I spent Saturday mostly on the train, en route to and from the Free Software Foundation's annual associate members meeting in Cambridge. The conference is one of the highlights of the year for me -- good news delivered by smart people, bad news framed as motivation. And as, I think, one of the board members pointed out a few years ago, you get the superficial pleasure of seeing what they spend the money on.
On the way I listened to the excellent new Titus Andronicus album, The Monitor, which I'd purchased along with some other music (The Airing Of Grievances, also by T.A.; Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock And Roll; Arcade Fire's Neon Bible) in a semi-impulsive bid to update my music library. It's very, very good: Wrenchingly earnest, unabashedly pretentious, with maddeningly catchy guitar melodies. "Richard II" is my favorite song as of this writing, but I've found myself singing the unwholesome chorus of "No Future Part Three" to myself more than I probably should: "You'll always be a loser, you'll always be a loser..." It's been frustratingly long since I've bought a record where I didn't feel bored and alienated by all but a few songs; this one's a very nice treat. I'm glad to finally own Neon Bible as well, but it's almost too scary to listen to all in one go -- "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" is a grotesque and upsetting little kernel of discomfort nestled snugly in the middle of the track list.
I'm embarrassed to admit that taking the Acela is also something I look forward to. Why it costs $80 is beyond me (as Chris would sing, "that's a whole lotta dough!"), and the sandwiches they sell in the bar car are unpleasantly damp; but god the scenery is breathtaking, and I get four solid hours to devote to programming, a rare treat for me. This year I spent the time finishing a pretty large project that I'd started around this time last year and which had gotten variously stalled and started up again several times in the intervening months. It was satisfying. I made a lot of progress.
The train was late getting into South Station, though, and it was close to noon by the time I got to Harvard Yard. The first few speakers had already gone. It was almost lunch-time, so I just kind of lurked awkwardly outside the auditorium. It being spring break, Crimson Catering was out of commission, but Deborah Nicholson had arranged for some pretty good burritos to be airdropped in. I ate one with tofu in it, outside on the warm rocks. My lunch companion was Debra Cauley, who writes technical manuals for a lot of Free Software projects; she had some interesting stories about being a long-term Alphabet City dweller, with all the attendant stressors and excitement. A friend of hers, whose name I didn't catch, gave me a few handmade stickers that said "Free Software - Fuck Yeah."
After lunch I had the good fortune to see Eben Moglen give a state-of-the-Free Software-nation talk. He's no longer on the board, and was going to be abroad doing the SFLC's business instead of at the conference, but apparently he'd come down with a cold that caused him to miss a flight to India (but which allowed him to give a one hour, ad lib lecture? I don't get it either). Cold or no, he's always a great talker. He devoted a lot of time this year, as he did last year, to software patents -- in particular, the difficulty in negotiating disarmament in the patents arms races between corporations engaged in IP détente. He also talked about Sun's semi-recent purchase by Oracle: "We in the Free world have not traditionally looked to Oracle for pro-Freedom practices," he said, getting laughs. Still, he thought, it was possible, or even likely, that Oracle would keep the MySQL project, which they'd acquired with the rest of Sun, going, as a way of eroding Microsoft SQL Server's position. The last thing he talked about was freedom for network services and making the relationship between Free Software and privacy more manifest. "It'll be as hard as anything we've ever done," he said, "but not harder."
I stayed in the room after Prof. Moglen's talk for Walter Bender's presentation on Sugar, the desktop environment for the OLPC project. A lot of Free Software people seem to also have a bent towards alternative education and teaching practice, and Sugar's always had a secondary roles as a proof of concept of its designers' pedagogical theories. Walter demonstrated some interesting features of the platform, like the ubiquitous "view source" command that brings up the source code to any component of the system; he discussed how this feature dictates some organizational requirements for the software itself: We can better facilitate learning on the Sugar platform, he said, by making the platform's software easy to understand and decompose into simple pieces. I was skeptical -- View Source works well enough for the system's chrome, which seems to be written in Python, but doesn't let you dig any deeper. (Maybe that's good enough, though?)
Richard Stallman's talk was a step up from his spiel from last year about "The JavaScript Trap." The FSF has clearly been sharpening their thinking about freedom for network services. Whereas Mako had focused in the past on the rights of a user a service to access its source code, which to me seemed to lack the logical imperative common to the rest of the FSF's dicta, "Who does that server really serve?" suggested that you should be doing your computing only on your own hardware -- the work that's been done over the past several years to abstract away the concept of the personal computer has also had the side effect of making it acceptable for users to delegate control of their applications to systems they have no reason to trust. It's hard to make coherent arguments about your rights as a user of other peoples' hardware (at least, I think it is) -- better not to give up your agency in the first place. RMS suggested, as Eben Moglen did, that a federated network of secure, peer-to-peer systems would better serve the interests of users. (I think it's certainly worth a shot.) The usual cadre of imbeciles was on hand to pepper him with irrelevant questions ("Have you considered [boring, overly-specific edge case]?"), which he duly dismissed. He seemed to be in good spirits.
There was a meet-up scheduled afterwards at a local bar, which I considered going to. I hadn't seen anyone I knew, though; and aside from lunch, the only interactions I'd had were with Robert Collins, from GNU bzr, and this uncannily persistent Gnome usability guy, both of whom wanted to tell me how much they hate GNU Guile. Plus, although the conference, like last year, was extended to go for three whole days, I hadn't arranged for anywhere to stay in Boston. Greg's living in China, and my dreamed-of invitation to crash on the couch at the Acetarium didn't materialize. So I had to catch an evening train back to NYC, and the last one 'til, like, late was leaving at 6:30. As it happened, hanging out at the pub turned out to be off the table -- I made a run to the bank to get cash and lost sight of the procession of beardos I'd assumed I could count on to lead me to the place from the Science Center. I wandered around the shopping district near campus for about ten minutes, swearing audibly, before giving up and getting back on the T for the four hour trip back home.
I got some more programming work done on the way, but there was something missing: That knot of yearning in my chest for the tall grass and salt marshes of New England wasn't there. Maybe it's this cold spring we've been having.
My band, Hotel For Dogs, continues its inexorable ascension to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: We just wrote a song about a guy who works at the zoo and has to distinguish the boy pumas from the girl pumas. It's a fraught kind of husbandry.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Twelve Hours of Papo
Nina and I just got back from a trip to Puerto Rico!
It was kind of a modified Spring Break: Nina's got an actual break this week, but my schedule was looking a bit hairy, so we wanted to go a little early. We put the whole thing together kind of at the last minute, too -- we didn't really know where we wanted to go, except that it had to have beaches and be warm; we wanted to do something purely vacational. Like Seinfeld: no learning (but, hopefully, some hugging). Nina suggested Puerto Rico, and I asked around about it. My mom recommended a bed-and-breakfast in San Juan where she'd stayed while on a Caribbean cruise (weird!). Chris wrote me a very detailed account of his own visit to the island a couple of years ago, from which I extracted the following:
"La Boca is nothing," said Chris. "La Perla is way worse."
Armed with this knowledge, and a reservation at The Gallery Inn, we hopped a Friday morning flight to SJU. It's crazy how close Puerto Rico is! I slept for some of the flight (enough to miss the beverage service and the distribution of "Chocobillys") and didn't have to break into any of the toys I'd packed to distract myself. We cabbed it to the hotel directly from the airport. The place was beautiful! The Gallery Inn is what it sounds like: The proprietress, Jan D'Esopo, is a sculptress (among other things), and the maze-like building, which looks like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez story, complete with crumbling plaster and creeping vines, is also her house. It's also a showroom for the various objects she's made, among which, notably, are several facsimile busts of Michelle Obama, whose grinning visage can be found peeking out from behind ferns or down from the mantelpiece in a musty costume closet, etc. The building is also home to several exotic birds that mingle more or less freely with the guests (although we are instructed not to pet or cuddle them):
The place is on Calle Norzagaray, directly across from the city wall that protects Old San Juan from the predations of the Atlantic Ocean and marauding navies.
That evening we walked down to the Plaza De La Marina. There were a bunch of push-cart vendors there, and I bought a kind of blended fruit smoothie of the type that Chris had raved about in his travelogue. (It was good, but cost $7.00) After no small amount of restaurant shopping (places close early, dogg), we sat down at a small place called El Caldero Sabroso, where the cook, a middle-aged lady with a very fuzzy, if bleached, upper lip served us two plates of mofongo, a kind of fried plantain mash that was very, very good.
The next morning, after eating our complimentary "continental breakfast" (which included Puerto Rican coffee with powdered milk blendered into it all foamy) in the sun-drenched, lizard-infested garden, we struck out to see some shit. The first thing we did was head down the stairs by the side of the road leading down into the shantytown below. A lot of the place seemed to be in ruins -- houses without walls filled with drifts of garbage -- and inhabited almost entirely by stray cats, who did not give a fuck. We left, not realizing until we saw its name emblazoned on some basketball bleachers from the road above, that this was the notorious La Perla. It wasn't really that bad. After that, we walked a little further down the road 'til we got to the Castillo de San Cristóbal, where we joined an English-language walking tour. The guide, Hector Montes, a strawberry blonde-haired, blue-eyed park ranger, had an aggressively didactic approach to explaining the fortress's many layers of fortification. "Did you know," he said, "that the walls in this tunnel are grooved to allow the defenders to pack the walls with gunpowder? Did you know?" We didn't know.
Later in the afternoon we took a cab to Condado, a neighborhood across the Ashford Ave. bridge from Old San Juan and renowned for its nice beaches. The sun was approaching the horizon once we found a segment of beach that seemed right, in the back of one of the enormous resort hotels and girded by a pier a little ways out from the shore, but the sand and water were both impossibly warm. Nina and I rolled around in the surf, letting the small waves carry us back to and from the shore. When it got genuinely dark, some bright lights -- like, flood lamps -- came on on the pier and lit the water up white. It was like being in a water rescue scene in an action movie. We got out and put our clothes back on over our swimsuits and wandered over to the front of the hotel, where there was a small bar and a restaurant from which we ordered mojitos and some impressively good nachos.
On Sunday we spent the morning at the other big fortress in Old San Juan, the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro. The enormous green lawn in front of the fortress walls, where people were flying a crazy array of complex and beautiful kites, proved to be a better time than the fortress itself, the exploration of which was concerned mostly with stair-climbing amd peering through arrow-slits; but we ran into Hector Montes again, taking tickets at the entrance. "You two look familiar," he said. After we got back to the hotel, we decided to buy into one of those package tour deals, which would take us the next day to a bunch of different places, including the rain forest in El Yunque, and a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo. The organization we ended up registering with was called "Manny Tours." They were expensive, but we didn't really have a lot of time to be choosy. And vacation is a "sometimes food," as Cookie Monster would say.
And then we took a walk out to Escambrón, the beach nearest our hotel by walking. It ended up taking longer than we anticipated, and Nina developed a really bad blister between her toes from the thong of her sandals, which was only made worse by the sand once we finally got there. So we didn't really go in the water, and when it started to get dark we decided to head back to the hotel. We wanted to hail a cab, but none of them would stop for us (the medallion light on the top is not a good heuristic for determining availability, since the cabbies never use the meter). Finally one did stop, without us hailing it, as we limped down Muñoz Rivera Ave. There were already passengers in it, but the driver'd taken pity on us. "Thanks," we said. "Where're you from," asked one of the riders, an old white guy. "France?" "We're from New York," we said. "Oh. We're from Jersey," he said.
That night, during a walk around the Plaza Baldorioty De Castro, Nina finally acquiesced to my desire that she get her photo taken by the carnies with the bird-draped push-cart -- they had a bunch of different-colored birds, which could be dutifully posed on the shoulders and arms and heads of tourists. The carnies seemed to want to lade people with as many birds as possible, but I had something specific in mind: Beside the parrots and macaws, there were a pair of slate-green budgies, one of which was visibly overweight and didn't seem to be able to close its mouth, giving it a slack-jawed, overstuffed look. I had the guy put that bird and that bird only on Nina, on top of her head. After he took the picture, though, he insisted on decking us out, together and singly, with various combinations of the other birds. I was expecting their talons to be pinchy and uncomfortable, but they were actually really gentle. One of the parrots sat on my shoulder, licking dried salt out of my ear with its soft, dry, weird tongue.
Manny, or, as we were instructed to call him, Papo, bore a strong resemblance to Penn Jillette, without the smugness. He picked us up at the hotel at around 9:30, and we started the trip to El Yunque, collecting other parties along the way (including a couple of obnoxious girls on an actual spring break from Harvard, as they were quick to mention, unbidden). He gave us running descriptions of the social and economic conditions of the neighborhoods we passed, explaining how, for example, the recent recession had forced the governor to thin the rolls of island government, one of the major sources of employment in the area, contravening the policies that made Luis Muñoz Marín beloved enough to get the airport named after him.
The public portions of El Yunque are built into levels corresponding to different elevations. Our first stop was at the visitor center, where we watched a Spanish-language documentary about the park (narrated by David Ortiz) and changed into our bathing suit. We were on our own for the next leg of the trip: Papo dropped us off at the entrance to a trail taking us from the side of one of the main roads, through the rain forest with a pit stop at La Mina Falls. Babies, I have never been in a rain forest. As I was saying to Nina, I was expecting it to be all mist and tarantulas and fungus. It's not actually like that, although there are certainly some weird, snakey roots and funny-looking plants, along with the ubiquitous lizards. It was more like a really hilly park, with paved trails leading from one vista to the next. Along the way, there were these little open air concrete (and graffiti-tagged) "cabins," where, at night or during a rainstorm, I guess, you could take shelter and eat meats cooked on the crude provided grill.
The waterfall, as Papo promised, was cold and refreshing. An enormous dude covered in scary-looking tattoos splashed around with a toddler on his shoulders in the pool directly under the falls.
After we met back up with Papo, he took us to a roadside stand run by some friends of his. We got, as per his recommendation, the pasteles, a kind of smoother-textured tamale made of plantains and wrapped in banana leaves, which lent them a complex, acrid taste. Papo hung out in the kitchen as we ate, sharing a Medalla Light with the staff. The next stop was Luquillo Beach, a preternaturally calm expanse of flat sand and water on the eastern side of the island. While Papo waited in his van, we bought piña-coladas from the one-armed guy manning the cantina and then hung out in the water. Nina showed me how to float on my back, something I'd never been able to do successfully before (no lie -- the part I'd been missing is that you have to tilt your head back 'til your ears are in the water; otherwise you sink), and she pulled me around like a tugboat by my feet. I loved that. We kind of walked around on our hands in the shallows until a small stripy fish swam up and nipped at Nina's finger. We tried, unsuccessfully, to catch him.
The final component in our package was the kayaking trip to the "bioluminescent bay," which began at the marina in Fajardo. The paddle started in the open, choppy waters of the bay, from which the guys running the trip led the group, theoretically in single file, into the "channel," a tree-lined aquatic corridor that quickly became so dark that the only thing we could see, trees included, was the red, coiled glowstick tied to the stern of the kayak in front of us. This was what we used, along with the guidance of mangrove branches, to keep us moving forward until the channel finally opened up into another, smaller bay. I am not a champion kayaker by any stretch, but Nina and I were more coordinated than a lot of the other pairs, who couldn't seem to figure out how to get their boats to turn in the right directions. The place we unded up was, I guess, where the highest concentration of bioluminescent organisms was -- dipping our fingers in the water or paddling around with our hands produced bubbles of strange, bright whiteness, and when you scooped up a handful of water, there were little sparks in it. The creatures didn't produce enough light to, say, see by; but they made colors that shouldn't have been as visible as they were in the dark. And, almost more strikingly, we'd paddled out to a part of the island that was far enough from a major city that we could see clearly the whole menagerie of northern-hemisphere constellations in the sky. Nina pointed out the Little Dipper to one of the Harvard girls, standing on end and low in the sky, near a lighthouse to the east.
We flew out the next morning, uneventfully (our in-flight movie was The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spanish-language edition). Arriving back home after a frustratingly long and expensive cab ride -- awful traffic on the BQE -- we ran into Martin hanging around on the stoop. "Were you guys just on vacation?" he asked. "Guess where we went," I said. "Puerto Rico? Where'd you stay? How much was your hotel?" We told him. "I could've got you a room for a hundred dollars less than that. How much was the plane?" And then he asked "Did you go to La Perla?"
It was kind of a modified Spring Break: Nina's got an actual break this week, but my schedule was looking a bit hairy, so we wanted to go a little early. We put the whole thing together kind of at the last minute, too -- we didn't really know where we wanted to go, except that it had to have beaches and be warm; we wanted to do something purely vacational. Like Seinfeld: no learning (but, hopefully, some hugging). Nina suggested Puerto Rico, and I asked around about it. My mom recommended a bed-and-breakfast in San Juan where she'd stayed while on a Caribbean cruise (weird!). Chris wrote me a very detailed account of his own visit to the island a couple of years ago, from which I extracted the following:
- Expect to eat tostones covered in ranch dressing
- Stay out of the neighborhood called La Perla
"La Boca is nothing," said Chris. "La Perla is way worse."
Armed with this knowledge, and a reservation at The Gallery Inn, we hopped a Friday morning flight to SJU. It's crazy how close Puerto Rico is! I slept for some of the flight (enough to miss the beverage service and the distribution of "Chocobillys") and didn't have to break into any of the toys I'd packed to distract myself. We cabbed it to the hotel directly from the airport. The place was beautiful! The Gallery Inn is what it sounds like: The proprietress, Jan D'Esopo, is a sculptress (among other things), and the maze-like building, which looks like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez story, complete with crumbling plaster and creeping vines, is also her house. It's also a showroom for the various objects she's made, among which, notably, are several facsimile busts of Michelle Obama, whose grinning visage can be found peeking out from behind ferns or down from the mantelpiece in a musty costume closet, etc. The building is also home to several exotic birds that mingle more or less freely with the guests (although we are instructed not to pet or cuddle them):
- Campeche, a 14-year-old moluccan cockatoo, who seems to be kind of the mascot of the Inn
- Mikey, a giant blue macaw; the most vocally articulate of all the birds. He was able to produce an eerily accurate rendition of human laughter
- Pica, a harlequin macaw with a mite allergy that made her look a bit threadbare
- Dozer (sp?), a cockatoo like Campeche, but with more shrieking
The place is on Calle Norzagaray, directly across from the city wall that protects Old San Juan from the predations of the Atlantic Ocean and marauding navies.
That evening we walked down to the Plaza De La Marina. There were a bunch of push-cart vendors there, and I bought a kind of blended fruit smoothie of the type that Chris had raved about in his travelogue. (It was good, but cost $7.00) After no small amount of restaurant shopping (places close early, dogg), we sat down at a small place called El Caldero Sabroso, where the cook, a middle-aged lady with a very fuzzy, if bleached, upper lip served us two plates of mofongo, a kind of fried plantain mash that was very, very good.
The next morning, after eating our complimentary "continental breakfast" (which included Puerto Rican coffee with powdered milk blendered into it all foamy) in the sun-drenched, lizard-infested garden, we struck out to see some shit. The first thing we did was head down the stairs by the side of the road leading down into the shantytown below. A lot of the place seemed to be in ruins -- houses without walls filled with drifts of garbage -- and inhabited almost entirely by stray cats, who did not give a fuck. We left, not realizing until we saw its name emblazoned on some basketball bleachers from the road above, that this was the notorious La Perla. It wasn't really that bad. After that, we walked a little further down the road 'til we got to the Castillo de San Cristóbal, where we joined an English-language walking tour. The guide, Hector Montes, a strawberry blonde-haired, blue-eyed park ranger, had an aggressively didactic approach to explaining the fortress's many layers of fortification. "Did you know," he said, "that the walls in this tunnel are grooved to allow the defenders to pack the walls with gunpowder? Did you know?" We didn't know.
Later in the afternoon we took a cab to Condado, a neighborhood across the Ashford Ave. bridge from Old San Juan and renowned for its nice beaches. The sun was approaching the horizon once we found a segment of beach that seemed right, in the back of one of the enormous resort hotels and girded by a pier a little ways out from the shore, but the sand and water were both impossibly warm. Nina and I rolled around in the surf, letting the small waves carry us back to and from the shore. When it got genuinely dark, some bright lights -- like, flood lamps -- came on on the pier and lit the water up white. It was like being in a water rescue scene in an action movie. We got out and put our clothes back on over our swimsuits and wandered over to the front of the hotel, where there was a small bar and a restaurant from which we ordered mojitos and some impressively good nachos.
On Sunday we spent the morning at the other big fortress in Old San Juan, the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro. The enormous green lawn in front of the fortress walls, where people were flying a crazy array of complex and beautiful kites, proved to be a better time than the fortress itself, the exploration of which was concerned mostly with stair-climbing amd peering through arrow-slits; but we ran into Hector Montes again, taking tickets at the entrance. "You two look familiar," he said. After we got back to the hotel, we decided to buy into one of those package tour deals, which would take us the next day to a bunch of different places, including the rain forest in El Yunque, and a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo. The organization we ended up registering with was called "Manny Tours." They were expensive, but we didn't really have a lot of time to be choosy. And vacation is a "sometimes food," as Cookie Monster would say.
And then we took a walk out to Escambrón, the beach nearest our hotel by walking. It ended up taking longer than we anticipated, and Nina developed a really bad blister between her toes from the thong of her sandals, which was only made worse by the sand once we finally got there. So we didn't really go in the water, and when it started to get dark we decided to head back to the hotel. We wanted to hail a cab, but none of them would stop for us (the medallion light on the top is not a good heuristic for determining availability, since the cabbies never use the meter). Finally one did stop, without us hailing it, as we limped down Muñoz Rivera Ave. There were already passengers in it, but the driver'd taken pity on us. "Thanks," we said. "Where're you from," asked one of the riders, an old white guy. "France?" "We're from New York," we said. "Oh. We're from Jersey," he said.
That night, during a walk around the Plaza Baldorioty De Castro, Nina finally acquiesced to my desire that she get her photo taken by the carnies with the bird-draped push-cart -- they had a bunch of different-colored birds, which could be dutifully posed on the shoulders and arms and heads of tourists. The carnies seemed to want to lade people with as many birds as possible, but I had something specific in mind: Beside the parrots and macaws, there were a pair of slate-green budgies, one of which was visibly overweight and didn't seem to be able to close its mouth, giving it a slack-jawed, overstuffed look. I had the guy put that bird and that bird only on Nina, on top of her head. After he took the picture, though, he insisted on decking us out, together and singly, with various combinations of the other birds. I was expecting their talons to be pinchy and uncomfortable, but they were actually really gentle. One of the parrots sat on my shoulder, licking dried salt out of my ear with its soft, dry, weird tongue.
Manny, or, as we were instructed to call him, Papo, bore a strong resemblance to Penn Jillette, without the smugness. He picked us up at the hotel at around 9:30, and we started the trip to El Yunque, collecting other parties along the way (including a couple of obnoxious girls on an actual spring break from Harvard, as they were quick to mention, unbidden). He gave us running descriptions of the social and economic conditions of the neighborhoods we passed, explaining how, for example, the recent recession had forced the governor to thin the rolls of island government, one of the major sources of employment in the area, contravening the policies that made Luis Muñoz Marín beloved enough to get the airport named after him.
The public portions of El Yunque are built into levels corresponding to different elevations. Our first stop was at the visitor center, where we watched a Spanish-language documentary about the park (narrated by David Ortiz) and changed into our bathing suit. We were on our own for the next leg of the trip: Papo dropped us off at the entrance to a trail taking us from the side of one of the main roads, through the rain forest with a pit stop at La Mina Falls. Babies, I have never been in a rain forest. As I was saying to Nina, I was expecting it to be all mist and tarantulas and fungus. It's not actually like that, although there are certainly some weird, snakey roots and funny-looking plants, along with the ubiquitous lizards. It was more like a really hilly park, with paved trails leading from one vista to the next. Along the way, there were these little open air concrete (and graffiti-tagged) "cabins," where, at night or during a rainstorm, I guess, you could take shelter and eat meats cooked on the crude provided grill.
The waterfall, as Papo promised, was cold and refreshing. An enormous dude covered in scary-looking tattoos splashed around with a toddler on his shoulders in the pool directly under the falls.
After we met back up with Papo, he took us to a roadside stand run by some friends of his. We got, as per his recommendation, the pasteles, a kind of smoother-textured tamale made of plantains and wrapped in banana leaves, which lent them a complex, acrid taste. Papo hung out in the kitchen as we ate, sharing a Medalla Light with the staff. The next stop was Luquillo Beach, a preternaturally calm expanse of flat sand and water on the eastern side of the island. While Papo waited in his van, we bought piña-coladas from the one-armed guy manning the cantina and then hung out in the water. Nina showed me how to float on my back, something I'd never been able to do successfully before (no lie -- the part I'd been missing is that you have to tilt your head back 'til your ears are in the water; otherwise you sink), and she pulled me around like a tugboat by my feet. I loved that. We kind of walked around on our hands in the shallows until a small stripy fish swam up and nipped at Nina's finger. We tried, unsuccessfully, to catch him.
The final component in our package was the kayaking trip to the "bioluminescent bay," which began at the marina in Fajardo. The paddle started in the open, choppy waters of the bay, from which the guys running the trip led the group, theoretically in single file, into the "channel," a tree-lined aquatic corridor that quickly became so dark that the only thing we could see, trees included, was the red, coiled glowstick tied to the stern of the kayak in front of us. This was what we used, along with the guidance of mangrove branches, to keep us moving forward until the channel finally opened up into another, smaller bay. I am not a champion kayaker by any stretch, but Nina and I were more coordinated than a lot of the other pairs, who couldn't seem to figure out how to get their boats to turn in the right directions. The place we unded up was, I guess, where the highest concentration of bioluminescent organisms was -- dipping our fingers in the water or paddling around with our hands produced bubbles of strange, bright whiteness, and when you scooped up a handful of water, there were little sparks in it. The creatures didn't produce enough light to, say, see by; but they made colors that shouldn't have been as visible as they were in the dark. And, almost more strikingly, we'd paddled out to a part of the island that was far enough from a major city that we could see clearly the whole menagerie of northern-hemisphere constellations in the sky. Nina pointed out the Little Dipper to one of the Harvard girls, standing on end and low in the sky, near a lighthouse to the east.
We flew out the next morning, uneventfully (our in-flight movie was The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spanish-language edition). Arriving back home after a frustratingly long and expensive cab ride -- awful traffic on the BQE -- we ran into Martin hanging around on the stoop. "Were you guys just on vacation?" he asked. "Guess where we went," I said. "Puerto Rico? Where'd you stay? How much was your hotel?" We told him. "I could've got you a room for a hundred dollars less than that. How much was the plane?" And then he asked "Did you go to La Perla?"
Friday, March 05, 2010
The Sound Of Young America
It looks like The Pogues are foregoing their annual St. Patrick's day Roseland performance, which is convenient, since this year I was planning on skipping it, Shane's new teeth and all.
After two separate, abortive attempts at Union Pool, I finally saw The Muslims on Friday at Cake Shop. (They've since been renamed The Soft Pack, which is a way less punk rock name, but.) It was freezing cold when I got to Ludlow St., and some light snow had started to fall. There was a line down the block to get in. As I got in line, I thought I recognized a guy standing off to the side, by the curb, holding a vintage amp in one hand, a gig bag slung over his shoulder. His beard made him look like an earnest satyr. "That's Patrick Stickles!" someone yelled from a cluster of NYU freshmen behind me. "From Titus Andronicus!" Patrick waved and, to my surprise, came over to talk to the guy.
"Titus Andronicus are amazing," the fan said.
"Uh, I don't know if we're amazing," said Patrick. "A baby's laugh is amazing. We're just really high energy."
"Can you guys play a show at our dorm?" asked one of the kids. To my further surprise, Patrick entered into schedule negotiations with the guy.
Cake Shop was packed, moreso than I'd ever seen it. Nina showed up and we sort of nestled up against the bar. A bunch of people kept trying, annoyingly and unsuccessfully, to squeeze past us -- not only was there actually no room, but there was an enormous guy standing right in front of us who would brook no attempt to usurp his spot. I'd never given much thought to the cruddy old TV above the bar, hooked up to a grainy video feed of the stage, but that night it was the only way I could see what was going on.
The Soft Pack were fine -- I've liked them for a while now for two reasons: 1. They've got a fantastic song called "Extinction," a great, nasty, Richard Hell-type punk song; 2. They've got a kind of aggressively non-rock-and-roll aesthetic: they dress like guys who temp at a second-tier investment bank, and, like, the most handsome dude among them looks like a less memorable version of Todd Barry. They played a tight, fast show. It was their record release party, apparently. Maybe I'll buy their album.
So this February has been, apparently, the snowiest ever in New York? That's crazy! All told, we've gotten two large reg'lar snowstorms and then one kind of unexpected one at the end that really clobbered everything. I don't know, I'm a big fan. Nina hates it, but I love the way a good layering of snow changes the terms of engagement with the city: More climbing, more balancing, more puddle-jumping. From my office on Friday the 26th, in the midst of a storm that would leave the city with twenty inches of snow, I watched the flakes blowing practically horizontally, or in miniature vortexes, doing the strange things that snow does when caught in the updraft between two large buildings in Manhattan. Here's a photo I took up on the roof in Sunset Park:
The night after one the big storms, I hit up Don Pedro in Williamsburg to see Cerebral Ballzy, who I'd admired ever since hearing them on Myspace a year or so ago. I'd eaten something gross, was worried that I'd crap myself, but managed to huddle in a dark corner of Don Pedro's music space, which looked like a place you'd through a quinceañera party: It's a large, mostly unadorned and featureless room, with high tin ceilings in need of cleaning and repair.
The first opener was a band called Fuck School. Their lead singer Nick was a big guy in a hooded robe whose long hair and beard contributed to his druid-y appearance. Fuck School's set was short and sloppy, and funny. At the end, they played their eponymous anthem, which put me strongly in mind of a similar song by The Headliners ("We are The Headliners / We only fuck minors / We are not coal miners"). After they were done, we were subjected to the execrable Total Slacker. (I'd recognized their waif-like lead singer earlier, with a sinking heart.) Or not, since I and, satisfyingly, most of the audience, left and went out to the bar while 'Slacker was on.
Cerebral Ballzy came on close to 1:00 AM, but the crowd was still pretty thick. They sound a little like the early Jones / Da Fonseca collaboration, Contraband, but with knit caps and skateboards. Their lead singer, Honor, is a great front man -- he's got a really expressive face and a tough, cheeky attitude. Literally: his coin slot was hanging out of his jeans the whole time he was climbing the amps and dangling off the exposed pipes on the back wall of the stage, tearing bits of insulation out with his bare hands. I've never been to a hardcore show before, and it was great -- the songs were fast, the audience was intense and enthusiastic. Honor stood straight atop an amp, one arm behind his back like a punk George Washington crossing the Potomac, while the band played what I guess might be their hit, a song called "Shit Rag," which is about a topic near and dear to my heart: a digestive crisis and the suppression of its expression. Towards the end of the set, Honor's, uh, ballzy made an appearance. He flapped them vigorously at the crowd.
I saw Patrick Stickles again when I went to see Titus Andronicus and Parts & Labor at the Bowery Ballroom on Saturday.
Parts & Labor were good, although I was spent part of their set being preoccupied with how beardy and owlish the lead singer looked -- he rocked out, but it was hard to read any emotional cues from him. Is this what punk rock looks like these days? To my fusiform facial area, heavy beardos are all pretty much indistinguishable from the yeti in Monsters, Inc.
Titus Andronicus were fantastic, though, in spite of being even beardier. I'd never seen (or heard) a full-length set by that band, nor had I heard any of the material from the album they were releasing the next week. So I noticed some things that made a really strong impression on me: Like Ted Leo & Co., they've got really clear, bright lead guitar lines; but whereas The Pharmacists take their cues from pop-punk and soul, Titus Andronicus draw from folk and traditional music -- one song even featured an extended breakdown into The Battle Hymn Of The Republic, never a bad idea. I've read several comparisons of their sound to Bruce Springsteen's, and one thing they definitely have in common is their use of chord resolution. I've got kind of a tin ear when it comes to intervals (although I passed "Clapping For Credit" back in college with flying colors), but I'm thinking of a 4th or a Major 3rd or something. Or maybe it's a 5th, I don't know; it's that sonic "dunh-dunh" you get from the inhalation / exhalation of an accordion or from drawing the bow across and back on the violin or cello. From what I could tell, Stickles' songs tend to chew over the problem of, well, America; American history; being an outsider in America. The material's compelling and disturbing to listen to, and his reedy howl drives home that there's no actual resolution to be had.
"This might be the best show of all time," said a guy behind me. I wasn't sure initially -- I was a bit lonely, didn't know the songs -- but the crowd was undeniably lively, and it wasn't just dudes. Some of the hardest pushers and shovers were ladies, and not the peacoated, Blackberry-checking ones you usually find at the Bowery Ballroom -- these were nerd girls: Acned; fuzzy-haired with long, wispy girl-sideburns; wearing faded, baggy sweatshirts. They were great. And, oh man, that eponymous song: It's a steamroller. Pretty much impossible not to get right up in the middle of the pit when they play that one. So I guess it was a pretty great show.
Towards the end of the show, Patrick took a moment to wax optimistic. "We're going out on tour on Monday," he said, turning to his bandmates, "and I honestly believe it's going to be the greatest adventure of our lives." Then he serenaded them with a solo cover of a Replacements song called "Treatment Bound." And then the band joined in and they played a vigorous, extended finale, a song from (I think) a triptych called "No Future."
After two separate, abortive attempts at Union Pool, I finally saw The Muslims on Friday at Cake Shop. (They've since been renamed The Soft Pack, which is a way less punk rock name, but.) It was freezing cold when I got to Ludlow St., and some light snow had started to fall. There was a line down the block to get in. As I got in line, I thought I recognized a guy standing off to the side, by the curb, holding a vintage amp in one hand, a gig bag slung over his shoulder. His beard made him look like an earnest satyr. "That's Patrick Stickles!" someone yelled from a cluster of NYU freshmen behind me. "From Titus Andronicus!" Patrick waved and, to my surprise, came over to talk to the guy.
"Titus Andronicus are amazing," the fan said.
"Uh, I don't know if we're amazing," said Patrick. "A baby's laugh is amazing. We're just really high energy."
"Can you guys play a show at our dorm?" asked one of the kids. To my further surprise, Patrick entered into schedule negotiations with the guy.
Cake Shop was packed, moreso than I'd ever seen it. Nina showed up and we sort of nestled up against the bar. A bunch of people kept trying, annoyingly and unsuccessfully, to squeeze past us -- not only was there actually no room, but there was an enormous guy standing right in front of us who would brook no attempt to usurp his spot. I'd never given much thought to the cruddy old TV above the bar, hooked up to a grainy video feed of the stage, but that night it was the only way I could see what was going on.
The Soft Pack were fine -- I've liked them for a while now for two reasons: 1. They've got a fantastic song called "Extinction," a great, nasty, Richard Hell-type punk song; 2. They've got a kind of aggressively non-rock-and-roll aesthetic: they dress like guys who temp at a second-tier investment bank, and, like, the most handsome dude among them looks like a less memorable version of Todd Barry. They played a tight, fast show. It was their record release party, apparently. Maybe I'll buy their album.
So this February has been, apparently, the snowiest ever in New York? That's crazy! All told, we've gotten two large reg'lar snowstorms and then one kind of unexpected one at the end that really clobbered everything. I don't know, I'm a big fan. Nina hates it, but I love the way a good layering of snow changes the terms of engagement with the city: More climbing, more balancing, more puddle-jumping. From my office on Friday the 26th, in the midst of a storm that would leave the city with twenty inches of snow, I watched the flakes blowing practically horizontally, or in miniature vortexes, doing the strange things that snow does when caught in the updraft between two large buildings in Manhattan. Here's a photo I took up on the roof in Sunset Park:
The night after one the big storms, I hit up Don Pedro in Williamsburg to see Cerebral Ballzy, who I'd admired ever since hearing them on Myspace a year or so ago. I'd eaten something gross, was worried that I'd crap myself, but managed to huddle in a dark corner of Don Pedro's music space, which looked like a place you'd through a quinceañera party: It's a large, mostly unadorned and featureless room, with high tin ceilings in need of cleaning and repair.
The first opener was a band called Fuck School. Their lead singer Nick was a big guy in a hooded robe whose long hair and beard contributed to his druid-y appearance. Fuck School's set was short and sloppy, and funny. At the end, they played their eponymous anthem, which put me strongly in mind of a similar song by The Headliners ("We are The Headliners / We only fuck minors / We are not coal miners"). After they were done, we were subjected to the execrable Total Slacker. (I'd recognized their waif-like lead singer earlier, with a sinking heart.) Or not, since I and, satisfyingly, most of the audience, left and went out to the bar while 'Slacker was on.
Cerebral Ballzy came on close to 1:00 AM, but the crowd was still pretty thick. They sound a little like the early Jones / Da Fonseca collaboration, Contraband, but with knit caps and skateboards. Their lead singer, Honor, is a great front man -- he's got a really expressive face and a tough, cheeky attitude. Literally: his coin slot was hanging out of his jeans the whole time he was climbing the amps and dangling off the exposed pipes on the back wall of the stage, tearing bits of insulation out with his bare hands. I've never been to a hardcore show before, and it was great -- the songs were fast, the audience was intense and enthusiastic. Honor stood straight atop an amp, one arm behind his back like a punk George Washington crossing the Potomac, while the band played what I guess might be their hit, a song called "Shit Rag," which is about a topic near and dear to my heart: a digestive crisis and the suppression of its expression. Towards the end of the set, Honor's, uh, ballzy made an appearance. He flapped them vigorously at the crowd.
I saw Patrick Stickles again when I went to see Titus Andronicus and Parts & Labor at the Bowery Ballroom on Saturday.
Parts & Labor were good, although I was spent part of their set being preoccupied with how beardy and owlish the lead singer looked -- he rocked out, but it was hard to read any emotional cues from him. Is this what punk rock looks like these days? To my fusiform facial area, heavy beardos are all pretty much indistinguishable from the yeti in Monsters, Inc.
Titus Andronicus were fantastic, though, in spite of being even beardier. I'd never seen (or heard) a full-length set by that band, nor had I heard any of the material from the album they were releasing the next week. So I noticed some things that made a really strong impression on me: Like Ted Leo & Co., they've got really clear, bright lead guitar lines; but whereas The Pharmacists take their cues from pop-punk and soul, Titus Andronicus draw from folk and traditional music -- one song even featured an extended breakdown into The Battle Hymn Of The Republic, never a bad idea. I've read several comparisons of their sound to Bruce Springsteen's, and one thing they definitely have in common is their use of chord resolution. I've got kind of a tin ear when it comes to intervals (although I passed "Clapping For Credit" back in college with flying colors), but I'm thinking of a 4th or a Major 3rd or something. Or maybe it's a 5th, I don't know; it's that sonic "dunh-dunh" you get from the inhalation / exhalation of an accordion or from drawing the bow across and back on the violin or cello. From what I could tell, Stickles' songs tend to chew over the problem of, well, America; American history; being an outsider in America. The material's compelling and disturbing to listen to, and his reedy howl drives home that there's no actual resolution to be had.
"This might be the best show of all time," said a guy behind me. I wasn't sure initially -- I was a bit lonely, didn't know the songs -- but the crowd was undeniably lively, and it wasn't just dudes. Some of the hardest pushers and shovers were ladies, and not the peacoated, Blackberry-checking ones you usually find at the Bowery Ballroom -- these were nerd girls: Acned; fuzzy-haired with long, wispy girl-sideburns; wearing faded, baggy sweatshirts. They were great. And, oh man, that eponymous song: It's a steamroller. Pretty much impossible not to get right up in the middle of the pit when they play that one. So I guess it was a pretty great show.
Towards the end of the show, Patrick took a moment to wax optimistic. "We're going out on tour on Monday," he said, turning to his bandmates, "and I honestly believe it's going to be the greatest adventure of our lives." Then he serenaded them with a solo cover of a Replacements song called "Treatment Bound." And then the band joined in and they played a vigorous, extended finale, a song from (I think) a triptych called "No Future."
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