xtcian

3/15/03 Columbia County, NY You want

3/15/03 Columbia County, NY

You want perspective? It's available in large quantities on the first above-freezing night of the year on a near-full moon. Just take the flash off your camera, hold very still, and let la lune be your only source of light, and all will be revealed to you.

the barn around 1am; click for bigger

3/14/03 Brooklyn, NY I got

3/14/03 Brooklyn, NY

I got drunk tonight for the second night in a row something I haven't done in earnest since about 1995 – so I'll keep this mercifully short lest I start posting my PIN numbers and start talking about the fetish catalogues we used to order in high school. But I will say this: losing makes you appreciate a win more than you can possibly imagine.

Just a few short weeks ago I posted my whimpering sobs about falling to Maryland by 40; tonight, we kicked their ass when it mattered most: in the ACC Championship. Normally, I would have been "jubilant but restrained," opting to begin worrying about tomorrow's game immediately, but in this yo-yo year of ying and yang, I've come to savor the victories that are, not those that would be.

To be clear, that kind of Buddhism apparently requires a fishtank full of Sex on the Beach shots with ten straws.

Neil Balas, Lindsay and I being good Buddhists

3/13/03 Brooklyn, NY I've generally

3/13/03 Brooklyn, NY

I've generally had good luck with Mac computers each one I've bought has lasted way past its own relevancy and certainly far into the nether reaches of Moore's Law. I have waxed philippic about my Mac Plus, Quadra 660AV, Powerbook 1400, iMac and iBook until the guards came and took away my TV privileges.

And I know most of you reading this blog are doing so on a PC; I mean, I read the webstats. 69% of you, to be exact. Believe me, I look upon a nation of PC's the way I look at a car dealership with miles of new SUV's: we gotta suffer through all that hardware until people start acting responsibly.

But I confess to having bought my first Apple lemon: a G4 tower 1.25 GHz dual-processing machine that crashed 45 times, had a "kernel panic" ten times, and froze at least four. Editing the the Pink House movie on that thing was, on a good day, merely Sisyphean; on bad days, we wanted to drop it out the window and let it smash on Berkeley Street.

I won't go into the unfathomable number of hours spent on the phone with various Apple employees and our reseller, but our editor Jessie and my betrothed Tessa deserve entry into the Can I Speak To Your Supervisor Award for Infinite Patience sweepstakes. Finally, after two months in the shop (and a replaced motherboard, hard drive, blah blah fucking blah) we were rewarded with a brand spanking new G4 1.42 dual. And today we began the fine edit of our film for the first time, with no crashes, no panics, and at a blinding speed.

Tessa is asleep now, so I'm off to make slow, sensual love to our new G4 tower. O blessed dual-processor, make our movie full of delight, won't you? Say you'll massage it into a boisterously funny comedy, okay baby? I promise I'll [insert computer-related genitalia joke here] and then [insert sexual computer pun on "firmware" here] and perhaps [dumb "hard drive" innuendo followed by RAM used as verb] if only you'll [uninspired, poorly-thought-out "screen inches" joke to leave audience "laughing"].

3/12/03 Brooklyn, NY This blog

3/12/03 Brooklyn, NY

This blog goes out to Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, because they're the only motherfuckers on the planet who will be able to figure out who is making the ghostly racket at Tessa's Manhattan apartment from 2 to 4am. Seriously, the building contractor, a lawyer, and a sound engineer have all suggested "poltergeist" as a possible culprit, and they were only half-joking.

Tessa and I rolled our own Mystery Machine into the city tonight, planning to camp out in the place until we heard the noise. The tenants, who have not been able to sleep for two weeks, are staying at a hotel, so we had the run of the building. Without warning, the sounds started around 12:30am relatively early, by all accounts – and I only heard them because I was sitting on the toilet.

We've done everything: fixed the boiler, replaced the pipes, got a whole new water heater, bled the radiators, and still you could head the "thwunk thwunk thwunk" along with the sounds of rushing water. I know it is something simple - like the small dishwasher running in the bar downstairs but unearthing the problem in the labyrinthine mess of a West Village apartment built in 1888 is going to put us under.

So this is when Scooby-Doo and company show up, right? Fred with his ascot, Shaggy with the pot, Velma with her Sapphic tendencies and we find out it's the evil owner of the gay porn store next door! He would have gotten away with it too, except that he had no motive.

3/11/03 Brooklyn, NY One thing

3/11/03 Brooklyn, NY

One thing about relentless archivism is that it allows you to read your entire email inbox from the year 1999, which is something I found myself doing tonight. 1999 is a weird year from our current perspective; not long enough ago to be considered history, it is true that everything is different now.

On this date in 1999, I was boarding a plane to North Carolina so I could attend the wedding of Lindsay and Dana. I was in a long-distance relationship with a wonderful girl named Mary who lived in Chicago (whilst I lived in Los Angeles). I was writing the trailer for the movie Mystery Men, while in pre-production for my first short film "The Rescue of Autumn." Meanwhile, the dot-com I helped create had gone public, and all of my compatriots were holding their stock to see if it would hit 125.

I was also severely depressed. Six months of Prozac was doing nothing but rob me of ability to care about the protagonists of movies. Mary eventually tired of my swooning lack of communication, and "Mystery Men" bombed despite my attempts at breathing life into the ad campaign. "The Rescue of Autumn" was a surprise hit in New York later that year, but largely, I think, due to the amount of bourbon and Japanese sake ingested by the attendees; despite great performances from the actors, it only serves to embarrass me now. Oh, and the dot-com was bought by a gazillionaire and the stock plummeted to the single digits. Lindsay and Dana, however, are still happily married.

I remain an archivist of old emails and old notes, mix tapes, and dinky pieces of random shit – because I think it's important to remember the distinct flavor of the times you've experienced. Some eras are obviously better left unexcavated, but if you're attempting to tell stories with your life, you had better be ready to dive into your own belly button lint with a heartbeat's notice.

I don't write as many lugubrious emails as I used to, nor is my world hinged upon the many affirmations I sought in the virtual world of women. Tessa has relieved me of the latter, and this blog has replaced the former. I wish I could apologize to everyone for my behavior of 1999, but the bandwidth would crash the server; suffice to say being 32 is hard. Just ask Jesus, Mozart and Schubert.

3/10/03 Brooklyn, NY Driving up

3/10/03 Brooklyn, NY

Driving up the Eastern Seaboard with the satellite radio tuned to the BBC will give you eight hours' earful of how much the rest of the world despises the United States right now; it seems like the only country with no beef is Bulgaria. I don't blame any of them. If I were more involved with the folks over at moveon.org, I'd suggest helping the French, who are busy convincing the rest of the world that our government is a drunk 15-year-old at the wheel of a loaded school bus.

One liberal mantra is "this would be the first unprovoked attack on another nation in the history of this country" but they'd be wrong. America did the exact same goddamn thing with the Spanish-American war. Remember it from 9th grade? One of our battleships called the U.S.S. Maine, docked in Spanish-owned Cuba in 1898, suffered a mysterious explosion (probably engine-related). The U.S. government, however, in cahoots with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, drummed up a war against the Spanish to sell papers and solidify American power. Sound like any Republican-controlled government and Fox News you happen to know?

Back then, the cry was "Remember the Maine!" which is exactly like Bush Jr. invoking "Remember September 11!" for Iraq, in that both statements attempt to blame the wrong people through a hideous slight-of-hand that Gary Kamiya calls brutal sentimentality, and I call the New Mercilessness.

At the farm I have a giant picture of the 1899 U.S. Congress well, actually a "composite photograph" of every member's head stuck on random bodies, making the whole thing look like an animation still from Monty Python. At the bottom, it says, "They Remembered The Maine." And you can see it, too, the scowling faces of hundreds of old, corpulent white guys obviously suffering from the gout, aching to kick some brown people ass.

I bought the picture last year because I thought it was hilarious; I didn't know I'd be staring at such a deliciously apt doppelganger for our times. Frankly, I'm surprised that the Spanish-American war isn't being brought up more often these days; I find it rather comforting that the U.S. has acted like a tyrannical, imperialist dipshit before and managed to survive.

a police action on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge held traffic there for an hour here's Manhattan from that vantage point. recognize anything?

3/9/03 Chapel Hill, NC I

3/9/03 Chapel Hill, NC

I don't know how much better a day can get for yours truly, but today was definitely in the running. First off, it's sunny and 70 here in the Southern Part of Heaven, so Chip and I made our usual pilgrimage to the Carrboro Elementary School basketball court for a war of one-on-one attrition we've had since about 1988. We met up with some old-timers whom I've played with over my years here in fact, one of them is the guy I always think about when I ruminate on hoops in my 40s. We had some good runs with them, and then Chip and I got another good one in before it was time for the Game.

Uptown, the scene was a bit sparser than other years, because Spring Break started for the students two days ago. Those that remained crowded the UNC clothes shoppes buying Vince Carter jerseys, Michael Jordan shorts and getting temporary tattoos of a Tar Heel.

top: the unbelievable interior of the Shrunken Head boutique; bottom: me with a gaggle of Carolina chix en route to the game (I always try for pictures like this)

The Duke-UNC game is one I have now attended eighteen straight years. The first game in 1986 – I sat with Kendall and had no idea what I'd gotten myself into. Now, in 2003, the Mecca I call the Dean Dome has lost none of its religion. This is a game I didn't think we'd win, what with all the rumors of coaching problems, our abysmal conference record, and the fact that we are all freshmen playing on a near-empty tank of gas. I even thought the crowd might be slim, but it was a full, deafening, rocking house.

Chip and I couldn't get our usual cushy seats down near the mezzanine and actually had to sit in the very last row up top. Which turned out to be fine: I think these experiences keep you honest, being surrounded by kids that live and die with the team, not to mention that we could create an ungodly amount of noise by banging on the roof of the Smith Center.

top: the view from the rafters; bottom: Chip and me actually IN the rafters

The game was an instant classic, no doubt destined for years of replay on ESPN. The lead was hardly ever more than 2-3 points in either direction, and at one point after Dahntay "Thug" Jones elbowed my beloved Raymond Felton in the face, a fight broke out between the two benches that required six state cops to calm it down.

We made 5 of 6 foul shots to extend our lead to three with 3.1 seconds left in the game; then Dahntay sprinted down the court to bury a three unfortunately for him, time ran out a tenth of a second before the ball left his hands, and the evil forces of Dook were finally vanquished, and students stormed the court, as Chip and I screamed our goddamn heads off. It was one of the best games I have ever seen.

I have traveled from all over the world to get this game every year, and the last four times, I have left demoralized and dejected. This year is different. All is well with the world, and the celestial kingdom has righted itself. Even another 8-hour drive back to Brooklyn won't be bad, because both the Land Rover and I will be floating on air.