Month: January 2008

Ode to Atticus

Atticus Wolrab is a figure shrouded in mystery. All that I really know about him is that he is an artist who does all of Mike Keneally’s album art. I just discovered his Flickr stream today, and it’s one of those goldmines of creativity so deep and brightly lit that I have to tell everybody about it. Check him out.

Here are some of my favorites: breakfast face (one of several), dumped, and Bernal Hill (which I myself have photographed, although in somewhat less flattering light). But his stuff is endless, really. And he likes to put song lyrics in the descriptions and write strange, lengthy tags (see the right column of this picture).

Oh, and he just sent me a message. Isn’t that nice?

Today’s Discoveries

Today I found a peculiar enjoyment in walking through a cold drizzle. It reminded me of London, where just getting home after walking all afternoon was a victory and falling exhausted onto my bed was first prize. Here in Brooklyn it’s much the same; although generally I make dinner first and savor the day’s hard-earned shin splints.

I find the best stuff when I’m looking for nothing. Today I found robots. Lots of sculpted robots made of found objects. They live in a couple of junk shops on Atlantic, called City Foundry, if I recall. I was also followed by Jesus. Once on Bergen, then later on Court. It was good to see him. Compared to Arkansas, he’s under-represented here.

At the Salvation Army I had the exquisite pleasure of not only finding a super-rare Earthsuit CD (the previous, Christian incarnation of Mute Math), but also an even rarer Latyrx t-shirt. Both cost only $2 each.

Get to Know David Mead

The perfect cherry on top of my triumph yesterday was a MySpace bulletin from David Mead saying that he’d be playing at the Living Room last night. The Living Room, like most of the great tiny venues in New York, is located on the Lower East Side[1], just down Ludlow from Houston[2]. I was going to be at the Mercury Lounge last night to see my friend Elizabeth play trombone with one of her many bands. Fortunately her show was at 10 and David’s at 11.

Some background on David: he’s probably my favorite solo singer/songwriter in the world. Originally from the South, he moved up to NYC, then down to Nashville, and has moved back up recently. In addition to writing lyrics with smooth sophistication, he also composes melodies that grab you instantly. As a direct result of his immense talent, he’s not well known. I have all his CDs. Check out the tunes on his myspace page. If he were a movie, he’d be endlessly quotable: “trapped in the orbit of your rolling eyes,” “the lonesome weight of truth,” “and miles will make you notice / all you dream is real.” Here is David’s online lyric archive.

And, on top of it all, his journals are very entertaining and elegantly written.

1.) Let’s make a list of these tiny Lower East Side venues I’ve been to thus far, all within a 4 block radius of each other: The Living Room, Arlene’s Grocery, American Underground, the Mercury Lounge, Piano’s, Rockwood Music Hall.
2.) Scene of Tuesday night’s trucking maneuvers.

Job Offer Accepted!

I got a job offer today and I accepted! The position is Interactive Account Manager, but the web department I’m working in is only a few months old, so everything will be flexible and TBD. The company is called Unit 7 (named for a song by jazz guitar great Wes Montgomery). Check them out here: www.unit7.com.

Their offices are fantastic. Right off Union Square in Manhattan. My commute is about 30 minutes.

The pay is great – twice what I made before, but I’m pretty sure that’s the general cost of living increase for New York. Everything here does seem to be about twice as expensive. I know that if I were to live without a roommate, my rent would be double my LR mortgage. So living with a roommate will allow me to save up a bit.

I have to say my streak of good fortune[1] is still in full effect. I got in town a week ago Tuesday, had my first job interview this last Tuesday, and got the job today. All the more surprising is that I had originally intended just to be a temp for awhile, but the recruiters nabbed me and put me out there. So I’m plunging headlong into this thing. I start on Tuesday, after the MLK holiday. Wish me luck. Hopefully my Arkansas job skills match up to the Big City.

1.) Laptop travails notwithstanding.

New York Thoughts

I’m starting a new category on the blog just for New York City, because I think the city will present me with a continual flow of new experiences. Here are a few:

You couldn’t pay me enough to be a big-rig driver in this town. Last night, walking past Katz’s, I helped a truck driver as he attempted to turn off Houston onto Ludlow. Ludlow is, like most of the streets on the Lower East Side, tightly packed with parked cars around two thin lanes. And there was a delivery truck double parked on Ludlow last night. And road cones. The rig took out a few of those while flattening a bag of trash, but stopped short of scraping a mailbox. The driver was clearly stuck, so I told him to hang on while I moved the remaining road cones and gave him hand signals to negotiate the mailbox, which his reflectors did scrape past. No serious harm came to the mailbox. There’s a job I could never do.

Speaking of jobs, I wonder about the lives of all the convenience store clerks, magazine kiosk workers, cabbies, and generally the people who make the city work. Where do all these people come from? Where do they live? How do they live? And who are all these people driving in cars? Why would anyone want to have a car in this town? Are they all commuters to somewhere else? Who are all these people?

All of these people, with so many religions and ethnic backgrounds, all here…and not killing each other! While it’s true there are ethnic enclaves like Chinatown and the Hasidic/Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn[1], you rarely read about full-scale warfare between them. Every faction in this town gets along with the rest of the city because they know that if they don’t, they will not survive. Is New York City a model for the rest of the world to follow? Or does this scenario only work in cities?

Maybe I shouldn’t think about it so much.

1.) Which I walked through today; it was like Israel without firearms.

Lazy Sunday

It’s almost 2 p.m. and I’m still in my pajamas. I’ve been watching, copying and screen-grabbing a DVD that my brother made of old home movies. I uploaded several shots to flickr, so check those out.

Yesterday I ventured uptown to eat at Tom’s Restaurant, made famous by Seinfeld and Suzanne Vega. I also walked by the Flatiron building (also known as the Daily Bugle in the Spider-man movies), which I’d never managed to find before. I also spent a lot of time at Norman’s Sound and Vision; they were having a big 50% off sale in the basement. Here are the highlights:

The Old 97’s – Satellite Rides: $1.50
Pearl Jam -Ten: $1.50
Beastie Boys – To the 5 Boroughs: $2
Steely Dan – Two Against Nature: $1.50
Elvis Costello – Spike: $1.50

I’d wager that in the next few years, as CDs die off, this sort of thing will happen more often. Stores will start unloading used CDs at the same prices as used vinyl. $1 to $2. The retail CD stores are already gone; it’s just a matter of time before the secondhand places start disappearing.

Beware Wireless Aircards from AT&T

Back before the road trip I signed up for a cellular wireless aircard for my laptop, so that I could have Internet access from the road. There was a 2-year service agreement, and I thought if it worked I could use it as my Internet connection in New York so $59 a month is about the going rate, right? Well, I soon discovered the service was spotty and only seemed to work near windows or outdoors. Needless to say it was not a suitable replacement for a conventional earthbound net connection. I really should have canceled it when I got off the road. Time is money, and so procrastination is expensive. Turns out there was a buyer’s remorse period that had long passed, and to get out of the 2 year agreement I have to pay a $175 early cancellation fee.

Sigh.

Interesting side note that the spell-checker pointed out to me just now: “canceled” is the proper spelling, with one “l” while “cancellation” is preferred with two of them. This makes no sense.

On the Road

I arrived a little early for my appointment today with the recruiter, so I thought I would kill some time by checking out the New York Public Library. They just so happened to have an exhibit of Jack Kerouac’s personal notebooks, papers, artwork, and his original typewritten scroll of On the Road. The scroll is 120 feet long, and 60 feet of it were on display. The contents of the scroll were recently published in book form, but seeing them firsthand was awe-inspiring, even for someone whose exposure to Kerouac is limited to an episode of Quantum Leap.

Yes, I’ve never read On the Road. Despite having just completed my own massively long road trip, I didn’t want to read about someone else’s. And Kerouac specifically always bothered me. I’ve never liked the self-destructive madman school of writing. Bukowski, Burroughs, Thompson and Kerouac all strike me as writers whose appeal is largely vicarious and voyeuristic. The people who get most excited about their works are the people who are very often the least likely to experience that peculiar world of kicks-joy-darkness. And I’ve always disliked beatniks, real or imitated, because they so seldom smile.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe it took way-out cats like that to break the rest of us out of the antiseptic numbness of the 1950’s. Maybe I should read On the Road when I’m done with Gangs of New York. It seems a sensible enough transition.

Assortment

Long week. And it’s still not over.

Monday. I got everything packed up and Jennifer drove me to the airport for my flight at 3. At check-in, I did the e-ticket thing, and while I was waiting to get my baggage checked, the guy who didn’t do the e-ticket said, “the line is behind me.” Whatever, dude. I let him go first, and he actually left his garment bag at the desk! You’re supposed to carry your baggage to the security station, but he apparently forgot or was not aware of this. So I carried Jerk Off’s garment bag over to security. Why? Because you defeat a**holes by not becoming one.

I landed around 11:30 p.m., and took a cab on an unduly long trip to the apartment because I gave him bad directions. I’m learning. For future reference I live by the Battery Tunnel, exit 26 off the BQE.

Tuesday I set out to enjoy the insanely beautiful weather. 66 degrees! I went to the Lower East Side, which I think is my favorite part of town, probably because it’s the oldest. I’m almost done reading Gangs of New York, the nonfiction account of mid-to-late 19th century crime in New York, and every street down there is full of history. I got some Chinese takeaway and ate in Tompkins Square Park, reading and listening to three scruffy musicians playing Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes. I walked up to Union Square, and there was no place to sit because everyone was out enjoying the weather. So I went to Circuit City to check out laptops. The guys I talked to said that my dead laptop’s hard drive probably wouldn’t be able to be inserted into a newer model, and so my options were either have Circuit City transfer the data onto a new machine at a cost of $100 per 10 gigs[1] or buy a hard drive enclosure to turn my hard drive into an external drive[2]. Hmm. I went shopping at Target where I couldn’t find DVD cases, dark blue full-size fitted sheets, or HANGERS! They had no adult size hangers. At all. None. The mind boggles. Nevertheless I stocked up on groceries and whatnot and schlepped it all back to the apartment, all of which constituted a significant workout. Fatigue.

Also on Tuesday I witnessed not one but two examples of Bad Ideas in Child Transport.

Wednesday I walked through Central Park in the still-gorgeous weather, got a haircut, walked down to 48th street to check out the guitar shops, and then back to Circuit City at Union Square where I bought my new HP laptop. For $59, Circuit City offers a package of a laptop bag, wireless router, and flash drive. AND, they offer a free (with rebate) Lexmark printer with purchase of a laptop. My big mistake was buying Microsoft Office[3] and having Firedog (Circuit City’s answer to Best Buy’s Geek Squad) install it along with Norton. D’oh! That only took 3 hours and some exorbitant bench fee I don’t want to remember. I then began the hunt for a hard drive enclosure, which they didn’t have in stock. During my 3-hour wait I wandered around and checked at Radio Shack where the very helpful sales guy tried THREE enclosures, none of which fit my drive. Eventually my laptop was ready and I schlepped it, the printer, and my router back to the apartment. Ugh. Tired. And then there was the support call ordeal of setting up my router, but I’ve bored you enough. Now the fun part…

Thursday morning I returned a message from a recruiter, and we set up a meeting at 3 p.m. It went pretty well. He said he’d be setting up several interviews for me. Here’s a phrase you want to hear when you’re meeting with a job placement specialist: “substantial raise in pay.” Of course, most of that is the cost of living increase between Arkansas and New York. Afterward I went to a different Circuit City, right around the corner from the recruiter’s office, and picked up a hard drive enclosure. Wish me luck.

1.) Um, that would be a big hell no.
2.) Not surprisingly, this was not an option they proposed. I consulted my technology brain trust of Brian and Brandon.
3.) Thinking I’d need Word for resumes, etc, but I probably won’t.