I did all of this work on a blog, just to ignore it. I’ll add some stuff soon.
11
Jan 10
MARC’s Cold War On Bicycles
On MARC Trains and Bikes
The Greater Greater Washington blog and The Baltimore Sun’s Getting There blog—both generally excellent regional transportation sites—have two recent posts up discussing the possibility of allowing bicycles on MARC trains. It’s an issue that doesn’t come up much because, I imagine, MARC’s incompatibility with bicycles is largely taken for granted at this point—or at the very least MARC’s overcrowding and general insufficiency is so taken for granted that encouraging new riders with cumbersome, awkward baggage isn’t much a priority. No matter the boon it could be for commuting in the region—not just Baltimore to Washington commuting, but other points in the MARC service area that might not have ace local transit systems—maybe we have bigger fish to fry, like getting longer trains, weekend service, comfortable cars, or locomotives that don’t break down, right? Continue reading →
11
Jan 10
Six Pop Science Ideas That Need to Die Now
Motherboard.tv is a new science and tech web site from Vice. Original post here.
In the ’90s, A Brief History Of Time may have satisfied our cultural need to reduce science to soundbite. But in the aughts, science banged into fiction like a pair of protons in the Large Hadron Collider, with home brewed black holes, time traveling particles, cats with wings, and a legion of armchair meteorologists pointing at the snow and declaring global warming a hoax, just to name the biggies. Welcome to Pop Science 101, a class without a teacher, a textbook, and a series of Wikipedia entries updated more often than Michael Jackson.
Here are six pop science ideas that popped over the past decade that we hope will die — or get sucked out of our collective system and into a black hole — before the new year (and one we actually like).
11
Jan 10
Zombie Technology: What Came Back From the Dead In the 2000s
Motherboard.tv is a new science and tech web site from Vice. Original post here
Jokes, fetish objects, relics, and curiosities—states as permanent as smoke. The aughts were a decade of resurrection, from the taking-back of turntables from audiophile snobs to passenger rail’s political re-sanctioning to the resurrection of Polaroid, grandpa’s favorite photo style, by way of retro-hipster sanction. There’s no common thread here, no grand Internet-like phenomenon to bind them together, just culture recycling creative in a decade filled with so much trash.
11
Jan 10
Dancing in the Ruins
Dancing in the Ruins
Know your city. Know it beyond maps and neighborhoods and good restaurants, your favorite bar, blue lights, your kid’s school, the good and bad parts of town. Know its ghosts.
This isn’t too much to ask. Not just in Baltimore, but everywhere, people stay too pocketed off, sealed in cars, afraid of neighborhoods they don’t know. Just the difference in viewing a street from foot as opposed to a car, or even bicycle, is amazing. New buildings pop up, architectural quirks materialize in the streetscape, the scene changes.
Urban exploration, in its classic sense, sounds like a game of dares. Associated with sneaking/breaking into abandoned buildings, onto old hospital campuses or military bases, or descending into black slime-coated old sewers or subway passages, it comes off as more of a sport than casual touring. But at the root of even the most extreme varieties is appreciation for a city’s forgotten and shuttered urban spaces–its history, in a sense. In other words, it’s more than just purposeful trespassing.
Baltimore has long been a hotbed for that kind of urban exploring. An aged industrial burg, the city’s full of fenced off, shuttered, and mostly forgotten old factories and mills full of rusted through old machinery and other relics, although fewer and fewer than in the past. After a leveling process that took years, the Westport power generating station, once the largest of its kind in the country and a filming location for 12 Monkeys, died with a whimper in late 2007, leaving a barren platform between the Middle Branch the Patapsco River and some light rail tracks slated for upscale condominiums. Within the city limits, the massive building–full of regal arches, massive iron doors, dated generator equipment, and graffiti–was sort of the grand high temple of local urban exploring.
Many of the other popular targets of explorers are in rubble now, too. The Seton Institute, a former mental hospital for abusive priests in the Reistertown area, is mostly gone. The “hell house,” outside of Ellicott City, has been likewise razed, as is the Carr Lowery Glass Company, also in Westport. Still, these places lured the thrill-seeking kind of explorer. And you don’t have to trespass to appreciate old architecture. Continue reading →
11
Jan 10
Motel #2
Originally posted on Killoggs
Watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at Josh’s the other night inspired me to revisit an old story.
The burning smell started just outside of Grand Junction, a mid-size city in western Colorado about five hours west of Denver and about 15 minutes from the Utah border. You sort of ignored it at first, pretending it was in your head, and when it got stronger—an acrid tinge of burning plastic or rubber inside and outside of the car—you imagined it was coming from one of the mines you imagined were around.
This is about two hours past Grand Junction, well into Utah. And east-central Utah—200-ish miles south of Salt Lake City, heading north now–is exactly what most people imagine when they hear “Utah.” Ahead to the north, just at the horizon line, is the grey dingy outline of the first rise of the Wasatch mountains, and every other direction is flat, with a scrubby pimple of desert here, and a short, late-stage plateau there. The last town was an hour or so ago, and the next one is about an hour and a half away; Price, and its soot-stained little sister Helper, notable for being the meeting place for full coal trains creeping out of the surrounding foothills.
In between is a nothing you just can’t imagine if you’ve always lived in cities or, for that matter, the east coast. A house every 30 miles; a new fence, a new property line every 15 miles; a clump of cows every ten; a dark-red crushed rabbit every five. And restaurants, gas stations, motels, or anything else refuge-like are the thing you think about to keep from getting bored or even from thinking about an acrid smell that’s been trailing you since the last city you were in that even had a bus station.
If you’re driving to, say, Los Angeles (with a detour to visit a future sister-in-law in SLC), it’s a little early to be getting bored. Seven hours in? Almost, very close to dark, but not yet. The landscape doesn’t change much from roadside to squinting-distance: low scrub sage bushes; wind-not-water now worn arroyos, a clump of cows; hard, pinkish brown dirt; no, not even straggler trees. But birds, and airplanes. You can see every bird and airplane in the west from east-central Utah. Horizon to horizon contrail chalk lines from plane schedules now how old. Continue reading →
11
Jan 10
Motel #1
Trashing Days
IT WAS A YEAR OF MOTEL ROOMS. The Greenwell Inn, Price, Utah: Everything was light blue-green in and outside of the rooms, almost the color of the swimming pool, on a wide ex-highway boulevard through a desert town of 8,000 in Carbon County—which means coal. The (former) Narrows Motel, Glen Arbor, Mich.: five or six rooms at the waist of tepid, inland Glen Lake, where everything in all of the rooms was covered in fine soil, not dust. The Nordic Motel, Portland, Ore: an air conditioning unit fit for a morgue and no visitors or drugs signs. The Wildwood Motel, Gunnison, Colo.: The room was covered in flower prints, greenish carpeting, and framed prints of nature scenes—like what you imagine other people’s grandma’s houses looked like.
That’s not the chronological order of 2003, but more how it’s remembered. Narratives make their own calendars. My 2003 was my most intense period of detachment and outright selfishness. It is the year that sent me, eventually, toward writing for a living. Continue reading →
11
Jan 10
The Insane Clown Posse Posse
City Paper, Dec. 2 2009
The Insane Clown Posse Posse
Why we can’t get enough of Juggalo/Juggalette culture
There are other pathologically devoted subcultures besides Juggalos, and there are plenty of other, even more violent, talent-less, misogynistic, and homophobic musical acts than the Insane Clown Posse. But nothing quite approaches the perfect storm of following and artist than the evil-clown face-painted duo of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J and their legion of Juggalo and Juggalette followers.
It’s anyone’s guess as to how many people make up that following, but we can make some reasonable stabs: A recent article in The Detroit Free Press estimates the ICP empire takes in more than $10 million a year. The Gathering of the Juggalos, a yearly festival centered around the duo’s label, Psychopathic Records, logs attendance close to 10,000 a year. Mall stores Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts likely host as much ICP real estate as they ever did Marilyn Manson merch. The band’s most recent release, Bang! Pow! Boom!, hit No. 4 on the Billboard charts. Add in comic books, movies, and “Juggalo Championship Wrestling,” and it’s a formidable empire, and an independent one at that.
That’s pretty small potatoes compared to bands like the Grateful Dead, Jimmy Buffet, and Phish, the pantheon of band-as-lifestyle culture. Yet, those particular subcultures don’t get doted on in quite the same way. Mocked, maligned, sure–but nothing compared to the attention, mostly negative, bestowed on the Juggalo. A quick internet scan brings up a four-part Juggalo feature in Vice; a post on The New York Times’ web site about Juggalo vocabulary; and the telling observation that every alt-weekly and music blog in the country seems to be able to send a reporter to an ICP live show, but few deem an actual album worthy of review. Continue reading →