xtcian

6/1/02 Today another longstanding Chapel

6/1/02

Today another longstanding Chapel Hill landmark is gone; the venerable Pyewacket has bitten the dust. I've long since gotten used to the impermanence of everything in North Carolina (in fact, it was one of Chapel Hill's better qualities) but the demise of Pyewacket comes as a bit of surprise in that it was so fetishized by everyone in town. It was certainly the best place to take your parents, if you were an English major, that is. All the other Carolina parents would patronize the usual boring surf-n-turf bullshit "New South" restaurants like Slugs and the edge-of-the-stripmall tastes of the Macaroni Grill.

Not my parents, and not my friends parents either. We all went to Pyewacket, even though I thought the food was a little boring. It had a kick-ass bar, and was an excellent place to fall in love (or at least seduce somebody), and it wasn't that expensive. Tessa used to work there, alongside all the upscale hipsters. And it always seemed packed, which is why I don't get the whole "lack of business" angle - but then again, I haven't been around in five years.

The Gap-ification of Chapel Hill has been a long time coming, and though it's easy to wax nostalgiac for the days of the Hardback Cafe and Jeff's Confectionery's vanilla cokes, those days ain't never coming back. The Intimate Bookshop burned down, then was rebuilt, then went out of business; Sephora now sells scented mascara there. Barrel of Fun - where I spent $8 daily on the Cyclone pinball machine - is now one of fifteen coffee places on Franklin Street. The Mona Lisa painting that had withstood decades of the Pink House was painted over the fucking day after I moved out.

the Mona Lisa in my room at the Pink House, circa '97. click here to see how it figures into the Pink House movie

The only way to stay sane in this world without devolving into a bitter, warped, cynical guttersnipe is to embrace these changes and figure that they all serve some greater good. My friend Ehren Gresehover hates the Amish because they've chosen a particular year, sometime in the mid-1800s, to call it quits on technology. He thinks the whole rustic Amish thing is arbitrary and moronic, and I'm inclined to agree. You can't decide you want the world frozen in 1986 (although it was a damn fine year for music), just because you were more comfortable with your surroundings then. The students of UNC today lap up their tall mocha frappucinos and comparison shop for toe rings the same way we sought out Suzanne Vega vinyl and took our parents to Pyewacket.

I mean, I'm trying to be at peace with the future, because there's not really anywhere else to go.

5/31/02 I have two ongoing

5/31/02

I have two ongoing projects with my digital camera that probably only keeps me interested in particular, but if you're going to be a total dork, you might as well fling yourself right into it. Plus, I'm getting married to someone spellbinding and have a pretty good career trajectory and don't have to try and get laid anymore, so now I can continue all of my stupid, shut-in, geekily particular projects without worrying what any of you think. Ah, the freedom!

Anyway, one project is a photo essay on company signs in NYC that still have the World Trade Center towers as part of the logo. I'm interested to see how long they last as symbols of New York, until the companies go through a redesign and get rid of them. Here's a couple of examples:

the Playpen on 8th Ave - porn and martial arts movies

a Manhattan Fruit Exchange truck in Chelsea

You'd be stunned how many of them there are, but I can't always get my camera ready in time, especially while driving. And of course, there's my other project (admittedly purloined from my internet hero James Lileks and his awesome ghost ads site) which is a photo essay of all the faded, crumbling advertisements on the sides of buildings in NYC, for companies that no longer exist, selling products nobody remembers how to use. Stuff like this:

cropped pic of 26th St. signs for furriers and muff beds, painted circa 1930

I mean, I don't even know what a muff bed is. The coolest signs are the ones with five-digit phone numbers that begin with letters. Obviously, I've had to crop the hell out of them to put them on this blog, but I want to put up a web page with some nice, dramatic ones on there. You know, because I'm a dork.

The best thing about having projects like this is that it gets you in the habit of looking, and sometimes a picture comes of it that you never saw coming. The benefit of a digital camera is the ability to erase pictures you don't like, so you don't have those 7-8 pics in each roll of film that are utterly useless. But you need to be careful with your emotional editor, or else you'll delete something cool just because it wasn't what you thought you wanted.

While snapping a pic of a WTC logo etched on a bagel shop awning, I tripped in the street. I would have erased the picture, but then I stopped, and saw this:

And that has made all the difference.

5/30/02 We're back up in

5/30/02

We're back up in Columbia County tonight, which meant a windy post-midnight drive and an exhausted arrival. I just realized that there's no way in English to say "windy" - when meaning a "road that winds around a lot" - without confusing everybody. Whatever; I'm sure the wind was blowing too.

In my growing fascination with other people's blogs, I've surfed around on various subway lines on nycbloggers and came up with something I've known for some time: there are a shitload of knitters out there, and they all keep a diary. I suppose it has something to do with the natural storytelling element of early American quilting bees and klatches and the like, but fuck - those girls sure like to write about knitting. It's so alien to me that I find it fascinating, and what's weirder, they're all single and knitting baby clothes.

I found two blogs, one by Marney and the other by Theresa, and they came up with questions for people to answer on their knitting blogs, so I'm deciding to play along, even though I couldn't knit so much as a tea cosy if my life depended on it.

1. Where did you attend school as a child, and what do you remember about the playground?

Grant Wood Elementary School in Cedar Rapids, IA. The main thing I remember is that the most popular girl in class led me to a hole in the staircase and told me to look in, and when I did, the boys on the other side blew sawdust into my eye. I went to the nurse and then I was told I was in trouble.

2. Do you remember your favorite activity?

Staring up at the timeline of Presidents of the U.S. during Social Science class, and memorizing them all, something I can still do today (except for Franklin Pierce - I always forget that bastard).

3. What sort of lunch box did you have, and what was in it?

A Peanuts lunchpail with a baloney sandwich in it, and a thermos full of strawberry Quik and glass shards from when it fell off my bike.

4. Describe yourself as an elementary school student.

Prey.

I dunno, maybe I'm not doing these questions like the knitting girls would have liked.

me trying to lift Sean, circa 1971

5/29/02 Spent a blissful day

5/29/02

Spent a blissful day not going into the city, which is always a treat for us. I'd spend every day screwing around Brooklyn if I could - part of my anxiety wants us only to visit Manhattan after working hours, which is basically when the only fun stuff happens anyway.

After seeing a blurb in Slate about a map of bloggers typing away in New York, I went to the site and promptly cast my lot as one of the fine bloggers at the Grand Army Plaza subway stop vicinity. The nycbloggers.com site is really cool; you can find fellow online diary exhibitionists just by perusing the subway map. It's one of those "unconscious brotherhood" things that always gives me a cerebral hard-on. I was the first at my stop; by 5pm there were three of us. Looking at the map of Manhattan, you can see where the hipsters live: no blogs at the 96th St. stop on the Upper East Side, but 12 already at Astor Place (by the time any of you read this, I'm sure there will be tons more).

Even more incredible, the site was conceived and built yesterday. The digital age is truly amazing, and has made lighting work of urban legends and cultural memes, so much so that two underemployed coders/bloggers can meet on the street yesterday, have a good idea, write the code, be in Slate the next day (how it got there I have no idea) and then get hundreds of thousands of hits by today.

The site has an incredible feature on it: the entries of bloggers writing on 9/11, one of whom worked two floors above me at the Woolworth Building. I put our family's diaries on there as well, because I think the writing in some of those is quite lyrical.

One's own experience of the WTC towers is always subjective, but I thought the buildings were so unbelievably beautiful. My floor at the Woolworth Building had the stunning vantage point of being up in the air with them, giving us the true sense of their vastness. I'd eat lunch and just stare at them. I even put them in the first part of a novel I'd started there:

"I watched the sun set between the twin towers. I used to think the towers were like the headstones at Stonehenge, you know, vast, druidical markers from the mists of the past, but here I was too close: they were more bars, solid awful steel, offering only a glimpse of something so beautiful behind them."

And with all of my relentless archivism, you'd think I had a hundred pictures of the World Trade Center, but in all my ferreting through stacks of pics, I only found one:

It's my old roommate Josh Pate and me, on a fall break trip from Carolina in 1990, both of us probably drunk. We were on a boat going to the Statue of Liberty, about to go up into her torso - something you can't do anymore.

5/28/02 Out of the frying

5/28/02

Out of the frying pan, into the fire, I suppose: we went straight from the bucolic, verdant greenery of Columbia County to the sinus-closing congestion of LaGuardia Airport to drop off Chip, then across the Queensboro Bridge (which I find quite dramatic) to the City. At Asset, we met with Peter Coleman and another illustrator from Morocco who was actually quite brilliant - and whose name I won't reproduce here because I'll get it wrong. Like Dumas in "The Three Musketeers," I'll just call him "Monsieur T_______."

Later tonight, Stasia Droze came to Brooklyn with her boyfriend Jim, and she interviewed me for a documentary she's been making since about 1996. It's a study of several different people in the entertainment industry, and she checks in on them every year or so to see where they are, both career-wise and emotionally. I've been a subject of the film since the beginning, and I think it might run a little like this:

1997: trepidation, unsure of Los Angeles
1998: depression, deep mistrust of Los Angeles
1999: rage-filled, violent loathing of Los Angeles
2000: relief at having finally made it to New York
2002: trepidation, unsure of anything

What Stasia's little doc has forced me to do is take stock of my situation, especially as the biorhythms yaw and flutter in opposing angles; the last time I was interviewed, I had a ton of money in the bank, but my back hurt so bad I could barely speak - this time, I'm on unemployment, but I'm engaged to the greatest chick on earth, and we have stunning places in which to live.

Oh, and I'd made a movie. Just thinking about the interview she made with Peeler and I at the Game Show Network in '98 riddles me with Stupid Feeling. I know I've whined about this until friends and family daydream of restraining orders, but O! the unreturned phone calls, the wasted time going out to "network," the failed and dopey screenplay ideas, the humiliation, the humiliation of being in that place.

Strange, then, that I want to visit LA again. Perhaps I just needed my pool table back in New York, and now I can approach Los Angeles without feeling like a primal piece of my liver was being held hostage there.

Anyway, I felt like tonight's interviewed lacked the verve and fire of my previous endeavors, most likely because I'm tired. Or was it

The Celextant, May 28, 2002

Thank god I have the foresight to keep shoving the pills into my wallet, since I seem to be hellbent on leaving my dopt kit everywhere I'm not. On the emotional front, I feel like I'm still ingesting a lot of anxiety and obsession, even if it is toned down about two notches. The problem is, I'm not sure if I want to go on a higher dose. I'm just getting my sexual innuendo back, and I don't feel like being a zombie. I mean, I went to "About a Boy" yesterday, and I wanted Hugh Grant to fall in love, something that would have never happened on Prozac. I also wonder about the "lack of intensity" thing. What am I if I'm not a fireball of zany idiocy? Happier?

5/27/02 I went to sleep

5/27/02

I went to sleep last night with a farmhouse filled with people; I woke up at 1pm today and we were just about the only ones left. Thankfully, to relieve the post-partum depression imparted on us by one of the greatest weekends in recent memory, Todd Walker and Chip Chapman stayed around. We all felt hungover, even though none of us had been drinking last night. After watching "About a Boy" in Great Barrington, we came back to the farm, Todd took some pictures, Chip walked around the grounds, Tessa gardened, and we all had a major decompression.

Tonight Tessa and I gossiped about the various goings-on and personality disorders among our friends, and how much we loved everybody. I also remarked than we learned a lot about the farm this weekend; namely, that it can handle the collective urine of 50 over-educated iconoclasts caroming into their early 30s - and that the carriage house is indeed soundproof, because we didn't hear the screams when Joy and Julianne were attacked by bats. I think the farm also acts as advertisement for the area, which is fine by me, because I'd like to drag every last guest up here to grow incontinent with us.

Jamie and I survey the grounds like we know what we're doing

5/26/02 Not to be overly

5/26/02

Not to be overly hyperbolic or anything, but today was one of my best birthdays ever, and I got to share it with some of my favorite folks in the world. Tessa got me a bike (which I haven't had in 12 years) and everyone pitched in for a great party. I'm way too exhausted right now to go into details, but suffice to say the farm was really alive with some incredible people. We played sports all day (thwacked golf balls into the fields and then had some intense basketball games) while Rick cut hair all day long.

the collective hair of 15 of my best friends

Tonight we had a banquet in the newly-transformed-into-Valhalla 2nd floor of the barn, complete with candle chandelier, Salem's tenderloin, and a talent show.

overhead view of the table, about 60 ft. long

People came and go, and I wished Jamie Block had crossed paths with Lindsay, but everyone did amazingly well, given all their other commitments. And my sweet Tessa gave me one of the best, choked-up, sweet engagement toasts in history. I was so blown away, that I forgot to give her one in return. I suppose that is something that needs rectifying, and will plan so accordingly.

Lawrence Lucier lines up 25 of the ~40 guests for proof we did it

5/25/02 Tonight things are just

5/25/02

Tonight things are just how I would like it: I am lying in bed, having just turned 35 years old, and my entire house is filled with people. Every room, including the carriage house and parts of the barn, has a human sleeping in it. Only Chopes and I are awake right now.

overhead view of one of the three dinner tables

I haven't got any big insights for turning 35 just yet, but my senses have been dulled by fatigue, three small snifters of expensive scotch, and the desire just to exist with all of my friends in one place right now. Before we went to bed, the last thing Kendall asked me was "how did you begin all these relationships with people?" Which to me was a much more interesting question than "How do you maintain all these relationships with people?" The answer is the same for both, anyway: I simply put forth a modicum of effort.

Tessa sure looked beautiful while gardening today. And I really pegged her with a football, too (accidentally). She is such a good sport, I tell y'what. I'm quite fond of the girl.

seven toothbrushes lie in wait on the upstairs bathroom sink