xtcian

2/8/03 Day LXIX of the

2/8/03

Day LXIX of the Escape From the Belly of the Beast Road Trip of McIlhenny Island's Finest Tobasco Awaiting Us

Dallas, TX to New Orleans, LA

I lie now in one of my favorite places on earth, if not my favorite: the French Quarter of New Orleans. Curiously, I never came here to drink the first time I fell in love with the place, I was with Bud, Chip and Jon, and none of us had a good enough fake I.D. to get in anywhere (there had been a rumor that the drinking age was 18 in the Quarter in 1987, but we found that to be disappointingly false). I have no family here, and I'm certainly not Cajun by any stretch of DNA, and I have a seriously problem with humidity – but I love each and every millisecond I've ever spent in this unbelievable city.

A bunch of us got together about seven years ago and split an apartment for about $40 bucks a month in the Garden District, a fairy-tale land right off the St. Charles streetcar, surrounded by houses that are so beautiful that tourists walk among them with their mouths agape. I hardly ever got to come down that year from NC (I'd run out of money), but just knowing I had a place in New Orleans filled me with warmth. I know, it's irrational. What are you going to do?

We're not exactly in the Quarter this time, but only a few blocks east this bed & breakfast, bedecked with beads, 19-foot ceilings, and photographs from the 1860s, was also the only place that took dogs. I suppose it had to; this is the gayest neighborhood in the parish.

Our first stop, of course, was the Best Kept Secret in New Orleans, known to anyone who has been here with me as the Verti Marte. Not much more than a hole-in-the-wall convenience store stuck in a shotgun shack on the corner of Gov. Nicholls and Royal Street, they have a $4.25 shrimp po-boy that is the best thing Tessa and I have eaten since birth. I've been there drunk, I've been there sober, and the food is as good or better – than pricey ultra-Cajun Commander's Palace, Arnaud's, or anything Emeril Lagasse can cook up.

sated, almost post-coital after the Verti Marte cajun corn

Chopin the Dog is wearing his Mardi Gras beads (I didn't ask him how he got them; he must have shown his nuts to somebody) so I gave him a little piece of alligator meat from the jambalaya. He liked it so much he followed me around for an hour. Glad to see the town has another convert.

2/7/03 Day 48 of the

2/7/03

Day 48 of the Ugly Secrets in the Cellar Road Trip

Dallas, TX

You are long gone now, so I don't have a chance to say any of this to your face. It would have been too late even then, with the weight of your illness humbling you so badly, and me too green for audacity. But I want you to know that I know.

I know what you did to them, how you humiliated them, how such small tokens of affection cost you so much. Do you remember when you beat him senseless over a haircut? I can imagine the feeling you got as you towered over him, eyes red with rage, able to stop yourself but enjoying it too much. So many things can be chalked up to the time, the place weren't your parents the same to you? It is a generation that inflicted cruelty upon children, after all. True enough, but there was a part of you that loved it, a part of you so damaged, so sick, that you couldn't stop yourself from splattering his blood upon the bathroom floor, because it felt too good. He saw it in your eyes and knew.

The liberties you took with women were legendary; a nod, a wink, a cruel clank of wine glasses over a dinner table because boys will be boys - but I know what else you did. I know.

What was left out of the mythology being tied to radiators? Enemas? It's one thing to abandon, yet another to torture. On and on it went until they all got old enough – and tall enough – to dare you to try it again. After that, it was all about the things, the stuff, the willful manipulation of couches and dollars equaling affection.

The people close to me aren't allowed to hate you; somehow they navigated the twisted trunks and roots of your mystique and ended up with a brokenhearted love. I think a part of you, somewhere deep in the bayou of your most naked self, you were capable of love too. But it is my job to know, to bear witness to what you did. You hurt the ones I love so badly, and with my unjaundiced heart, I will be the one to remember long after they have managed to forget.

2/6/03 Day 47 of the

2/6/03

Day 47 of the Zero-Emissions From Both Cars and Wealthy Scions Road Trip of "Oh, The Ironing"

Dallas, TX

We had dinner tonight with a billionaire. Yes, that is someone who actually has more than 1,000,000,000,000 pennies that he could put in a giant pile somewhere, look skyward at it and pronounce, "verily, I say unto you, that this mountain is MINE." It's hard to imagine a billion dollars. I've been trying all day, in fact, tried all dinner to look at him and see the vast google of zeroes extending behind him in an infinite mirror loop of endless fluttering bills, but alas, it was beyond my comprehension.

Oh yeah, and he wouldn't give any to our production. The money we need to finish this movie - $30,000 is equivalent to .00003% of his net worth, so I could see how that might pinch.

Anyway...

Being in dreary Dallas has pushed me to the limits of my tolerance for the Rich and Unstable. Moreover, I just can't stand the number of SUV's being driven by single drivers that litter every shopping center by the thousands. Escalades, Yukons, even that giant yellow COCK SUBSTITUTE Hummer 2 are docked in front of every Starbucks. Seriously, nobody in Texas has a real car. I know I sound like a whiny, granola-snorting bark-eater, but this shit has really been getting to me lately.

In response: as of last week, our apartment in Brooklyn in powered entirely by wind. And no, it's not some sort of wealthy liberal fantasy, it's an actual company called 1st Rochdale Cooperative that provides windpowered electricity into ConEd's grid, and it's just as cheap or cheaper - than ConEd's regular price. Take a look if you don't believe me. I think it's so fucking cool I can barely stand it – my iMac, Cuisinart and Fisher-Price record player are all being powered by a windmill somewhere outside of town.

On the car side, we might - might - get a pretty substantial tax refund this year, allowing us to think about a new hybrid car. Currently, the only gas/electric hybrid cars available in America are the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid. Both get about 50mpg in both the city and country, have four doors, tons of horsepower, and both use the brakes as a way of constantly recharging the batteries (no, you never have to plug them in). In fact, the only difference between these cars and their petrol-guzzling compatriots is your desire to be an Ugly American and keep troops in the Arabian peninsula so they can be gassed by Muslim extremists.

Other little details for those who care: the Prius is about a half-foot shorter in length than the Civic, making it something of a dream for parking in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Civic goes farther on a tank of gas (650 miles!) but only because the tank is bigger. And the cargo space, confusingly, is roomier in the Prius. I think the Prius looks cooler, but Tessa likes the Civic style.

Personally, I'd rather have the Beatles-in-Yellow-Sumbarine-esque quality of the Fiat Multipla (which looks like Dali designed it) or Ford's SUV hybrid (available in 2004), but we can't afford to fly to Milan, and we don't have a time machine. In the meantime, the only way I can assuage my anxieties in this wicked world is to keep my side of the street clean, and hopefully a 21st-century supercar and the quixotic dreams of windmills will go a long way in that direction.

visiting Salem's sister Katie today, I put the camera on a timer, and then her dog stepped on my nads

2/5/03 Day 46 of the

2/5/03

Day 46 of the Dull, Achy Feeling Road Trip of Creeping Pain in the Throat

Dallas, TX

I'm going to keep this mercilessly brief, since today was a fairly rotten day for the following reasons:

1. it's cold, gray, miserable and pissing down rain
2. Tessa's interminable family estate problems
3. losing to Dook when we were leading most of the game
4. and, fourthly,
5. I feel totally rotten and virus-y.

So instead of reading today's blog, why not try my brother Sean's instead? He just started it a few weeks ago, and has already got in trouble for it (just like I do on a weekly basis), so it can't be all bad.

me trying to hoist Sean aloft, December 1971

2/4/03 Day 45 of the

2/4/03

Day 45 of the Dreams Realized, History Held, Fascination Endures Road Trip of Judea's Bitumen

Austin, TX to Dallas, TX

On the sixth floor of a random university building tucked away on the University of Texas campus, one of my holy grails sits behind a giant plastic tube. I have searched for it for years, looked for a poster, looked for it online, and now I have seen it, inches away from my face: the world's first photograph ever taken.

"View From the Garden at Gras, 1826" by Joseph Nipce
click for a larger image

This is not exactly the way it looks in person; this was the photo made from it in 1952 by the man who discovered it in the abandoned attic of a long-dead descendant of the photographer himself. The actual photo - actually, Niépce called it a heliograph - is rendered on a piece of thin pewter the size of small laptop screen, and can only be seen by viewing from an angle, when the light hits it just right.

Still, when you take it in, and realize what you're seeing, it is mystical beyond transcendence. This little piece of metal was the first "true" representation of visual reality in our universe. It spawned the daguerreotype, which turned into modern photography, which spawned every motion picture you've ever seen, and now finds its way into every digital picture snapped 3.7 billion times a day. Every famous photograph, from Dorothea Lange's migrant mother to Robert Jackson's photo of Lee Harvey Oswald to Alfred Eisenstaedt's V-Day kissing photo, owes its debt to it. My own movie owes it everything, 24 times a second.

And yet, the first picture, as Jim Lewis says, is also the world's first great picture, although my reasons for believing it are a bit different from Jim's. I love the windows of the "pigeon house" on the left, how the barn slopes oblong in the middle, and the rough French horizon in the back. But the most beautiful thing to me is but a detail: the pear tree just to the left and above the sloping barn roof. The daylight that peeks through the branches is a striking announcement to all men that nature could only represent its true beauty through the document of photography. From this moment on, paintings will not suffice. That break in the trees is the future slicing its way into our now-open eyes, and nothing could ever be the same.

There is no sign pointing to the room on campus where the first picture sits; the building is under construction, and you have to walk up the six flights of stairs to the photo department. Even there, the receptionist only casually remembers where it is, and left us alone in the tiny room to stare at it as long as we wanted. Road trips like ours are always dominated by the big picture, of towns and money and schedules, but the once-in-a-lifetime unearthing of small jewels like this make us Lap the Miles and Lick the Valleys Up.

the hallway at U. of Texas photo department - the Niépce print is in the tiny room at right

Oh, and today's blog goes out to Peter and Derek up in Prince Edward Island in Canada!

2/3/03 Day 44 of the

2/3/03

Day 44 of the Urban Outfitters Store That Now Stands Under the Glow of Charles Whitman's Bell Tower Road Trip of Sister Schools

Austin, TX

Being in other college towns always begs comparison to the one you're used to, and it must be said that Austin and Chapel Hill stack up well. Both were pretty early adherents to technology (esp. the internet), both are left-leaning state schools in the middle of states that aren't known for being particularly left-leaning, and both feature hot Southern women who are usually smarter than your first impression. Unfortunately for us, Texas has pulled ahead of Carolina in the rankings lately, due no doubt to our sorry-ass record of professor salaries. Their basketball team is also better than ours right now, which is truly horrifying.

As a town, Austin shares Chapel Hill's penchant for fucking up perfectly nice downtown boho shops by inserting Gaps, Barnes & Nobles and every other corporate behemoth focus-group-tested for the student environment. Austin is bigger, though, and is (confusingly) the capital of Texas, and has done a better job of holding on to its homegrown talent and southern flavor.

Chapel Hill, as far as I can tell, has two honest businesses on Franklin Street that have changed very little since the 1950s: the Rathskellar, and Sutton's Drug Store. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but Jeff's Confectionery where you could get a vanilla coke from the soda jerk – has been replaced by Smoothieville™. The Intimate Bookshop, where Charles Kuralt cut his teeth shopping for non-fiction, is now a Sephora™, where dum-dums shop for lipliner and male fragrances. Fowler's, the marketplace known for Big Bertha (a walk-in refrigerated room featuring every beer known to man) has been replaced by BW-3™, a "hot wings" sports bar. At least I think it has – it's impossible to tell where anything used to be. It's like post-war London sometimes.

I wonder how much of Chapel Hill I romanticize. Sometimes we'll be walking through a particularly bohemian neighborhood somewhere, with craft stores, vegan coffee shops, indie record stores and tons of locally-owned restaurants where you can eat outside, and I say something like, "it's totally Chapel Hill here" Which is a bit silly, because Chapel Hill was barely like that when I first got there in the mid-80s.

I think I'm looking for the following out of a town:

- you can walk everywhere, including to the mall
- 2 separate independent record stores with a rivalry
- three coffee shops, all equipped with wifi internet, each different according to mood
- at least two arthouse movie theaters
- tons of gays and lesbians who are allowed to hold hands
- a fantastic underpriced thrift store
- a place to dance, 3 places to see bands
- an all-night diner with fresh donuts
- a garden shop
- a hardware store manned by a Guy Who Knows Everything
- at least one business owned by one family since 1799

Salem and I once had an idea for Chapel Hill: combine a Krispy Kreme and the Cat's Cradle to make an all-night diner with Hot Donuts Now that had amazing bands and DJ's every night. The diner would adjoin the club, and there would be a mezzanine for serious listeners and a mosh pit for serious dancers. The name: The Krispy Kradle.

Why doesn't anyone listen to us?

Krista, Tad, Kari, me and Salem dancing in our Chapel Hill living room, circa 1989

2/2/03 Day 43 of the

2/2/03

Day 43 of the Forgotten Farm Where Dreams Go To Die Road Trip of Forsaken Homesteads

Houston, TX to Austin, TX

I've visited my old houses before, usually out of some morbid curiosity about what my childhood rooms look like, or to resurrect the ancient whisp of a spirit still embedded in the rocks and mortar I may have deposited from the intensity and omnidirectional energy of being a child. It's an only vaguely satisfying venture, lemme tellya, and can usually lower you into the still, warm waters of depression.

Tessa had that going on today as we passed through Brenham, TX the rural homestead that her father had planned as the place where all his descendants would congregate, hoist ram's heads of mead aloft, and send convocations to him in the sky. He built a beautiful Southern plantation, along with two artists colleges on either side, in arguably the prettiest part of Texas. He was to buried here on Carolina farm, and the troubles of the world would never lap this far.

Problem is, he didn't really have much use for family, and his gestures of grandeur almost always disintegrated into Who Gets What, and the plantation now sits, like an unwritten Faulkner novel, full of empty rooms, clean squares on the walls where pictures once hung, and wasps building nests in the curtains of every room. It is truly where Blakey's inconsistent and conditional dreams of family went to perish. The last party ever held at the estate is actually in Tessa's film, and I wonder what all of them would think if they knew what an empty bug's husk of a place it would become.

Tessa fondles the chandelier her mother decorated in happier years

Some things you just have to let alone, and I let Tessa howl at the house and her father – for letting her down. I know we are building a better farm upstate for our (god willin') family, but you have to let someone say goodbye to an era any way they'd like.

Chopin the dog, of course, was having none of this maudlin horseshit. I think he understood - in some primal way that this was his ancestral homeland, and promptly stormed off to get covered in green pond scum and chase sticks under the dock. He was born mere yards from here, to a neurotic and genocidal mother no less, so I made him sit for about .03 nanseconds, while I took this picture of him in his original cur dog environment, 13 years after his birth:

click for bigger

Getting the hell out of there was Priority One, so I floored it to Austin, where we commiserated with the very talented Jim Lewis over Mexican food. He knows all the same NYC literati we do (i.e. Tessa does), so there was much gossip afloat. His new novel The King is Dead will be out later this year, so buy one and keep the money in the family.

Over dinner, I got the same pangs of regret I usually do when discussing people's literary careers in New York: why didn't I move to the City in 1993 when everyone wanted a piece of my spleen? Instead, I retreated into myself, wrote an unsellable novel and went to Pi Phi pledge formals. God slacks with those who slack unto themselves, I guess.