Oh Brooklyn!

As I've said before, I am moving to Brooklyn at the end of this summer. Despite having grown up in the New York suburbs, I don't know Brooklyn at all-- except for its reputation and the art museum (I roll my eyes at the former and like the latter). And I know how to get from the Music Hall of Williamsburg to Grand Central in time for the last train. But that's about it.

So I spent much of Saturday puttering around on a Dahon seeing what I could see. Here's some preliminary thoughts (and goodness knows I'll probably prove myself wrong in all sorts of ways come August).

Fixed gears are still a thing. Except now they have  tiny gear ratios, cruiser bars and little porteur racks on the front. I guess the first wave of fixiesnobs all blew their knees out? Also, no one wears helmets. 

Speaking of bikes, the lane situation is really confusing. They are everywhere, but they're also all over the road. I've heard enough horrific stories about cops fining cyclists for putting so much as a spoke out of line, so I found myself yawing all over the road trying to stay between my designated stripes. And the cabs give a lot less elbow room than their gentler Philadelphia cousins.

Riding through Williamsburg I got a lot of censorious looks from guys in hats: at my bare shoulders and  midriff from the Hasidic guys in their giant fur schtriemels, and at my dorky little bike from the scrawny hipsters in Cinelli caps.

Bed Stuy looks a lot like South Philly, if it were expecting a siege. Bars over everything. And no bars, to speak of. Or grocery stores. Or cafes. But plenty of hair salons. I might have just been going down the wrong streets.

The less bourgie areas have a layer of grime over them that is far more aggressive and permanent looking than laid-back Philly could ever achieve.

There is a bike vending machine!

PROOF!!

Brooklyn Bridge Park is stunningly gorgeous. I love rivers, bridges, and manicured parks, and this has the lot. I counted no less than five weddings. One of them involved a tandem bike, and reminded me to never try riding in a crinoline.

Red Hook is visually amazing too. There are giant fort-like buildings with gothic shutters along the waterfront. Out of sight of the river, it looks like Portland wants to look- so hip and quirky your teeth hurt. But at least it did it first.

It takes a kind of hiccup, a shift of perception, to see myself as a New Yorker again. For the first four years that I lived in Philadelphia I insisted on an outsider status- I wore black and walked fast and cultivated a superior attitude (in retrospect, I wasn't being a super-sophisticated New Yorker, I was being a hipster).

But then I fell in love and got a cool job and an independent life, and New York became the foreign place. Days flew by, happy, quiet days. I resented going to New York, almost, because it represented something I'd convinced myself I didn't need. But I got restless eventually, restless enough to give up the lovely, easy life I've led for nearly three years. And the other day, sitting by the river with the two great bridges overhead and the sun frying my black clothes, I thought 'I'm coming home.' 

--Isis

OH RIGHT, HEADLINE OF THE DAY!

Woman Finds Toad in Can of Beans

You're welcome.

Sorrow Fatigue and Eight Shiny Things

I spent too much of last week glued to the news- everything from Gawker to the New Yorker- and feeling a mixture of sick fascination, guilt for that fascination, and exhaustion.

Here's a good summation from Lindy West at Jezebel (Don't read if you're averse to cussing.) Incidentally, I've been reading her ever since she wrote for the Stranger and MAN has her writing improved. Smart, smartly evolving lady writers turn my crank in all kinds of directions.

Also, oh my lack of god, I wanted to name my cat Tamerlane. A good thing there was nothing in his goofy little face to justify the name of a hotshot historical warrior man/deranged Chechen yobbo.

So here are some things that are nice and not sad and that I think about to give my mind a rest from being miserable and anxious, which doesn't help anything but is impossible to avoid.

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1) The other day I was in one of those trashy South Street shoe stores buying their ONE pair of untrashy flats, and I noticed those giant neon heels and thought only a drag queen would wear those. And sure enough, there was a pretty dude trying them on. 'You look skanky!' his companion said. 'I know!' he said, and bought them. 'I'm always right,' I thought.

2) Chris Hoy, my favorite track cyclist, announced his retirement with extraordinary grace. While I'm sorry to see him go, it's unusual for an athlete to recognize he's done and not keep plugging on until he is embarrassed. Also, an excuse to post the legendary Hoy legs:

Eek!

3) The inimitable Bike Snob is doing a ride and book signing next month. Ya'll better be there! 

4) The simplest songs can be amazing: 

All you can do is do what you must.

5) If you can get through this video without tearing up a little, you're a cyborg:

6) France legalized gay marriage too! Also, who knew how many bigots conservatives there were messing up the boulevards? Well sucks to be them. 

7) The swallows are back! I saw them zipping around the Schuylkill when I rode out the other day. Soon the tubby fledglings will be popping their heads out of the nest boxes, gaping away. I love swallows. 

I think the one in the hole is an adult. Fledgelings are fatter. 

8) A blog post I wrote for work featuring my opinions on Claes Oldenburg's horrible paintbrush is creeping up the google results for 'Paintbrush drip Philadelphia'. It is number five. Let's make it number one, shall we?

AND, with that shameful bit of self promotion, I am out. 

Coming up will be a SERIOUS essay about writing about places that don't exist. I'm working on it, but the world keeps persisting to exist and it's getting to me. So it's taking some time. 

--I

Goodbye Mad City (Springtime and House Shows)

This is the second in a series of posts about things that could only happen in Philadelphia. Since I will be moving to New York in August these stories hold an extra bittersweet charge for me.

Green, how I love you green! Every pale, revelatory spring I think of that line, from Romance Sonambulo by Lorca. Here's the first stanza:

Green, how I want you green. 
Green wind. Green branches. 
The ship out on the sea 
and the horse on the mountain. 
With the shade around her waist 
she dreams on her balcony, 
green flesh, her hair green, 
with eyes of cold silver. 
Green, how I want you green. 
Under the gypsy moon, 
all things are watching her 
and she cannot see them. 

Here's the rest. The version I grew up with translated 'quiero' to 'love' rather than 'want', but I suppose this is more contextually accurate. 

But not this green. I HATE this green.

On an entirely unrelated topic: House Shows! I went to one last night, the first in a while. It reminded me how exhausting and great they are, and why I don't go too often. 

West Philadelphia is full of great big Victorian houses that were once very grand and are now bursting with punks. Some have huge pyramidal stacks of empty 40s on the stained marble mantlepieces. Others are full of paintings and Christmas lights. Some are houseplant jungles, most have dogs and cats and giant bike piles near the door. They are usually warm and friendly and dilapidated and smell of weed and zealous vegan sweat. 

Usually the shows are in the inevitably disgusting basement. I've found myself sitting on derelict washing machines, dancing in the slot between two filing cabinets, and trying not to knock over an extra bike pile. Usually the deliriously drunk and happy listeners are respectful of the house and appliances, though last night a particularly hammered young yob was punching the ceiling pipes for no particular reason and pulling the insulation off.  

The bands can be anything from absolutely terrible- a duo whose broken amp produced earsplitting shrieks at random intervals but soldiered on for half an hour anyway comes to mind-- but they can also be great. You never know, and I've enjoyed shows from the third floor of the house because to descend was to stop hearing music and just be subjected to vibrations and pain from the overamped band in the basement. 

But I like being clean and like my personal space and don't enjoy being sweated, spat or stepped on, so I hadn't gone in a while. But last night we went because a lovely friend lives in that particular house, and this guy called Erik Peterson was playing.  And damed if it wasn't an absolutely cathartic experience to be crammed into a living room (moving up!) with dozens of overexcited teenagers hollering 'SEE YOU IN HELL, BOYS!' 

'I'll be coming to recruit your rebel children!'

And yes, I felt a hundred years old, but it was nice to see that a bunch of suburban looking kids were just as into idealistic lefty punk as I was at their age (and still am in a corner of my cold and cynical little soul). 

There was another band I like, called Blackbird Raum. It was hard to hear them though, because the crowd (now relegated back into the basement) thought that an acoustic folk punk set is an appropriate time to start moshing. I stood on an end table to peek over the crowd, and could barely see the band past the roiling mass of tipsy young heads. I didn't miss being younger, when I would have stayed farther up in the throng. I didn't miss being clipped in the ear with studded pleather boots. I didn't miss concentrating on the band with half my mind and avoiding sharp spikes and elbows with the other half. 

But I missed enjoying these things, just a little bit.

It's better without the screaming kids.

And then I spent much of today dealing with taxes because I am a grownup.

Where else in this world will you be welcomed into a house and know that you'll recognize many of the faces, where you can sit in a colorful kitchen between sets, chatting away with new acquaintances, where you can pay seven bucks and hear three genuinely good bands? (The third was called Pale Robin). 

Oh mad city, I will miss you.

Isis

Cycling and wrath fatigue.

I spent too much of this evening watching Fabian Cancellara KILL it in the Tour of Flanders... Damn, Spartacus! 

Epic music, too

Of course a lot of ink is being spilled about Peter Sagan doing this: 

Eww. And I liked him so much when he was popping mad wheelies...

Maybe I'm just suffering wrath fatigue, but I just can't work up a sufficient amount of outrage. He's a sleazy bastard, most of them are sleazy bastards, most athletes are sleazy bastards, and the whole podium-girl thing is outdated and ridiculous. Even Spartacus looks over it. 

And yes, it's yet another symptom of rape culture and the feminist blogs I read are all riled up and boycotting cycling. And I just can't get mad about some stupid 23-year-old boy and I feel like a jerk.

I love cycling of course, and it's really been through the wringer lately. Especially with Lance Armstrong's downfall (and that of everyone he dragged down with him) I don't blame anyone for seeing it as a irredeemably corrupt sport. It will be interesting to see how things play out in the next few seasons. I hope my favorite riders don't turn out to be doping too. Or behave like immature scums. 

So I am going to think about a truly amazing stage in the 2011 Tour, where Thor Hushovd managed to rather handily win a mountain stage he wasn't supposed to, because he's a bulky sprinter and climbers tend to be built like squirrels. Here's a great video-- Thor's the one with the rainbow stripes. 

I love the Norwegian announcers absolutely losing it

And I'm going to think about the best ending of a Paris-Roubaix in recent memory-- a relatively unknown Domestique named Johan Van Summeren won quite unexpectedly, tumbled off his bike and proposed to his girlfriend right then. 

And it was adorable.

And I'm going to think how I know some of the very best people in my life through cycling, including my gentleman friend. How this sport attracts the nicest, most accepting and endearingly weird types you can imagine.

Photo by Pat Engleman. Hi Simon! Hi Sam!

It's just that the famous ones who are terrible are really publicly terrible. 

And that podium girl thing needs to be over. 

--Isis

One unpopular opinion and an enraged bird

First of all, I think the whole red equality sign thingie on Facebook is really sweet. I don't think the Supreme Court is going to get anywhere this time round, but it just reinforces the fact that young peoples' hearts are in the right place and the country will eventually shift towards equality-- kicking and screaming all the way.

Now, there was another minor kerfuffle rolling round the internet, about this guy who had this to say about a Picasso he put his elbow through: 

“My feeling was, it’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it,” Mr. Wynn told The New Yorker in 2006, recalling how the painting was damaged. “Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.”

Now the consensus among artists is that this guy is a giant entitled douchebag, which is difficult to argue with. However, I have agree with him about the painting. Not because it's a Picasso I don't much like, but because a certain healthy irreverence in regards to art is refreshing. I don't think we should run through museums drawing sharpie mustaches on everything, but I do think it's important to remember that paintings are just objects (sculptures too, of course).
In no way does being 'just an object' devalue art as art. But I think it's become standard to view art, especially art with a famous name signed on it, as inviolate. For example, there are some Michelangelo sculptures that are just straight-up weird: 

.......

Now, Michelangelo is my favorite artist, sculptor, fencer and all-around cranky bastard. I LOVE Michelangelo. And I'd look at this sculpture and think I was missing something. I would stare and stare at these lumps and disjointed joints and think, "this is by the greatest sculptor of his time, but it looks all wrong. There's something wrong with me for thinking that." It was only when I looked at is an artifact, without my beloved Michelangelo's name attached, that I stopped being distressed. It's flawed sculpture, made by a man who might have been having an off day and certainly didn't look at nude women very often. It's just an object. 

As an artist myself, I used to struggle with this a lot. I would make a drawing I considered perfect, overwork a small detail, smudge everything out, and wind up in hysterics. As I got older and made more pieces (and dropped some and spilled coffee on others) the artifacts themselves became less and less important. I knew I could fix anything that got damaged, and if not there was more where that came from. It was liberating to stop attaching much value to individual pieces (though when my cat jumped on a picture two hours before going to a show I lost three years off my life, so maybe I'm not as liberated as I think). 

I guess I'd like art to be a living, vital thing, and too much reverence makes for boring art and boring people. And have you seen how amazing restorations are these days? 

Dude.

So I'm not too worried about that Picasso. 

Now, apropos of absolutely nothing, here is a capercailie terrorizing a Swedish reporter:

It gets good about halfway through

That's all I got. 

--Isis

Goodbye Mad City (Roof Deck)

This is the first in a series of posts about events that could only happen in Philadelphia. Since I will be moving to New York in August these stories hold an extra bittersweet charge for me. 

On Friday I made my tired and allergy-ridden tail stay awake for a midnight show, something I haven't done in years. It still took a combination of coaxing from my Gentleman Friend and judicious face-pouncing from my cat to get me out of bed and onto my bike, but once combed and vertical I remembered the lovely anarchic feeling of riding out late and perked up. 

The show was at Lickety Split, which is a South Street bar. I'd never been there before, because it is a South Street bar and they tend to be terrible, awful and bro-full, which is the worst. 

Yes, they are dressed as zombies. But they always look like that anyway.

This time, however, I was pleasantly surprised. I recognized half the faces upstairs, and not a bro among them. And of course, the music was great. 

Roof Deck is a folk-pop trio made up of Jaime Pannone, James Kirkland, and Geoffrey Waterman. This is their official portrait:

Born and bred in the Bikery

And another official portrait:

See above.

On a side note, I've drawn all their portraits (which you can see here, here and here) and displayed them-- at the Bikery. That's the thing about Philadelphia-- there's about one degree of separation between everyone, or at least everyone cool. 

Roof Deck has only been around for a few months, but you wouldn't know it. The three have a lovely cohesive sound, as if they have been together for years. They only play original material, which tends towards the melodic and thoughtful. Their mood is so delightfully relaxed and warm that I wondered why I have subjected myself to so many shows that left me dented and deafened. Jaime does much of the singing, and her sweet, clear voice matches the material perfectly. My favorite song was 'Oh Seattle'. 

After the show we hung out with the band and random bar-folks, trading stories. We stayed till closing (I haven't done that since college) and rode home smiling. 

Roof Deck will be playing at the Woolly Mammoth this Saturday at 9.00. You should go. It's worth it. 

Only in a relatively small city like this one could you find a scene like that. 

--Isis

How to Cheer Up a Nerd

Most of this week was severely terrible. Despite the best efforts of my dear allies, many things conspired to put me in a pretty evil mood. I hate feeling evil, and then I get mad that I feel evil, and that makes me more evil. So sorry to everyone I groused at.

When I sulked into the Last Word (my favorite West Philly bookstore) the nice owner whipped out A Hero of Our Time-- and not just any version, the NABOKOV TRANSLATION. I unsulked immediately-- I NEEDED that book.

AND the Edward Gorey cover...

I don't think I can underestimate how much effect that book had on me as a teenager. It opens with a poem, whose narrator lies in the Caucasus dying from an unexplained bullet wound. He's dreaming of his lady friend, who is dreaming of him, and then he croaks. At fifteen that was the most romantic thing in the entire world. The book itself is about a thoroughly disillusioned, bored, brave depressed young man named Pechorin who has adventures and feels jaded. I had no higher aspiration at fifteen than to be Pechorin. Upon reading it again, I realize I glossed over all the sections about mountain scenery and early 19th Century travel, of which there are pages and pages. I also missed out on Pechorin being kind of a jerk-- but a romantic jerk, but a jerk nontheless. The climax of the book is when he shoots an acquaintance off a cliff. 

Why did I think that was so awesome? Also Pechorin has blond hair and a black mustache. Is that even a thing? Regardless, I stayed up way too late reading and feeling young and dreamed that my bed was surrounded by exotic weaponry, which was cool. 

Then today I was riding home, singing 'Janie Jones' to myself as one does. That song, too, is pretty important to me-- or rather, the Clash on Broadway boxed set, of which it is the first track. I remember the first time my father played it for me, I thought WOW. And I still think that. Anyway, I was hollering out the part that goes,

'This time he's gonna really tell the boss
'He'll really tell the boss
'Exactly what he FE-EALS!'

And right on cue, a guy on a fixie a few yards behind me shouts,

'IT'S PRETTY BAD!'

So I rode the rest of the way grinning.

SO DREAMY

And then I found an acceptance letter in my mailbox from one of the grad schools I applied to. Which inspires all kinds of mixed emotions, because until today my plans to make a huge change in my life were abstract and now they are concrete.

I haven't figured out these emotions yet. Next week had better be calm!

--Isis