So I've been traveling.

Just when I was getting going again, other things got in the way.

Like having to leave the frozen east for the more enjoyable climate of San Francisco.

San Francisco was hosting one of those academic conferences in one of those big non-descript hotels that occupy the areas around the business districts of American cities. This one happened to be down around Market Street, within an easy walk of the Ferry Terminal, which has a nice farmers market on the weekend.

There was also a storefront from some boutique olive oil manufacturer that sold rather expensive olive oil and olive trees to boot. I'd love to have an olive tree, but I'm not sure it would grow in my current location. I'd love even more to have an avocado tree, but again I doubt the climate would suit it around here.

We didn't stay at the conference hotel or anywhere near Market, really. It's sort of expensive and again sort of generic. There are times when it's very convenient to stay at or near the conference hotel (MLA in LA earlier this month being one of those times), but sometimes it's extremely enjoyable to distance yourself physically and mentally from the conference. We stayed at a place that played a bit role in one of my favorite films. They claim to be a Nob Hill hotel, and in some ways they are, but really it's the edge of Nob Hill and they could be as easily the upper Tenderloin as lower Nob Hill, and besides it's only three blocks from their door to Polk Street, a particularly gritty nightlife area that recalls Adams Morgan but with more menace.

However, I wouldn't characterize the neighborhood as run down or dangerous. Neither the Tenderloin nor Polk are what they were in the mid-1990's, which is to say they're considerably more mundane, although not gentrified. As for the hotel, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who asks. Just get a renovated room, because that's half the kick.

The conference went well, because I know you were waiting for me to get around to it. Fortunately, the panel I was on was one of the first panels and in addition to having a nearly full room with some good exchanges during the question and answer, I knew that by Thursday afternoon, I was finished worrying about the presentation and could relax for the remainder, which I did. I took a few panels off to visit Coit Tower in particular and North Beach in general, and while the Coit Tower elevator was closed for repairs, I hadn't planned on going up the tower anyway; I just like the murals and views from the grounds are great. We even saw a few of the parrots that make Telegraph Hill their home.

Food: House of Nanking (a favorite of ours on Kearny). The food is excellent, but if you are someone who thinks you should be pampered as a customer, I'd give it a miss. They're pretty brusque. The last time I was there, the place looked like a total dive. This time, the interior had been remodeled and the menu prices reflected that capital investment. I liked the dive look better.

Food: North Beach Pizza (another favorite). Since we'd been there last, the joint had moved across the street. The old location was a bit cramped, always crowded, and not exactly suited to efficient movement. The new place has a really high ceiling and an open design, as well as significantly higher capacity. The pizza is still excellent, especially with a bottle of straw basket chianti.

Food: Gamine (a new one for us). We were walking around Union Street looking for food and came upon this gem. It's tiny and owner-operated, which is a definite plus in my book. It was also stocked with several regulars, as evidenced by the owner's personal attention and setting up of complimentary dessert wines. While we didn't receive such attention, the atmosphere was enjoyable, except for the drunk twenty-something who was hitting on the co-owner, who was the wife of the other owner. I had moules mariniere and pomme frittes, both of which were very very very good -- the sauce had a nice amount of garlic and pepper in it. It was a bit overpriced ($15 for the mussels and $5 for the frittes -- they didn't come as a package as I believe they do at Bistrot du Coin), but not horrifically out of line.

We had some other meals, but I'll leave those to your imagination. Not that I've described these meals in particular.

Air travel is a pain.

Couldn't even stay away a month...

I was down at the NGA last weekend mainly trying to find a place to read where I wouldn't be bothered before I headed over to some friends on Capitol Hill who were putting me up for the night, since, after all, this was my first trip back to DC as a visitor rather than a resident in 15 years.

After a bit of reading and a little consternation that the movie that day, Antonioni's Deserta rossa, didn't start until 4:30 and would last until 6:30, therefore ruling out my being able to watch it, I decided I should really try to see something while at the gallery. For the past eight years it's been an incredibly rare opportunity that I've been at any museum without at least one child dragging me off long before I wanted to go, and you have to take advantage when you can. So I wandered into the West Wing to take a look at the Martin Puryear exhibition.

Puryear is from D.C., although his artistic materials seem more suited to some rural farm -- lots of rough wood and mesh enclosures that reminded me of chicken pens -- although highly stylized chicken pens. Some of the pieces are remarkable. I enjoyed the scale of the Desire (pictured at top of page, and hopefully you see what I mean about there being something rustic about the whole contraption. It almost seems like one of those old style threshing set ups but broken down to minimal form and shifted components. Very beautiful in my opinion.

I got my gallery fix in, but I couldn't help wishing I had a little more time to see the Antonioni film and maybe even the concert they generally have on Sunday evenings in one of the west wing atriums, staples of our pre-children days. Afterwards it was off to Capitol Hill and a delicious dinner with a little wine and lots of conversation -- after all, DC schools opened the next day and my hosts have a third grader -- and oh yes a little more reading.

Ocean City may be a pit, but I've cumulatively spent about a year and a half of my life there.

I was down in Ocean City, MD, recently, enjoying some beautiful weather and Thrasher fries and being amazingly out of touch with teh internets. Unplugging can be a beautiful thing, at least for a time. Unfortunately, if you need to interact with other parts of the world, being unplugged can be mighty inconvenient. Email tends to pile up.

On the beach, I was noticing all these aging bodies with their sad tattoos and thinking that for most people, tattoos are really only attractive -- if at all -- for a short period of your late youth. Look, I'm not young and I've never in my life been confused for chiseled, but I can guarantee you that my modest spread would look even worse with a tattoo adorning my sagging tapestry. As you might guess, the "tramp stamp" does not age well.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, our lifeguard was a great trip. Every few hours another lifeguard would relieve him, and he would use his break to do pushups and crunches behind the lifeguard chair, much to the delight of the ladies and perhaps a few men. He became even more intriguing one day when he called the beachgoers over to his chair for the obligatory shorebreak speech and unleashed his foreign accent on the assembly. Turns out he was Quebecois, a fact we discovered the day we moved out of our rental apartment only to realize we'd been living next to him the whole week.

Speaking of our little rental apartment, we had a little surprise when we arrived late on Sunday night. The typical move-in day in the OC is Saturday, but we were otherwise occupied, so someone else picked our keys up and held them for us until we arrived...late Sunday night. So around midnight, we're coming up to the door of the place and the TV is on. I turn the key and come face to face with some shirtless man who turns out to be the owner of the unit who thought no one had rented it that week. A little embarrassing all around, but he picked his sheet and pillow up off the sofa and drove off in his truck to parts unknown.

Dropping the veil.

My my my it's been a busy few weeks.


Let me let you in on a little secret.


I'm leaving the District of Columbia. Lighting out from the territories, if you will. To a bona fide state, or at least a commonwealth, and I'm not talking about that nasty place across the river.


When I first moved here in 1993, to the lush semi-suburbs of Woodley Park, I had no intention of staying a decade, let alone 15 years. Last year I had no intention (or at least prospects) of leaving. But chance rolls the dice.


I was a young lad then, not exactly strapping, but young nevertheless. I worked a night job at a university and trudged home winter nights after the Metro had closed and before I understood -- or cared to understand -- the bus system, stopping briefly at KramerBooks to browse the literature and philosophy sections as I warmed up for the big walk up the hill and over the Taft Bridge.


Then it was Logan Circle, where my roommate and I would watch the prostitutes chatting up the line of johns in their cars stretching down N Street by the all night gas station. That's when the Circle itself was nearly deserted except for the homeless and dealers and 14th Street's main features were the Black Cat and Barrel House Liquors.

Finally, I settled in Adams Morgan when I tell you -- and I kid you not -- a spacious two-bedroom with a beautiful westward view could be had for $850/mo utils incl... The Diner was an auto supply store, those red brick Adams Lofts, whose architecture I think was inspired by the Holocaust Museum, were nothing more than a surface parking lot, and Club Heaven was still playing some of the shittiest music ever recorded.

Let's give thanks for the good things...El Tamarindo, Astor Mediterranean, the recently departed San Marco (which beat the pants off Pasta Mia), The Common Share, Idle Times, DCCD, Crooked Beat, walking to the Zoo, biking anywhere else...

I suppose I could post a more general lamentation about the death of the District's independent and used bookstores...Kultura, Neil's, Vertigo, a basement place on U Street between 15th and 16th whose name escapes me now, Chapters (though they claim they're not closed...). Fortunately, we've still got Bridge Street Books, Idle Times, and Second Story.

Movie theatres, record stores...you know the run down. Hats off to the Biograph, the Key, the Janus, and the savior of all tight graduate student budgets, the Foundry.

OK.

Well, I'm not shutting down shop quite yet, but I'm not sure what the future brings.

Until next time...

So long, Buffalo.

Buffalo was a hoot. The city has beautiful bones, but unfortunately much of those bones are laid bare by the economic depression that followed the collapse of the shipping and steel industries. I suppose photos will follow once I'm fully back and functional, but in the meantime you'll have to take my word for it.

This was a business trip, or as much of a business trip as possible when you and your wife are toting along two children, so we weren't there completely to see the sights, and we spent much of the time in a hotel in downtown Buffalo.

It's extremely difficult to get a six pack of beer in downtown Buffalo. Sure you can find a bar, no problem, but try to find a six pack of beer and you'll wish you'd started sooner. While they apparently sell beer in CVS stores in New York, in downtown Buffalo if you try to go to CVS after eight p.m., you're out of luck. 8 p.m. -- What sort of CVS closes at 8 p.m.? Convenience my ass.

We settled on buying five bottles of Labatt's Blue from the hotel bar for a price that would have bought us a case with some change anywhere else.

Outside our business itinerary, we squeezed in a trip to Niagara Falls, both American and Canadian sides, and were amazed both at the beauty of the falls and the utter tastelessness of the detritus that has sprung up around the falls. In a show of extremely bad taste, some geniuses have lit the falls at night with multi-colored lights, turning a natural wonder into a monument to human mismanagement.

We had a minor incident returning from Canada, because we didn't have passports or birth certificates on hand for our children. We'd forgotten that ever since the US broke diplomatic relations with the barbarians to the north, it's been a tense border situation. After hinting that perhaps we were smuggling in Canadian style Manchurian Candidates who would eventually grow up, take powerful positions within the US government, and betray us to the Canadians -- or at least make us go metric -- he let us through.

More on the Canadian bits later...

Random Thursday.

Happy New Year, or better late than never.

It's been a week since I was in D.C., but driving down Connecticut Avenue last night around 9:30, I felt like it had been a month. Maybe it's because the train ride from Chicago had been so long -- a seven hour layover in Pittsburgh made it a nearly 24 hour journey -- or maybe it's because we simply ran ourselves ragged on every leg of the trip.

In Pittsburgh, with seven hours to kill, we visited the Andy Warhol Museum, seven floors of fun just across the 7th Avenue Bridge on the North Side. It had been several years since our last visit, and it seems that in the interim the museum has decided that Warhol's work alone isn't enough to keep the museum fresh, and two floors almost completely featured work by other artists (Bruce Nauman and Ron Mueck).

I'm also pleasantly surprised to say that after four days in Chicago, where they put meat in everything from soups to sodas, we were able to get beautiful salads in Pittsburgh, a town not exactly known for healthy eating. Lest my dear readers think I'm knocking Chicago, which is a first class city, I will admit that we hardly went out of our way to find good food. In fact, at least half of the meals were eaten either in the hotels of the MLA or the underground tunnels connecting the hotels. OK, let's be honest...at least 75% of meals were consumed that way.

A quick rundown of the MLA would go like this: saw friends, saw panels, bought or weaseled my way into many books, chatted up a few press acquisition reps, moderated a panel that was surprisingly well attended, given its kiss of death time slot, and finally spent the last few hours in Chicago at the Art Institute. Most of the modern American art is unavailable or scattered throughout the museum, as they're undergoing a pretty ambitious expansion and have many galleries closed. Also, a Jasper Johns exhibit was taking up way too much space. I like some of his stuff, but after two shows at the National Gallery of Art earlier this year, I think I'm Jasper Johnsed-Out for a time. Besides, the show was called "Gray," and featured his grayscale paintings, which after about five rooms starts to overload.

As for New Years Resolutions, I resolve this year to work on publications. That's a modest enough goal, I think.

Pre Holiday Preparations.

Here it is. Day before Thanksgiving. DC has a certain lull to it in the days leading up to holiday breaks, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, as people leave town trying to beat the last minute rush. We're just sitting tight and waiting until tomorrow morning, when no one is generally on the road, because we've done the Wednesday afternoon thing only to have a three hour drive turn into a five and a half hour drive.

Although the past two years, I've been in charge of the pumpkin pie baking, my mother informs me that this year my services are no longer needed in that department, unless of course I want to make a pie of another flavor. Apparently she's picked up on the fact that I haven't exactly had a lot of time on my hands this fall.

Since we'll have some free babysitting, we'll probably try to catch a movie here or here, even though they both have a crappy selection. I have absolutely no hope of catching up on reading while in a house occupied by at least four and often as many as 8 children between the ages 2.5 and 12. However, the book I'm about to begin is Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

I'll see what happens.

I'm sorry Mr. Pynchon.

I finally finished V. It took forever -- I think I began the book sometime in the foggy memory of summer, when reading ambitions heighten with all the phantom free time that disappears like so many grains of sand through your sandchair...

It's not a bad book...it just didn't interest me. I suppose the Stencil bits interested me, because that's where Pynchon was at his conspiracy theory that could completely be all in your head best, but the Whole Sick Crew just bored me to death. Sure there were funny bits, but in the end it's like one of those stories your friend tells, and when you don't laugh he says, I guess you had to be there.

It will probably grow on me and I will come to terms with it in the trajectory of post-WWII literature and the dawn of the Postmodern, but at this point what it's done is moved my 2nd attempt at Gravity's Rainbow much further down my reading queue.

I'd packed Zadie Smith's White Teeth with me last weekend in the bizarre reasoning that I would easily finish V. on the train ride north, but I was nowhere close. I read about thirty to forty pages on the way up and passed out until Trenton, I believe. Then the weekend was a blur. So I found myself pushing through the last hundred pages of V. as I headed south, exhausted from the weekend but trying to stay awake so I could put that book back on the shelf when I returned to Adams Morgan.

And dear readers, I did just that.

Recent recollections of Yosemite.

Yosemite is the type of place you don't really want to leave once you've gotten there. First there's the scale of everything, from the Giant Sequoias, to the waterfalls, to the cliff walls. Then there's the beauty in every detail, from the moss and lichen giving stones distinctive patterns to the flitting shadow of a deer or bobcat. You could probably spend a month straight there and not run out of things to do (although I think more than a week or two with small children might drive you batty). The weather was warmer than normal, around 70 degrees every day, and we hiked about as much as you can with small children in tow.


One day we hiked to the top of Vernal Fall. It's only a mile and a half from the bottom to the top, but much of that is more or less straight up. Vernal Fall is beautiful, a thick long sheet of water plunging onto huge chunks of raw granite and throwing so much spray that the upper part of the trail is called "Mist Trail." At that point you're climbing wet rough cut granite stairs and if you're me you're reminding yourself that you're almost there and damn it'd be a shame to turn back now even though you really really want to stop climbing.


You do eventually want to keep climbing, though, because you know you'll get to the top and once at the top you won't have to do anymore climbing, you'll get to sit down on a big slab of rock, close your eyes, and listen to the water rushing. You can also stand at the edge of the fall and look down into the valley below:

In the bottom right, you can see the water as it begins falling over the edge. In the lower left you can see little dots of people climbing along the trail as it winds up the mountainside. Other hikers were lying in the sun, resting from the climb, eating their lunches. Like us, many of them would be turning around to head back down the trail after a short rest, but some would be continuing up the trail another two miles to Nevada Fall. We saw a pair of hikers coming the other way with cross country skis strapped to their backs; outside the valley, there's still snow on the ground in places and many of the high trails are closed because of ice.

It's much easier coming down, by the way.

See you later, alligator.

I'm outta here for a short time, hitting the west coast for a little rest and relaxation. If I get into internet access, I might post and I might not. When I return, though, I will post pictures.

New Orleans Redux

To begin with, the New Orleans that tourists see -- the New Orleans that makes people visit -- has not been destroyed. In fact, the French Quarter was remarkably undamaged by the storm itself or the flooding afterwards. Probably the most damage that has been done to the French Quarter has been the loss of the tourists, who have for one reason or another not come to the city in the numbers they once had. The major tourist hotels surrounding Canal Street are fully functional, so it's not a question of room availability.



However, whole neighborhoods have been destroyed. The houses are there, but they're so heavily damaged that they're unliveable, and with the destruction of the neighborhoods there's been a ripple effect: the loss of population, the loss of small businesses set up to serve the local population, the loss of large retail to serve the local population, the loss of jobs that all those businesses provided, and on up. This mall is one example:


I didn't get a shot of it, but there was also a huge Wal*Mart building shuttered up, another victim of the storm and the devastation of the neighborhoods it served. You know it's bad when a vulture like Wal*Mart can't re-open.

Block after block, in section after section, homes are abandoned. Some are visibly damaged from the storm, but others look as if they're simply empty (except in many cases for the tell-tale sign of a high water mark on the siding or brick). Nearly all have the spray-paint marks familiar to those of us who watched the post-Katrina coverage. The spray-paint indicates the date it was searched, the agency searching, and the results of the search. Sometimes short messages are also painted on the houses.

But New Orleans is resilient, even with fewer people and fewer tourists. The population that's there dearly love their city, but they aren't terribly excited about the help they've gotten from federal or state agencies. We should also remember that one of the Bush Administration's most forceful steps in "rebuilding" the area was to suspend union work rules so that construction corporations could undercut the union wages and boost their profits -- this sort of corporate giveaway is the only sort of financial help Bush understands.

Promises for later on.

I have a whole lot of photos. Maybe I'll put some up when I get back to town. I'll save a few stories until then.

getting down and dirty in the Crescent City

Last night I went out to a joint called Vaughn's, where Kermit Ruffins
was playing. This bar was no French Quarter Daiquiri trough either. It
was a cramped little shack with sagging wood floors and an ancient cash
register that served no other purpose than to hold the money. A cigar
box would have served the same function.

Since the Saints are still in the NFL playoffs, the band led off with a
rollicking version of "When the Saints Come Marching In" interpolating
the Saints's de facto theme song, "who dat?" They promised to return to
the "Who Dat?" Song throughout the night, and they did.

One tremendous thing about the bar was how informal it was: band and
audience were barely separate, with the band tucked into a corner of the
dancing area, and between songs it was difficult to see any separation,
with individual members of the band carrying on conversations with the
audience.

We were lucky enough as well to run into another member of the Rebirth Brass
Band (the tuba player, Phil), who'll be playing the Velvet Lounge in March. He handed us a copy
of "Ultimate Rebirth Brass Band," which was nice.

All in all, it was a very late night.

Big Easy

Well, I'm sitting in the Cafe Beignet on Royal Street waiting on a catfish po'boy. It's cold down here. More later.

Utah...it isn't just for Mormons.

After hanging in Zion National Park a few days, we decided to head up
the mountain to see some snow, and we drove to Brian Head, Utah, to
figure out what to do.

In addition to having some skiing and sledding, Brian Head is also close
to Cedar Breaks National Monument. So we killed two birds, as they say.

Anyway, we spent the entire afternoon sledding, which in addition to
being free (except for sled rental of five bucks each) allowed even our
little daughter to enjoy the snow.

Of course, now that the sun's gone down, it's getting pretty damn cold.
Over and out.

Happy New Year Everybody.

I was sitting in the parking lot of Palace Station in Las Vegas when the
fireworks started going off. It's a long story.

Las Vegas is one of those magical places where time and money and sense
get entirely warped, and what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so often
because it's highly embarrassing and takes place under unreal
conditions.

Which isn't to say that Vegas is a dreamland; its filthy underside is
full of the same stories of paycheck-to-paycheck, stringing together a
few part-time jobs, praying that nothing happens to your uninsured ass
ordinary people as any other town, except everything is amplified here.
Directly across from the casinos that spring up off-strip to serve the
growing local populace you will find pawn shops and predatory loan
businesses offering paycheck advances and loans on your auto title. It
is still illegal, however, to pawn off your children.