Time spared in your Spare time

icicles form on the whiskers of tires.


egg cartons make omelettes of vertigo.


a roadside orphan of a tree considers its situation,


while others conspire on the possible ways over the wall.


if you are a plastic toy, there is more than enough to smile about.
you are small. you are playing. you are blue, yellow, or green.


if you are a wire jellyfish, then shine silver with looking.
from the sill towards something morning. maybe flying.


and the moon. it will go through phases very different from simply halves or fulls, regardless of whether you care to notice or not.


...

the past, or the passing. going fast, or fasting. being last or lasting
...

On Sunday you get to thinking that if the earth rotated a little quicker on its axis (as before, hundreds of millions of years ago), then two things:

(1) the Time between sun rise and set would be shorter...
(2) but the year would also get piled full with many new days, gratis.

Hard going to know if that's a fair trade.
on matters of Quality Time with the time at hand on a Sunday,
there is nothing to say.
best let the daylight sort it out for itself.

The Liquor House and WMDs

My local paper apparently just got bought out by some media giant, and I know this is supposed to be the death knell for good local coverage.

Despite this, there is a certain something that certain staff writers (yet unfired), sometimes bring to the the Herald-Sun. a naturalism to the journalism. And two things in particular: the eye for the story worth writing, and simplicity in letting the story “tell itself,” saying things with such clean lines (and one sentence paragraphs) that every detail absurd, beautiful, and cruel is so clear as to be invisible and imminent at the same time. um, or something like that.

...
And really, that there is a speakeasy club in Durham with the false name “Trimmaz” is absolutely amazing (below). What more is needed to recommend the virtues of non-fiction over fiction? That it was BYOB is so damn do-as-you-please.

But then the shotgun detail is sad and scary --the criminal charge brought forth scarier still in its surreality. No WMD’s in Iraq, but friend, just go down onto Garland St. and apparently you can find something worth calling one. It’s just that kind of world these days....:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
City Shuts Drinking Club Front Business

BY Eric Olson : The Herald-Sun
eolson@heraldsun.com
Jan 24, 2005 : 8:53 pm ET

DURHAM -- City officials have closed down a Garland Street barbershop that was operating as a front for a liquor house.

Police responded to the business in late December after receiving a complaint of noise, Durham police Sgt. D. Gunter said.

When they arrived, they saw a Trimmaz sign that advertised the 1911 Garland St. business as a barbershop, he said.

The business had nothing inside except for a single table and a box for collecting money, Gunter said.

"What they were doing was opening up a liquor house and an activity center," he said. "They weren't selling it, people were bringing their own in."

To avoid drawing attention to what really was going on, Gunter said, patrons of the business parked across the street in empty hotel parking lots and walked to the building.

"We watched it for a couple of days and found a flier that said, 'Parties all night, every night,'" he said.

Police at one point also arrested a juvenile boy with a sawed-off shotgun outside the business and charged him with possession of a weapon of mass destruction, Gunter said.

City officials got involved and cited the club for several violations the next day.

Within a week, the landlord evicted the tenants, and Pratt Simmons, the City-County Planning Department's planning supervisor who oversees zoning enforcement, had closed the door of the barbershop for good.

"With no foot dragging or tape to cut, I was amazed how fast they were shut down," Gunter said. "Everything just sort of fell into place perfectly."

Intersectional

Intersections are crossings. and maybe crissings. There is some sense of something --a running out-of and into, a through and through, where one's meeting another one too. If there is any convention recognized, let it be the names of not only the places, but moreso the paths, that we choose to christen in our particular avenuvial ways.

How can it be that the starting of something starts here and the ending ends there in a way that can be named? And I’m even speaking in a practical sense here. Take for example this T intersection in my neighborhood.


There is plenty going on here, a dissertation’s worth really, for the civil engineer and the critical theorist alike.

Why Chapel Hill Rd. runs perpendicular into Chapel Hill St. can only be considered as a cruel, cruel joke played by the Dept. of Public Works on anyone trying to find there way anywhere. Of course, I could just not be picking up of the obvious and important differences between a Road and a Street that would make my - and many drivers’- conflation just a silly one. And this is just one detail, for after all. it’s important to note that we have the situation that - where Chapel Hill Rd. hits Chapel Hill St. - the latter turns magically into Duke University Ave.!

I think there is a term for this in subatomic physics, where the very act of colliding with certain other types of particles turns you into something completely different. muon to gluon or something. But who needs a cloud chamber to understand such phenomena when you have the streets of Durham's west-end to see how true this is? likewise, if you are slapped by a friend or jilted lover, such a singular collision might also bring the point home, transforming you most elementally from Significant Other to Ex in a pico-second. gold to lead.

There are risks to be run. and what's more, stop signs and traffic lights. In making it possible to find something, let’s first take this opportunity to get truly lost. May I recommend somewhere at the corner of Chapel Hill Rd./St.

MLK Day

__________________________________

Angela Davis, teacher and activist, was speaking on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations at Duke University. Only a few years ago Duke didn’t recognize the holiday in any way. Now they have a former Black Panther speaking in honor of. It is a Go Figure kind of moment.

NPR reported that many are bothered that on this holiday King is primarily remembered as he was in 1963, rather the person he was in his last and later years when not only civil rights, but human rights more broadly, were occupying his activism and manifesting itself in his strong opposition to the Vietnam war.

Angela Davis picked up on this very sense, and like some Aesop’s fable drew out the current presidency as an example by which the connection between civil rights abuse, prisons, the death penalty, and global war finds itself embodied, and embodied in a way she can’t but imagine King would have responded to. Her thoughts, the recent news, and all other things considered bring forth disturbing patterns that don’t take a moral philosopher to find creepy.

But first: priorities. In a world where everything finds final worth in its price, by commodity or actuary, Davis noted:

This weekend's presidential inauguration will cost more than the 35 million dollars the Bush administration initially pledged to the tsunami disaster.

The final amount they pledged in tsumnami relief, upwards of 500 million dollars, is equivalent to the bill for 1.5 days of our war in Iraq.

If you are the president, this might not seem strange.
(In fact, a number of things may not seem strange to you in the least). Indeed, as Davis points out, why, for example, would anyone be bothered over the nomination of his long time friend and advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, to be the new Attorney General? It would beg the question in the first place of anything strange in the fact that while governor of Texas you oversaw 152 executions in your state, more than any ever in the history of the US. Your legal advisor at the time, Alberto Gonzalez, saw nothing wrong with this, nor that it included the execution of mentally retarded people.

It seems to me if the stories of people like Sister Prejean don’t convince one that such things are worth a second thought, the fact the US Supreme Court was considering the legality of such executions, and recently found them to be cruel, unusual, and unconstitutional, might make one wonder. Or one could take pause on the well known demonstrations of racial prejudice being characteristic of the US death penalty system. But these, it seems, are just maybes.

For Gonzalez as much as for Bush, if this doesn’t register concern, it is clearer why the Geneva conventions, which Gonzalez called “obsolete” and “quaint,” wouldn't. Could this attitude, a Congressional investigate panel recently asked, have contributed to the Abu Ghraib abuses? Charles Graner just yesterday was sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in the torture, and one could ask further questions after this. For he was a prison guard in Pennsylvania, and not only have US prison practices have been linked to torture practices of military detainees, but Graner himself was sued for going even further during his Penn. days -- for putting razor blades for prisoners’ food, for example.

How does this person get sent to be a prison guard in Iraq? Maybe that questions answers itself all too well. I’m not sure. But the fact this is a live question for us, and not for our president or soon-to-be Attorney General, is sobering a tap on the shoulder that more work is needed. I don’t know what work that is exactly for me, or us, or anyone necessarily. A thousand small-things-large, and daily, I imagine.
Oh, but only if voting were enough.

As for MLK and this day, what Angela Davis made clear in her talk is that these issues on penalty, prison and King’s broader human rights concerns are all one in the same question still urgently waiting to find answer. The fact I can hear this from her, a person formerly on the FBI Ten Most Wanted, speaks something to the nature of possibility that does exist.

Drive 95

Even though the trips are short these days, as Travel it still seems long.
There were a couple recent years when, in the name of Science & Discovery, I spent a lot of time driving alone between Long Island and Florida collecting ants in sandy holes of pine barrens. The trips were wearing in a way no book on tape was never really able solve (especially since my right car speaker is shot). So it felt like a big step to take a solitary drive further than just a couple hours over these holidays, from Durham to Boston.

I go 95. That’s to say interstate 95, though more than a few tractor trailers may try to run straight over your little Subaru at about that many miles per hour. The toll taker at the Delaware Bridge tried to thieve 3 bucks from my change. And the stop-and-go snail trails of cars between DC and Baltimore are hardly ever going to stop. Still, I felt vaguely, most vaguely, reminiscent for a moment on this drive north. Like some bird that had read the migration directions dackwarbs, I was going on vacation. to vacate.

The things you see may not be better than the things you don’t, but how would we ever know? Looking can bide the time nicely, and seeing even moreso, if you’re lucky.

Firstly, a stop through Our Nations Capital. The Capitol looked bright ( but as we now know, clearly tinier that of Texas, pardner).


D. says I never take pictures when I visit the District. but I do! Ahem. a certain D. might recognize this certain house flower? It turns out that flowers aren’t as shy to the camera as some congressional staffers that I happen to know...


I visited my all time favorite, the Freer Gallery of Asian Art. Not only is it a wonderful place, but it is almost always e m p t y. Me and this old Indian woman were like tumbleweeds in a ghost town, blowing quietly room to room.


New to the Mall is the new National Museum of the American Indian (?- Is it just me who didn't get the memo about “Indian” being a suitable term again?)

It is a beautiful space. Something between a desert, the inside surface of a seed, and a moon (the photo here converted to 'pencil,' you know, for that real "acrhitectural" effect..)


...
As for space, the next stop, NYC, certainly takes up a lot of it while amazingly managing to hardly have any. Even still, there is enough that you can bowl. If you go 30th birthday bowling in East Village, the man of honor, C., might wear a pig mask while sizing up his shot. I wish I has something to say about this, but really, I'm drawing a blank.


They have TV floating widescreen above the pins at this place:

I can’t think of a more annoying concept. Perhaps pins that scream bloody murder when you knock them down? actually that might be funny... I don’t know. I’m sure someone working on this very problem.

And let's face it, TV has found is way to every other conceivable space. For example, say you want your whole body scanned by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) just to see if you have any weird thing growing in you, or, say possibly a forgotten surgical tool?

First, it is a Busy Life, so don't bother with sitting down.
As Seb and J. point out at this Park Slope establishment, you can just walk-in off the street, and keep standing...


While all the electron dipoles in your body are orienting you into a big human compass for the sake of seeing your insides, why not pass the time watching the Sox/Mariners game on the Flat Screen while you are at it.

There is always room for entertainment. I think medical term is Cathode Anesthesia.

Donna Haraway speaks of the cyborg life we increasing lead. Humans interfaced with technologies so fundmentally and seamlessly, our social and organic selves intertwined, wires to vessels, wristwatch to adrenaline high, information-now-identity. Why does "normal American life" feel more and more like something out of a Sharper Image catalog taken from the USS Enterprise?

Computer Scientist Steve Mann has been working hard at it for decades:


I sometimes feel like this, between my laptop, digital camera, and cellphone. Once considered a remarkable Luddite among friends and family alike, I am shocked to what a little cyborg I've become. Example enough is this very inter-net inter-face web log, open access to the things that would otherwise stay cradled inside the memory-bed in my head.

And of course peripatetic picturing taking is one of Professor Mann's specialities. New technology has made his 24-7 wearable computer habit a little less burdensome, but please, shoot me if I ever strap one of these things long-term to my head....

...
As anesthetics go, art is my preferred opiate.
Please give me a massive chuck of stone any day over a flat-screen.
J. and I made it to the Isamu Noguchi museum.

It was black stone morphine, most perfect.


And they had nice skylights too. Peer too much and you start getting watery, but no worry in losing yourself, assuming at least you find your friend reflected in it, and upside down. Everything is a mirror.


But no, I mean it like for real, everything is a mirror. J. proved the point by sticking my camera down his coffee mug, and in his genius found an image that has been echoing in my head for weeks now...


...
And then, you know, Massachewsetts.
It snowed, like it was supposed to. Winter-whiteness became state law a few years back after extensive pressure by Robert Frost poetry lobby.


But the cyborg in me can't help tinker. Sure, this looks as if the trees of Kendall Square are snow-thrown from a storm,

but this is actually a negative of the orignal picture, the trees lit from below in the dark (to see, copy this image out and flip the negative button in PhotoEditor ). There is no limit to the true blackness of a snowflake after all.

...
Holidays mean presents, means hand-wrapped somethingness in a huge and funny game of mutual acknowledgement, and hopefully thankfulness.


Hands might also pass over dishes of food. Rob (left hand) cooked a south Indian feast for New Year's. The spices were intense and baroque, and had the odd effect of getting us all a little high somehow. Cath's hand (right) is busy blowtorching the creme brulee, the sugar providing a more predictable buzz.


And my father had the holiday lights up, wound around post outside the door. Slip on the ice when you are walking up, and it quickly turns into a firey waterfall. You might have a twisted ankle real bad, but you also just got to see God in the streak of color that turned your eyes to mush, so consider it a fair trade.


(And then one thousand other things happened)

...
..This post is already too long. Like the road. Like 95 if you have a headache. Blessed with the luck of the Irish (or quarter Irish), your Ma will accompany you on the 13 hour drive back down. I'm turning her into a cyborg too. She has heard of email, and has on a couple special ocassions managed to retrieve a message from her answering machine. But stick a digicam in her hand, and she can find the rainbow in the interstate sky, dead center if you look close


Having arrived, you know you are back in the South when you pass by one place, and one place in particular. Not the Piggly Wiggly, nor the Waffle House.

Nay I say to anything but Chadsworth’s Column Store. That’s right, the place for all your home-column needs. Just call 1-800-COLUMNS. I reckon they’ll have something Corinthian that’ll suit you for this New Year, like the feel of some honeysuckle on an old oak fence...