The Importance of Well-Placed Furniture

No, this isn't an IKEA catalog.

Tonight marked a landmark of sorts. I finally assembled all the furniture I plan on assembling in my apartment. Some of it comes from IKEA, most of it are castaways from various friends. I framed and hung two woodcuts I bought in Rio as seen in this photo. My apartment is complete (although I plan to buy a turntable and stereo and move my treasure trove of vinyl and CDs from storage).

Somehow, with this step, the transition has hit a new phase. It took 2 1/2 months, but there it is. I put away the red suitcase that I had packed back in Brazil in late-September and stuffed all the crap in various nooks and crannies around my apartment. No suitcases anywhere anymore. No one could tell I had just arrived.

I wish I had done this back in DC. Maybe, that would have helped me feel more settled. But, you know, I never felt settled enough to do that. Or I never let myself feel settled enough. Am I settled now? I don't really have any choice in the matter now. 

Yes, things are drifting into some kind of routine. The morning walk by the lake to the BART. The lunch at the handful of options around my office. The afternoon walk by the lake back to the apartment. The apartment. A routine is hardening now, like concrete. God help me.

Monkey

How'd you get so funky? Did you do the monkey, King Tut? Now, that's a good question how did he get so funky? But more apropos perhaps is what is the monkey? What exactly do you have to do to do the monkey? Is it a dance and if so how does it go?

All of this is a kind of round about way to talking about a monkey I saw once by the side of the road in the Brazilian Pantanal _ which is great big wetland that is tons more interesting than the Amazon in terms of seeing nature. Where the Amazon is mostly a vast wall of green when it isn't devastated for pasture, the Pantanal is vast flood plain chock full of wildlife. Trees hang heavy with huge storks, crocodiles fill the rivers and cute furry capivaras litter the sleepy dirt roads. At one point during my first trip to the Pantanal the photographer I was working with said to me, "I know I'm being paranoid, but I can't help but think they're putting all these animals here for our benefit." Whatever. He was paranoid that way.

But it was really an amazing trip and what was even more amazing is we must have seen only three or four other cars on the road, either coming or going, over a couple of hundred miles of driving _ in terms of people and cars it was just that empty. On the way back though we saw this black monkey standing on the side of the road looking lost, hurt and angry. I wish I had a picture but we just breezed by. At the time, it looked like the road scared the fuck out of him. His expression seemed to say, "What madness has man wrought with this?" Thinking back he also looked like he had just escaped from a massacre or something. But that didn't hit me at the time.

I thought of the monkey yesterday as I was bicycling down Prince street in Soho and glimpsed this strong, Italian-looking man with a healthy five o'clock shadow trying to take a picture with a profession looking digital camera. He exuded confidence and certainly looked the part of a famous photographer but what what he doing taking a shot of a facade in Soho. I mean where is the art in that? Soho is like so over-played now isn't it? I mean is there any art going down there any more, anyway? I remember back in the day when there were only about three restaurants and the ever present smell of baking that left tourists searching for the source after they had their Sunday brunches only to discover it came from a factory and the galleries didn't open on Sundays. I remember sitting on the scrap metal sculptures in the motorcycle park on Broome street with my friend Noel after we'd checked out the record shop over on Prince street _ forget the name of it but it might of been something like the Music Gallery, I was really into Public Image and early Clash at the time. And then Soho just kept growing and growing until it looked more like Rodeo Drive than anywhere else, more shopping, less art. Still, it's fun to bike through it on these hot spring days to see the pretty woman and men all shopping and eating in the outdoor cafes.

But the Italian photographer, he can't be real, can he? He should be in Bushwick or somewhere in Brooklyn these days, maybe even Newark or who knows the Bronx. Look at what madness man has wrought with this.

Get Your Mother Off The Crack

If you pressed me for my favorite rap song of all times, I'd have to say it was "Top Billing," by the Audio Two. It's really bare bones and the kid rapping "Milk Dee," is all business, he just gets to the point: "I get money, money I got / Stunts call me honey if they feel real hot / That's how it is, you can ask Giz / I stole your girl while you were in prison / Jail, for MC assault / You was jealous it's all your fault." They had a couple of other good songs, too like "I Don't Care" and "The Questions," but I think their next best song had to be "Get Your Mother off the Crack." You know the song is great because they didn't have to call it "Get Yo Momma Off Da Crack," it's just that real. Anyway, check it out.

I bring this up because I came up DJing during the 1980s crack epidemic. In fact, my first stab at white boy rapping was the song "I Want Some Crack," which I wrote back in 1986 or so. So yes, it's true. I invented Crack Rap, much props due. Thank-you. Thank-you. Anyway, it was a funny time that, all these really skittish people hanging around pre-gentrified Williamsburg making me nervous: hoes turning tricks by the river and then walking past my apartment to score some crack from the Latin dudes over on Driggs and then heading back toward the river to give some more head. I read somewhere that some crime experts don't think the drop in New York crime statistics had that much to do with Rudolf Giuliani's "Zero Tolerance" policies as much as it did with the crack epidemic just burning itself out. That makes sense. If you saw the folks I saw cracking up you wouldn't want to go there. You would, in fact, want to get your mother off the crack soon as possible. It wasn't like the that Furious Five song "White Lines" that told you "don't do it," but that all coke heads got pumped up dancing to anyway. "Get Your Mother Off the Crack," wasn't a party song, no way, no how. It was a stone cold diss.

I bring this up to point out how much things have changed since I've returned from Brazil. I left right around the time Giulani took office. Today, no more crack hoes, not too many addicts hanging 'round and rap has gotten pretty damn baroque compared with what the Audio Two was doing back in the day. This point is well illustrated in the movie 17 Again (which is actually, not bad). As you might already know, or could probably figure out, the movie is about a guy who gets to re-live his high school years again. So in the late 1980s the cheer leaders dance to Young MC's "Bust a Move," and today it's Fergie's "Fergalicious." Needless to say, I really dug the old school but the cheer leader moves for Fergalicious were just that.

Okay, so what's my point here? This whole digression was touched off by digging through You Tube and coming upon some videos by friend Bo. Bo is this really top notch DJ based in Rio de Janeiro who plays capoeira and travels around the world producing tracks for third world rappers. Basically, all the stuff I would have really liked to do when I moved down to Rio but instead I became a foreign correspondent and raised a family. Oh yeah, Bo also surfs, which is something I could slap myself for never learning having lived for nearly 15 years a few blocks away from a surf break. But here's the thing, I was busy trying to get myself together as a journalist and a pop and never found the time. And now that I'm back in New York on an editing desk, I'm starting to see just how glamorous the path I did choose to take might seem to those of you who aren't me. But I'm always a road not taken kind of sucker. But anyway, I got over all the envy stuff and instead I'll share with you some Maga Bo videos for your enjoyment. Any of this making sense?



Oh yeah, there's a post script: I was walking down Av. Visconde Piraja one night with Nicholas about a year or so ago and we ran into Bo who Nicholas hadn't met before or had but was too little to remember. And after we said good-bye Nicholas asked who he was and I filled him in. When we got home Nicholas told Ivandy "Yeah, and we met a DJ friend of Papa's from back in the day. He needed a haircut."



And check out Bo's blog:

http://comandodigital.com/kolleidosonic/

Living on the Top Floor

A heat wave's descended on the Bay Area, and it's about 80 degrees in my apartment right now at 10:17 p.m. I live on the top floor of my apartment building, and the walls of my place are still radiating heat. My cat Canela - a Sao Paulo native - was in a coma when I came home tonight. He usually meows wildly to greet me when I come home. I was glad he was still alive.

The heat started yesterday, and I celebrated by driving out to the hottest part of the Bay Area, Mount Diablo, and going on a five-mile hike. I hadn't been out that way in four years, when I used to work in the area. Driving around, I was amazed by how much I still remembered of Contra Costa County. "That mini mall wasn't there four years ago," I pointed out as we drove by. "Clayton Road's another few miles ahead." And it was.

We got out on the trail and learned that an extreme Marathon was happening on the mountain. We saw lots of rather tired-looking people with numbers pinned to their chests struggle along the trails holding containers of precious water in their hands. One even held a whole gallon jug of water. From what I could gather, they were running 50 miles around the mountain. 50 miles! Culture shock again. I don't remember people doing that when I was last here. The oughts have been a masochistic few years for Americans, I thought to myself.

Speaking of masochism, we trekked up the mountain, through wavy fields of grass, past oak trees, along a weak little creek, and pleasantly, the heat stayed under control. Swept poured down my face, nonetheless, dripping down my sunglasses, mixing with my sunblock into a pungent glaze. A pungent glaze. 

On the way back home, we stopped at a gas station mini mart to snack up. I ducked into a High Tech Burrito. Inside, two guys in their early-20s were working behind the counter taking orders, wrapping burritos. A young woman also in her early-20s walked in and knew both the guys and they all chatted about something I couldn't quite catch. A middle-aged woman walked in and also knew one of the guys. I imagined the web of connections between these people - the schools, football games, pool parties, parents' friends. Suburban America. Another dose of culture shock.

By the time we got to the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, with the bay misty on the horizon, I was glad to be back in this cooler, less insular, more anonymous world. That's how I felt the hundreds of time I drove through that tunnel and emerged on the other end during the years I worked out in the suburbs. Like taking a deep breath of fresh air. 

Chang is Missing

Okay, and I've been a little a.w.o.l. myself. Where have I been? Around, reading, thinking and I've come to some conclusions. I've also pulled a muscle really badly so I'm limping around town. One thing I've decided is to put back most of the stuff I took off the blog. We discovered the posts are cached anyway _ that's kind of what freaked Jack out, the whole Hotel California aspect of life on-line: You can take it off the blog anytime you want but it will never leave. See? Anyway, I've decided to stand up and be accountable, not tonight, maybe tomorrow, though. I've also been reading a bit about Ian McEwan and Donald Barthelme _ an old hero _ I've also been reading a bit about Nixon, an old villain. It's a really interesting history called Nixonland, which describes the cultural climate during the years I was growing up. A lot of people consider growing up their teens etc. I consider growing up like the time I was four, five, six and seven. I was kind of over the hill at 22 _ or rather approaching my mid-life crisis. not that I plan to die young or anything like that. If anything I'm hoping for a second burst of enthusiasm. Okay, so the Nixonland stuff got me to thinking about how little I knew about the background of things I'd been living and feeling in those heady late 60s early 70s days. A lot of the hippie stuff, the revolutionary stuff I was feeling, spewing was just kind of in the air, I had no idea about the context, what came before. Being all that young, I may not have even knew what was really happening but I could feel it, it was blowin' in the wind and back then Bobby Dylan would tell you, that you don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When I get back to this and edit it some I'll add a link here with stuff Bob Dylan said about Obama, which I think is pertinent. I like Bob Dylan because he hit on a time all so well. Then he kind of lost it for a while, but lately he's kind of attuned to what it's like to be an old guy _ this is what I'm trying to figure out. How to position myself at 44. (Note to myself: link to article about people over 45 being out of work longer in yesterday's New York Times.)

That's another thing I'm trying to do with this blog, more links. Just that I'm too lazy when I'm writing to go through the whole process. I fear that first adapter of this blog will miss out on the final versions of things, but that's how I work in washes. I do something rough and then tighten and if I'm lucky tighten and tighten. Things I think are worth linking to today: DJ MagaBo's mini documentary of Ghislain Poirier and Marc Bittman's column about exotic greens because Ghislain reminds me of the name of some kind of exotic green. I'd also like to link to the catalogue for Michael Jackson's cancelled Neverland auction, which is better than a Matthew Barney exhibit. Note to the readers: if for any reason you want to buy me a pricey present I'd really like the boxed set of catalogues.

Anyway, have you ever heard about the shy photographer syndrome? It's apparently very common, in fact I learned of from a guy I consider a very good photographer and apparently he suffers from it, too. It's when you can't just get into someone's face to get the shot. Well, the photo above is a good example of the shy photographer syndrome, but I think it works. I liked all the orange going on with her and the view from the back expressed it better than from the front. Her face distracted from all the Orange and wicked witch of the west boots. It also leaves a sense of longing that I needed for the Chang is Missing theme, which you probably guess is a homage to Wayne Wang's first feature Chan is Missing, which will probably piss Jack off on some level. But that's not what I'm trying to do. What am I trying to do? Well, express something new and original pull it all together like Donald Barthelme or maybe like, oh I'll figure it out. You don't have to watch but I'll figure it out, so stay tuned. Carnaval may be over but there's another one on the way.

Lunch with Miss Lizza

I had a very nice lunch with my friend Lizza yesterday. I met Lizza a couple of years ago in Rio when she came into the AP offices to work as an intern. She was very green and I busted her chops a bit to make what? Red? Well, anyhow she went back to the states and went to Colombia Journalism School and today she's a staff writer on the Village Voice. Congratulations. It turns out she's one of the few people from her class to get a job, so I guess double congratulations are in order. At our lunch, she did, however, express some of the discomfort all of us feel in this business for various reasons, but I won't go into details because we all know where that has gotten us on this blog. The point is that when you have a cool job, like her's certainly is, you kind of take it for granted. When you don't have it, it seems like a job to die for. As fed up as I got with my job in Rio I knew there was no lack of fools dying to take it. The fact that the pay is never very good doesn't come into play much until you get hired. But she's youngin' and the Village Voice is a cool (though not as cool as it used to be) paper to be hooked up with. I mean cool in the way that you can hear about cool things happening around town, you get paid to have your ear to ground and hang around others in the same situation. The thing that appeals to me is being able to go around the city and ferret out stories. I never did that in New York, sometimes I think I'd like to be metro reporter or even a cop. I knew a guy in Rio who used to go back to Berlin for vacation and work as a Taxi driver just to get back in touch with his home town. I just like walking around different neighborhoods and seeing what's going on, I'm interested just to discover what is there. Niether would I mind being one of those reporters who does the kind of column showing cool things you can buy around town, I just dig checking things out. But now I have a wife, two kids and a dog to support so I'm not going to be doing that stuff I don't think.

The other thing during my lunch with Lizza is that I noticed that we are both in different stages of Brasilophilia. I know it sounds disgusting doesn't it? But she arranged to meet at the Brazilian coffee shop where I waited for her drinking, what I consider, awful espresso and piss poor pao de queijo. She is still at the point where it all seems marvellous. (I'll explain below why Brazilian coffee just aint't that great, though toward the end of my stay in Brazil I was beginning to be able to find export quality coffee which was decent if expensive.) I'm past that, I think I have a pretty realistic take on things, I pine for Brazil fully aware of how shitty so much of it is and how shitty so many things are here. Lizza said when she met me I was very down on Brazil, which is probably true, but then I haven't wonder if I'm not very down on everything _ maybe I'm too much of a complainer. I should probably stop it. Whatever. Lizza took the above pictures so I thought they were fitting for this post, I'm not sure why she sent them to me but what the hell.

Below please find the low down on Brazilian coffee for your reading pleasure. It's a little out of date, I wrote it in 1998 but you'll get the idea:

^Brazil is land of coffee, but good luck finding tasty cup to drink<
^By MICHAEL ASTOR=
^Associated Press Writer=
¶ POCOS DE CALDAS, Brazil (AP) _ Sure, Brazilians down enough thimble-sized "cafezinhos" to make them the world's second-largest nation of coffee drinkers after the United States.
¶ It's also true Brazil is the largest producer and exporter of coffee.
¶ But that doesn't mean it's easy finding a steaming cup of good coffee.
¶ "Brazilians have gotten used to drinking bad coffee," laments Jose Barbosa do Rosario, who edits Coffee Business magazine.
¶ Brazilians grew accustomed to bad coffee in the 1960s, when the government decided that instead of destroying the accumulating mountains of coffee beans it was obliged to buy from growers, it would practically give surplus beans away to domestic roasters.
¶ Because good quality beans commanded higher prices on the international market, the coffee left over was usually poor, and Brazilians got used to it.
¶ "It doesn't pay to produce quality coffee if there's no market for it," grower Oswaldo Aranha Neto says.
¶ There are, however, some encouraging signs.
¶ The Association of Brazilian Coffee Producers is running a school to train restaurant and cafe operators how to make good coffee. And the Brazilian Coffee Industry Association recently began awarding a seal of purity to roasters who can prove their coffee is pure.
¶ Purity does not necessarily spell quality, though. Because of the harvesting techniques employed, Brazil ends up with more bad coffee beans than some other countries.
¶ In Colombia, for instance, coffee berries are picked from the trees only when they are ripe. In Brazil, the berries are taken in a single swoop. Unripe, overripe, bug-eaten and broken beans are sifted out later by machines.
¶ It is those rejected beans that are the raw material for all those cafezinhos _ "little coffees" _ that Brazilians know and love.

Book Report

Here's a book review I just wrote for Evan Wright's new book. I shared a house with Evan (and a couple of other guys) the second semester of senior year at Vassar. We lost touch a while ago. He was very mild mannered and easy going, he unnerved the hell out of me by spending the whole of exam week planted on the couch watching television when everybody was freaking out and cramming. I doubt he even left the couch to take any exams, it was that bad. I took the picture above in the fall, during our disasterous stay on Long Island. When I took the picture it made me think of the Clash song "Safe European Home," even though it was an American home and it made we wonder what people were doing at that very moment in some of those small hamlets I'd visited deep in the Brazilian Amazon and I thought about how vast a world we lived in. Looking back at the photo it also says "Hella America" to me. Here's my unedited review of "Hella Nation":

¶ The September 11 attacks left more than a few Americans shocked to discover the depth of anti-U.S. hatred that exists in some corners of the world. Many of these same Americans would also probably have been shocked to learn life in these far-flung places bears little resemblance to the modern day U.S.A. with all the conveniences they have come to take for granted.
¶ That point is effectively driven home in the first chapter of Evan Wright's "Hella Nation," where US army troops stationed in Afghanistan are easily conned by an Afghan translator into believing the former-Taliban stronghold of Kandahar with its "medieval bazaars and dirt roads clogged with donkeys and chickens" also has a McDonald's of its own. One soldier, pining for someone to make a chow run, shouts out, "Get me Supersize everything."
¶ "Hella Nation" _ a collection of 12 previously published magazine articles written for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and LA Weekly among others _ is filled with details like this, painting a comically macabre portrait of present day America with a clear and sober eye.
¶ Wright made his name with his first book, 2004's "Generation Kill," chronicling his time with the United States Marine Corps as an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone. That book has been adapted into an HBO miniseries, complete with a character standing in for the author. Not bad for someone who got his start reviewing adult movies for Hustler magazine. "Hella Nation" is essentially the story of his unlikely road to success.
¶ Most of this information is in the newly-penned autobiographic introduction, but the stories that follow serve to flesh out his character and fill us in on his career path. In the book, Wright's father praises his son's promotion to Rolling Stone's unofficial ambassador to America's underbelly as being "one step up from ambassador to the crotch." It's a mere question of degrees, but the difference is an important one.
¶ Wright traces his success back to the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California that provided magazines like Hustler a loophole that allowed them to avoid obscenity charges, provided they publish at least one article a month that aspired to serious value. This requirement gave Wright his chance to shine after publisher Larry Flynt _ who believed white supremacists were behind the 1978 shooting that left him paralyzed _ gave him a break from reviewing porn movies and assigned him an article about the Aryan Nations _ included in the book.
¶ The other factor to which Wright attributes his success is Alcoholics Anonymous.
¶ Wright's work _ which has taken him from desert war zones to forest canopies in the company of eco-anarchists and into homes of HIV positive porn starlets _ have been likened to the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
¶ It's a comparison Wright rejects.
¶ He claims his reporting differs from Thompson's in that it is more about the subject than it is about the reporter. But that's a difficult argument to make when Wright's stories find him in such odd positions as wistfully regretting not holding the hand of crying porn star Jasmin St. Claire as she prepares to blow flames out of her rectum or driving around with anarchists preparing to vandalize symbols of corporate America.
¶ This is not a bad thing, since his stories are more interesting when makes an appearance. Portraits of ultimate fighter Tito Ortiz and the rock group Motley Crue are good, but don't rise too much above standard magazine fare. His article, "Scenes from My Life in Porn," originally published in the LA Weekly, is by contrast a near masterpiece and his portrait of Pat Dollard, who abandoned a successful career as a Hollywood agent to produce pro-war films in Iraq, verges on the epic.
¶ Wright may have even created his own genre of reporting: "Hella Journalism," which rather than viewing the world through a cascade of drugs and alcohol, applies the prism of a 12-step program to a society that has thoroughly assimilated Thompson's gozno excess.
¶ Here, for example, is Wright describing conservative commentator Ann Coulter asking Dollard to blow cigarette smoke in her face at their first meeting: "She leans her oblong, Brazil-nut-shaped face toward Dollard's lips, and he exhales through his yellow, cracked teeth. Coulter, who later explains she recently quit smoking and is still jonesing for tobacco, shuts her eyes and coos, 'Thank you.'" In short, the terminology of addiction and the lack of repugnance at the yellow, cracked teeth have all become acceptable part of the national discourse in the quest for a legal high.
¶ Although some of the stories predate the Bush years, the book comes together as a powerful portrait of America during that time. Many of the characters who inhabit Wright's landscape can be boiled down into some form of con man or prostitute, who in this era rife with reality TV and toxic mortgages, in many ways have come to stand in as our new American idols.

The Bitch is Back

Sorry I haven't been posting anything lately but yes, that unpleasant experience from last week dampened my appetite for writing the blog. I'm trying to figure out how to navigate all this. I was talking to a friend Sunday about the whole episode, and he said he had no clue why anyone would put themselves out there like that with twitter, Facebook, blogs and the like. Why cause yourself trouble and reveal yourself to people who may not have your best interests at heart? Why create trouble for yourself? What do you get out of it?

I kind of agreed at the time, especially just days after the blog fiasco. I mean, I've been enjoying doing the blog, and it really is my only creative outlet these days, but what am I getting out of it? It seemed the potential for harm, as demonstrated last week, outweighed the potential for good.

So I've had trouble figuring out what to write now. I've opened the "New Post" page a few times over the past week and hemmed and hawed, maybe even typed a few words, but then closed the page. OK, I've pledged not to write about my old company at all, not that I wrote about it very much before, but why share personal details with the whole world?

But then again, should I let all this silence me? I'm still trying to figure it out. Maybe, I'll just post pictures of cute animals like in cute overload. Or talk about the 5K I ran last Saturday in Napa, my first ever race. Or just keep it to Brazil nostalgia. Or why write anything? Is all this communication doing anybody any good? Still figuring it out. Will report back.

Growing Up (Old?) in Public

So just a week or so ago we were happily (or sadly _ a friend said this blog was sad) chugging along, picking up steam wondering if we had any readers or what we might do to attract more readers when we found out we did have readers in the worst way. Seems some of Jack's post about his former job found their way on to someone else's blog and were read by people who still worked there and they were hurt by the sentiments expressed. I didn't think he said anything hurtful, but when you're scared about losing your job and someone is performing the mathematics of elimination, even math can be pretty scary. So Jack pulled all the stuff he posted relating to his former job and warned me to read over what I'd written just to make sure I didn't get in trouble with my job. I did some minor editing, but didn't feel too concerned about anything I had written. Then I thought about an article I'm writing about white supremacist groups and that after it gets published, or even since I've already done the interviews, they might Google me and learn about my opinions and things like where my kids go to school _ so I woke up and pulled all that stuff. A university guy who studies these groups did actually Google before agreeing to be interviewed and was surprised to find I wasn't still in Brazil. Did anyone even notice the blog has gotten a little thinner? I doubt it, but then these are leaner times, heh, heh. Well, it's kind of pain that only press we seem to be able to get is bad press. We haven't had a single comment posted, though I heard someone tried but couldn't. I think I've fixed that. I'd also like to thank our two followers and apologize for not be more diligent about posting lately but the whole experience sort of got us down. I saw Jack even posted something explaining that he'd pulled stuff and then he pulled even that and I haven't heard from him since. Which brings me to the photograph of the guy up above. He's got a really cool look, especially his beard which is hard to make out in the photo. I invaded his privacy to take the picture, but didn't have the courage to get up real close for a better shot even though he was sleeping. But with my iPhone it was pretty easy and discreet to take the picture. This is the new world we live in where we live our lives in public, on-line and all our faux-pas and foibles are easily (and cheaply) beamed around the globe. That may be why soon we won't be needing journalists anymore. Nor will we need record companies, books on paper, movie theaters whatever. I'm not bemoaning it, there's really no point, since it is pretty much inevitable, unless of course the Internet crashes. Wow, what an impact that would have.