Mardi Gras and Boston don't exactly go together. This is, after all, the town founded by people who thought England was too much fun in the 1600s, so they came to Cape Cod and New England to pass along smallpox, live a life of repressive religion and cook their food without spices. A lot of that still reverberates here: classic boston cooking tends to involve a hunk of white fish covered in breadcrumbs and broiled, then served without sauce or pepper.
The whole idea of a multiweek outdoor pagan celebration also doesn't work as well in the depths of a real winter.
There is a lot of Mardi Gras activity on the various ski resorts. Unfortunately nearly all of it happens after Fat Tuesday, which is even worse than having a Halloween party the week of Thanksgiving. I saw the Radiators at Killington one year in such an event, and when the doorman offered me beads I intoned that I'd given them up for Lent. Blank stare in return. New Orleanians love that story.
Anyhow. Last night the good folks at Harpers Ferry booked a real New Orleans show during the real Mardi Gras weekend. My friends in the band Juice came up for three nights with Brotherhood of Groove, and Big Sam (trombone player from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) came along for the ride, sitting in with everyone. Boston Horns opened the show. Juice was a little sloppy but energetic, funky and well received.
It's easy to forget to go see music and your friends and dance and all that good stuff, especially when work is fun and fulfilling itself or when life is...hectic. But it's an imbalance. Mardi Gras is in its own way about addressing that - having fun in the face of impending abstinence, laughing at tragedy, inverting rituals. It's also about making fun a priority sometimes, an organized and specific part of life for a date certain. For a few days a year at least, Dionysus is in charge. He even gets his own parade in New Orleans. And I'm glad I got to see him last night, if briefly.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Monday, February 20, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Living in Public
180,000 miles in the air last year. 88 nights in hotels. Innumerable tagamet and maalox. I feel like the guy they made fun of in the onion sometimes - in case you don't know, the domestic terminal at SFO has great chow mein by the delta / northwest security gates.
Travel is weird. I have friends in rock bands, they travel even more than me. But they travel with other folks, a shared experience, with varying levels of support staff and stuff from the sublime (major label) to the ridiculous (my couch). I travel alone for the most part.
The last few months I've done a lot of thinking about it. What's good, what's bad. Why it's worth it. Why sometimes it's fun and sometimes it sucks. The fun part will define another post. This one's about some of the reasons it sucks.
For me it's about living without privacy. I like people. I like to talk to people. It's pretty much what I do for a living - go around, talk to people, try to get them to agree with what I'm doing and either join the movement or give me some funding to push the movement forward. But I'm a deeply private person and travel, for work or for play, rips privacy to shreds.
I love my apartment, my peace and quiet, my instruments, my pots and pans, my staple foods. I really like my own bed and towels. I like having a full set of clothes around. I don't really like houseguests, and the band couch above is one of the only exceptions to that rule. They don't come around a lot and I get a lot outta them.
I don't like the hours and hours of non private travel time. Right now I'm alone in the airport terminal, blogging because I don't want to watch TV in the airport bar or run through my book before the flight. The airport is a public space like the subway - no one talks to you unless they're drunk or think you're cutting in line. So we all pretend to have some privacy, we pretend not to smell the farts or notice the nosepicking. There is ubiquitous taupe, grey and blue carpeting. Ambient noise. I hate it. It doesn't stress me out anymore, but I still hate it.
Two nights ago, at dinner with a board member who travels way more than me (actually two of them, both of whom put me to shame) I heard him say that when he gets to the airport he enters a timefree, stressfree zone in his head. Never gets tense about lines, never thinks of where he is as being grounded in a specific time zone. It's a good way to think about it. I've certainly lost the habit of being stressed at the airport. But can't quite grip the time concept. He flies from Japan to Germany twice a month, so perhaps that's different.
This is all just carping because I wish I were going home instead of another hotel in another town. Ah well.
Travel is weird. I have friends in rock bands, they travel even more than me. But they travel with other folks, a shared experience, with varying levels of support staff and stuff from the sublime (major label) to the ridiculous (my couch). I travel alone for the most part.
The last few months I've done a lot of thinking about it. What's good, what's bad. Why it's worth it. Why sometimes it's fun and sometimes it sucks. The fun part will define another post. This one's about some of the reasons it sucks.
For me it's about living without privacy. I like people. I like to talk to people. It's pretty much what I do for a living - go around, talk to people, try to get them to agree with what I'm doing and either join the movement or give me some funding to push the movement forward. But I'm a deeply private person and travel, for work or for play, rips privacy to shreds.
I love my apartment, my peace and quiet, my instruments, my pots and pans, my staple foods. I really like my own bed and towels. I like having a full set of clothes around. I don't really like houseguests, and the band couch above is one of the only exceptions to that rule. They don't come around a lot and I get a lot outta them.
I don't like the hours and hours of non private travel time. Right now I'm alone in the airport terminal, blogging because I don't want to watch TV in the airport bar or run through my book before the flight. The airport is a public space like the subway - no one talks to you unless they're drunk or think you're cutting in line. So we all pretend to have some privacy, we pretend not to smell the farts or notice the nosepicking. There is ubiquitous taupe, grey and blue carpeting. Ambient noise. I hate it. It doesn't stress me out anymore, but I still hate it.
Two nights ago, at dinner with a board member who travels way more than me (actually two of them, both of whom put me to shame) I heard him say that when he gets to the airport he enters a timefree, stressfree zone in his head. Never gets tense about lines, never thinks of where he is as being grounded in a specific time zone. It's a good way to think about it. I've certainly lost the habit of being stressed at the airport. But can't quite grip the time concept. He flies from Japan to Germany twice a month, so perhaps that's different.
This is all just carping because I wish I were going home instead of another hotel in another town. Ah well.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
my funny (sf) valentine
I hate valentine's day. Whether single or coupled, it's almost impossible to live up to the hallmark corporation's depiction of the day. That said, today wasn't too bad, for being solo and on the road...
Full day at work - concalls to the east coast in my boxers, good day at the cc offices (fully clothed), group lunch of burgers. Only here is the burger meal 1/6 beef. Salmon burgers. Turkey burgers. Veggie burgers.
Work meeting in the late afternoon, battling jetlag through four double espressos over the course of the day. Vanilla lemonade, no booze.
Thence to a flashmob pillow fight. Best part was hearing the bell toll six pm and seeing about 50 people carrying pillows drop into a full sprint. It was like the blizzard in boston, except with down feathers flying everywhere.
Drinks with a work colleague at a used-to-be-a-dive, now looks-like-a-dive-but-with-dj bar. Solo dinner of chow mein with pork at Sam Wo, a venerable chinatown dump. Not the best. But $5.50 with tip is hard to beat, and there's something about a plowing through a pile of noodles, alone in the second floor of a garret, that just screams valentine's day...
Full day at work - concalls to the east coast in my boxers, good day at the cc offices (fully clothed), group lunch of burgers. Only here is the burger meal 1/6 beef. Salmon burgers. Turkey burgers. Veggie burgers.
Work meeting in the late afternoon, battling jetlag through four double espressos over the course of the day. Vanilla lemonade, no booze.
Thence to a flashmob pillow fight. Best part was hearing the bell toll six pm and seeing about 50 people carrying pillows drop into a full sprint. It was like the blizzard in boston, except with down feathers flying everywhere.
Drinks with a work colleague at a used-to-be-a-dive, now looks-like-a-dive-but-with-dj bar. Solo dinner of chow mein with pork at Sam Wo, a venerable chinatown dump. Not the best. But $5.50 with tip is hard to beat, and there's something about a plowing through a pile of noodles, alone in the second floor of a garret, that just screams valentine's day...
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Snow Report
Ah, the Boston Blizzard. A unique phenomenon.
I grew up in Tennessee. We have different standards for "blizzards" mainly involving around 2" of snow, massive shortages of white bread / toilet paper / canned goods in the stores, and hysterical drivers in SUVs careening through intersections. Folks are calmer up here, local news staff notwithstanding.
It was a good weekend to lead into a day sequestered in the snow. Friday night dinner at Silvertone, drinks at the Enormous Room (verdict: worth the hipster factor when the DJ is of high quality...which it was, barely - but don't wait in line to get in). Up at 5AM Saturday to ski Loon, a crushing wreck on the ice and a sore thigh. Made it easy to spend today chowing junk food watching the olympics while it was whiteout outside. Wasn't nearly as bad at any point as the short blizzard in December, but it went on and on and on. I was crusted with snow after a walk to the 7-11 for essentials. But, for the first time ever, I was able to find a parking spot less than 100 feet from Taiwan Cafe for late lunch on a Sunday (well, my friend with the 4-wheel drive found it, but I got to walk from it with my gimpy leg). Small victories.
I grew up in Tennessee. We have different standards for "blizzards" mainly involving around 2" of snow, massive shortages of white bread / toilet paper / canned goods in the stores, and hysterical drivers in SUVs careening through intersections. Folks are calmer up here, local news staff notwithstanding.
It was a good weekend to lead into a day sequestered in the snow. Friday night dinner at Silvertone, drinks at the Enormous Room (verdict: worth the hipster factor when the DJ is of high quality...which it was, barely - but don't wait in line to get in). Up at 5AM Saturday to ski Loon, a crushing wreck on the ice and a sore thigh. Made it easy to spend today chowing junk food watching the olympics while it was whiteout outside. Wasn't nearly as bad at any point as the short blizzard in December, but it went on and on and on. I was crusted with snow after a walk to the 7-11 for essentials. But, for the first time ever, I was able to find a parking spot less than 100 feet from Taiwan Cafe for late lunch on a Sunday (well, my friend with the 4-wheel drive found it, but I got to walk from it with my gimpy leg). Small victories.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Postcard from Zagreb
Greetings from Club Mama, the brainchild of my hosts in Zagreb and the unofficial home of Creative Commons Croatia.
Got to Zagreb on Thursday afternoon for the "Freedom to Creativity" Festival (in Croatian, "sloboda stvaralastvu"). It's the second annual version of the festival and last year was the launch of CC - Croatia. This year the theme is science and technology which is why I'm here. Lectured Thursday night at the exposition - they had translations of open science web sites, including ours, open source organic seeds, and a set of microscopes that lent themselves well to pictures.
Dinner Thursday was with my host Tom at a Dalmatian fish restaurant. He had the black risotto (black from the cuttlefish ink) and I had salt cod with boiled buttered potatoes. Tasty. Although I prefer what a cream poach does to salt cod, this was good. Dessert was a local specialty - caramel cake - which was more akin to a caramel custard or flan, but with rose liquer added for bouquet. First of many double espressos with dessert.
Friday morning I got interviewed by a Croatian TV show. I was told afterwards that it's actually more like "A Current Affair" than "Nova" - last week there was a major story on alien abductions - but that it's also the most popular show about science in the country. You pays your money and you takes your choice. I am excited at the idea that the show is frequently digitized in Bosnia and that DVDs of those digitizations are sometimes available on the black market. Me wantee.
Friday afternoon I lectured at the local university, with a solid turnout (let's just say that in my speeches, there's usually more seats than people, but this time it was a sellout). Both lectures had lots and lots of questions.
Friday night I had dinner with Tom and his girlfriend, Ivana. Broccoli soup and kalbschnitzel. Then we went to the first concert for the festival. Tom and Marcel (my other host) also run the largest electronic music label in the country and were promoting a band's first appearance in Zagreb - MistakeMistake out of Belgrade. If you like Hip-electro- ragga-2-hop reggae-step, there appears to be a serious scene waiting for you in Belgrade. It was a lot of fun. They were followed in short order by Ghetto Booties, three women with laptops. Think a modern, Croatian version of the go-gos but based on electronica. Half liters of strong dark beer were $2. And just so you know, if you see a skinhead with white laces in his shoes, beware. Apparently the ones with black laces are much less likely to stomp you.
Slept late this morning - was expecting a reporter from the local daily to call, but she let me be, apparently - then took a long walk around the center of town, the food market, the cathedral. Ate a slice of quite decent pizza, grabbed some apple brandy and plum brandy from the natural products store around the corner and came back to mama for wireless and coffee. Air france home tomorrow just in time for the super bowl and a burger in southie.
It's nice here. It really brings home the divide between the US and the Balkans though - the people my age lived through a civil war that destroyed an entire way of life, after growing up under socialism. There's a brutal honesty and an awareness of the importance of context, art, language and more that is just nonexistent in the states. We're really lucky. But it's made us a lot more boring, and made us ignore an awful lot of stuff we should pay attention to...
All Zagreb pix here.
Got to Zagreb on Thursday afternoon for the "Freedom to Creativity" Festival (in Croatian, "sloboda stvaralastvu"). It's the second annual version of the festival and last year was the launch of CC - Croatia. This year the theme is science and technology which is why I'm here. Lectured Thursday night at the exposition - they had translations of open science web sites, including ours, open source organic seeds, and a set of microscopes that lent themselves well to pictures.
Dinner Thursday was with my host Tom at a Dalmatian fish restaurant. He had the black risotto (black from the cuttlefish ink) and I had salt cod with boiled buttered potatoes. Tasty. Although I prefer what a cream poach does to salt cod, this was good. Dessert was a local specialty - caramel cake - which was more akin to a caramel custard or flan, but with rose liquer added for bouquet. First of many double espressos with dessert.
Friday morning I got interviewed by a Croatian TV show. I was told afterwards that it's actually more like "A Current Affair" than "Nova" - last week there was a major story on alien abductions - but that it's also the most popular show about science in the country. You pays your money and you takes your choice. I am excited at the idea that the show is frequently digitized in Bosnia and that DVDs of those digitizations are sometimes available on the black market. Me wantee.
Friday afternoon I lectured at the local university, with a solid turnout (let's just say that in my speeches, there's usually more seats than people, but this time it was a sellout). Both lectures had lots and lots of questions.
Friday night I had dinner with Tom and his girlfriend, Ivana. Broccoli soup and kalbschnitzel. Then we went to the first concert for the festival. Tom and Marcel (my other host) also run the largest electronic music label in the country and were promoting a band's first appearance in Zagreb - MistakeMistake out of Belgrade. If you like Hip-electro- ragga-2-hop reggae-step, there appears to be a serious scene waiting for you in Belgrade. It was a lot of fun. They were followed in short order by Ghetto Booties, three women with laptops. Think a modern, Croatian version of the go-gos but based on electronica. Half liters of strong dark beer were $2. And just so you know, if you see a skinhead with white laces in his shoes, beware. Apparently the ones with black laces are much less likely to stomp you.
Slept late this morning - was expecting a reporter from the local daily to call, but she let me be, apparently - then took a long walk around the center of town, the food market, the cathedral. Ate a slice of quite decent pizza, grabbed some apple brandy and plum brandy from the natural products store around the corner and came back to mama for wireless and coffee. Air france home tomorrow just in time for the super bowl and a burger in southie.
It's nice here. It really brings home the divide between the US and the Balkans though - the people my age lived through a civil war that destroyed an entire way of life, after growing up under socialism. There's a brutal honesty and an awareness of the importance of context, art, language and more that is just nonexistent in the states. We're really lucky. But it's made us a lot more boring, and made us ignore an awful lot of stuff we should pay attention to...
All Zagreb pix here.
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