned up to eleven. The studio manager made an executive decision that the building was closed for the rest of the day, which was my signal to walk downtown and hook up with my best friend. After all the excitement, It took a few hours for me to calm down. In the end I got today off as well.

Can't wait to see what they have in store for the new guy tomorrow.

Took this as I was walking home:



All in all a very 21st century accident: the street was filled with people taking pictures on their cel phones.

The Loneliest Street Lamp

No, not the title of a maudlin children's story, but an abused street lamp on the Henry Hudson Parkway across the street from Fort Tryon Park. The bike path runs along the uptown lanes, above the downtown lanes. I think this lamp used to be a flashing yellow to warn people about the park entrance. It isn't anymore. I don't know if that's because NYDOT decided the park entrance doesn't need a warning signal, or if they just don't care anymore.

Also, I'm working on another short story, I yam, I yam.

Marcel Duchamp is smiling

Parking accident or impromptu street sculpture?

Radical Trinidadians?

NY1 is all abuzz this afternoon as I struggle into consciousness with the story of a foiled plot to blow up a fuel pipeline at JFK:

Three people have been arrested and one other is being sought in a plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Law enforcement officials said Saturday at a press conference in Lower Manhattan that the plot, which never got passed the planning stage, involved a plan to set off explosives in a jet fuel pipeline that feeds through the airport and runs through residential neighborhoods.

According to a law enforcement source, the 40-mile pipeline brings aviation fuel from a facility in Linden, New Jersey, through Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens to the airport.

Now, the story's developing, as they say, but one of NY1's soundbites as I listened was "radical Trinidadian groups". What is a radical Trinidadian group? One which passes the Dutchie on the right hand side?

Thanks. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitstaff.

I am enough of a former car nut

To recognize a Volkswagen with an Italian accent:



In a similar vein, one of the wildest rides I've ever been on was being in the backseat of a Citroen 2CV, driven by a crazy Belgian, as it stormed along "roads" through fields near Brussels. The "roads", hard packed dirt and usually driven on by tractors, have been in use for years, so much so that the fields around them have slowly grown until they're higher than the "roads". Imagine a flat, dirt bobsled course and you have the idea. I don't think we got over 50 miles an hour, but it felt like three hundred. . .

Bright Pretty Things

Although the gig I'm on seems increasingly pointless and frustrating, there are some nice things about being in Midtown at three in the morning. Things are all lit up and pretty:

I also found my first Taxi Master yesterday. Caught a cab home at zero dark thirty and went from 49th and Sixth all the way downtown to my house without hitting a single spotlight. It was a little bit of Manhattan satori.

Today's installment of It's a Small and Increasingly Funny World

The Syrian guy who works in the health food store across the street from me answering his cel phone with, "how you, playa?"

Amish graffiti?

Found in the 14th Street F/V. This is new. And weird.

Reality? Wazzat?

It's getting to where I can't tell the war footage from video games. I swear, while I was watching this, the part of my brain which likes blinking lights and blowing things up was wondering whether my computer had the horsepower to play this game.

(I also like how the people in the video are labeled "terrorists", despite the fact they're Iraqis fighting in their home country.)

Paid for squat

I'm currently getting paid to sit around and do nothing. Even more, I get paid for a full eight hours even if I leave after five.

It's killing me. So much for my dreams of being fabulously wealth and completely indolent.

Algonquin Square Table

For anyone who is actually reading this thing:

Unlike some people, I don't post a lot. There's a very simple reason for this: I don't find my day-to-day thoughts or activities all that interesting. Believe it or not, my life is not filled with fabulous dinner parties, witty comments or Dorothy Parker. It is filled with working, friends, making dinner and taking the cats to the vet.

So, there ya go.

It's alive!

Yes, it's alive: My website lives and breathes, taking up valuable space on the Intertoobz. I sincerely hope you like it.

Visit it. Visit it a lot. Have your friends visit it. And on and on.

Next up: finishing that short story I started two months ago.

The End of Privacy

From New York Magazine:

But maybe it’s a cheap shot to talk about reality television and Paris Hilton. Because what we’re discussing is something more radical if only because it is more ordinary: the fact that we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

I've been thinking about this article for a few days now, and I think Nussbaum has a point here. If privacy is predicated on the ability to selectively deny personal information, then we may be reaching a point in which that notion of privacy doesn't mean anything. The next step is obvious: if the old notion of privacy is dead, dead, dead, then the social conventions which go with that notion no longer serve us, either. The place where the old social norms meet the new behavior are bound to produce friction.

I don't know where I stand on this, yet. I'm still a private person by nature: do MySpace, no Facebook, no nothing. And I like my privacy, or the notion of privacy I think I have. I also don't find my day-to-day thoughts all that interesting, because my life is pretty mundane. Nussbaum talks about that later in the article, the notion of the "invisible audience". Do I have an invisible audience? Would I know it if I did?

I remember talking about this with my friend Heather years ago, and the conversation came down to two points of view. One was that the online world was driving kids to develop an attenuated multiple personality disorder, one in which they were free to flit from online personality to online personality, a sense of fluidity which could induce a personal vertigo. The other was that the ability to inhabit these different personalities gave kids the ability to role play their way through tough situations from a variety of different angles, easing the confusing burden of puberty. One view wholly negative, one positive. I opt for the more positive one myself.

In the end, though, I don't think there's any way to know. As with any social change, I think we just have to hold on and see where this one takes us.

Wikipedia and Google Earth

I'm a Wikipedia junkie. For an information addict like me, it's better than crack: all that stuff there, all the time, just begging me to read it. I know Wikipedia has problems with people defacing articles, among other things, but for things historical, technical and scientific it's a great resource. (It's section on professional wrestling is also worryingly complete.) I also happen to love (you guessed it) Google Earth: I find something very contemplative in zooming around the planet, looking at all sorts of places I didn't know existed.

The other night, reading about the Allied island hopping campaign in the Pacific during World War II, I started going back and forth between Wikipedia and Google Earth, and the result was amazing. I've read a fair amount of World War II history, so I know the general outlines of the campaign. But with Google Earth I got a completely different grasp on the where, on the tiny islands and the great distances. The Google Earth community placemarks are great marking the American ships which went down in Ironbottom Sound and all of the naval battles in and around the Solomons. There's even a placemarker where Admiral Yamamoto's plane crashed.

The fact that I was doing this at 4:45 in the morning must just be another sign of how cool I am. . .

And, one more thought: One of the criticisms I hear of Wikipedia is that you can't trust it because you can't trust the people who write the articles. What makes people think those who write the "trusted" sources are any more believable?

Haka

This is pretty cool:

It's a haka, a Maori dance. Apparently the Blacks, the New Zealand national rugby team, does one before the start of every match.

If you're a Lord of the Rings fan/nerd/obsessive, there's another haka shown in the extra material of the third movie. I don't remember clearly, but I think a group of the Maori extras do a haka for the rest of the crew at a ceremony/party after the third movie wrapped. Also very cool and very moving.

Why hakas this morning? I dunno. Why not?

Accidental discoveries

This afternoon at work I stumbled across Here is New York, by E.B. White. It's an essay he wrote in 1948 about (guess it. . .) New York City. I read some of it on the train ride home and it's amazing. An excerpt:

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everyone wants and needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.

And I think so. One of the things I say about New York is that it makes you very quickly learn how to filter information. Every day living here you are bombarded with an enormous amount of stuff: speech, music, sound, smell, touch, human and animal contact. I think to be successful here you have to learn how to filter all that down into what you need to know and what interests you, because taking all of it in all the time will burn you out, make you go running for whatever quiet suburb promises isolation and the illusion of control. I think White is talking about that, albeit much much stylishly than am I. Here it's possible to be a part of so much while maintaining the ability to snap back into your own world when you want and need to. Or, if you want, you can be absolutely alone in a room full of people.

Working feverishly on the website. Feverishly.

A picture to start with

Of a pimped-out messenger bike on 14th Street. For those keeping score, those are old school Oury grips, which came to mountain biking in the late 80s via BMX.

Fascinating, I know.

Website coming soon. I promise.