EMPLOYMENT STRIKES!

Yes, both Drew and I are now members of the working class of America. Today, I visited HCD Media in Dumbo to meet a team working on a documentary on prisons in New Orleans. My first task is to transcribe the interviews, something I'm not looking forward to, but at least it's paying and I got my foot in the door. I could possibly get in as a Production Assistant and then (hopefully) as a field sound technician. The producer I talked to today said he had to run sound, for lack of an engineer, and hated it. Good signs all around.

So I biked over to Dumbo, just to see how long it would take. About half hour, turns out. Not bad at all. On my return trip, I was turning onto my street for the last 10 seconds of riding when POP! HISSSSSSSSSS there goes my back tire. I could SEE my apartment. I got in and what do I see sticking out of my tire?



What is that? A staple? A piece of a car? All I know is that I'm lucky I was so close to home, traveling without a spare tube. The roads are unkind to bikers. In fact, roads are probably worse for biking than traffic. Ask anyone who has biked on Broadway. In fact, the entire U.S. infrastructure is pretty terrible. We got a D on our roads, bridges, dams, etc by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Now, I'm not one to prioritize, but shouldn't this be important? I know, I know we have to worry about unemployment and Wall St. and mortgage rates, but shouldn't this be slightly higher on the list?

According to the stimulus bill which probably won't get through the senate, out of the $550 billion in spending, we're looking at:

$142 billion for education
$111 b. for health care
$90 b. for infrastructure
$72 b. for aid and benefits
$54 b. for energy
$16 b. for science and technology
$13 b. for housing

Now, the opponents of this bill are saying the projects for the infrastructure will "take too long" and they want more projects that are considered "shovel-ready" (provide jobs quickly).

I might have to side with the Repub's on this one. We need some fast cash. Considering the state of the construction on the L Train, it might be two years before it's faster to take the subway to Manhattan than walk.

Anyway, it's getting warmer and biking is the preferred method of transportation for sub-3 Catherine St. We just have to avoid these staples and things.

Check out www.bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com for some entertaining bike stories in New York. He's much funnier than I am.

Thoughts on Girls, Bikes, and Garbage

A few totally unrelated points that I want to touch on from this past week...

1. Girls in bars are predatory. They stare you down, they're up front, and they all want to hook up. This is a great thing, of course, but I've always had a sort of reservation about meeting girls in bars. Something about me being drunk, or them being drunk, or the awkwardness that ensues after the first night we hang out...it's just not appealing. The most appealing girl I've met so far in the city is the one I talked to at a sound design company about getting jobs in the city and working on tours and all of that. Anyway, I guess I'm just a bit overwhelmed at first. Bars are NOT like this in Penn State or Wilkes-Barre. Every girl is beautiful as well. The city is magnificent. And somehow, there are free drinks any night of the week if you look hard enough.

2. Biking the city is exhilarating. Riding 5th Avenue with traffic, you're right beside taxis and buses. You have to cut around the left sides of cars at intersections, because people will just turn right without signaling. If you hit someone's side view mirror, you better not stop or look back. The Williamsburg bridge is the biggest incline in the city, and the hardest ride in the winter. However, it has the best view of Manhattan, so it kind of makes up for it. Drew got a job as a bike messenger today, so at least one of us has an income. If it comes down to it, I might have to do this too.

3. Dumpster Diving is a lucrative hobby in Brooklyn. We came home with a dozen bagels the other night. We're going again in about thirty minutes. We need bread and produce. Hopefully we can minimize our grocery costs by simply finding out the right time to grab things. http://freegan.info/ is a great site for this, as well as free bike workshops in Brooklyn!

4. If Nate and I can't get a job by the end of the week, desperate measures may have to be taken. We're thinking about jobs on a loading dock or working on a boat, sailing to Europe. Maybe washing skyscraper windows. The audio business is not booming these days. I've applied to over 100 places this month. No responses.

In any case, life is still great. Reading lots of books. Watching lots of movies. Listening to a lot of new music (Dirty Projectors are amazing!), writing lots of cover letters. It's just a waiting game, and I'm not in a bad place to be waiting.

Milk

I'm going to do my best to keep EVERY good movie and album off of this blog, because you can always read reviews in newspapers and online critics, etc. However, if a movie really hits me. If it sticks with me for a few days, or inspires, I can't help but mention it here.

Now don't get me wrong, other movies this past year were great. No discredit to The Wrestler, Man On Wire, Slumdog Millionaire, or any of the other amazing films this year. However, Milk takes the cake.




For those of you who don't know, Harvey Milk was an openly gay politician in the 1970's that was successfully elected San Francisco City Supervisor. He pretty much led the gay movement into the public and inspired the marches and oppositions to national anti-homosexual legislation. He was assassinated by fellow supervisor Dan White, along with the mayor of San Francisco

This kind of leader for any type of movement is electrifying. He was able to build a community where homosexuals could feel comfortable, and then gain enough power and voice in that area to demand equal rights. Thousands of people marched the streets of San Francisco, multiple times. He stood up for the one issue he believed in, and triumphed (for a little while, anyway). This wasn't only a victory for the gay community, it was a victory for politics as a whole.

I feel very inspired by this film. I've been watching movies with very powerful central figures, like Che or Man On Wire. Movies where the protagonist has a passionate goal and will stop at nothing to achieve it.

I'm at a point in my life where I need to get that passion back. I had it once, and I now lack a direction or goal. I think I'm waiting around for something to hit me, so I know which way to go. Sometimes politics will creep into my head, but I don't think I have the energy or attitude to get to the top. It's a gruesome game. I'd rather just play music.

Anyway, this is NOT my Oscar post. I will do a top 10 list once I have viewed a majority of the films. Soon, soon!

Songwriting

Drew, Nate, and I sat down today and played music pretty much all day. It's 6:30 and we'll most likely be playing music later as well. It feels good. We're all on the same page, and I haven't felt that way about other musicians in a long time. We're doing a lot of things with acoustic guitars, lots of drums, bongos. Quiet but intense. We want to be able to play subway stations.

I just realized my Mac has this photobooth thing, so I'm going to take this opportunity to post some grainy pictures of our place, if anyone is interested. It's cramped but we love it.









I'll be posting some recordings hopefully when we get some shit together. Life is exciting, even if there's no income.

Obama-rama

January 20th, 2009. 12:32 pm. The inauguration address has just ended. We can now say "President Barack Hussein Obama." At the same time, I am unemployed and things are not looking good. My college degree is utterly worthless and I'm looking at restaurant jobs.

But who can kill the optimism in the air? You can't deny that no matter how bad things are, there's a feeling of electricity never felt before for our generation. No one cared about politics, and many people downright loathed the system. I got my "Worst President Ever" T-shirt in 2003, when I started to realize what was going on. I just couldn't believe people were supporting the actions and programs of George W. Bush.

The viewpoint has completely changed. Bush isn't even relevant anymore, and hasn't been for the last 3 months. Everyone is hopeful. Everyone is excited for the future. Everyone thinks it can only get better from here. Despite the economy. Despite the Middle East. Despite the environment. Despite the education system. Everything is going to improve.

I will never forget the night Obama was elected. We were soldering resistors to the circuit board that would later become the theremin. I had no expectations for victory. I remember a quote from a friend's blog that said:

"if you're in New York, and you vaguely recall some slight issues of voter fraud, and there's an abandoned car on fire down your block, the Repubocons gone done and stoled it again. However, if you see more beer bottles on the street than usual, Obama has won."

I think we all expected defeat. We've been used to it. Remember 2004? It was like someone had died. No one could believe Bush got re-elected. How? After all the screw-ups and the endless war in Iraq, how could he get re-elected? It seemed inevitable that it would happen again.

It must have been around my third rum and coke and 55th resistor that I realized we had won. Not only did Obama win, but our generation won. The country won. The world won. There were about fifteen of us watching the acceptance speech. We all hugged and celebrated. I cried a bit. I don't think anyone could possibly understand what the election meant to younger generations. This was OUR future. This was OUR election. So many people, promising to move to Canada, to Europe, to Asia if McCain had won. This time they were serious. Faith in the United States was depleted. It was embarrassing to be a U.S. citizen. We were bullies. We were arrogant. We were rednecks. We loved guns and beer and fightin' for justice.

We had to cling to satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephan Colbert. We got our gratification from the most scathing attacks on the president. With his level of corruption, it wasn't hard either. There was no hope that ANYTHING we believed in would be supported by the Bush administration. Environmental improvement was useless. Peace in the Middle East? Not a chance. I watched No Child Left Behind dominate my 11th grade English class as the Great Gatsby was eliminated to make room for more practice tests. Unemployment skyrocketed in the last year and a vast majority of my friends had no health insurance. We ALL needed this.

On November 4th, 2008 I cried with everyone. I ran down Atherton Street with Sean and ran into Dave Pfister, crying and waving an American flag. We were patriotic again. We were proud of our country. The president was one of us. He knew what needed to be done and was going to strive to do it. Common sense had won. Science had won. Intelligence had won. Peace had won. We knew it was going to be hard, but we were looking forward to the challenge. We were motivated.

We went to the Phyrst and danced all night. It was true, there would be more beer bottles on the street than usual. It was going to be a great Wednesday morning. Everyone who had been working on this campaign would realize their work had meant something. Everyone I knew who stood on the street for six hours a day, that would amount to a brighter future. Finally, everything we had endured would pay off.

Our generation is taking our place as the relevant force of the country. We will be making the decisions and working for causes we believe in. Our government will hear our voice and our president will work for us. The rest of the world will not look upon us with disdain and anger, but with benevolence and support. It is a uniting moment for everyone. We are now Americans. And damn proud of it.

I know there are many people who do not share this viewpoint. I know there are people, even close friends of mine, who are skeptical. I know there will be people who will attack this entry, saying I am naive, blindly following a man that has yet to prove his worth. He's all personality they'll say. He's inexperienced. This is all true, and he DOES have yet to prove himself. But I am confident that he will. Just wait a few years, and then comment on it. If there's nothing to look forward to, what's the point of hoping?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

There are few books I've read in my life that I consider important to other people. Ishmael is one of them. I thought Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was one of them. It's not. I thought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was one of them. It's not. These are simply vaguely describing an emotion and attitude that is nailed down and exposed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

There is so much to this book that it is a great challenge to actually finish it. But damn, is it rewarding. In short, it is a philosophy lesson mixed into a narrative of a man and his son traveling cross-country on a motorcycle. The concepts touched upon are things I've thought about and killed myself over. The reasons why I couldn't let music go. The reasons I can't get a 9-5 job. The reasons why I struggle with existentialism and living in "the system." It's all laid out here, intelligently and relative to today's mindset. I simply want to touch on some of the concepts that REALLY struck me as I was reading this:

1. Classic vs Romantic Mindset: This can also be described as technical vs aesthetic, structure vs surface appeal, etc. It hammers home the argument that these are NOT separate concepts. The thing that separates the two are the "quality" of the work. If things are manufactured without care or quality, then they are perceived by the consumer as useless or disposable. However, if something is evidently made with "quality" in mind, it is appreciated. Take a homemade mug or chair or table. If something is hand crafted by someone you know personally, it's going to mean a lot more than something put together from a Target box. I think this goes for anything functional. A lot of the time, the surface aesthetic is slapped on with whatever current "style" or "fashion" is relevant, and this is often a cheap way to fake "quality." It's an interesting argument.

2. He does a lot of urban vs rural comparing. Fast people, fast cars, neon signs. I think this argument is presented best at the very end of the novel with this passage:

"The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
It's the primary America we're in[the west coast]. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly overgeneralizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true."

3. Pirsig puts the quality back in technical work. He talks of the "peace of mind" of finishing a long a grueling technical project, such as the repair of a motorcycle. Or a theremin. Or a bicycle. Or a calculus problem. It's all the same. It's the zen feeling of inner peace, and it's related to an aesthetic that people today do not want to associate with technology. It's not the technology that is in the wrong, it's the mindset.

There is another great quote from this book in my facebook profile. I suggest reading that as well. This book has changed my life. I think it happened at a great point in my life. It fixed a haze of confusion and self-doubt and set me straight on a track of quality and motivation. It's a VERY hard read, but very rewarding. I'm extremely satisfied and kind of have a great peace of mind after reading it. Ha!

Anyway, I need some pulp for a while. That was intense.

Why I Won't Set Foot Back in Manhattan Until I Have A Job

Going to Manhattan is an expensive endeavor. First of all, the process of getting there costs $4. Unless you decide to visit separate parts of Manhattan, then it's $8. We decided to check out Union Square, since it's right off of the L and we figured we could get a cup of coffee.

I have been saying that I've never felt out of place in Brooklyn. I never felt that I was in a dangerous part of the city, and I've never felt fear or anxiety. I have, however, felt out of place in Manhattan. Multiple times. Union Square is one of those times. Columbus Circle is another one of those times. People look at you with your beard and your backpack and greasy jeans and give you looks of disdain. What were we doing in Union Square? Obviously not where we belonged.

We went to Eva's in the West Village for some tea and to sort things out. Not a bad place, but still much classier than we wanted. We were looking for a diner run by one dude with tattoos where the coffee was good and people were hospitable. Nate called and we went for sushi.

Yummy Village Sushi was one of the best places we've been so far in the city. 95 Macdougal St in the West Village, the four of us gorged on sushi and sake like we all had an income (Not one of us do). The service was great, they put heat lamps right next to our table and gave us complimentary edamame.

Afterwards we went to 62nd st and Broadway to see Slumdog Millionaire. Unfortunately, after the Golden Globe victories, everyone else is also going to see it. We got tickets for Che:Part 1. Apparently the movie Che is in two parts, both clocking in around 2 hours and 17 minutes. Yikes.

Benicio Del Toro was great. I'm a huge fan of the Motorcycle Diaries, and this sort of picks up where that leaves off. Unfortunately, Part 1 was $11 and we could not afford Part 2.

In any case, we could not afford drinks after that. Subway+Tea+Sushi+Movie = roughly $50. Thanks Manhattan.

Today we are living the opposite life. Drinking out of flasks, staying in Brooklyn, and setting our spending goal at $10/day to make up for yesterday. If I got paid by the cover letter since the beginning of January, I'd have made up the difference by now.

Hire me?