Modern Telecommunications

The one thing I don’t like about writing posts on the Palm Pilot is that they don’t go up according to when they were written, just when they were uploaded. The following are a couple of posts I wrote on the way to Sorrento. I’m back, I had a fabulous time, I’m way jet-lagged, and I’m processing some really horrible family news that has me reeling. More later as I settle down from everything. But for now…

Commentary from the road, Thursday: I’m on the train to Boston and sure enough this guy gets on at New Haven and starts in with the cell phone. He didn’t look the type at first — he raced on all out-of-breath, wearing cut-off sweats and looking like some mook. Next thing I know, however, he’s got the headset on, the phone in a little stand, and he’s making a volley of calls telling all his colleagues and clients where to reach him. He hasn’t stopped yakking away yet. Yes, chowderhead, a cell phone is a useful tool, but we’d all be much happier if you valued your privacy a little bit more.

Meanwhile, my own phone rings with a call from my landlord, warning me that there’s some danger of my 1200 square feet of basement apartment flooding if we get a lot of rain in the next week. Apparently, the pump that usually keeps all us cave-dwellers dry may have been damaged by some gas-line work. If all my things are destroyed by the time I get back from Italy, I’ll be one morose kid.

Cubicle Creep

Please save me from Kenny G. And Luther Vandross. And whoever else is creeping over the cubicle wall from the radio tuned to some god-awful adult-contemporary or soft-hits or regurgitated-cud station. God, it can really suck to be a freelance contractor who can’t really getting away with telling someone to pipe down. Frankly, it’s better when she’s got the radio on than when she uses the headphones, because at least this way she doesn’t hum off-key to herself all day.

Aside from the horror of the music itself, the worst part is that it’s only the tinny upper register that really makes it into my cubicle. so all I get is the tenor sax or the keyboard fills or the star search wails. Oh, the agony.

On a more encouraging musical topic, I picked up a great maxi-single from Chicks on Speed after hearing it playing while I was at Other Music last saturday. (I was with friends who were on such a manic spending spree that I got caught up in the excitement and broke my long-running CD spending freeze.) The Chicks did these amazing deconstructed electronic covers of some of my favorite quirky songs from the B-52’s: Give Me Back My Man, strobelight, and song for a Future Generation. Totally fun and brilliant.

Just for kicks, write me and tell me what your capsule description would be if you had a part in song for a Future Generation.

Hi, I’m Sparky and I’m a Virgo. I love french fries and talking to cute guys!

We’ll Call Him Shawn

Freshly shornIt’s amazing what a haircut can do to help morale. I think it’s because I cut my own hair (and have ever since I was fifteen — I’m solely responsible for all those asymmetric skater styles I wore in high school and college), and I usually end up doing on the spur of the moment when I feel the need for some kind of change that I can control. Or maybe it’s the feeling of letting go of excess weight. Or just the novelty of looking different after feeling a bit of a rut come on. Any way you look at it, I’m all easy-to-groom again and ready for the wash-and-go pace of my trip abroad.

Oh yeah, someone I chat with a lot pointed out to me that I haven’t even mentioned here that I’m leaving Thursday for a free week-long trip to Sorrento, Italy. [Insert warning of a week without updates here.] I’m helping a friend look after a group of her customers (among many other things, her company sells tour packages) in exchange for a week of free travel, food, and lodging in southern Italy. This is the same way I got to go to China and through the Panama Canal. It’s a sweet deal, and playing shepherd to a busload of tourists is a small price to pay for the change of pace.

But anyway, I shouldn’t suggest that I needed a haircut because I’ve been feeling rotten or anything. stressed yes, with sporadic mopiness, but not rotten. Amidst the frantic crush to get work and errands done before I leave for Italy, I had a fantastic weekend entertaining P.J. and Chris, who stopped by for a quick trip filled with record shopping, eating in bamboo-filled restaurants, and general carousing.

Me, my old hair, and P.J.

There were some moments of weird social dynamics to the whole situation. I mean, we all got along swimmingly, but P.J. and Chris are old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while, and who came to visit me after they had already spent a couple of days together in Philadelphia. Chris looks bad-ass on the subwayTo some extent, that left me a bit of an outsider to chunks of conversation they were having. Besides, they were in tune to the goings-on in all the record stores we visited in a way that I haven’t been in a few years, since moving from Boston back to New York threw off my connection to any flavor of musical scene. On top of that, I know them independently, through correspondence and phone calls and whatnot, so I also had to adjust to meeting each of them face-to-face for the first time. It’s an adjustment I’ve had to make many times when meeting on-line pals for the first time, but the extra layer of catching up they had to do threw me for a little while. I got over it, they got over it, we got used to knowing each other as meatspace pals instead of flirty online abstractions.

Them boys is fun, though, and we laughed a lot, looked at a lot of cute boys, bought a lot of records (well, all I got were a few zines and a Chicks on Speed EP of B-52’s covers), and goofed around.

Hallowinded

Well, Halloween was mostly a bust, but I guess I was expecting that. The day was one of the most irritating of my entire life for reasons too tedious to get into (let’s just say I’ll never do a project as a favor for a client again), I was pooped, my tonsils and a wonky wisdom tooth are acting up (which is making me very nervous about next week’s trip to Italy), and I just wanted to go out and start slapping people. Fortunately, there were so many people wandering around in decent costumes, or at least fun attempts at decent costumes, that I lightened up a whole lot. Outside of the parade environment, there’s something I find really invigorating about people roaming around in costume, especially when they’re acting as if nothing is unusual at all. Sometimes that jaded New Yorker expression really pays off.

Come nighttime, I indeed slacked off and found myself unable pull together a decent costume, so like I do every year, I just dove into my steamer trunk and my dresser and put together a half-assed “Bad Boy scout” theme with a scout uniform shirt, some leather pants, and a few accessories. I don’t think anyone got it except for one perky Belgian guy. After some dinner and a little time-killing at the Phoenix, members of my party gave way to fatigue, so we called it a night. Oh well. Better luck next year, I hope.

Halloweentown

I may be a Halloween slacker, but apparently my unconscious manipulation of the cosmic luck plane appears to be doing better than the rest of me. Namely, the movies which arrived in my mailbox in the last few days, after lingering on my NetFlix waiting list for months were Gothic, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow. Spoooooky, right? Right?

By the way, Gothic sucked. I wish I could have seen it during high school and college like all the other black-wearing kids. I might have enjoyed it more if I could still be impressed by that level of pretense. It’s nowhere near as much fun as Ken Russell’s much campier Lair of the White Worm.

No Holiday Spirit

I’m such a Halloween slacker. Just about every year, I fold under the pressure to think of something fun to do and fun to wear, and usually wind up just dicking around, all bored. Last year was a notable exception (well, my use of my authentic cop uniform was a little half-assed as a costume, but I went to a great party in the ‘Burg, where everyone inside and out was in costume), but I usually feel this inordinate pressure to be creative and whip together some clever, high-concept outfit and my energy and organizational skills are never up to the task. I’m thinking this year I’ll head over to the Lure for their Halloween ball, where I won’t need a costume per se, but I’ll still get a chance to dress up and watch the freak flag fly high if all goes well.

The big thing to avoid at Halloween, as far as I’m concerned, is the freakin’ Parade. It’s great in concept, but few things are more horrifying than trying to wade through thousands of people swarming the narrow streets of the West Village, all drunk and stooopid and carrying on because they’re in from Queens or the Jersey suburbs and they’re all hyper because they’re in the Village(!) and they can go totally crazy, and you can tell because they’ve got on crazy hats! It’s worse than Gay Pride, I swear.

Pleasures of the Big Screen

Damn, I just noticed how badly I’ve been neglecting this. Oh well, shit happens. Not that my media-/pop-culture consumption has trailed off at all. If anything, a brief burst of solvency found me treating myself to the occasional CD binge and an extra movie night or two.

I love going to the movies, I really do. As much as I hate when guys in personal ads say lame, boring, unoriginal things about what they like to do for fun, I have to admit that my first suggestion for a relaxing social activity with a pal is always to go to the movies. I love the immersive experience. And now that stadium seating is becoming de rigeur, I don’t even have to wince in anticipation of the physical discomfort — even for a li’l peanut like me — of sitting in one of those awful old seats.

Aside from the way heavy-duty sound and a large screen (and don’t give me any of that wussy crap about sitting too far to the front — you’re never too far up front until the the perspective becomes too weird to compensate for, in the first couple rows or so) completely envelop you and bombard you with the sensory input from the flick/movie/film (what I consider to be the three levels of cinematic quality), the most wonderful part about going to the movies is the social aspect. For better or worse, and it usually helps, you feed off the energy of the rest of the crowd when you go see a movie in a theater. It’s a vital part of the experience, and makes up for the added impediments to putting your feet up on the seat in front of you. I can’t tell you how many summer blockbusters have been salvaged for me by going to see them in a crowded theater on a Friday night (in Times Square, if possible, where the audiences are always the rowdiest) where the crowd shouts along with or at the movie, in a giant orgy of audience participation. I still remember when I realized that Godzilla 2000 was gonna be a hoot the moment that we heard a crash of glass in the back of the theater and the smell of malt liquor filled the air. Even if it’s as simple as the audience rooting for a real clunker like the sheep they are, the energy helps make the most of what might otherwise be a bad situation.

When I found out that The Nightmare Before Christmas was being re-released for Halloween this year, you know I was all for it. As much as I already loved the film, the added effect of enjoying it with all the trimmings of the movie-theater and audience experience just made it that much sweeter. I also started playing around with the interesting effects I get with my digital camera in low-light situations:

A Plea to the Nerds

Do you have a math or science background? If so, maybe you can give your old pal Sparky a hand. I’ll gladly barter trinkets or prominently featured links to your web site You see, in a little while I’m going to be a doing a week-long consulting gig for Princeton University Press, configuring certain features of their typesetting system and showing them how to set equations, formulas, and other kinds of mathematical notation. I’m trying to collect examples of as many kinds of mathematical typesetting as I can find to use as examples and reference materials for them, but most of what I’m familiar with is specific to the needs of mechanical engineers. Do you have any textbooks or academic publications you could browse through for me? Any photocopies or scans would be totally fantastic. I’d really appreciate it. Also, any pointers toward a chart on the Web listing the names of various math characters would be cool.

On a less geeky topic, I’m trying to track down this incredible punk cover I once heard of the song “Find It,” sung by the Carrie Nations in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Does ay one know who did the cover? Know where to find it? Lemme know!

Pals

I’ve got a lot of pals, for whom I’m eternally grateful. I’ve had them organized here by regular friends and friends I had primarily over the Internet, but as time has gone by and I’ve gotten to know some of the Internet folk much better, I’ve realized that’s just a dumb-ass distinction to make.