Travelin' Man

Some random images from my travels through Brooklyn yesterday.

Listen while you look:
Stanley Cowell Travelin' Man mp3

Fort Greene

Fort Greene

Brooklyn Heights

Read God's word, the Holy Bible, daily.
Read God's word: The Holy Bible Daily

I had the random thought walking past this empty lot that parts of Seattle are a little like Williamsburg, but without the dead-rat smell.

Chad & Lily at the biergarten. If you know a female that's down with the Lench Mob, watch your step 'cause the gat is kept in the purse like my homegirl YoYo.

Max Bill, Chadrobot, J.Ralph Phillips

And finally, the cat at Duff's in one of its less-violent moments.

A billboard grows in Brooklyn

Spotted in Dumbo this afternoon on a trip to Wax Poetics.
[click to enlarge]

Fresh Air

The Bronx-based band Air released only one album in its short tenure, a self-titled collection produced by Herbie Mann and released on his own Embryo label in 1971. The music is hard to categorize, occupying a space somewhere between jazz and folk (Other Music's Duane Harriott put it well: "If you can imagine Soft Machine jammin' with Weldon Irvine, you're almost there"), but the real draw is the unique soul in the voice of frontwoman Googie Coppola. There are definitely some more upbeat jams, but here's the one I always go back to:

Air Jail Cell mp3

The vinyl is tough to find (I traded for mine at Sound Library several years ago and I think the price tag was $45.00). Luckily you can snap up the CD, re-issued this week by DBK, for a cool soundtrack to the last few months of summer.

Houses of the Holy

I found this book at the Hell's Kitchen flea market a few years ago.

This scenery reminds me of the end of Sequim Bay, where there are (or were, when I was a kid) a bunch of old fish shacks and abandoned wooden boats lined up on the beach. It was one of my favorite places in the world. Now if there had only been a boat-shaped outhouse there....

Somewhere in Idaho (this looks like the McCabe & Mrs. Miller set...yes, I am obsessed).

Somewhere in Wisconsin.

Somewhere in Texas.

Somewhere in Tennessee.

This dude seems pretty excited about going to the bathroom.

Surf and Turf

The T blog is currently featuring a short profile of David Selig—eco-innovator, die-hard surfer, Red Hook resident, owner of the restaurants Rice and ñ, special man-friend of my former boss-lady Cecilia Dean, and one of the more interesting and laid-back dudes I've met in New York. Above, from a previous article in the Times, David is shown filtering used cooking oil for use as fuel in the Rice delivery van.

He just opened a solar-powered taco stand on the beach at Rockaway...looks like our weekend plans are taking shape.

Click here to read the interview.

Photos by G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

Massive Moves

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We're moving.
There, I said it.
Employers have been told and all stops have been pulled out. Our lease is up September 14th and we're headed west, to Seattle. There was a chance we were going to stay here because I was very honored to be considered for the art director position at Vogue. I had two interviews but it didn't ultimately pan out. We were planning to move anyway, so it's no big deal, it was just one of those things where if you're asked to interview for a job like that, you have to do it, and if I had gotten it we would have stayed a bit longer. Since I didn't, we're on the move.
We already bought a place: a condo in a 1967 building on Capitol Hill, at the corner of Melrose and Harrison. We got it through Redfin last October and have been renting it out since then.

One whole wall is windows, and the view is pretty sweet.
(And no, jerky, those are not our decorations.)

It sits above the freeway but the glass is very thick, so it's not loud.

There's a little stairway/park right next to it. Littlejeans and Inez will be able to look at pigeons down below and think their violent, murderous thoughts.

We'll miss Ali, Muhammad, et al in our corner stores here in Brooklyn. Honestly, our new one in Seattle (above) is a better store overall, but they could learn to make a fricking sandwich.

We are dangerously close to Top Pot Doughnuts.This place is good too (Artemis). It's just down the street.

There are some little galleries and studios in the neighborhood (some of which were there when we lived at Summit & Thomas, before we left for New York in 1999).

I took all those photos last fall when I went out there to sign the closing documents. I picked up the keys on my birthday, October 31st. It's rented out through the end of the year, so we're going to stay with my mom for the first few months, in Madison Valley.

So there it is—I've been beating around the bush, but now it's official. Not surprisingly, this blog will be obsessed with the transition from Brooklyn to Seattle in the next several months, in between the regular flow of gritty and pretty. I expect it will be quite an adventure.

The Science of Sleep

For whatever reason I have not been sleeping well lately—this is the second night in a row I've gotten up at 4. And it's not like I'm going to bed early. Anyway, in addition to finishing up the next issue of Wax Poetics (no.30, The Rock Issue, with a double cover of Bad Brains and Elvis, sadly without the foil stamp and metallic inks I wanted—rock issue...metal—but a great issue nonetheless), I also changed the format of the blog so it only shows the last ten days' worth of posts. There have been some complaints about the time it takes to load, so this should be better for everyone, hopefully. Yawn.

More from the vaults...

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Some nice recent album covers:

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Azeda Booth Big Fists mp3

I also just picked up Broken Social Scene Presents Brendan Canning Something for All of Us..., the best record of the bunch, but not the best album cover. Here's a video instead:

War Stories

If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press, and I guess it's also as good a time as any to post a few war-related things I've had in the hopper for a minute.


1. Tonight HBO will air the third episode of David Simon and Ed Burns' mini-series Generation Kill. Simon and Burns created The Wire, and bring the same deeply nuanced and darkly humorous approach to this portrayal of an embedded reporter's observations during the initial invasion of Iraq. Through its unbiased, Wire-like gray area approach, the series reminds us that the troops themselves, despite whatever political affiliations they personally hold, are there to do a job, and it's interesting to see what that involves on a day to day basis. It seems to me it would be impossible to watch the show and think that the war has been anything but a total waste of life, effort, time and money.

2. Generation Kill is also a well-designed package—from the seemingly endless, haunting radio chatter that hangs over the end credits, to the logo, which makes uniquely smart use of this distressed typeface, evoking destruction, death metal, targeting, sand, maybe even a bit of religious/crusade overtone—and if you really read into it, does the middle cross look a little like an iconic image from Abu Ghraib? I don't know, that might be a little overreaching, who knows.

3. The other night, discussing McCain's outlook on the war, Keith Olbermann used the phrase "Iraq as old guy's second chance in Vietnam." For whatever reason, it reminded me of Hearts and Minds, one of the best films I've ever seen and the winner of 1974's Academy Award for best documentary. I saw the director, Peter Davis, speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music when Hearts and Minds got its DVD release, and he was talking about how the production company had a policy of giving each film they did a one-million dollar budget. That was sufficient enough to produce the company's feature films, including Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show—but it was a truly outlandish, smokable amount of money for a documentary. Davis took it and went to Vietnam and around the world shooting footage and interviews totaling more than 300 hours. What was distilled into the final cut is absolutely mind-blowing, riveting, eyes-glued-to-the-screen, forget-where-you-are greatness. It is also heartbreaking, and it is required viewing as a compare and contrast exercise with our current conflict—and the conflict the Bush administration is currently manufacturing with Iran.



Some of the most poignant moments to me are the interviews with Daniel Ellsberg. They prompted me to read his memoir a few years ago, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, which I cannot recommend highly enough, both as a history of the events of that era, and as a window into the thinking of a true patriot and a courageous and brilliant thinker. Ellsberg started working in the Pentagon as an adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the exact day the Tonkin Gulf Incident occurred—and seven years later his views had changed significantly enough that he leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, which arguably precipitated the end of the war. There are few people better equipped to analyze that period of time in our history.