City Paper, 14 2009

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?

Michael Dresser, author of Getting There, almost always takes a long, progressive view with regional transportation issues—he’s been speaking truth to the ICC project since the blog started—but, here, he argues against allowing bikes on trains:

As much as I like bikes and bicyclists, I’m skeptical. I tend to consider worst-case scenarios and I can’t help but think that having bicycles on a rail car such as the one above—without having a safe place to secure them—could be a real safety hazard in the case of a derailment. In a crowded car, they could become an obstruction; in an uncowded car, I can see them becoming a missile.

“Missile” might be a bit of an overstatement. This presumes the bike is unattended and sitting unrestrained in an aisle. Never mind that this overlooks other potential missiles—strollers, perhaps, or rolling luggage—but I don’t think anyone is suggesting that this is how bicycles should be transported on the MARC. A scenario like that would really only need to happen during rush hour, when all rows and ADA spaces are certain to be full—and keeping bikes off of trains during rush hour seems reasonable (like Virginia Railway Express)—and also presumes that MARC wouldn’t do even a bare minimum to accommodate bicycles in terms of, well, making their transportation safe. Which isn’t much.

And, anyhow, the safety argument would seem to ignore that fact that Baltimore’s light rail and Metro, and Washington’s Metro, all allow bicycles on their trains at all times. He also fails to note that MARC—which, believe it or not, is not the most overcrowded, cash-starved train system in the country—is one of two commuter network’s in the country that has a blanket ban on bicycles. Which is unacceptable: There is nothing uniquely prohibitive about MARC trains.

At least two commuter-rail systems have dedicated bike cars—CalTrain, which actually often has two bike cars per train, Seattle’s Sounder—and many more have spaces set aside in cars for bike storage, usually just enough room for two or three. And other cities that do the bare minimum and allow bikes with no accommodations—Dallas and Nashville—let cyclists keep their steeds in ADA spaces with the stipulation they must leave the train if the space is needed for a handicapped rider. More, most systems across the country keep the crowding situation on trains in check with limits on the number of bikes allowed in each car and even the specific cars that allow bikes. Miami, for example, only allows bicycles in the last car of its trains. (Check out the Track Twenty-Nine blog for a full city-by-city run-down.)

As a solution to the bike-plus-transit commuting problem, Dresser makes this suggestion:

Instead, I would propose a solution employed by one gentleman of my acquaintance. He rides a bicycle to Penn Station and parks it there, takes the train down to Greenbelt, picks up a second bicycle that he keeps there and pedals to his workplace. Cost should not be a big issue for most riders. Anyone can pick up a used second bike for a fraction of the cost of a new one through the print or online classified ads. Rather than lobby to get bikes on trains, bicyclists ought to concentrate their efforts on getting safe, secure bike lockers at each station.

So, Dresser is suggesting that bicycle commuters purchase a second bike and rent a locker at their destination. It’s more of an onus than he makes it sound. Even a used bike is going to cost a few hundred dollars for something quality—and if you’re going any kind of distance, it’ll need to be of some quality—and renting a bike locker, assuming your destination has them, is also going to cost some coin. Keep in mind, too, that this second bike, once transported (somehow), to your destination is going to serve one and only purpose once there—getting you from the train station to work. Maybe you have to really like bikes to understand why that’s a problem, but it is.

Also, this presumes that you are a daily commuter, and don’t just ride once or twice a week to a destination, or maybe just need to get somewhere like a doctor’s office or any of the other myriad reasons people take the train that don’t involve an office and five days a week.

More than anything though, it seems like Dresser is taking a short, and regressive, view when it comes to bicycles on MARC. If getting around Maryland and Washington D.C. in a sane manner is to be at all sustainable, bike commuting needs to be an integral part. The whole buying-a-second-bike-and-keeping-it-in-a-locker is a work-around—and at this early stage in the United State’s return to sensible transportation (transit, bikes, walkable communities), work-arounds should not be permissible.

As the Greater Greater Washington post that kickstarted this whole discussion points out, the Maryland state legislature agrees. In 2000, the General Assembly passed House Bill 1260, which states simply that Maryland railroads, “SHALL ADOPT REGULATIONS TO FACILITATE THE TRANSPORTATION OF BICYCLES ON BOARD PASSENGER RAILROAD SERVICES.” In the post’s comments, there’s some disagreement related to case law as to what power that actually has—as in, MTA may not technically be doing something illegal in ignoring the bill, but can still be penalized by the state in non-judiciary ways—but there’s no question to the law’s intent.

Of course, if MTA were to concede to the assembly, it has every right to look to the assembly for funds to make bike access happen—which is, one can imagine, why lawmakers haven’t followed up in the nine years since the bill’s passage.

MTA and The Sun Are Still Wrong About MARC and Bikes

City Paper, Dec. 28 2009

The Baltimore Sun’s Getting There blog posted a response from the Maryland Transit Authority to all the hullabaloo about bikes not being allowed on MARC trains generated by a Greater Greater Washington post a couple of weeks ago. No surprise, but it’s not exactly satisfying.

The MTA’s Henry M. Kay notes in the Sun post that MARC’s Penn line is the fastest commuter railway in the nation. But it’s also worth noting that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s regional trains, which do allow bikes, hit a top speed of at least 100 MPH, nipping at MARC’s 100-plus-MPH heels. In any case, the solution MTA studied was removing two rows of seats for bike stowage—which, heavens, would take away seating for four passengers. Without explanation, Kay says the two rows would be per car, but it only seems necessary to have perhaps two or so cars per train with bike capacity, as do many other commuter rail systems in the country.

Kay is really only explaining Penn Line rush hour trains, however, in his response. And, again, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that allowing bikes on Penn Line rush hour trains is a good idea. What about non-rush hour trains when rows of seats are sitting empty, or far lower-speed and lower-capacity Camden and Frederick line trains? In fact, just allowing bikes on those lines seems an easy stopgap solution—and neither the MTA nor Getting There columnist/blogger Michael Dresser have come up with a reason, good or not, for not allowing them on those trains. One suspects there just isn’t one. As I mentioned before, bicycles are a rapidly growing part of commuting habits and, sorry, buying a second bike, transporting it somehow to your destination, and stowing it there full-time is not a solution.

By Josh Sisk

The lesson from this one was that everyone I know is a Cranberries fan.

The lesson from this one is that fans of Animal Collective side projects don’t read about them on Spin magazine’s web site.

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).

Polar Shift Theory or Something With Magnets Is Going To End the World In 2012
2012 turned into a big spazz party in large part because there’s not one thing that’s going to end the world, there’s actually like three or four things and that damn calendar. Most of them you could chuck just reading a sentence or two: undetected mystery planet Nibiru is going to collide with us; Earth is going to cross something called the “galactic plane,” and that sounds bad; NASA’s covering up an impending meteor strike. But, the somehow realer sounding one is “polar shift theory.” (Ironically, it’s probably the word “theory”.) NASA calls it a bait and switch with real science that predicts the magnetic polarity of the Earth will shift a small number of times over its lifetime—which won’t kill off all life, but could fuck up a lot of compasses—and that switch will make the Earth start spinning. . . backward. Let’s please kick amateur astronomy back to sky charts and Tasco.

Flying Cats
Since the History and Discovery channels started chasing the Maxim crowd—rather than the Sea Wings loving boomers—we’re left with a load of end-of-days programs like “Life After Humans.” There’s probably a crock of misleading pop science that goes on in them, but you’ve gotta love flying cats. See: housecats will move up into skyscrapers to avoid predators, and they’ll have this cat community in the sky, and they’ll get from building to building on flappy sugar glider-ish wings. Some writer really, really loves his or her kitty. At the same time, you have to admit: evolution did come up with crazy shit like us.

Vaccines and Autism
If you’ve wisely avoided this, here it is in capsule: a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal is used in many vaccines, it was found to be maybe dangerous to very young children—which skeptics tie to a spike in autism over the past two decades—and has since been mostly removed from vaccines used in young children. Of course, this was dredged up around the time the government was pushing the H1N1 vaccine (of which there was a thimerosal-free version for kids), and hysteria ensued.

Freakonomics
Maybe it brought economic theory to the people, but, more likely, Freakonomics, the thought-school of sorts that gets a rise on applying economic theory to things (sumo wrestling, the KKK) that don’t have much to do with weighty topics like global poverty and why we’re all totally goddamn doomed, is going to wind up remembered something more like creationism-as-science. In the words of London-based analyst and stockbroker Daniel Davies: “When future generations ask the economics profession ‘What were you doing while the great bubble built up ahead of the Second Great Depression?’, and we have to reply ‘Lots and lots of quirky little working papers about sumo wrestling and speed-dating’, it is going to be really, really, fucking embarrassing.”

Everything To Do With the Large Hadron Collider
The largest particle accelerator ever built cost 8 billion American dollars, is 17 miles long, and has been in process for nearly a decade and a half. It’s purpose: finding the end of physics. But, it’s funny: the LHC is so massive and so expensive, it can’t not be in the public’s eye — and yet at the same time, it’s really, really hard to grasp what it exactly it does. It crashes tiny stuff into other tiny stuff and great, but even most non-science college educations don’t get much past a three-particle atomic model, let alone try to parse quantum mechanics. So we get pop science being dragged out of where there isn’t any.

Remember the Earth-eating black holes? Much worse was an article that went viral this fall suggesting that a crew of Higgs particles (unfortunately dubbed the “God particle” by those that should know better) is colluding in the future to travel back in time to create bad luck, thus sabotaging the LHC—which at the time was breaking down on the regular. Apologies to the world’s time travel hard-ons: theLHC appears to be functioning as intended now.

The Natural Global Warming “Trend,” Or “Climate-gate”
“But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes,” wrote Sarah Palin in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month. How’s this for a theory: Global warming is really caused by particles traveling back in time to punish us for even acknowledging this climate-changing creep-o.

Kevin Bacon Theory
We are all connected—human-to-human, group-to-group—in describable networks. It’s not a game: our actions have meaning across those networks in ways we’re just starting to understand. Actually, we like this one: it doesn’t breed hysteria, isn’t twisting facts or research, and can be understood in terms of common sense and, oddly enough, was born from common sense. And it proves, scientifically, the value of community.

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.

Turntables
Music-prowess-as-status is hard to maintain when all of that music is stuck on a hard drive—and so a wall of CDs begets a wall of records. That’s not the whole picture, of course, but amidst all of the stuff about “tactile experience,” warm sound quality, album artwork treated right, and the rest of it, I can’t help but think of the first kid in our middle school parading around in a Pixies t-shirt like he taught Kim Deal bass guitar.

The Nintendo Power Pad
What is the Nintendo Wii but the Nintendo Power Pad fully realized? Almost, anyway: the decade also brought us the Dance Dance Revolution mat and, the Power Pad’s closest ancestor, the sporty Active Life series’ mat—which by most accounts seems about as shitty as its 1988 ancestor. Then there’s the Bluetooth-powered Wii Balance Board, which ups the technology to impressive levels and leaves a device that transcends gaming into actual fitness activity, which, I’ll say for the record, is an affront to evolution.

Passenger Rail
It’s likely that from wherever you sit, the whole picture isn’t entirely clear. Yes, there’s all of the hullabaloo about the United States’ high speed rail initiative and its promise of real actual money for new rail projects—California’s banner already-funded Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line, filling a transit gap so urgent I’m still amazed it exists at all, looms large, as does the proposed Midwest network.

To think, just a few years ago the U.S. passenger rail service Amtrak was practically begging on the street for bare operating expenses. But with the help of the government’s big stimulus handout, the country’s undergoing an interurban rail revolution. Light rail, streetcars, and heavy commuter rail projects from Los Angeles to Denver to Seattle to Baltimore, designed with community, not sprawl in mind, are moving the nation closer to collectively pissing on Henry Ford’s grave.

Web Cams
An early pop-Internet gimmick of chunky video that had “bone zone” written all over it was reimagined in the late aughts thanks to drag-race bandwidth speeds. Google’s newly popular video chat add-on is fine and all, but Sony’s Eyetoy gesture-recognition camera and Microsoft’s forthcoming Project Natal, upping the body-recognition ante to unseen heights, are blowing the web cam concept into near-spooky dimensions.

3D Movies
The first one I saw was the way-too-larger-than-life Bono-jerks-off-in-front-of-really-expensive-cameras “flick” U2 3D. However full of shit U2 may be, it looked really, really cool. Night shots panning up the stadium’s rows and rows of lighter-lit fans felt like something out of Bladerunner. (And bonus — the 3D glasses looked like Bono-glasses.) There’s something about much of the 3D new-wave’s output that seems rather indulgent, but as it’s getting harder and harder to get people into theaters and it seems like they’ve got less and less to offer for more money, any actual innovation is a good thing. The real holy grail of course is 3D without glasses (just like real life!). We’ll be watching what the industry does with it, but we’re not keeping our glasses on.

Polaroid
On one hand, Polaroid photography’s been a crutch for hacky hipster photographers, a set aesthetic that can make just about any shot look smart, candid, and even good. On the other hand, the pictures do look good, all of them, in the same way. The comeback is love/hate, to say the least, particularly with iPhone’s Polaroid app making it brutally ubiquitous. And, if you’ve ever doubted the power of hipsters, consider the Impossible Project, a group recently formed to crowdsource the financing to begin manufacturing Polaroid’s 600 film under sublicense, effectively bringing it back to life.

Bicycles
Just look around you. This decade saw an explosion of bike riding of all stripes, whether it’s spandexed jock riding, fixie posing, everyday commuting, or just plain old kicking around for fun. Take the explosion of infrastructure improvements — bike lanes/paths/routes, bike lockers, bike racks, bike share projects (in Montreal, Paris, and Washington D.C., notably) — and add in new co-ops, shops, advocacy groups, and political recognition. Not only is the United States’ heart attack posse getting smaller, but its people are getting smarter too.

Dancing in the Ruins

City Paper, May 20 2009

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.

While you pass by many of them everyday–again, whipping by distractedly in a car–some of old Baltimore’s wreckage takes a bit of a trip. Fort Armistead–though better known for less savory things (such as drug deals, prostitution, needles, rats, feral cats, high school tweakers, and sex) and the annual all-night Starscape rave–represents a grittier, do-it-yourself kind of destination. It’s one you can actually prowl without worrying about jail or asbestos, but you might want to travel with companions and wear thick-soled shoes.

Fort Armistead is technically a park, but discharged by the city into a sort of anarchic, sparsely maintained pocket of heavily spray-painted bunkers, gun batteries, and tunnels, offering a whole lot of concrete and a whole lot of spray can professions of satanic love. Expect the enclosed areas to smell bad, too. Built in the 1890s to protect Baltimore’s harbor, the fort never saw actual battle, sitting as sort of a bummer counterpoint to the well-maintained, historic Fort McHenry. In a certain sense, that makes it all the more worth visiting: it provides a more honest sort of history, one that acknowledges decay.

Sitting across the harbor and pocketed just underneath Sparrows Point is Fort Howard. The old gun batteries, relatively graffiti- and needle-free, are likewise relics of the city’s early 1900s defense network–”Endicott series” forts–and never saw battle. The fort abuts North Point State Park to the northeast and the tiny town of Fort Howard, not home to much more than a VA hospital, to the northwest. The fort itself is accessed through the town off the very end of North Point Road. It’s about as isolated as it comes within a half hour drive of central Baltimore, which accounts for its relative lack of skeeze. Expect more concrete batteries, covered in more ivy than tags, no people, and a stout, candy-striped lighthouse that now guards the harbor entrance.

Also outside of the city, and within more tamed jurisdiction, Patapsco State Park is a local gold mine of exploration. The park’s signature feature is the Thomas Viaduct, a 600-foot-long series of stone archways supporting still-operational railroad tracks. Built in the 1830s and serving freight trains continuously since, it’s the sort of presence you imagine will be left standing for millennia after human beings have left the area. (For a comparable structure that is also off-the-beaten path, the Carrollton viaduct, a short wander up the Gwynns Falls trail from Washington Boulevard, is an impressively imposing three-story monolith built in the same time period.)

The park’s true jewel, however, is its cast-aside chapel, the Chapel of St. Stanislaus Kostka–also known as the “good church”–and its small patch of graveyard. Overgrown and slowly crumbling, what’s left are the structure’s dilapidated walls graced by now three-sided windows, creeping undergrowth, a pair of old arched doorways, and a front yard full of rusted-out cars. It’s far enough away–and requires a 30-minute or so walk in along Alberton Road–that taggers have mostly spared the ruin and, for the same reason, it’s a relatively minimal safety risk as well. This is also the stop on your underground tour of Baltimore where you’d be wise to start heeding one of the cardinal rules of urban exploring, “leaving only footsteps.” Think about these things getting discovered by some wayward alien sometime well into our post-apocalypse. A fort is a fort, but a chapel, well, is something for a species to boast.

Further up the Gwynns Falls trail from the Carrollton Viaduct is one of the cooler stretches of current post-apocalypse in the city: the Ellicott Driveway portion of the trail. Essentially an old highway, complete with yellow center striping, overgrown at the edges and slowly cracking apart, the ex-road now serves cyclists and pedestrians. As it winds for a short distance from Frederick Avenue to Baltimore Street along Gwynns Falls and an infrequently used stretch of rail line, the trail passes under the crumbling backsides of an old butcher, a leather and broom works, and a defunct brewery lining the ridge above and slowly succumbing to gravity. If you’re on the road in the right lighting–flat twilight perhaps–it’s a fabulous place to freak yourself out.

Right here in the city, there’s enough awesome abandoned historical buildings to keep yourself entertained for weeks. Check them out from the outside, though, as entering will probably run you afoul of the law. Check out the building at 1450 Bayard St., original purpose unknown (utility station perhaps), with its mammoth concrete front yard forbiddingly fenced off and offering what looks like a garage sale targeted for the Maschinenmensch of Metropolis (e.g. various heavy industrial objects that could double as toys). Perched at the neck of one of the busier commuter corridors in the city, the American Ice Co. building towers over the West Baltimore MARC station like a red brick sentry. It’s well worth slowing down for. And things such as the facade of the old Mayfair Theatre or the art deco remnants of the Hutzlers Complex, a cavernous department store that closed down in the late 1980s, make it worth parking.

Most of these places are pretty, no surprise there, but that’s so much the point: appreciating the beauty the city has to offer. These sites are easy to get to, free, and frequently awesome, or at least very cool. The more eyes on them, the less likely they are to get razed for condos, a la the Westport station. So, pack a camera and get to really know your city.

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.

If you’d stopped in Grand Junction, or even a few miles outside of it, near Fruita where the Colorado River twists red-muddy underneath grassy, hundred-foot shelves, to pee off the road, maybe by that one camping spot on the gravelly plane in between the highway and the low, nondescript hills hills hiding the river and its grass halo. If you’d have stopped here, even just because some of these things are worth remembering, you would have noticed the acrid smell dissipating as you walked down the embankment trying to see if even the local kids are maintaining the fire pit (a very loud campsite, yes). You would have crept toward the smell, underneath and toward the rear of the car. It’s just a spot—a bit of sweat on the bottom side of (must be) the gas tank dripping onto some bulbous part of axle and, yes, burning but not flaming.

But flaming now, of course. Flaming out the sides and back of the car, giving up big black plumes that fill the car, and melting through something down there such that the brakes only half work, or less. It feels like smoking a cigarette dipped in dirty motor oil and hits the eyes like an over-chlorinated pool. So, even as the car rolls just another few inches, we’re on hands and knees gagging while a close-trailing semi pulls behind. A man says “I’d get away from that thing if I were you” and creeps up and around the side of the car—down the embankment almost to the fenceline—with a fire extinguisher. Not like a sniper, but like a little kid playing sniper. The truck driver graciously empties the extinguisher all over the side panels of the car, and shrugs.

At this point, it’s important to have a very clear understanding of the layout of this particular half-mile stretch of Utah road. 50 yards or so to the south is a small bridge over a trickle of river, denoted across the landscape by a serpentine trail of stunted trees. On the west side of the road is a tall chain-link fence that runs from the river until at least the next bend in the road. (Also, most fence out here is three-wire barbed.) Behind it is a gas station, not on the road actually, but set back quite a ways as if the road (now a smaller state highway) is passing it incidentally. The relationship is further complicated because it’s difficult to tell which way the station is actually facing; there are old gas pump islands on either side, and the signs are all faded or removed. The station’s corner office and store is actually on the southwest side of the building, so facing away from the highway. It’s dusty and apparently abandoned, but the only way you can confirm that is by the tall fence in between it and the road; a lot of open businesses in places like this are very good at looking closed via brutal weather and exposure, age, dust, and a culture that doesn’t give much of a shit. The away-facing office doesn’t help.

So: standing there roadside watching a car and soon possessions burn—all of them; this is a moving trip–but maybe not actually explode. You evacuate a few boxes of books, then a couple of bikes, and the there are two new people standing the side of the road. One is a very old but fit man with a specked white beard, and who looks as weathered as the likely ex-gas station across the road and out a surprising distance into the desert, like maybe a poorly calibrated hallucination.

The other person is a little kid, and maybe you’re not the sort that little kids register with, so we’ll leave it at little kid. They both have full buckets, and as the old man douses the underside of the car, the little kid goes back to the river and refills the empties. Soon enough, the fire is out, and we’re all left standing out there at exactly sunset with the very acrid smell of much melted rubber and plastic. (The truck driver wishes me luck and drives on.)

This is the part of the story where you should probably feel some kind of fear, or least pre-fear. A bit sick, perhaps, or a little sweaty. But, no, instead it’s anger. It’s the feeling that this has fucked everything up—fresh start, grad school, radical life decisions planned and agonized over beached on a not-even-sand dune in the Utah desert. And here are your books spilling out onto the highway shoulder. And here is your car, certainly dead forever, or at least dead beyond the $1,500 you have in the bank. So maybe it’s the brutality and awfulness of the past two years, and, like a star expanding just it can suck back even harder, you’re looking at this piece of shit pink now underneath the dusk, and you just want to kill.

And all of this is probably why when someone says we should tow this thing to our station across the way and take a look underneath, you don’t think but shrug. You don’t think about why they would need to tow a car 100 yards, or how they’re going to get the car in there when there’s no gate, or about how you could pay for repairs to a car at a service station with no apparently electricity when all you have is a debit card. Then you’re standing there with a little kid and a burned-up car waiting for the old man to come back with a tow truck.

Instead of going through the gate however you imagined that was supposed to happen, the old man drives up the highway for a half mile, and turns left onto a dirt road. It’s spectacularly dark; headlights, a dash light, and stars. There are some low hills here and trying to pin them down outside of the truck window, you might as well be tracing night sea swells lapping at the sky on or submerged in some black ocean. At about this point, the rear car axle seizes and we’re only to leave it there on the road. So, we’ll drive on to the station which must have a back entrance in these hills somewhere and, we’re to understand, a telephone.

Eventually, the road flattens back out into the scrub desert and there’s a tall, padlocked gate. A couple hundred yards off, there’s highway traffic and, in between, the service station and you can now see an old RV behind it all lit up. We’re on a big concrete pad now, cracked and dirt-covered, making up a sort of yard for the station/RV complex, which itself is dotted here and there by rusting machinery that looks more farmlike than auto shoplike. The old man hasn’t been silent this whole time. He’s been reassuring you that he can get someone down from Price tonight to tow the car, and at a reasonable rate. You shouldn’t worry. Everyone is good people around here, and he knows the best ones.

You’re given a dusty can of soda from a warm stand-up cooler in the office/shop part of the store, and the old man goes into the garage to use the phone. It’s clear the store has seen the end of the world and isn’t waiting for anything. Dust all over; toppled post card and comic book racks; filmy windows; enough grit on the floor to make it go crunch; old bags of chips tossed around; mostly empty shelves; an old flickering fluorescent. (I shouldn’t need to describe it really; you’ve seen it— you’ve seen almost exactly this gas station. It’s more than a TV and movie trope; by now, it’s a tattoo on the brain on anyone older than 25. It’s the end times refuge, with expired end times soda that has the aftertaste of a dusty hard-boiled egg.)

You don’t know precisely how you’re feeling because you’re just now starting to feel something about the situation. And it’s not fear; it’s more an awesome hyperreality that you almost want to savor. Everything is so clear and out of your control it makes your teeth hurt. It’s like when the old man comes out of the garage and says you should come drive out in the desert to open the gate for the cows with him, you of course say yes.

You pull out of the gas station yard and drive not back the way you came but instead onto another road you didn’t see before. It’s cracked asphalt, eroding into the dirt on either side, and beneath the accumulated dirt and sand, you can see the road is highway striped. Then you’re driving south on this highway, empty but still marked with roadside reflectors, a half mile away and parallel to the first while the old man explains how the state came in so many years before and built a new highway, and this was the old one. His gas station was condemned in the process, and he’s spent the interim basically being a good Mormon and waiting for the OK to reopen.

It’s another two or three mile drive, at some point steering off the old highway onto a two-track, kicking up dust clouds to block out the stars. It’s been a lot of talk about state bureaucracy, organizing lawsuits, and generally reversing time in a way that will never happen and, judging by the sort of told-this-story-a-thousand-times tone in the old man’s voice, he knows it will never happen and is mainly telling the station’s story out of habit (and probably to explain driving down an abandoned highway behind a tall fence.)

And, abruptly, we stop. The dust clears and there’s a gate. We’re well out of view of the highway by now and the gas station or any sort of recognizable geography but yawning flatness and yawning darkness. It’s just headlights on the gate, silence, and a quiet cyclical engine shutter from the truck. It’s like looking forward is looking off of something. He tells you to get out and open the gate for him, and getting out feels like stepping off of something. But there it is, the ground, and you walk forward using its friction to the gate and open it like he said. And this, finally this, is the point where you’re afraid, that either he’s going to do something horrible to you, or kick you out into the dark to get sucked up into space.

But, no. You get back in and he’s telling you about this surprise he has for you, the awesome thing that no one ever gets to see. And you’re driving down a third, different dirt road heading in who knows what direction. Around a bend and there in headlights is a man walking. A grubby kid about 15 or so, with an old Army backpack hanging off his shoulders and a rifle hanging off of that. He sees us and kind of does a little dance there in the headlights before jumping in the back of the truck without saying a word or anything.

The kid’s retarded, the old man explains. He doesn’t go to school, spending most of his time out in the desert just wandering and eating stuff he shoots. After about a week or so, he usually finds his way home in a manner similar to what just happened. (After living for six years in small mountain towns and sub-small town places like this, it’s only now, six more years on, that I realize just how enviable of a life this is.) You look back and the kid’s all sprawled out in the truck bed, still unconcerned or oblivious to the fact that his grandfather or father is driving around with a stranger–like, maybe this happens all the time.

With a sharp upward bump, we’re on the old highway again, a different part further along than when we got off. Right across from it is what looks like an old rest area. It’s completely in ruins; a couple of small dusty stone boxes as bathrooms, a larger stone box as some sort of visitor’s center; a large flat area beyond presumably a parking lot; and in the middle of it all, right ten feet in front of the truck now is a pond. He turns out the headlights and for the first time you realize there’s a moon up, and the crumbling little roadside complex, filled out with shrubby trees, looks not new but preserved. Flashed, burned white onto a surface not like a picture but like a picture that makes it’s own light and is three-dimensional.

“Watch,” the old man says, pointing at the pond. “Wait. Watch. Just watch.”

And within a minute a spout of water shoots into the air, maybe 20 or 30 feet, dancing and glimmering up there in the light for who knows how long before flopping back down onto the pond with a undelicate slap.

He explains that it’s one of the only cold water geysers in the world. It used to be a roadside attraction, but now it’s just here.

Later, after my car had been loaded up onto a flatbed tow truck, the old man gave me an old post card of the geyser. I think it’s still at my dad’s house in Washington. I later confirmed that the geyser, named only Roadside Geyser, is one of 12 cold-water geysers in the world.

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.

First, it sent me to the Wildwood Motel and, of the four, it was the least accidental, the one that really counts. Writing, I think, is the most solitary thing and the most public. It operates completely in one’s head and is consumed infinitely and unknowably. I was coming off a period of time where I had difficulty thinking, or was thinking about too many things, and was having a hard time interacting with people because of it.

My last apartment, in a different small mountain town very close to New Mexico, had been shared with a fellow that looked like he rode around during the day underneath the hood of a truck—and the space itself was scuffed all over with black ash, littered with firewood scraps, and had more piles of junk than furniture. You couldn’t squeeze a meaningful thought through the front door.

I had a short story gestating at that point for several months. It’s not worth getting into what it’s about here—and I don’t even think I have a copy of it anymore—and the story is certainly terrible, some psychosexual J.G. Ballard rip-off involving a pilot and co-pilot having cockpit sex during a plane crash. Wherever the hell it is now, it’s still awful. But I loved it then.

The story wasn’t the only thing I worked on, but I considered it a refrain of sorts in my daily writing. It was either a break between the other stuff or the other stuff was a break in between working on it. No matter. The point is that I was writing all of the time, and probably in an unhealthy, obsessive way. It gave me the usual rise that comes from writing, but also an excuse to be away somewhere—which, mostly, was the Wildwood.

And the Wildwood was an amazing place to be alone, just on the outside of town (pop. about 5,000), set back off a frontage road. It was empty, too. Hunters stayed there during the fall, fisherman in the summer. In the winter, it was just me: one light in the multi-building, single-story complex; one car in the snow-packed circular drive. My own furniture was abandoned in a storage unit. My few boxes of books stayed mostly in the car. It was like not living anywhere. It would have also made for an amazing set up to be an alcoholic, and it was almost like I was doing an injustice to the situation by not being whole-hog self-destructive.

That February I submitted the story to a contest put on by the local college lit journal. And I went about my business of generally not having any business, save for graduating from school and watching the parking lot turn from snow to mud. I also wrote a story about a guy who cuts his finger and watches it get infected and fall off. For fun. I don’t know what happened to that story either. I didn’t have a computer or a word processor, so everything started out on unruled copy paper, in chicken-scratch that, as it moved down the page, drooped more and more down on the right-hand side. The end result looked like an old, leaning barn.

The cockpit story won me $100 and was published in the journal, which was distributed around town. One runner up had something to do with vampires, and the other I can’t remember. They were pretty bad but, you know, not bad enough. Small towns are hard to explain to city people; most of whom regard small towns as an Eden myth or angry right-wing cesspools with good tap water. But small towns are real, and during the spring in this particular one, a stack of the lit journal—and its story of pilots fucking as they died—was in the entryway of every business in town.

The morning after they were distributed, there was a special buzz around the college. A local student, a cowgirl type whose name I can’t remember, had been rolling around Gunnison grabbing up the journals, announcing that she’d, by God, be burning them at noon in the parking lot of Taylor Hall. I showed up there at noon, where she had a dump truck to take copies to the landfill (instead of burning, for whatever reason). There, too, were a half dozen or so red-faced kids screaming her down in the name of free speech and so forth, the people had a right to pilots fucking as they died, and so forth.

There was a big public debate at the school, of course, attended by a few hundred kids, some angry, but mostly just bemused. Some people yelled unnecessarily, an impassioned few spoke about democracy and art. No one talked about pilots fucking as they died. Not even the cowgirl-type, who was calling me a pervert and suggesting that I needed psychological help. She was after all, a psychology major.

A few weeks later, the day after graduating, I slipped out of town, driving west toward Los Angeles. My car exploded about halfway through Utah. Gas had leaked down onto the rear axle, which heated up enough after a few hundred miles to catch fire. A kind tow-truck driver brought me 50 miles through the dark scrubby hills to Price, where I was dropped off at the Greenwell Inn. Maybe you’ve seen a place like Price, so out in the middle of everything it’s almost like being at altitude, as if you’re going to fall in every direction at once. The Greenwell rate was good—the clerk understood my situation—so I decided to stay a while.

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.

Is it that Juggalos are just more interesting than Parrotheads or Phans? And more interesting to whom? If we’re talking about a white, progressive, and generally middle-class audience, Deadheads and the like aren’t terribly interesting, at least in some part because, well, they’re “us.” At least for the most part–if not of a similar age, then similar mainstream income brackets, similar values, beliefs, etc. Juggalos, however, are a majestic, and distant Other.

What exactly is that otherness that appeals? Juggalos typify a number of things that Phish fans and Dead followers don’t. There’s certainly an underlying ideology–social justice, for one–to the hippie-cum-yuppie followers of premiere jam bands, but Juggalos have that, too, plus a mythology to back it up. It’s probably not worth digging too deep here, but ICP’s dedicated many of its albums to what’s known as the Joker’s Cards: six, all corresponding to a different feature of the “Dark Carnival,” a pretty standard Catholic purgatory re-imagined as a carnival. For instance, Riddle Box, ICP’s 1995 major-label debut, is about some kind of jack-in-the-box that tells you if you’re going to heaven or hell. The Ringmaster (1994, certified gold), is “One who was created by your own evil ways. One who will judge your very fate.”

And the title of Bang! Pow! Boom! refers to a character that basically sweeps up the Dark Carnival when it gets too full. With explosions. “It’s awesome to see him come and perform because when he performs, you know you’re not just seeing a few people go to hell,” Violent J (Joseph Bruce to the government) told Murder Dog magazine in a recent interview. “You’re seeing a whole gangload all at once!” Basically, ICP mythology is a creative take on fire-and-brimstone evangelical Christianity: long on narrative and description, short on ideas, and all hell.

Which is all pretty interesting and weird, and one of the genuinely peculiar things about Juggalos. Who knew that behind lyrics like “I got your fuckin’ present hangin’ next to my nuts/ now when I’m swinging on my hatchet/ if it hits you it cuts” was a message of virtue? (Or something that made sense.) But the artifact that went viral this past summer was an infomercial for the Gathering, an event Spin magazine called “four days of unrepentantly moronic mayhem.”

The mythology isn’t funny–childish, sure–but the things touted in the Gathering infomercial are, at least to a certain group of people of better means and education than your average Juggalo or Juggalette. Wrestling, Pauly Shore, brutal overuse of “bitch boy” and “motherfucking,” a whole lot of overweight people, talent like Vanilla Ice, and Faygo soda (a Detroit-centric generic brand), and then there’s this: “There’s a lot of sex in the air, too. Don’t doubt it.” The infomercial, a YouTube smash, is basically a litany of punchlines, a condensation of everything Juggalo culture gets ribbed on for the rest of the year. An ultimate self-clowning.

There’s a catch, however: Most of this stuff isn’t specific to Juggalo culture. Even all of it in combination isn’t. Hell, I grew up drinking Faygo soda. The connection’s just a band, and that’s nothing new.

“If those of the ghetto are nothing more than carnival exhibits to the upper class, then let’s give them the show they deserve to see,” proclaims the ICP web site. The wildly successful duo used to rap a lot more about being poor and about class warfare, albeit crudely–”Because the rich man be stressing all the dumb stuff/ they cut their fucking wrists if the grass isn’t green enough”–but that line from the web site sums something important up about the equation between Juggalos and the rest of the world. This is about class, and maybe it’s even mostly about class.

In a subculture that seems so stunted, the Juggalos have done something political, however unintentionally, and created an amazing parody of the American lower class. Which is important because, at the same time, it’s created a forum for progressive, intellectual, middle-class “us” to laugh at poor people. Like conservatives, Juggalos have a persecution complex. Meaning: It doesn’t matter if we mock Juggalos or not, that mockery is built into the identity. The whole thing is like a big performance of the educated, well-to-do world’s quiet condescension of the proles.

One thing that seemed to really hang up gawkers regarding the Gathering were the seminars, or at least the advertisement of such. No one knew what that meant. A seminar? For these people? The subtext, of course, was these uneducated people. And these people are into a lot of shitty things–violence, for starters–but so are a lot of people one might tag as educated. What’s the difference if the violence is being delivered from an ICP lyric or an Xbox game?

In the same Murder Dog interview, Violent J makes a telling point: “Juggalos are way bigger than ICP . . . We’re just happy that they endorse us, that they embrace us.” And, in turn, there is something even bigger behind Juggalos. “Is it those whose minds have become devious because of a lifetime spent inside of a caged hell, or is it those who invented this caged hell years ago and done nothing to help destroy it yet?” asks the ICP web site, glibly pardoning its own violence hard-on and conjuring a crude sort of Marxism in much the same way the Joker Card mythology recalls crude Christian evangelism. And no one but no one would want to admit that Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope have an actual salient point–but the workers are restless, and they’re painting their faces.