xtcian

10/17/03 As you might have

10/17/03

As you might have guessed, I'm in more of a pictoral mood than a writing mood. And if you have been with me for a few months, you know my weird habit of recreating pictures from years past, so another delightful pair won't surprise you.

Chip, Bud, Jon and me in Atlanta, March 1987 - I'm wearing fake glasses for fun

Chip, Bud, Jon and me upstate, October 2003 - coming to rock a town near you!

10/16/03 I'm not sure if

10/16/03

I'm not sure if it's Seasonal Affective Disorder or what, but I've been in a terrible mood over the last few days, something apparently impenetrable to the fine folks at Forest Pharmaceuticals, since their Celexa isn't doing the trick. Writing about being depressed is almost as bad as writing about being tired - both instill sadness and fatigue in your intended audience. Yeah yeah, but I can't always be full of spitfire and vinegar, god damn you.

I'm working on a Salon piece that is a brilliant little ditty that should write itself, but I find myself staring off into space, hyperconcentrating on some tiny memory from seven years ago, or just outlining the maps of France on our walls. I don't typically suffer from writer's block (a year and a half on this blog should tell you that), but I do suffer from writer's malaise, a systemic detachment from the English language in general. Perhaps I miss the kind of instant feedback that our college town offered, or maybe I need to be immersed in close quarters with like-minded friends.

Or maybe I just need to shut up, and remember that the inspiration for a piece of art will always pale in the cold slog of actually having to create it. It is in those exhausted days at the end of a novel, or an article, or a movie, that you desperately want to claw your face off, or flap your arms and fly to the moon - but you don't. You stay and work out of pure professionalism and craft, because that's what separates you from others who wanted to do something like this, but lost heart in the face of unbelievable odds. Shut up, you fucking whiner. This is what you DO.

10/15/03 I've long been a

10/15/03

I've long been a fan of stringing pictures together to create a panorama, but mostly it has just been a hodgepodge of photos taped up to resemble the whole. Images like this one of my room in the Pink House have adorned my walls since I was a wee one dorking out in Iowa.

But with Photoshop, you can actually meld pictures together with some amount of precision. It's my first effort at a huge file (and I've had to size it down by about 90% to fit on the Web) but here is a panoramic view from our hill, taken last week as the leaves were about to go into their peak. Click on the image below unless you're on a dialup account, in which case click on the image below and then get some laundry done while you're waiting.

P.S. I threw down the mantle a few days ago, and now my buddy Tod has his own awesome blog!

10/14/03 I received some of

10/14/03

I received some of the nicest emails of my online career today, all from folks who appreciated their viewing of the Pink House movie, and weirdly, I'm feeling much better about the whole experience. That doesn't erase the fact that I puked on Broome Street on the way home last night, and woke up with a hangover commensurate with my age, but it was good to get nice and drunk on a Monday night. Just like college! Flaming Dr. Peppers at Ham's! Whooooo-hooooo!

Salem had a few hours to kill before flying back to Atlanta, so we acted like total gossipy girls and went to North 5th Ave. to screw around at Gucci, Prada, Hugo Boss and Dunhill. Now, I've never been inside the Manhattan Dunhill store before, but it is a beautiful and sad throwback to a time when men were so manly that they were almost feminine. Something about the footwear, the driving goggles, the natty suits - it's all rather gay, in a British not-gay sort of way.

Upstairs is a walk-in humidor, where they keep scores of different kinds of cigars at exactly 70% humidity and try to come as close as possible to a Cuban cigar, which means tiptoeing around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I wish I had a taste for cigars (or that they didn't make me barf) but the whole Dunhill vibe makes you long for the life of a rich, white, British man with a motorcycle sidecar. The display tables are all covered in stitched leather, and there's even a cigar-smoking room with every sort of liquor and newspaper, pristine like the Ambassador Suite at a 5-star hotel - now closed-off and unusable because of Bloomberg's smoking ban.

There's also something a little cold and distant about Dunhill, as if all of the accoutrements were devices designed to promote sex with pliant, rich American women - but there would be no follow-up call, no provocations of love after that road trip into the Surrey countryside - you would be away on business, and pretty soon, she would understand that you would always be away on business.

After that, Salem and I trucked over to Barney's. Being an utter tyro at this whole shopping thing, I thought Barney's was a discount clothes store. I dunno, something about the name. It just seemed like someone named Barney wouldn't be selling $400 shirts. Oh, but they were.

The place was abuzz with the filming of "Sex and the City," which took over the women's section (so we couldn't get a gift for Elizabeth). Even freakier, we bumped, literally, into Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson as they got off the elevator. Kate looked about 14 months pregnant, and Chris looked exactly the same as 1994, when Greg Humphreys and I spent the day smoking something wonderful with him backstage at a rock show in Charlotte. Those guys always had the best stuff, which is probably so obvious that I needn't even say it.

Yay for shopping in New York! I'm too poor to buy any of it!

10/13/03 click for bigger We

10/13/03

click for bigger

We had a small friends 'n' family sneak preview of the Pink House movie tonight, and it was the first time any of our friends had seen more than a trailer. My un-Buddhist perfectionism didn't allow me to watch the film with the crowd; I was tied up in minutiae from the moment it started (is it loud enough? is it too loud? wait, what happened to the phone sounds? am I going to have to re-write the beginning?) and mostly I just prayed we got through the thing without the DV deck exploding.

But as I sit here now, deep into the evening with Tessa long asleep and quite sick by my side, I think the whole thing was received in varying shades of great enthusiasm. Yes, I am fully aware of a few things wrong with the movie and will strive to fix them before we do the serious shopping. But even hardened moviegoers who have sat through hours on end of crappy indie films, folks who are predisposed to loathe, they came up to me and beamed.

Sometimes you have to be happy with the victories you get. Regardless of the film's future, I spent an evening entertaining some of my favorite people in the world. Half of the original Pink House was there, so was Salem from Jasper, GA and Laurie Williams and Block and my family and so many others who have worked on the movie. And what it came down to was this: they laughed at the "Marmaduke" line. If that is all we get from this, well, it won't be enough, but bringing 93 minutes of happiness into this world is surprisingly satisfying.

10/12/03 I don't take my

10/12/03

I don't take my seasons lightly; if it's going to be autumn, then my environment is bloody well going to be autumnal, dammit! I knew I could count on Jiffer to carve pumpkins with me, and even though she did hers in Wisconsin Conventional, it's always important to have a partner in dorkitude.

This was a great weekend at the farm, with near-perfect weather, and a fabulous clientele to boot. Sean, Jordana, Michelle, Jon, Chip, Bud, Baps, Lars, Jiffer, Ingo and Kelly joined Tessa and I for a vernal equinox celebration, and Columbia County rewarded us with the beginning of the color season. We took a bike ride on the Harlem Valley Rail Trail that could be described, I guess, but why bother? My recommendation is to bike it for yourself.

but if you clip in your pedals, remember that you have them clipped in, or else when you stop, you'll fall flat on your ass with your bike landing on top of you, y'know, like I did

One of the nights we played Celebrity, and there's always one person that gets frustrated. Usually it's me, sometimes it's Lars, it has occasionally been Colin Soloway, but tonight it was Sean's turn. His team lacked the, um, chemistry of some of the other teams. Plus, there's a rule about all games of the mind: Chip always wins. If you're on his team, you will win. He's the Shaq of trivia.

I don't always get to thank my baby enough for what she does, but I can say it here and loud - Tessa was amazing this week. Not only did she produce the screening of the movie tomorrow, not only did she make dinner from actual ingredients all day, but she did it toiling under the drudging penumbra of a bad flu. She's frosting and the cake.