I hate to say this, but building a Noah's Ark-Themed Amusement Park in Kentucky to re-invigorate the economy really isn't really that bad an idea.
The Ark Encounter, a proposed theme-park brought to you by the same folks who brought you the Creation Museum has received encouragement from Kentucky Governor Steven Bashear, who proposes giving tax breaks to any investors, on the grounds it will stimulate the state's economy.

I think it's a good idea for two reasons:
1) Americans have always had a knack for creating good artificial paradises--from the frosted spires of Disney World to the post-modern Sodom that is Las Vegas. Foreigners flock to those places like pilgrims to Lourdes.
2) The Biblical Creation Story is really no less hairy an article of faith than the much more (ahem)"liberal-friendly" melding of particle physics with New Age models of consciousness--the kind espoused in a movie such as this one.

My lifelong intellectual battle with people who think Adam and Eve rode to church on the backs of dinosaurs ended with an argument that came from a carpenter, (No, not that one. An actual carpenter.) We were smoking cigarettes in front of the courthouse debating the nature of the universe and things immaterial as ex-stoners are wont to do. I spat something along the lines of "Why don't you hillbillies just look at the freaking trilobites in the fossil record?" He snorted and shot back, "Land-o-Goshen!" (O.K. he didn't actually say that, but once you start paraphrasing some people, it's hard to stop)"I often figured God just changes up the rules of the universe every thousand years or so just to f*ck with our heads."

In terms of paradigm shifts, it was kind of a stunner. I had never had it put to me like that. I actually like the idea of a deity who meets our advancing pursuit of knowledge by making the cosmos that much more complex and unfathomable. Providing he doesn't send us to Hell for buying into it--as envisioned excellently by the late Bill Hicks in this funny bit

However, as Heraclitus said (a mere 5,000 years after Adam and Eve left the Garden), "God is a child at play with little colored balls." It's personally kind of fun to imagine a host of seraphim and archangels painting those gamma bubbles just as the Fermi Telescope trained its lenses at the center of the Milky Way a couple of months back.

I had, of course, grown up in Appalachia a stone's cast from the Scopes Monkey Trial--where you actually had arguments on the playground and at church suppers about whether the universe was 12,000 years old or not, and sometimes I even had to read about those archaelogical uncoveries! where fundamentalist paleontologists find the remnants of Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark, or the Tower of Babel at undisclosed locations near the Red Sea. The funny thing about that brand of Christian "Edu-tainment" (around which an industry has spawned) is that particular brand of Bob Jones science always seems glossed with this patina of Hollywood productions,particularly Stephen Spielberg. It's as though they want to convince us that while all those tweedy Harvard types are translating Greek in the library, the "real" scientists (with advanced degrees from Bob Jones University) are actually decked in pith helmets and bomber jackets looking for the literal Ark of the Covenant, coz that's what Indiana Jones was doing and imaginary archaelogy is a helluva lot more interesting than the real type.

You know, this may sound pretty snarky, but I'm somehow pondering whether many of the companies which produce that sort of dross, also shoot high quality pornography. After all, the production values are very similar (You know, leather thong straps and bad CGI), and there are only so many plastic totem poles and terrible special effects out in California for people not to have to share.

But, anyways, like many rural teenagers hammered with opaque religious arguments and shoddy, low-brow pseudo-science, I found solace in magazines like Discovery and Scientific American. I was drawn to the fractal-heavy covers and the spiky terminology which inspired eyeball kicks whether or not I could even get my head around them. Wormholes! Nth Dimension! Pocket galaxies! Buckminster Fullerene! Some mathematicians, like Rudy Rucker and Neal Stephenson, even wrote really amazing science fiction to accompany their ideas. I was also heavy into Pink Floyd at the time, which somehow seems relevant.

If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the early 1990's and made the decision to refute God, (He, after all, gave you terrible acne) there were four false idols to worship. For pagans, there was Jim Morrison (the Oliver Stone movie painted him as the resurrected Bachhus), for existentialists: Kurt Cobain (suicide's often the only answer when Hell is other people), for Satanists, there was Slayer (or Marilyn Manson if you were dealing with homosexual urges). Then there was Pink Floyd, whose music was a pastiche of astronomy, alchemy, and childhood trauma endlessly appealing those of us who spent many Saturday nights in smoky basements reading neon hieroglyphics in the threads of our Levi's and glimpsing spiral galaxies in our navels. Their aesthetic embodied all the weird mysticism of physics and astronomy, and it's no surprise that museum observatories frequently host laser light shows devoted to Floyd's music. Astronomers dig Floyd. Their seemingly endless resources and weirdness gave rise to arcane legends--(one I was reminded of recently was that the LED light on the Pulse album was engineered to blink for exactly 100 years).

However, adolescence comes and goes, the chip one has on his shoulder against others' beliefs falls, as does the notion that one might be important in the cosmic scheme of things, and Pink Floyd's music seems ridiculously narcissistic when I listen to it now. I prefer the Statler Brothers nowadays because they're weird, narcissistic, AND spiritual. I bet the kind of people who would buy tickets to feed tamed camels in a plaster ark probably dig on the Statlers, too.

To be honest string theory seems kind of loopy,too. He really must be messing with our heads.

Anyways, here's to Disney World, Las Vegas, and the Ark Museum. Peacable, plastic Edens where well-fed humans dwell side-by-side with trained animals. Here's to the efforts of theorists, from both M.I.T and B.J.U., for making the world something more precious than a market, a zoo, and a battleground. And here's to our Creator, for breathing wonder into every facet of our ever-broadening cosmos--stranger not only than we suppose, but than we can suppose..

Well, let's write down what 29 year old Keith has to say.This is a journal from this past summer

Walking exerscises the imagination quoth Celine. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That's it's strength.

Stoners are highly organized houseplants.

A dispute between neighbors at ABC No Rio. The guy says "I'm a vampire. The time I sucked my brother's blood, I only regret it a little.

July 4th. Neponsit Beach, Listening to Television (the band). I feel music taking a renewed importance in my life following the Saturn's Returns, recoping with my new refocused personality.

Constantly, I'm floundering in the digital age, yet in many ways, I'm adjusting to it better than most. Missing my lo-fi analog Chicago days. It was rock and roll as fuck for a little while there. Rock and roll doesn't leave much time for creative expression or, let's face it, any aspect of organized civilization.

Grandchildren will read these words someday. Hello future! Are there flying cars yet?

The day bagan at 6:10 pm with a shirtless walk up 5th Ave. I'm the only white man who takes his shirt off in midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it will catch on and I will be a zeitgeist. Summer must be so uncomfortable for the old.

I'm at Galapagos listening to a Marching Band blasting in my ears. Life has reached the coolness of cinema at this moment. There's something miraculous about getting this amount of people together. The performers outnumber the audience.

It's been wonderful to watch the transformation of my friends into adults. We've inherited a hot and sick world. We're the good guys, or at least the good enough guys.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND 20 YEAR OLD

Happy Thanksgiving. Lacking creative impulse, but desiring to put something on my blog, I just pulled out one of my old journals from college and started typing some of the more interesting lines. Lots of references to classical works, so I assume this was in the Fall of 2001 when I took some classes on Dante and Homer. After the 9/11 attacks, so I was pretty bummered the entire year. In 2001, I was 20 old years and much more serious than I am now. I hope I'm a better writer, too. Anyways, here's to memory.

The Trojan War is regenerative. No afterlife is hinted in the Iliad. Dark Mist. Nothingness. In war, the process of living is stalled. Hades exists in the aftermath.

In the Odyssey, Hell is the deteoriation of society. Odysseus mourns the afterimages of used-up men. The dead know the past and future, but cannot know the present. A circular concept of time.

Human features are shaped by inertia and force. There is a mix of both qualities in the features of James and Harriet. Theirs is a life lived long. I don't know whether it is by ignorance, innocence, or creativity that country people's houses eviscerate the lives of their tenants-cozy and full of icons like a lady chapel

All this education has turned me inward to self-attention.

My computer came back to life today.

Sooner or later, memories of my ex-girlfriend, something I read in the paper about a winning Megabucks lottery ticket being sold from a small convenience store in New Jersey. Something about the memories of my ex-girlfriend, the lottery story, what my grandmother once said mixing in my head with a layman's knowledge of Sartre in my head giving a notion about the futility of even the purest intentions and soon I'm sitting on the stoop sobbing to myself just because.

I concede that the old downtown was gutted out before I was born. There is very little I can confess to sharing with my mother's memories as a child from the same town. Memories of Saturday afternoons on the street.

Without zoning laws or people resigning to be told what the can do with their damn land, the storefront face of the South seems malleable and messy as quicksilver. A Civil War battlefield can become a Wal-Mart, as quickly as a tanning salon can become a Living Gospel Assembly church.

I feel my worst quality is that I draw away from people I love while also needing them near.

If I was any more mundane and boring as I feel I am now, I would become tangible only in the form of pre-packaged lozenges sold in blister strips of ten at Walgreens.

I'm becoming unreasonably blameful at my family for being so grounded. I have plenty of room to fulfill my own Abe Lincoln-forged myth of rising above my rusticated roots. I don't know why, but I think about Abe Lincoln more than I think about anything else.

The Krystal commercials encourage you to take home a sackful of hamburgers today. I just drank a sackful of beers.

Readingthe recent article in the NYT about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a crafty $1.6 billion dollar Swiss clock which in addition to telling the time, also reads dark matter from cosmic rays, I'm struck with regret that I never paid attention in math class.
What sucks about being a liberal arts major is that scientists often invent things that promise to solve your lifelong search for meaning, but whose utility, function, and purpose sends you running to the bathroom for aspirin.
I can think of two specific examples. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, a device whose operation is so abstruse for the laymen, I couldn't even understand its function when Hollywood digitally spelled it out for me in Angels and Demons.
The second is The Super Kamiokande
From the moment I laid eyes on it, I couldn't help but want one for myself. A 3,200-foot deep cavern of photo-multiplier jellyfish bots surrounded by ultra-purified water and two little guys in orange jumpsuits rafting around. Why do I love it? Perhaps because the name and image alone conjures up the Crash Man stage in Mega Man 2.It's cute and eerie in the way that so many Japanese things are cute and eerie. But what, oh, what, does it do? Let's check their website

We have discovered neutrino oscillations by SK which was started its data taking in 1996. This discovery has revealed that neutrinos have finite masses, which was previously considered to be massless, --a clue to a new theoretical frame-work of the elementally particle physics. K2K experiment has confirmed the neutrino oscillation by using the man-made neutrinos.

Well, it doesn't help that the entire website is in Engrish, but I just don't understand what the hell any of this means or why it has to be so deep underground to discover why neutrinos have masses. Why is it important? What's the value of finding this information? And inevitably I always stumble across that spooky and confounding term one finds in every science article.

The 23% of them is found to be a dark matter which does not emit light, but can be observed by gravity. The dark matter is expected to be a new elementary particle. The direct observation of the dark matter will be a great help to understand the structure of the universe.

"Dark Matter." I feel it's important to understand dark matter, to grok this concept so as to understand what the hell is going on and why I'm sitting here, me, this self incarnate in a body. But then I realize that to understand dark matter, I would first have to understand matter, by which I would have to first understand atoms, which might actually require me to do some math which calls to mind Mark McConkey stabbing himself with a protractor in 9th grade and textbooks which had covers that looked like this, but insides that looked like this and I just can't go back there.

If I still drank, I'd be pretty bummed that Four Loko was being taken off the market. For a young burgeoning drunk in the mid-oughties, energy-infused malt liquors seemed to be the most interesting development in alcohol since. . . well, man first crushed grapes. At no point in its history has the sublime kick of booze been augmented. I spent about eight good years solely devoted to task of discovering what the quintessence of being drunk is, and I submit my findings thusly:


"It makes people wanna commit incest."

Of course, we've spent milleniae attributing a Willy Wonka grimoire of different psychoactive qualities to different distillations of what is simply a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules:

"Tequila makes you feisty." "Vodka is friendly." "Beer calms you down." "Jagermeister is liquid cocaine." "Pernod makes you hallucinate." "Scotch is nostalgic" "Whisky is spiritual" ad infinitum.
In truth, Sparks Energy malt liquor, with its tangy mix of guarana, taurine, Siberian ginseng, and caffeine, was the only beverage that actually delivered on it's promise of being a different headkick.
I remember one hot July Summer night in Chicago back in 2006, there was an outdoor concert, Intonation Fest, sponsored by Sparks and Vice Magazine. At the concession stand, a twelve ounce beer was $5 while a sixteen ounce Sparks was $4, so, you know, do the math. It was a ginormous amount of people in the dead heat and the entire body politic was hepped on energy booze. As the Boredoms began playing their catastrophic drum set, I remember a mania and insanity coursing through the audience like a Bill Haley and the Comets concert behind the Iron Curtain. The potential for bedlam was everywhere. By the time Ghostface Killah mounted the stage, the thousands of us had melted like ice cream into a sweaty, flesh-walled slurry of hemmorhaging pheromones. We were a stupid bull cow, like Katja Kassin being finished by a purple-polychrome centipede dildo courtesy of the mandingus general.
Suffice to say, the stuff was poison, but I ain't forgetting such days anytime soon.
I feel old as I actually find myself supporting the ban of a substance. Me, the libertarian who believes every home ought to have a marijuana crop protected by Smith & Wesson actually in favor of banning a substance or at least suing the bastards. Why? Because with its fluorescent urban camo can, I think you're marketing it to kids. It has the same wacky can that appeals to those in love with the acrylic, epoxy-gooey world of toy guns and Nerf. I'm sure the manufacturers were targeting frat boys and guys from New Jersey, and it's no fault of the manufacturers that douchebags are into the same color schemes little kids are into. .
I think of the way I drank when I was 19, and I'm sure I would have been the kid whose heart exploded on this stuff. The problem lies in that alcohol is the only thing substance that, for whatever reason, one occasionally drinks twelve of, without intention to. It's a trucker's speedball.
So, I say, take it off the market as a alco-pop and re-introduce it under a brand name geared towards men in their early thirties. Dress it up. Have Ralph Steadman design the label and emboss David Foster Wallace's suicide letter scrawled in tortured longhand along the sweet gleaming lip of the bottle. . . Give it a puzzling brand name like "Quantum of Chappaquidick." Then I'll buy it.

Long time. No post. I've been writing a screenplay which takes up the one hour a day I can commit to writing at the moment. I-Pod has been on the fritsz. How about just a quick walk in Chelsea with me and one of the finest painters in New York City, Devin Powers?. I find myself badmouthing European tourists on this day. Rememember that I work on 34th St. though.

It just gets weirder on my Madison Square Park tour as I descend the island to the southwestern quadrant. One building which always grabs my eye is the Met-Life Tower, not to be confused with the taller, newer, and more well-known Met-Life Building which announces itself in great white letters in the city's skyline. The tower fits importantly in my early impressions of New York City because of a film of a worker scaling to the top of the bell-shaped spire and waving at the camera with his hat (I can't find this footage on Youtube, but I would advise all interested parties to check out Ric Burns' "New York" documentary which does have the footage). The monolith held the title of World's Tallest for three years until it was surpassed by the Woolworth building in 1913. One feature of the tower peculiar to New York is a grand round-faced clock. In a city that has embraced wristwatches and more recently, cell phones, I doubt the Met-Life Tower ever had a chance at becoming as iconic as Big Ben in London or the Old Town Hall Clock in Prague. Before the days of individual timekeepers, clock towers were communal devices signaling the end of workdays and calls to worship. In New York, each person is his own island, a complex of occasions as Charles Olson would have it. Placed in a collectivist European city, the Met-Life Tower might have been a great locus to which people made pilgrimages towards like the Camino de Santiago. But here in New York, it hardly warrants a glance upwards.
Skipping past Shake Shack and William Seward (who is not related to William S. Burroughs), I come to the most occultishly interesting phenomena at the tip of the Flatiron Building. I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, 23 Skidoo. This was a fad expression printed on pennants and arm bands in the 1920's, much in the style of "Don't Have a Cow,Man" or "Where's the beef?"
I've looked this term up in various slang dictionaries and found it to basically mean "get out while the getting's good." It was a meme which can be found in numerous pieces of pop culture of the era and even in the transcript of the Titanic sinking. Allegedly, the term comes from the wind tunnel effect created on 23rd Street famous for lifting up ladies' skirts. Crowds of layabouts used to lean on the building for the sole purpose of catching a glimpse of ankles and bloomers. The cops got in the habit of shooing them away and the code for it became "23 Skidoo."
The whole term carries some occult weight for the mere usage of the number "23" which ties it into the whole "23 Enigma" (first identified by William Burroughs!). Way back in 1912, the intellectual warlock Aleister Crowley published a poem entitled "23 Skidoo" in his "Book of Lies"--(Read on page 55, here).
The term was also used as the title of Otto Preminger's 1968 LSD-inspired film which starred Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his last film role playing "God." The urban legend surrounding it is that all the cast and crew of this bizarre film were taking LSD during the filming--funny to imagine Gleason from "The Honeymooners" tripping. I've watched bits and pieces of the film--(available to watch here and if you can make it through the whole thing, your patience is greater than mine). I can attest that Carol Channing's pupils seem dilated as dinner plates, but they were always kind of like that, right?
Well, finally, just to add to the weirdness of Madison Square Park is the Pentagram Building across the street on 5th Avenue. It's just this building that says "Pentagram" on the front, see? Does anyone else think that's weird or is it just me? Hello? Hello?

Madison Square Park is gothic and creepy--roiling at its corners are Masons, Satanists, Illuminati, and everything else that terrified Robert Anton Wilson. It seems almost exclusively devoted to secret histories.

The first thing to unnerve me was a monument to Chester A. Arthur who was the 21st President of the United States. Now, I'm enough of a history buff to recall the achievements of most presidents--but Arthur? The guy was born in Vermont where I lived for 4 years and I still hadn't heard of him. Turns out he replaced the big man Garfield in 1881 after Garfield took a bullet to his fat belly and Chester finished his term. Now Chester was known for two notable acts-one decent, one ignominious. He was the father of the civil service by passing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act which insured plenty of government jobs for those who could pass a written examination. Notoriously, he also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned immigration of coolie laborers for the next ten years-(we must have not need any railroad track lain at that point.)) Perhaps he was good essentially (Mark Twain gave his administration a ringing endorsement) but ultimately chose to a certain anonynimity as this is his most famous attribution: "I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business."

"Damn the torpedoes," quoth one Union admiral envired in front of the Madison Square Park reflecting pool overlooking legions of plaid-shorted Euro-tourists suffering mild heat strokes. David Glasgow Farragut, admiral of the U.S. Navy, was a hero of both the War of 1812 and the Civil War. In his finest moment he led his fleet to victory against the Confederates in the Battle of Mobile Bay, navigating full steam through a minefield (which were called "torpedoes" back then). When the USS Tecumseh hit a depth charge and sank, the fleet began to retreat. Lashed to the rigging of his flagship Hartford, he signaled by way of trumpet, "What's the Trouble?," to which the response from the USS Brooklyn was "Torpedoes," and he lay down that famous line before ordering the ships full steam ahead and winning a crucial naval victory.

So why hadn't I heard of him before looking him up? I'm enough of a Civil War buff to know that if Lee had listened to Longstreet, flanked Meade instead of sending Pickett up the middle, the Confederacy would have won. I'm enough of a Tennessean to know Davy Crockett, John Sevier, Sequoyah, Andrew Jackson, Minnie Pearle, Dolly Parton, and even Popcorn Sutton, but I really had never, ever heard of Admiral Farragut, even though he was born 50 miles from where I was. As though to rub mud in my face at my ignorance of this native kinsman, I stumbled upon Farragut Square in Washington D.C. last weekend. Looking upon the stoic image this man cut, I'd say he probably caught the eye of bronze sculptors and maybe even Lincoln himself to whom he was a favorite.
Well, there's plenty more of Madison Square Park to visit, so check back later in the week for the second installment of my tour!

Well, Trackable Hendershot has been out of commission, as I've been recovering from a bicycle wreck which resulted in something like a concussion. I've decided to post this video of me telling a couple of Appalachian ghost stories in Mt. Desert Island, Maine.
A warning: I make a speculation on the murder of Jim Miller that is no way attached to evidence of his death. Now, the first song I sing was taught to me by the Mowing Legend Willis Bivens. The story of the Genie Patch was taught to me by Sheila Irons, although I'm improving my own details. The last joke of the Mark Jones party was relayed to me by Gopher Todd. Enjoy at nighttime.

Aren't we lucky cats to be viewing the world premiere reading of the first scene of my new play "Poor Cock Robin?" Now, I suppose I should fill in a little background. The play has about 4 to 6 actors. The main character is a wild cat 20 year old from rural Arkansas who has move out to Los Angeles for what other reason, but to be noticed. Would anyone live in LA if they weren't migrant workers or handsome kids trying to be noticed? Well, anyways the main character is Champ Money Kennedy III, A a name I sort of borrowed off a cousin of mine. Anyhoo, he falls in love with a girl from Iowa, Anna, who works in the adult film industry.
Now, the play begins sort of like Inception does, which is in the caverns of someone's brain theater, Champ is strolling through his drugged out consciousness-talking to his dead grandfather, auditioning for an avuncular producer, all the while reads a children book in the background. Well, turns he's on ketamine ( a drug I've never done, mind you, but fictionally it's interesting because people astral projection on) Anyways, dudes, he snaps out
Then. . . he's on a house on Laguna Beach at night time with a .45 pistol stuffed down the front of his. His girlfriends' rolling on the bed doing Maui beach yoga. The camera runs in the middle of this, but here you have the first scene of Poor Cock Robin--a dissassociative, 21st century love story with shit loads of gun play. Some one produce me. Special thanks to Wythe and Ashley for lending their spirits

Well, a long while since I rapped at ya as Jim Anchower would say. My life has been a hectic dance of English teaching between two schools, one in Midtown, the other in the Empire State Building. Twixt these two, I have an hour long lunch break and the din of Times Square in prime tourist season when the heat causes all the critters to go wild. I've seen three Spidermen--one selling handbags, one riding on the handlebars of a penny-farthing and this guy. Where are these critter people when it's cold out? Are they wearing Spiderman suits under layers of wool? Anyways, I've been doing a lot of singing myself lately. I've always been impressed by the guys freestyling on the train. Most of them keep their ears plugged into bass tracks. I've always seen rap as this primarily urban art form excreted from the human rhythms and concrete textures of the city. Most freestylers draw inspiration from their environment as evidenced by Mr. Def here. Hip-hop has always been a hijacking a someone else's music, filing the serial numbers off, and restyling it as your own. Very po-mo.
Anyways, I've always had this habit of singing to myself. Lately, I've had Dion's "The Wanderer" rolling through my noggin. This especially happens when I go through Time Square and am awash amidst people, texts, and surfaces on everything. Now, I've never been very good at freestyling, but I love rockabilly rhythms. Today on the subway platforrm, I listened to a young African-American fella strumming acoustic and singing Garth Brooks "Rodeo." I began to think about the invention of rock and roll as a fusion between black bluesmen and white country singers. I was thinking why can't white peckerwoods start laying hip stream-of-consciousness beat poetry over gospel, rockabilly, and doowop tracks? I've been described by many people as being corny, which I read defined as overly-sentimental. Well, what's more sentimental than allt that white music from Statler Brothers to Porter Wagone?
I'm going to be the first person to label this fusion and we'll call it "corn rap." Hillbillies remixing tracks. But not Kid Rock because he's a douche. I'm talking about acoustic sincerity. See it's already sort of happening and it sounds pretty good.

I've come to prefer taking the train over any other mode of travel, and I love my bicycle as well as my saintly '94 Altima which I took for 10 years without dinging out too badly (and doing my damn share of drunk driving mind you.) I grew up on Rte 4. Povo Road and commuting as a child consisted of tearing through a quartermile rut of mud, stone, and two dogs trailing by just to get to your mailbox. From that, you'd spin out onto the improved road dropping little bits of gravel onto TVA graytop. Then it was over 4 miles of Cherokee bones and two creeks to get to C&R market where Robin (God bless her) would give me a carrot cake or moon pie pro bono.
Later as a teenager, I commuted to school in Athens, where the smart kids, pretty girls, and good drugs were. This usually involved a ferrying of minivans between me and the brothers Donegan and 30 minutes on I-75. Don't tell me I wasn't a little spoilt.
I liked St. Andrews and Bennington because I could walk to class. Through 3 feet of goddamn snow, tho. I ain't even trying to sound like your grandfather. I choose to learn at high altitudes which makes me a candidate for the European Graduate School. (Why are all the amazing schools on mountains? It's like Hogwarts, fer real.
I used to commute an hour from the ethnically diverse Northwest Chicago to the far Northwest Suburbs of Chicago to work at a public relations firm which chose to locate itself in the most drab and anonymous office space in total suburbia. The most harrowing commutes I ever took were through exhaust-clogged blizzards on the Dan Ryan Expressway--thank God for WBEZ. How's that for a waltz of reverse white flight, white collar poverty, and gas waste?
When I finally began to work AND live in Chicago, I was introduced to the CTA, the second-largest public transportation system in our country, yet woefully inadequate by a magnitude. I never understood how Brazil could one up the U.S. on public transportation. Despite her delays and breakneck whoop-te-doos, the El always delivered her packages on time.
Despite Europeans complaints of it, I find the MTA to be pretty much a world class means of transportation. It's safe, comfortable, and blessed with spectacles and entertainments various. Though I usually prefer to read. Most magnificent though is when she comes out of the tunnel and alights majestically on that spangled bridge and I view get to view Manhattan as an open book, that I really begin to appreciate the joys of a good train ride.

Now some of you know that I work at the Empire State Building teaching English to foreigners. The coolest aspect of this job is that when things get tilted and hot in the classroom I often get a free moment to poke my head out of the windows of the 63rd floor and have a little moment with gravity. Anyone who's climbed a high rock or incline knows what I'm talking about when I say that I can actually feel the weight of the earth pulling me down. When I stick my head out that window I'm always reminded of that scene in Star Wars where Luke dangles from that t-bar in Bespin . Is anything scarier than dangling over a precipice overlooking a void? My mother posted an article on Facebook recently about gravity as a sort of swirly, quantum agreed upon illusion. If you can grok this academic paper, I've got a home for you here.

Anyways, at 63 stories up when one puts one's head out the window there is an inevitable feeling of a force being pushed down and one becomes briefly terrified that a small bit of detritus, say a penny, might hurtle to the ground and slice through my neck artery. According to this article, air resistance prevents this from happening, but it's still up for debate, so why doesn't somebody take a bumpkin off death row and FIGURE IT OUT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD?

Anyways, one's heart races when you poke your head outside of a skyscraper. Even bringing out my head and arms, there's an incredible fear that one will be suddenly propelled downwards. A carpenter who fell off a barn once told me that 50% of drops over 20 feet are fatal. That always seemed a matter of heads or tails to me. But 63 stories!? Not even the cleanest executed Parkour roll would prevent you from being tomato paste. There's an off-chance you could survive being shot in the brain or being hit by a bus, yet falling off the Empire State Building or being run over by a train is going to kill you even if you're Bruce Willis.

Only one person has committed suicide in the two years I've worked there by jumping off. He was a brainy young man of privilege and the general temper amongst the street throng was a sort immigrant's righteous confusion that a kid who went to Deerfield and Yale could actually be unhappy. People were incensed. I heard one woman say, "Why didn't he jump off the Brooklyn Bridge? It's a nice view and he wouldn't have hurt anybody." There is actually a history in New York City of entitled young men jumping out of buildings. I remember reading a story in my literary journalism class taught by the late, great Steven Bach about a 26-year-old man who stood out on the ledge of the Gotham Hotel for 11 hours before leaping to his death back in 1938. He became upset after a remark made by his sister and stepped upon the ledge. Of course, he was clinically depressed. I'm sure the New York Post macho media probably painted it as a Look-at-Me everybody, Poor Little Rich Boy death same as Andy Rooney dissed Kurt Cobain after his suicide. But, apparently that whole story garnered enough of the cultural interest at the moment to justify Joel Sayre's New Yorker article and a movie. Well, depression strikes those in Yale and jail, say I.

Most terrifying about this whole experience is the rear animal in your brain that teases you to make the front page of the New York Post. I've often suspected that most people's fear of heights is a fear that they'll jump. I don't think I own this idea, but an understanding of one's balance--both physical and mental is crucial. I always marvel at the nimble assuredness of the men who built this 102 story skyscraper in THIRTEEN FREAKING MONTHS AFTER THE STOCK MARKET COLLAPSE. Ah, they just don't build them Ford Tough anymore.

The best part, of course, is returning to class-secure, happy, and grounded- while my students look at me as though I'm crazy.

Remember in The Great Gatsby how there's the valley of ashes midway between the rural West Egg and New York City? It's a lonely, null-zone meridian with a gas station perfect for Tom's affair with Myrtle. Remember the billboard with the watchful Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg?. Remember how George Wilson refers to the eyes as God after his wife's death? The billboard was a terrific symbol for a post-industrial American concept of God. God speaks to us through billboards and Christians know this.

I remember that my mom and granddaddy's picture were featured on a billboard for Wood Presbyterian Home which had a quote from my mother "Dad Couldn't Be Any Happier." Granddaddy passed away that summer and the billboard was imbued with a spiritual aura.

Well, here in the post-modern era, in the oxygen-strangling flanks of Manhattan I have discovered the Javits Center Jumbotron. Yes, Jumbotron is the actual term for those large ad screens composed of teeming reefs of miniscule light-emitting diodes.
. I took this video at around 11 p.m. I had an awareness that I was the only viewer of all these turgid hot gigawatts shot out to entertain and grab only ME. It was like that awful scene in any science fiction movie where the suddenly aware machine addressed the protagonist via a screenhead of some sort. And when I left, it would continue to show its spiraling animation to absolutely no one save the insects wedded to its gleam. When the screen lit up and said "ASK," I actually felt as though I beheld the Great Burning Bush itself. Like the Deus Ex Machina Babyhead at the end of Matrix Revolutions (God, did anyone even watch that movie?) You know, I would say this city needs to shut off some lights at night. Might feed a small village somewhere.





Although for pure Blade Runner cuteness, you just can't beat these 4 little pixies I found in Chinatown at midnight to keep a lonely pedestrian company.

Things are a sloppy mess of aggression, grilled veggies, and bad plumbing at ABC No Rio, and have probably been so for 20 years, “a collectively-run center for art and activism” (read: Aimless Punk Collective) in the Lower East Side on this blistering heat of the day before July 4th, a humid wave that tests any punk’s commitment to latex and leather. As the bands set up, there’s an obnoxious class struggle in the backyard between the dirt poor kids trying to put on a Saturday Matinee Blowout and their tony soccer apparel hawking neighbors at the Alife Rivington Club trying to watch the World Cup. There’s a big cock-strutting gravel scratch over who threw a brick over the fence or dumped a bunch of green paint on blah-blah-blah, though one of the ABC kids later tells me that the paint was dumped from another building and the brick was thrown by someone from another collective who just happened to be hanging out in the backyard of this particular collective (Wonder how the complex autonomies of self-organizing post-Yippies holds up in the civil courtrooms of Centre Street?)
36 years after The Ramones screamed “Judy is a Punk” at CBGB’s and introduced the world to the power of three chords, Punk (at least this New York punk, not hardcore, nor metal) still seems to come mostly in two varieties--Quoth Lester Bangs in 1982-- Hardcore: “Rolling clods of lumpy excrement with broken bones sticking out” and Oi: “Craters of dribbly gruel with patchy tufts of straw poking up.”
The kids are still handing out buttons that say “Extinct Government” and “Fear is Control” in a rubbled courtyard that plays up to a 90’s era Belgrade aesthetic, but I don’t the hear the biofueled throttle of actual revolution (although they do want to get some photovoltaics, gray water recycling, and a planted green roof if you can spot them $2.6 million, brah). This scene is a cultural favela for millenial Indigo children and people with hyperactive thyroids who need to work out their mondo daddy issues by trapping oneself in a particular decade, sort of like the 40 year-old stoner who still surfs within the confines of AOL because he’s afraid someone will show him, like, a Robotic Pig Heart Jellyfish on Youtube. If you think I’m being hard on the creative output of ABC No Rio, I submit as evidence this stanza from Hobo Bob printed in their zine Stained Sheets (ew).
I have the oil black heart of New York
beating in my breast
I am covered with her street grime
the fuel stench of her yellow cabs
I stopped recording to stop the fight. How's that for gonzo?

Living in New York can be a drag because of too many rats in the box--a good half of them terminally insane. I consider myself to be a scene washout after 3 years of beer, bad art, and noise rock when I was living in Chicago. I'm rarely out past midnight because of the poor train service and drunken assholery. Williamsburg gives me an anxiety attack. I'm more comfortable living amongst the Carribeans and Hasidic Jews of Crown Heights where I'm certain I'm not part of its scene.
However, occasionally I stumble on a spectacle as I did last night at Galapagos where The Hungry March Band(A Brooklyn-based marching band and Texas Couscous from France vie it out in a battle of two marching bands. The performers outnumbered the audience, but the line between the two blurred fantastically in a phantasmagoria Moulin Rouge sort of scene. Briefly, my life was a musical last night. I was entranced by the wonderful shadowplay taking place on the walls.
Only in a cosmopolitan megacity such as London, New York, Paris, or Hong Kong could you get this huge consensus of performers. Thanks Josie and Tessa!

I thought it would be really cool to walk up to straight up to Sting at the premiere and shake his hand and record it on my I-Pod. After all I'm a plain Tennessean made somewhat good (but mostly broke) in the awful, big city. A complete shiny-eyed bohunk with one strap of his overhauls unbutt' come up here like Sister Carrie, Madame Bovary, Tom Jones, and that little French critter from Balzac's Lost Illusions. I've got a democratic feeling of equality like the Tennessee farmer who, after hearing Martin Van Buren speak, stepped up, shook the President's hand, and invited him "to come out and r'ar around with the boys." Why not videorecord the whole experience?
Well, first you'll notice that the presence of celebrity causes me to giggle like Butthead, but come on dude's name is Sting.
Second, I completely lose the gumption to stick the camera to the man's face so the screen goes all Stan Brakhage to the inside of my cuff and I sidle up to him as he's talking to Paul Stamets about a revolutionary cardboardbox that not only biodegrades but is laced with tree seeds and fungal spores so it will literally sprout a forest after it decomposes. I actually had this thought in my head, "Wow, I'm going to rescue Sting from this weird shroomy sociopath." Turns out dude is a genius in the movie.
I walk up to him, shake his hand and say, "I will always remember you as Feyd Rautha." He said, "Yes, you remember those flying underpants." What you don't see is Sting gesturing to his bodyguard tremendously. I then started going about Baron Harkonnen and the image being stuck in the basal ganglia, when I realized I was the lunatic he was trying to be rescued from. Well, I had terrible breath anyway.
Then, I read on the Internet that Sting was schoolteatcher at St. Paul's Middle School from 1971 to 1974 before starting a band called The Police and recording "Don't Stand So Close To Me." Now listen to that song and you tell me who you think is the creepy guy.

I said I would make a movie one these days. Here it is. R-Rated language in the vain of total political incorrectness, I'll warn you.