October 6, 2006
Post Punk Rock Show, 1990 ::
photos — tagged 1990s, milwaukee, music, narrative, photos and the unicorn
8:20 pm
Post Punk Rock Show, 1990
Originally uploaded by Quicksand2005.
I don’t know anyone in this shot, but I do know where it was taken. It was the parking lot of the Unicorn, one of the coolest punk clubs in Milwaukee in the early 1990’s. As I mention in the photo’s comments, I grew up going to shows there.
What’s funny is that those shows seem like such a long time ago—it’s almost like I dreamed them. So it’s good to know there are other people out there who shared the experience, even if I don’t know them.
September 20, 2006
Why Entourage is so great ::
narrative — tagged entourage, narrative and tv
7:57 pm
Slate has an interesting piece on the greatness of Entourage. It reasons that people, particularly men, love the show because it represents something called “attainable greatness”:
Every guy between the ages of 13 and 30 has got that one friend destined for greatness, either at the minor or major level….For those of us sneered at by cruel nature, this person represents our only chance for sampling the run-off glory of vicarious accomplishment. Wingmen, moochers, and hangers-on—we’re usually the guy’s best friends, and we’re remunerated for being just that.
I sort of agree. After seeing two seaons of the show, I find I gravitate toward the character Eric more than any of the others. He’s the most responsible of the characters, and also the one who actually treats his life in Hollywood as real work. And he’s weird and awkward and has that East Coast neurosis that makes him really stand out among the beautiful people of LA. But yeah, at the end of the day, they guy would be working as a manager for Sbarro in New York if his friend hadn’t taken him out to LA to be his manager. So Slate does have a point, as much as I hate to admit it.
August 30, 2006
SF trip rundown/wrap-up ::
travel — tagged california, friends, narrative, san francisco and travel
10:43 am
So, my weekend trip to San Francisco was bookeneded by two extreme travel experinces (I already noted the return trip, and my trip out included a six hour delay at O’Hare) but the trip out to San Francisco to visit Maureen was really fun. I’m glad I went. As I like to do after long trips, here’s a list of the events worth remembering:
1. Landing in SFO after the six hour delay in O’Hare, and being able to get all the way to Noe Valley on the Bart and the MUNI bus system after being awake for something like 18 hours. Then staying up for another three hours catching up with Maureen and meeting her friend Heidi.
2. Driving down the coast on Route 1, visiting beaches that, although they were at high tide, were still beautiful, with a landscape like nothing I’d ever seen before. (It was my first time seeing the non-urban areas of Northern California).
3. Driving further south on Route 1 to buy organic, locally grown strawberries from a farmstand. I also had hot strawberry cider, which was kind of funky and had some serious pulp in it, but it was sweet and I enjoyed it.
4. Driving, somewhat accidentally, all the way to Santa Cruz before heading back to San Francisco on Route 17 (Google map). I remember when I was a skateboarder kid, Santa Cruz stood in my mind as an idyllic, untouchable land where the weather was always warm and the skateboarding was never hindered by winter. Seeing the city was impressive, if only for the realization that it was a real place, with real people in it. Also, there was a nice health food store that carried tasty vegan cookies. And Route 17, with all its twists and turns, is a really fun road to take, especially at high speeds.
5. Making dinner on Saturday night. It included marinated tofu and rice, and was something Maureen put together herself. That always makes me feel better than going out to a restaurant.
6. Walking from Maureen’s place on Elizabeth to the 24th Street Mission Bart station on Sunday morning. There’s something about San Francisco streets on Sunday morning that makes me feel, I don’t know, at peace. I remember feeling the same way the last time I was in San Francisco.
7. Visiting SFMOMA with Maureen, seeing tons of artwork I was familiar with, and some that I was not so familiar with but still enjoyed. There was an extensive exhibit by Matthew Barney (see his Wikipedia article or his flash-intensive website), who is probably one of the most prolific artists I’ve ever encountered. His work, which utilizes all different forms of media, took up almost an entire floor of the museum and included Bjork as one of the subjects/characters, dealt with, among other things, Japanese culture surrounding its whaling industry. I found the whole experience left me numb, but mostly because there was so much to process. Now, two days later, I’m still thinking about it. What that says about its quality, I’m not sure, but I think the exhibit is worth seeing.
8. Taking the ferry to Sausalito. You get an interesting view of the San Francisco skyline that you can’t get anywhere else. Also, I remember seeing the new Bay Bridge as it was being constructed—the new bridge paralelling the old one, extending out only so far into the bay, then abruptly ending. Also, as we got closer to Sausalito we could see the fog come over the mountains, which reminded me of condensed air cascading from the freezer on hot summer days.
9. Being totally exhausted by the time we got back to Maureen’s place on Sunday afternoon. She took a nap, I read a book. Then I got starving and went out for burritos. Came home and dozed on the couch with a cat purring on my lap.
10. Wrapping my mind around the strange weather in San Francisco. There’s no rain there this time of year, just fog. Also, the temperature is actually colder than it is here in Vermont, with daytime temperatures hovering around 65 degrees or so. And it gets cold at night—cold enough for sweaters and furnaces. This is not the California I learned of when I was a child. But of course, you would get out of the city and have to strip all your layers of thermals off start seriously overheating.
And just to give an update on my baggage: as I suspected, it was on the United flight on which I was confirmed, not on the flights on which I flew standby. So I arrived at the Burlington airport at 10 AM today to find my baggage sitting with the others at the airport’s miniature baggage claim area. Not too bad, I must say.
August 29, 2006
Insane travel ::
travel — tagged california, flight, narrative, travel and washington dc
1:25 am
Earlier today I pictured myself in exactly the position I am in right now, awake at nearly 1 AM, typing away on my computer because my body thinks the time is three hours earlier. But the way I got here is totally different than what I had in mind. See, I just got in two hours ago from a trip out to San Francisco to visit Maureen for the weekend. The trip was a lot of fun—I was happy to catch up with Maureen, to meet new people, and to see a part of California I hadn’t seen before, including a pretty long trip down the coast that ultimately landed us in Santa Cruz before heading back North to the city—and getting back home today was a truly and adventure.
It all started when Maureen dropped me off at SFO on her way out of town to LA. I was two hours early for my flight—more than enough time to get checked in, get my baggage checked, and to hopefully spend most of the rest of the time waiting (impatiently) to board the flight. But when I went to check in using one of the computer terminals, I found that my flight had been delayed for so long that I was going to miss my connection. So, the computer rescheduled my itinerary, placing me on a flight that was scheduled to leave at 10 PM (yeah, that’s right. It was six hours later than my original departure time). But the program did put me on standby for another set of flights, the first of which was scheduled to leave SFO at 12:45, which gave me almost no time to get through security and get to the terminal before the plane left.
I made it in time, and I got in on standby. The new plane was a 767, a plane so enormous that looking out the windows somehow made the entire world seem small, even while parked at the terminal. I noted as we taxied toward takeoff that we left SFO late, which meant I had very little time to catch my connection at Dulles. Knowing the connection was likely to be the last one of the day, I tried not to stress out too much at the possibility of being put up in some anonymous, plastic-coated hotel room in suburban Washington, D.C., or worse, spend all night in the United terminal at Washington. So as the plan zig-zagged across the continent, I occcupied my mind by reading, by cataloging the trip, and by trying to find the Clif bar that I’d bought earlier, which had fallen under my seat.
One surreal aspect of flying is that sometimes you find yourself in a city you never expected to be in, that’s thousands of miles away from your planned destination. When you find yourself there, it’s like a vivid dream. Washington/Dulles was like that for me. Also, I wasn’t dressed for the weather. At 9 PM (for me, it was only 6), the temperature was hovering at 90 degrees—roughly 20 – 30 degrees warmer than anything I’d experienced while in San Francisco—and with my long pants and thermal undershirt, I definitely was over-dressed for it. I got off the plane to check the terminal I needed to get to to catch my connection to Burlington, which turned out to be halfway down the next terminal. And the entry was blinking an alert that the flight was boarding. I had to run.
I ran harder than I thought I could. I ran past crew members hustling toward their own flights. I cut between befuddled families who you could swear it was their first time in an airport. At one point, I seem to remember hurdling a roller bag someone had in tow, but it may be my tendency to aggrandize the facts for the sake of a good story. But no matter what, note that nowhere between the C and D terminals in Washington/Dulles are there any fast-tracks, so you must rely on your own athleticism and endurance.
I got to my terminal to find it empty. Desolate. There was one woman at the boarding gate, demanding my name, I told her I was on standby, and then told her my name after she asked for it again. “I called your name, you weren’t here,” she told me. “Late connection,” I replied, feeling oddly like I had something to apologize for. She wrote my seat assignment down on my standby ticket and let me out on the tarmac, where I caught a flight up to Burlington. At the end of it all, I got here an hour earlier than I was originally scheduled to, but my bags didn’t make it with me. I assume, for the sake of my own sanity, that they will arrive tomorrow, on the flight I should have been on had all of this fallen apart at some point. Come to think of it, as I write this, I realize that my bags have just taken off from SFO and are on their way to meet me.
So, earlier today, I thought I’d be in the situation I was in now. But I figured I’d have my checked baggage with me. And that I would have flown through O’Hare, where I would have had a two-hour layover, during which I could have grabbed dinner. So things turned out a little different than I expected—at the end of the day, though, the adventure, and the opportunity to tell the story, made it worthwhile.
August 6, 2006
Coolest thing I’ve done in quite some time ::
personal — tagged cycling, narrative, personal and vermont
8:42 am
So, I’ve been dealing a lot with cars lately—much more than I’m used to, or particularly comfortable with. But I’ve resolved most of my car related issues over the past two days or so, and I look forward to motorized transportation taking a much less substantial role in my life in the coming weeks.
Here’s the story: my old car, a 1994 Honda Accord EX, has, at 12 years old and with 200,000 miles on it, become not the car I need, given the amount of travel I’ve had to do over the past few weeks and will likely be doing in the near future. To remedy the problem, I worked out a deal with my parents where I would get one of their old cars, and would pay them back once I became gainfully employed. But in order to get their car, which is Buffalo, I had to do some pretty serious planning and logistical maneuvering. The plan I came up with was this: Drive to Burlington, leave my car with friends up there; take a flight to Buffalo; Drive from Buffalo to Chicago for Pitchfork, then drive up to Milwaukee to visit Jeremy; then drive back to Vermont. All that plan worked out just fine, and I got back to Vermont on Wednesday.
But that still left the problem of the old car, which was up in Burlington still. I was fretting about finding someone to ride up with me to pick it up when my friend (and temporary roommate) suggested that I ride my bike up to Burlington to get it. Well, of course! I thought, why don’t I? And so yesterday I did it. I estimated the ride at about 68 miles, up 12 through Randolph and Northfield to Montpelier (2.5 hours), then cutting across 2 up to Burlington (about 3.5 hours). With the half hour or so break I took in Montpelier for lunch, the whole ride took (watch me do the math) six and half hours! Overall it was a much quicker, and much less painful, ride than I was expecting. Next time, I’ll have to take some alternative routes that involve more climbing. But that’s next time.
In any event, I haven’t taken any pictures since the batteries on my camera died during the Mission of Burma set at Pitchfork. Why I can’t get it together to get the damn things charged, I do not know.
January 17, 2006
John Lewis ::
narrative — tagged civil rights, narrative, politics and social conscience
10:40 pm
As a part of this year’s Martin Luther King Day celebration, my law school hosted an event with Congressman John Lewis (here’s a reasonable press release on my school’s site). His presentation was pretty excellent—combining a personal narrative about growing up poor in rural Alabama with his experiences in the civil rights movement in Selma and his current work as a Congressman. Throughout the speech was the constant theme of constant struggle—working for a just and fair society is not something that can be completed in a day or in a week, but rather is something we must commit our entire lives to.
I left feeling I was ready to do more work.
January 10, 2006
Alabama ::
travel — tagged civil rights, narrative and travel
7:30 pm
Well, that was quite a week.
It’s hard for me to believe that we left for Alabama just last Wednesday. Over the past six days, Jessamyn and I saw a significant part of central and southern Alabama, including the cities of Birmingham and Pelham (day 1), Selma and Montgomery (day 3), and Tuscaloosa (day 5). We saw a lot of civil rights history, including the Civil Rights Institute and Kelly Ingram Park (my flickr photos), the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma (where I got one of my favorite photos from the trip), and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery. We also saw much in the way of tourist traps in the state, including the Vulcan Statue in Birmingham and the Old Depot Museum in Selma.
One interesting observation about the two sets of historical destinations: I sensed that at one time there was a substantial disconnect between civil rights history and “other” history in Alabama. (That is, there was civil rights history, which was wholly distinct from economic history or, for lack of a better term, “mainstream” history.) However, those in charge of “mainstream” history seem to be making an effort to connect the two lines lines of narrative. For example, at the Vulcan Museum, which described the iron works in the city of Birmingham, one display talked about how the industry used to force convicts to work in the iron mills as part of their punishment around the turn of the 20th Century. According to the display, that practice was only challenged when the inhumane working conditions led to the death of a white worker. Although the display did not explicitly state that the practice was the result of racial discrimination, I could easily draw the inference.
And to top it all off, we had an excellent time staying with Jonathan and Julie, friends of ours who Jessamyn first met through her international network of librarians. If Jessamyn and I can make new friends each time we venture out of state, then I think that’s more than enough incentive to continue exploring different parts of the United States.
June 4, 2005
This Week ::
personal — tagged automotive, narrative, vermont and work
1:15 pm
So, that was a long week.
I got through my first four days at work without incident. There were a couple of bumpy parts, of course, like having to set the alarm every evening before I went to and having to get up unreasonably early for a dentist appointment on Thursday, but I survived all of those. I was also able to get a full night’s rest last night, so I even feel clear headed as I write this.
Speaking of today, I came in to New Hampshire this morning to get new tires for Jessamyn’s car. That was no problem at all. Though I went to a Tire Warehouse, where they don’t have any hydraulic lifts, they just lift your car up using a series of jacks. A little weird, I must say. Now I am currently in West Lebanon, taking advantage of the open WiFi cloud and the free coffee refills at the local Panera. Jessamyn has been down at a library conference in Rhode Island for the past few days, so I’ll be heading off to pick her up from the bust station in a couple of hours. Then we’re off to have dinner with some friends who live somewhere in New Hampshire, I’m not sure where. Sometimes, I hear that weekends are relaxing, but not this weekend, not for us, anyway.
May 20, 2005
Greg: 1, Crisis: 0 ::
narrative — tagged family, narrative and travel
11:41 am
I don’t know how many of you have been following the travel planning process that Jessamyn has discussed on her site. For those of you who haven’t, here’s the rundown: Jessamyn is currently in Pittsburgh, PA, doing a library talk. (In fact, she may be presenting as I write this.) Tomorrow, she will get on a bus for Washington, DC. Tomorrow afternoon, I will get on a plane in Burlington, VT, and fly down to Washington to meet her. While there, we will be spending some time with friends. We’ll then come back next week. I’ll be in town for all of a day and a half before leaving town again for my sister’s graduation from Cornell University.
And here’s where things get bad. I took Jessamyn to the airport yesterday (again, up in Burlington). When I got back to Bethel, I noticed a grinding noise coming from the rear wheel of my ‘94 Honda Accord. I’ve owned the car long enough to know what that noise meant: seized up caliper, worn down brake pads, and a damaged rotor. I was going to have to get work done on my car before I took it on the 6+ hour trip to Ithaca.
Now, for those of you who don’t live in Vermont, there’s something you should know about auto repairs in this state: they can take a really long time. Especially in the Spring, when everyone seems to take their car into the shop to get all the repairs done that have built up over the winter months. For example: when Jessamyn had to get her radiator replaced a few weeks ago, it took two and half weeks just to get an appointment. Then it took another day for the part to get there. So clearly, with my upcoming schedule, I was going to have to try to find someone to do the work, and fast.
Luckily, I was able to find a guy. He’s way out of town, up on a dirt road. He’s also one tough dude. (At least that’s what I could surmise from my rather brief discussion with him). When I dropped my car of with him a couple of hours ago, he said he was going to try to get the work done today; if he couldn’t, he said I could leave the car with him and pick it up when I get back from Washington next week. Needless to say, hearing this made me quite happy indeed.
Of course, I am quite aware that I should temper my effusiveness at this point. There’s still quite a bit of time between now and the time I leave for things to go seriously wrong. But still, I can’t help but feel that—at least in this match—that I have beaten a crisis.
Update: I got my car back! Not only that, but the mechanic actually drove my car to my house. I of course had to give him a ride back to the garage, but still, I really thought that was some pretty great service. With that said, if you ever find yourself in need of automotive repair and you’re in Bethel, Vermont, I highly recommend the fine mechanics at North Road Auto & Tire.
