Your Neighborhood Librarian Does New York

Oy.

The number of posts I've started with "Oy." It's many. I usually go back and delete it, but not this time I don't think.

We've just returned home from New York City. I love New York. I love New York like a really great tree or a crazy friend I don't see that often, or, or - like a city I used to live in. I know it but I don't know it. I like going back to places I know to see what they've cooked up lately, or if they haven't changed. I am sad that the Spanish place behind the bus station got closed by the health department. I am sad about that for two reasons, come to think of it. I am happy that you can now get pork donburi less than ten blocks from the Javits Center.

I love that the harp is still lit at the Tap Room.

Advil Calendar 2013 EXCITING GUEST WEDNESDAY Part Deux: The Exciting Guest Strikes Back!

You're going to say I'm lazy and I'm going to say... hold on. Honey, could you reach me my beer? Well ok obviously I am lazy, but not in this case. Okay kinda. Anyway.

I had the idea for Exciting Guest Wednesday a month or so ago, when I first decided to Advil it up again this year after a one-year hiatus. I solicited drinks recipes from friends, relations, business contacts, and the vermin who live beneath the porch. (Nobody wants that drink, by the way.)

And as I was getting together some of those recipes for today, I realized that the best drinksman I know, the person who makes me the most inventive, best-proportioned cocktails I've ever drink-drank-drunked - was sitting right next to me!

DAMAS Y CABALLEROS, QUIERO PRESENTARLES A MI ESPOSO,

Bob.

You were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and Six

Bob, Jim & Mary playing "What's that building?", originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We were just in Cleveland this weekend for a family thing. I love Cleveland, and it's not a joke. I went to college there, lived on my own for the first time, met my husband there. I like that town's shape and history, the long straight avenues and the crooked filthy river.

We drove out from Baltimore, arriving at our downtown hotel at about 9pm on St. Patrick's Day. Now, St. Patrick's Day in Cleveland is an ugly affair. Even though Cleveland drinkers are far from amateurs, the poorly-considered dye jobs, plastic costume accessories, and truly epic all-day consumption makes everyone look like a stumbling frat-boy pledge.

But even at that moment - possibly the least charming one in Cleveland's drinking year - and even in that place, which, more so than most American downtowns, has been converted to a pedestrian mall of theme bars, the composed scale and dignified proportions of those buildings made the screeching drunks seem insignificant and temporary. Which, luckily, they were.

When I was in college, the mayor's daughter was one of my boyfriend's roommates. We had nascent urban-design conversations in her parents' kitchen about how on earth to get people to come back to downtown, which emptied utterly after the working day was done. Wasn't too bustling between 9 and 5, either, for that matter. Personally, I liked it that way. Any weekend day, you could run down the center line of any street and holler down the alleys, climb fire escapes and listen to the wind and nothing else.

We kept telling my friend's dad, "It's all about the drinking. Just keep inventing reasons to bring in beer trucks, and eventually people will open bars down there and stuff." We were no geniuses, believe me. It took at least two major sports venues and, I can imagine, tax concessions made to several large corporations in order to really stimulate development down there. But we weren't wrong about the drinking.

There's a great article in Cleveland's free weekly, Scene magazine, about bars that open before dawn. I used to go to at least one of them, but usually not until after dark. Which, granted, in Cleveland is about 3pm sometimes.

It was fun to read Scene again. I had forgotten how fast and loose that paper feels. With all the cussin' and the jokes and the pithy movie criticism ("In 1984, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves explored the Freudian psychosexual themes of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. In 2011, Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood explores that story's capacity for cheesy CGI effects, fake exteriors, bad acting, and oafish dialogue"), it surely makes Baltimore's City Paper feel prim. Fucking prim, not to put too fine a point on it.

Bob and I were discussing this - how much we enjoyed reading Scene and how we sincerely do not enjoy reading City Paper - and one of us floated the idea that Scene writers are recent college grads and part-timers, while people who write for the City Paper actually have some ambition to get jobs in a major market or for a major news outlet or for whomever they imagine is actually going to be hiring writers in the future, which, frankly, hello look who's been writing almost exclusively for free since 2006. Give it up, man. Write for free, you get to swear more. True, you eat less, but this is why your parents warned you not to be a liberal arts major.

In general, it seems like Clevelanders are game to try things, in galleries and on stages, even in marketing campaigns (that's a joke, I know that), that people on the East coast are not.

Here, our willingness to start a Wang Chung cover band or make a musical based on The Wedding Singer is dampened by our desire to not to look stupid in front of New York. In Cleveland, they know New York is not looking at them. They are free to be the spitball table in the lunchroom.

They turn houses inside-out.

They construct the high school stoner's ultimate fantasy hangout:

couchbleachers, by Nate Page, Machine Project at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland

Baltimore has Stoop Stories, evenings of themed storytelling, but Cleveland has StorySlam!, hosted by a guy in a bear suit. Participants are invited to share their 'true until proven otherwise' Cleveland tales, and the audience is invited to create shoebox dioramas illustrating one of the stories they heard, or one of their own. Shoebox dioramas. The ultimate creative leveler.

Pittsburgh is like this too, to a lesser extent. Pittsburgh flies beneath the New York radar, luckily for them. Also St. Louis.

Minneapolis? Minneapolis knows New York is looking at them, and they will put on a musical based on the The Wedding Singer knowing full well that some New Yorker is going to steal the idea and charge Williamsburg hipsters thirty-five bucks a head to sing along to "Pass the Dutchie".

You know you know the words.

Who's driving my car now?

Driving with the windows open past the blinking yellow lights and 42-wheel tractor-trailers of Detroit’s morning rush hour, gaping at muscular stepped-back Art Deco skyscrapers decorated with multicolored brickwork and grandiose iconography (cadeuci, swastikas, treasure chests and shrieking cherubs) - and seriously bush-league graffiti - I hear a guy hollering out for the bus. Hold up for him, man – I bet it gets pretty lonely down here waiting for the next one to come.

It’s 9:14 AM in downtown Detroit.



A stinking homeless man brushes past me – six lanes of street and a sidewalk twenty feet wide, why are you so close to me? - mumbling, “Have a blessed one,” and the only reason I don’t snap back, “Have a pestilent one – you and your little god too!” (I'm also having trouble finding coffee) is because I’m pretty sure we’re headed for the same place. The public library.

Sure enough. The Skillman Branch of the DPL is high-ceilinged, built-in bookcased, under-librarianed and seemingly (but probably not) over-security-guarded, and they have hot and cold running wi-fi, electrical outlets, and excellent old-fashioned oak case tables and chairs. Their graphic novel collection, however, labeled “Manga,” is filed by title, and has color-coded age labels that are alarmingly inaccurate. Sure, Bone is for everyone, but Emiko Superstar is definitely Young Adult.



Back on the street, driving, 11 AM, I veer impulsively down a side street. Too late – aagh – One Way! I pull over and freeze, trying to figure out what to do, as a man on the sidewalk bats not even one eye. Slowly I realize that nobody’s coming, there are no other cars as far as the eye can see, and none on the cross street. People here make no-look mid-block U-turns like basketball stars showing off their passing, and they treat red lights with a nonchalance bordering on contempt.

Maybe, despite all indications to the contrary, they really do need to get somewhere in a hurry – there are clocks just above street level on the corners of half the buildings here, and half of those even work.



Once you get where you’re going in Detroit, everyone wants you to park. Parking is big here. Valet parking is offered in front of the merest deli and pharmacy, and giant signs and arrows advertise enormous garages and lots. Parking. Let me say this: parking is the last thing you have to worry about in Detroit. Hell yeah there’s parking – it’s a fucking steppe out here. Half the buildings are completely empty, a quarter have a wig shop at street level and are otherwise empty, and the rest? I think the owners let the tenants stay there for free.



The Fisher Building, for example – one of the most ornate secular buildings I’ve ever seen, with gilt and mosaics and seventy kinds of marble and twelve-foot-tall hanging light fixtures and painted groined vaulted ceilings, ahhh! - is tenanted entirely by nonprofits and government agencies. None of those people actually pay rent, I bet. It’s all got to be subsidized, I’m sure by the city, so that such a landmark doesn’t go empty and fall into disrepair.

Taking pictures in the nave of that building, people who work in it kept pausing to look up with me. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” “It sure is.” “No building like it in the world, is there?” “No ma’am. You’re fortunate to work here.”

It’s actually Fisher that’s fortunate. It may be the most fabulous building in Detroit, but it’s by no means the only one. Many of those empty skyscrapers (some easily 40 stories), built in the 1920’s, when money floated around like puffy white clouds here, would in any other city be considered jewels of the built landscape. Detroit is where decorative architecture spewed its last, explosive jets of tile insets and stained glass and cathedral-quality stonework... and then crawled off to slump in the corner and convert to strict functionalism out of sheer exhaustion.



The central branch of the library, another shining temple of a building, doesn't open until noon on weekdays. They've had a freeze on hiring professionals for two years and there are rumors of corruption at the management level; the vinyl chairs in the business section are twenty years old and cracked, but the murals on the third floor are fifty years old and glowing. Ok, that's Detroit. The average age of a librarian is 56.

But while every other big building I've been in here echoes like a marble tomb, this place is buzzing with people - lots and lots of people flowing in and out, using the computers, checking out books, attending programs. The librarians smile. Damn it. In an economically depressed area, library services are the last thing that should be underfunded.



The library is the anomaly, though. Everywhere else it's the same: an environment built for armies – armies of auto workers stamping and bending metal to make Mercury Sables and Ford Tauri, armies of suits marshalling their comings and their goings, and circling them, armies of prosperous, sharp, no-reason-not-to-be-optimistic feeders on this industry: admen, commodities brokers, labor brokers, hell, even parking brokers - has been simply left behind. There was not enough residual energy to demolish it before they left, or even to board it up. The Packard plant (above), where cars were built from 1907 until the 1950's, consists of 74 linked buildings on 80 acres. Nobody even bothers to break the glass anymore.

This had to have been a place that hummed. Danced. Harmonized. I would like to have seen it, but I have to admit, I love it empty. I took a lot of pictures.

Don't you cry for me

See the shadows as they drip like wine, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

My boys are off for a long weekend of adventure and affection in the Blue Ridge Mountains. FIVE aunties and uncles, plus Cousin Stretch, are along for the ride.

Although Bob and I are looking forward to going to lots of movies, drinking Bloody Marys, etc., I am almost jealous.

There is a tent.
There is a swing.
There is a stump fort.
There is a swimming hole.
There is a puppetry studio.
There have been UFO sightings.
There is tons of home-grown food from a giant garden.
There are silly aunties and uncles who love the crap out of them.

Summer.

Big Chief standin on Magnolia Bridge

at Cafe Maspero, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Both Bob and I have visited New Orleans plenty in the past. I had the good fortune to have a great old friend who ended up in a series of mansions in the Garden District, so I used to stay with her, and learned about neighborhoods outside of the Vieux Carre - Riverbend, Mid-City, and the Garden District. Later, my boss had a house in Bywater, and I worked with a guy who went to Loyola. I got my New Orleans history and geography little by little. It didn't hurt that one of the best implementations of an online photo archive was that of the Historic New Orleans Collection, and I used to visit it often to poach ideas (sorry, Chuck!). Doesn't appear to be online now, though.

When Katrina hit, I scoured the web for information about streets and neighborhoods that I knew. So much was unrecognizable.

I am happy to say that many of the neighborhoods that I knew and loved look great. They've been rebuilt. Some businesses, like Mandina's Restaurant, were closed for 18 months and still managed to come back. There are beautiful stories everywhere. I commented on the excellent local radio station we were listening to last night and was told that none of its music library had been digital, and all their music was destroyed in the flood. The station solicited donations from listeners, and was able to rebuild the collection from donations of music.

But many neighborhoods, huge swaths of residential New Orleans, are still wrecked. It is apparent all over town that there is no concerted will on the part of the federal government to rebuilt these communities. And Bob's cousin, who lives in Algiers and works for one of the last remaining hospitals in town, told me that Congress has just declined to pay the bill for the care the hospitals extended to city residents during and after the flood.

But we are here to eat and walk around and take pictures. We have managed to find us a muffaletta, some red beans and rice, two different kinds of gumbo, an awful lot of fried stuff for the children, and the best sushi in town. And this morning we introduced the kids to beignets. I'm glad I got pictures of that!

Trite thoughts

in the Quarter, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I think it's impossible to walk around New Orleans and not think about writing.

It's the houses - they're all shuttered up at street level, but they have those second-floor balconies. The tension between privacy and social life, that compartmentalization, that's so Faulkner, so Tennessee Williams, so Tom Pearson. You can't help but make up stories like that when you see how the buildings mimic the psyche.

This view of backyards that we can see from our hotel fascinates me. Some are lush little gems, some are completely derelict. I've been wandering around taking pictures of buildings ever since we got here.

I'm outraged by how much is still broken and abandoned.

Still uploading photos to Flickr.

Hooray for Dollywood

The Mystery Mine at Dollywood, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Ok that's a totally idiotic title but give me a break I'm in Alabama at a Best Western. It's hell late at night and my husband and my six year old are still awake and watching the cartoon channel - those loud, quick-cut, sardonic new cartoons that cause ADHD?

So I'd say that so far we're having a vacation that's about 300 awesome, as Zhou would say.

We woke up yesterday morning at Brother Joe's in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We'd gotten a jump on the road trip by driving down there Thursday night. It is so gorgeous there, especially on a late spring morning. You could eat the air. We stopped to say hi and bye to my parents, who were in the neighborhood, and Dad lent me his telephoto lens. Expect dolphin photos later.

Drove to Pigeon Forge, where Dollywood is, and spent the night, so this morning we were at Dollywood when the park opened. I was dreading the amusement park experience - I was picturing hot, greasy, crowded, fake-butter-scented, sweaty, fat, money-gouging, and exhausting. Bob was astounded that I had proposed it in the first place, but I thought we couldn't ask yon children to suffer Baltimore to New Orleans all in one go.

What a relief - since we arrived so early, the temperature was sweet, the place was empty, and there were NO lines. First thing we hit was this Mystery Mine thing. I'm not well-versed in the whole ride vocabulary and architecture, so it wasn't until after Mao and Bob had disappeared through the ride's gates that I realized: that twisting, looping double strand of tubing up there? is part of the ride my SIX YEAR OLD is ON. I thought:

1. "He's going to go hysterical and they'll have to stop the ride."
2. "He's going to throw up and we'll have to go back to the car."
3. "There is NO WAY those restraints are tight enough for his little body. They're used to giant Southern children around here, he's just going to slip through the bars."

Turns out it's the scariest ride in the park. It actually belches fire at you. Bob was mightily impressed, and Mao was appalled. He came off fine - no crying, no puking - but he was like, "That was INSANE. What is WRONG with people, they come up with shit like that? I mean SRSLY. OMG. WTF?" Not in so many words.

I was really impressed by the structures, the landscaping, and the use of materials in the park. There were buildings legitimately made of logs and stone - not just crappy facade stuff. The rocking chairs that were set out for people to rest on were made of wood. There was water trickling everywhere, little creeks and waterfalls, and a working water wheel at the grist mill. The craftsman stuff felt pretty contrived, but it wasn't fake - you can't sit there and pretend to make a broom.

The one thing that I thought was weird was that there was very little Dolly in Dollywood. I expected her face and her voice to follow us around all day. I expected at least a wooden Dolly figure with the face cut out so you could have your picture taken. I would have taken that picture, come to think of it. I had to look hard in the gift shop to find a t-shirt that had her face and the word "Dollywood" both. Maybe she has sold it.

We did a rather tame kids roller coaster so that Zhou could have a shot at a big-kid ride. There was a little splash to it, which he wasn't very happy about. Afterward, we were discussing which rides to go on next, and Mao said, "Nothing that goes upside-down, because those rides freak me out." I swear, he's really six. Then Zhou adds, "And nothing with water, because those rides give me a pissy fit."

"Hissy fit" we hastened to correct him. "Hissy."

Luckily, there have been very few of those so far. Tomorrow we drive to New Orleans though, another long day in the car. Luckily, I brought CDs of the first three Percy Jackson and the Olympians books, and the kids love them as much as I do. Unluckily, the reader, a Jesse Bernstein, slurs his 'tr' sound so much I'd like to kill him. If Percy looks out his 'bedgeroom' window and sees a 'chree' on the 'shtreet' below I think I'll have to hurl the disc out the car window, as my brother once did with a Sinead O'Connor cassette in Colorado on a road trip with his roommates.

Happens to the best of us when road fever is upon us.

All our pictures here.

Hit the ground running

Green monstah, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

This is us, getting ready for a two-week road trip through the American South.

• Mao: gathering Ricky Ricotta books and picking out DVDs for the ride
• Zhou: picking out toys to play with at the hotel in New Orleans and at the beach
• Bob: clearing out the fridge
• Me: grinding teeth, heaving vicious, loaded sighs

I've printed out the TripTik, checked out a million books, bought travel toothpaste. Checked our route against roadfood.com. Bought tickets to Dollywood, made hotel reservations. I'm gradually doing all the laundry, which will be folded directly into our luggage. TWO WEEKS. TWENTY-SIX HUNDRED MILES. Gas is over FOUR DOLLARS a gallon. GOD!

We're spending a week in New Orleans, then driving to my cousin's place on the beach in Georgia. I love my cousin. She suggested that we drive safely:

"As opposed to the way you and Bob usually drive. On suspended licenses. Tailgating. Speeding. On a donut. Three sheets to the wind. Changing lanes in intersections. Smashing your empty beer bottles against other cars as you whiz by. Letting the kids sit with no belts or hanging out the window shooting birds at retirees bound for St. Simons. Throwing your smoldering butts into bales of hay as you pass trucks full of Baptist children on the church hay ride. Shouting "Flaming cracker asshole" at cop cars. Punching out the cops who pull you over for doing all these things and telling them, 'I may be from below the Mason-Dixon line, but I am NOT a booger eating moron like you!'"

Aaand... all of a sudden I'm excited about our trip all over again. Woo hoo! The SOUTH, y'all! Cracker assholes! Breakfast sausage! barbecue! Brunswick stew! Fried fuckin okra!

Watch out, y'all. Pink-headed freak comin' your way.

I'm shallow like that

One reason why I visit New York is, of course, to shop. Last time I went up specifically to get new gloves at Sermoneta, and to show my cousin the perfume shop. This time all I really needed was to stop at Ricky's to buy Special Effects hair dye in Atomic Pink, and to go to the perfume shop.

So here's where we went:

Ricky's. I had to go to two different Ricky's to find Atomic Pink, but I managed it, plus a hairbrush for Bob so he'd stop using mine (ew), Miso Pretty temporary tattoos, some kind of color-safe conditioner that smells like clove oil, and dye for the kids - Big Man picked red and Mr. Four wanted green. He's going to look awful with green hair, but it won't last more than a week or so anyway.

The perfume shop. Aka Aedes de Venustas. The kids came in with me, and you know, you might think that in a tiny little shop packed with bottles of perfume and Belle Epoque frou-frou, kids would not be welcome... but the two proprietors, Rob and The Guy Whose Name I Never Catch, have always been genuinely welcoming of my kids. They accord them the same respect I do (actually, more), giving them sniffs of whatever divine concoction they've spritzed on a card for me, letting them crawl around and play with the two tiny Pekingeses that live in the shop, and loading them up with samples when we leave.

I love perfume. But it's not like I snatch up every new thing that comes out - I own a grand total of 5 bottles of perfume, most of which came from Aedes de Venustas, three of which I will never be without. I gravitate to frankincense, but I've been hoping to find something a little lighter, a little fresher, something that doesn't smell like I put the Catholic church in a blender and then spritzed it on my neck. So when I explained this to The Guy Whose Name I Never Catch, he auditioned 7 or 8 scents for us, and I settled on green, green, green and green by Miller et Bertaux.

kidrobot. After behaving themselves so beautifully for two days, did my kids deserve to pick out whatever they wanted at kidrobot? Well, Mr. Four wanted one of the Jim Woodring figures, and he wasn't getting that... and I would have said no to the labbit too, but they were super happy with the Peecol that they got.
Evolution. Here are the things that entranced my kids at Evolution: real zebra skins, bugs encased in plastic, skull beads carved from water buffalo horn, steer horns, little bits of Baltic amber, an articulated skeleton of a cat eating an articulated skeleton of a fish. Here is what they got: a button with the name of the shop on it, and they were happy about it too. I got a tiny trilobite for my charm bracelet.

Moss. No trip through SoHo is complete without a wander through this most precious of stores. Last time I was there I saw a $60,000 Murano glass chandelier, 9' in diameter, twisty and brilliant, installed at eye level because people like me are never ever going to get that close to that thing ever again. Bob had ahold of Mr. Four, who liked the chair made of plush pandas, and I walked with Big Man, who liked a columnar peridot chandelier and the carbon-fiber chairs.

The guy in the front room actually came out from behind his counter and suggested that my six year old son pick up one of those chairs. New Yorkers: they'll surprise you.

Museum of Failure

Getting a little work done, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We were in New York City this weekend. It was action-packed, and practically everything we did is going to make it onto this blog by the time I'm through. But first up must be our visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I have a little history with the Whitney. I worked there when I first moved to New York. They hired me to be webmaster, which even I thought was ludicrous, as I didn't even know how to write html. I was fired without explanation four half-days later, and, my head spinning, went back home and crawled into bed.

A few years later, I got to know the Whitney much better, when I worked for their software provider. I got to know the collection and some of the staff, and I figured out just what the eff happened when I got hired/fired. Got rid of the chip on my shoulder. But I still never went there very often - the permanent collection is kind of small and you can get to know it pretty quickly. It's an artists' museum, and I'm no artist. Always tried to get to the Biennial though. There was always something interesting that I wanted to see.

Like this year. This year I wanted to see the Fritz Haeg Animal Estates, animal homes installed at the museum. So our first stop this weekend was The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Waiting in line to get in, we saw the gigantic eagle's nest above the entrance. It's not that easy to get kids pumped up about visiting a contemporary art museum, but a two-ton, nine-foot eagle's nest just might do it. I thought, "This is going to be great!".

And then, as we hunkered down to regard the first piece we came to inside the museum, a crazy/fabulous Jason Rhoads factory/laboratory/tribute to Marilyn Chambers (and may I say, with regard to Jason Rhoads, it helps to have a six-year-old explain it to you), a guard came up to us.

"You can't do that," he says to Big Man.
"What can't he do?" I ask.
"The wall. He can't do that."
Big Man was standing against the wall so as to be out of the way. There were a lot of people there. I myself was actually leaning against the wall, to steady myself as I squatted.
"He can't touch the wall?"
"He can't do that."
"He can't touch THE WALL."
"No."
"Can he touch the floor? Would you like him to levitate?"

It was, as I said, crowded. But we were the stars of the museum. As soon as we entered each gallery, we had the undivided attention of each guard. Every time one of the children got within THREE FEET of an object, the guards started walking toward us purposefully.

I recognize that children can be unpredictable, badly behaved, spazzy. I recognize that the guards can't tell the difference between MY children, who know what "museum manners" are, and who walk around with their hands in their pockets, and OTHER PEOPLE's children, rabid little droolers who try to climb on everything.

BUT I have been in a LOT of museums in my time, and I have taken my children to a LOT of museums, and there are ways to do it and ways not to do it. See my next post, about the Guggenheim, also not my favorite museum but a joint which has finally figured out how to reconcile the presence of people with the presence of art.

"Museum of Failure," by the way, is an installation piece in the show by Ellen Harvey, which my children were warned away from.

Couldn't escape if I wanted to

new bracelet, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I am usually resistant to the kawaii in this world. The Sanrio holds only glancing appeal; cute hair barrettes haven't tempted me since I was in junior high and my best friend Vivien and I painted our own with tiny miniature scenes and preppy stripes. Hrm: I wish I had some pictures of those - Vivien was really talented. Is, that is, except now she uses her talent by finding oil wells and making her kids' Halloween costumes instead of painting barrettes and making her own wedding dress.

Fast forward more years that you know how to count... and... the other day we stopped in at this terrific rug gallery in Culpeper, VA, looking for maybe a wall hanging for The Talented Cousin Rachel's changing room at her massage therapy office, which is now this awesome inside-the-heart shade of red with an oatmeal-colored carpet... and ok, the rugs were great, but crazy expensive... and there was this whole table full of beaded jewelry and sculptures. Man, there was a 6" long iridescent alligator that called to me (it sounded like "Aaruugghh" but really really quiet), but it was too expensive and besides we have WELL ENOUGH things that just sit there and look neat.

And you want to hear about the bracelet. I don't blame you. It has about seven of these beaded charms, all just as clever and intricate and adorable as can be. It closes with rare earth magnets, which - my god, how long has it taken humanity to come up with THAT!? Lobster clasps? Fuck you! Where's the Nobel prize for the magnetic bracelet-clasp person?

There are matching earrings, mismatched. There is a sweet necklace that reminded me of the LEGO necklaces Big Man's friend Faith the Boy makes for his mom. (Kirsten, man, that kid is going to be a GOLD MINE.)

It has everything that a charm bracelet should have, including moving parts:



(the dolphin's tail wiggles!)

and an Easter egg:



It comes in a box that is orange, tied with a silk repp tie,

and lined with FAKE GRASS!

And to cap it all off... there is NO perceivable online presence for this craftsperson! Not even on Etsy! Unless you can go to Culpeper, VA, you cannot have these cute cute cute cute cute cute so cute even I love them charms.



Or unless I'm spelling it wrong and my googling is flawed from the get-go.

Oh ok. I found an online presence - but you still have to find a local retailer.

I'm already standing on the ground

tbird_200828, originally uploaded by TeamD Rally.

My brother is at this moment driving from Seattle, Washington to Jasper, Alberta - 4850 miles - as fast as he can. He's in a race called the Alcan 5000 Winter Rally.

I'd say he's crazy, but it just sounds like too much fun. And look at that picture... sigh. Besides, he and his partner were in second place at the end of the first day!

Follow him and his friends, the mysteriously-named TeamD, on their blog, their Flickr photos, and via their GoogleEarth video flyover of the route. (They live in Seattle, OF COURSE they've got their A/V all in line). They even have bumper-mounted and boom-mounted cameras on the cars.

Go baby go!

We're on the road to paradise - here we go, here we go

My driver's license is suspended in North Carolina.

When the young woman at the DMV who was trying to renew my license for me this morning looked up from her computer and asked, frowning, "Have you ever lived in North Carolina?" I knew exactly what was up.

In the late 1980's, I worked in the insurance industry - I worked for a company that serviced the customers of the state insurance funds, to be exact. If you get too many tickets or accidents and the regular insurance companies don't want you, if you want auto insurance, you have to get it through the state. This is true in most states. Those rates are HIGH, and, at least back then, the state funds did not offer a payment plan. So there is this secondary constellation of little finance companies that offer financing to the desperate youngsters and hard luck cases who need to drive so badly that they will pay thousands and thousands of dollars a year to remain insured. Needless to say, the interest rates were incredible. We couldn't do business in Michigan because they had strict(ish) usury laws. Usury! How often do you get to use that word?

It wasn't a shady company, exactly, but the people who made their way through it were not, as a rule, career insurance people. We had the ex-soccer player who is now the manager of a professional team in New Jersey. We had the guy with the Super Bowl ring who held all his "meetings" at sports bars. We had programmers whose IBM System 36 expertise was not in great demand elsewhere.

And we had my boss, a terrible human being who had moved from company to company, always in an executive position, dogged by harassment charges but possessing the kind of brash, incorrect sense of humor that made him a hit with the other upper-management guys, who all seemed to yearn for the days when they could make a pass at a secretary with impunity.

That guy once put his hands on my ass to steady me as I stood on a chair, then leered over his shoulder at the head of HR (HR!), "Ten more seconds of this and I'm probably liable for $10,000!"

I am very proud of myself that I replied, "Tick-tock, motherfucker."

Although they laughed - and he didn't move his hands. They thought I was cute, their little punk-rock mascot. I only wish I'd ever been asked to testify against him.

Anyway, he wasn't a terribly good strategist either. At one point, he lowered our rates and attracted so much business that all of a sudden the company had no more money to loan. He announced to the entire sales and marketing team that we were to do no work for a month. "Go play golf!" he decreed. And the rest of 'em all went to play golf. Yuck.

This was summertime, and I lived in an un-air-conditioned apartment in southwest Baltimore. Staying home wasn't too appealing, and I had no money to go anywhere. I did have a car, however, and a gas card, so one afternoon I got in the car and drove to Delaware. I slept in my car at the National Park beach. When I woke up, I drove to a diner and had a grilled-cheese sandwich. Then I drove south to the National Park on Assateague Island. When I got hungry, I found another diner and had another grilled-cheese sandwich. I drove south. I slept in the car. I danced on the beach. I ate grilled-cheese sandwiches, sometimes with a fried egg. I got as far south as Ocracoke Island.

I spent a night at a hotel in Nags Head, mostly to take a shower. I remember that shower. Five days of sunscreen, sweat, salt water, and mosquito repellent washed off me and out of my hair - I remember wondering where their graywater went, and feeling sorry for whatever was downstream.

At one point I left the Outer Banks and drove through Dare County. The sun went down while I was driving one of those two-lane state roads that arrowed straight through a swamp. It was DARK. I was nervous. Locals kept whipping along that road, pulling up right behind me, and then passing me with a roar in their pickup trucks.

Now, I know that some people are scared of cities. Perhaps rightly so. I've been mugged and broken into, and had cars stolen in cities, granted. But I'll wager that just about anyone who is not from the South can get really creeped out down there. We hear Creedence in our heads, and think of poor Ned Beatty, and we suspect that behind the wheel of every pickup truck rides a crosseyed inbred redneck who will drag us from the car, hold us captive in a tarpaper shack, and invite his legions of cousins to perpetrate unspeakable things upon us.

So, eventually, when the third or fourth pair of headlights came up fast and rode my bumper, I sped up... and of course, that was the cop.

He pulled me over, I gave him my license and registration, and he told me to close my window back up because of the mosquitos. Oh, the mosquitos on that trip are a whole 'nother story.

When I got back home, I sent Dare County a check to pay the ticket. Months later, I got a notice from them that they had suspended my license, along with my returned check. I called. Money order only, or I could pay in person. I got a money order and paid it. What a pain.

So today, when I called the North Carolina DMV to find out why they are still reprimanding me almost 20 years later, I find I have to pay a "license restoration fee" of fifty dollars. Can I pay over the phone with a credit card? No. "Do you know anyone in-state who can come in and pay it for you?" You've got to be kidding. Bob says I should have said, "Just you, ma'am - you're my only friend in North Carolina."

It was a great trip though.

My hero!

Jaime went to Saigon, ate a live larva. A large live larva. Click here for the video!

Look at her laughing - she makes Bourdain look like a puss!

My kids were SO impressed: the one said, "If I ate a grub I would spit it out!" Of course, he says that about mushrooms too. The other said, "Can we see one with the grubs going in people's noses?"

Jesus, what am I raising?

On the other hand, they both ate squid for dinner with an adventurous aplomb I've not seen since their first encounter with chocolate chips. Thanks, James.

Don't be a Boov about it

The dishwasher needs unloading, and loading again, possibly twice.

There is unfolded laundry on the coffee table.

I am behind on what I do for the Big Man's school.

I am a little behind on the freelance thing I do for the library.

I need to start on the freelance thing I do for the museum.

Haven't fine-tuned the presentation I'm doing for the 3rd graders tomorrow on Internet safety. I have to tone down the child molestation angle and replace it with, er, I don't know what. Suggestions?

Haven't taken a shower yet.

Neglecting Mr. Four criminally. Well, no. Don't take that literally. I hate fielding mean commenters who threaten to send the authorities.


But I went to NYC this weekend and went to the perfume store, and Moss (holy crap), and Ricky's, where, I was right, they had Special Effects hair dye in Cupcake Pink, and then I went up to Madison Ave. and bought really nice long yellow gloves and even scored a fat discount, and ated some oysters for dinner all by myself in a restaurant while I read my awesome awesome amazing book, and spent the night with great friends who I don't get to see often enough, and went to the old museum and breathed in the same old dust and smells and bought an umbrella, which I needed, and a drum, which Big Man needed, and stopped in at Maxilla & Mandible and decided what I would get the kids for xmas, and bracketed the whole thing by riding up and back with The Talented Cousin Rachel, who rocks and who is always fun to talk to.

Plus this weekend was the triumphant return of the All Mighty Senators, who despite some initial soundboard weirdness, which might have tripped up a less professional band and caused tension, played with the energy of teenagers and the virtuosity of 40-something rock and rollers, which, yikes, they are.

As are we all.

PS: That picture up there is me, very happy, consuming a mountain of sushi on my birthday about a week ago. Molly took it. The next day our friend Thomas observed that there really is such a thing as too much sushi. I disagree. If the amount of sushi we ate that night was not too much - and it wasn't - then no, there is no such thing as "too much sushi".

Shot right through with a bolt of blue

I seem to have developed a relationship with this year's baseball semifinal. Whatever you call it.

I'm not, as anyone can tell, a sports person. Like a lot of spazzy, myopic kids, my number-one strategy for avoiding ball-coming-at-me situations - which without exception elicit from me flop sweat, prayer, flailing, grimacing, and shame - has been to profess an active disdain for organized physical activity. Hey, I never liked organized religious activity either. Same reactions.

However, as my memories of cringing at home plate feebly waggling a bat at a softball I can barely see fade to dim specters in the dust-moted golden haze of The Land Before 1983, I have less reason to sneer at sports. Now, from time to time, I can enjoy watching professional basketball players actually fly: I can gasp at the artistry of women's soccer players (look at that shit! she kicked the ball around the defender, passing it to herself!). In New York, we even went to baseball games. Those were really fun.

But I'm still not a fan. I still don't know the rules, and I still think football in particular is both bureaucratically boring and viscerally ugly - a rare combination, wouldn't you say? I don't follow a team, or any particular players.

My husband is something of a fan. He knows a staggering amount of information about athletes, up to and including where some of them went to high school. He grew up in Cleveland, which is by god a sports town in a football state. He and his long arms played high school basketball and college rugby. He would watch a couple of games a week if he had the leisure to do it (to his immense credit, he doesn't, so he doesn't).

The fact that Bob grew up in Cleveland is significant. Cleveland teams have brilliant seasons, but do not tend to win championships. Was it a big deal when the Red Sox won the whatever a few years ago? Hah. NO Cleveland team has won ANY championship in ANY sport since some year that my husband and every member of his family would know.

Wait I'll look it up. 1964, the year Bob was born, the Browns won the Superbowl.

[Bob corrects me: the Super Bowl hadn't been invented in 1964. The Browns won the NFL Championship.]

And it's not that Cleveland teams simply suck: this much I know. I went to college out there, and in the '80's in Cleveland, even at the geek school, much of our social life involved getting together to watch the Big Game: playoff series after playoff series - and even a Super Bowl, I think - when through some sudden fluke, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Last-minute fumbles, insane athletic feats by the other guy, chokeage. Apparently, God Hates Cleveland Sports.

Game 1:
This weekend we were out in the old town for a family wedding. Niece Kate marrying Nice John. (Good luck, you kids!) Game one was the night before the wedding, and we missed it - well, Bob missed it. I didn't know one way or the other. We were attending Cousin Stretch's baptism that evening, and as the priest expelled her demons and incorporated her into the church, everybody but me knew that the Indians were playing the Red Sox. Boston won.



Game 2:
Katie and John, the bride and groom, are, like most Clevelanders, sports fans. Big sports fans. Let's put it this way - when their wedding invitation arrived, and it was cream-colored with a brown border, I didn't think for a minute that the brown was there to signify that it was an autumn wedding. I had my fingers crossed about the bridesmaids - I knew there was an outside chance they'd be wearing orange dresses with numbers on the back.

They weren't, of course - hey come on, I'm teasing... but the wedding party did enter the reception at a run, each wearing a team jersey over their tux or gown. That was pretty cute.

That night, back at the hotel, after our kids fell asleep, a batch of family crept into our hotel room to debrief, drink more, and - you guessed it - watch the game. That game went to 23 innings, tied until the Indians scored an unprecedented 47 runs in the top of the last inning and then retired the Red Sox side. Those numbers may not be exact, I did eventually fall asleep once the Indians were ahead by like 4. Still, pretty compelling, for baseball.

The next evening we found ourselves downtown when dinnertime rolled around. Googling "best sushi Cleveland" and plugging the addresses that came up into Google Maps, we came up with some joint in the Warehouse District. The football game was just over when we parked, and my god. Apparently the Warehouse District in Cleveland is considered a good place to watch the game, get unbelievably wasted, and then stagger around trying to use your cell phone in between little vomiting episodes.

I kept a tight hold on the kids, and we made it to the sushi place without either of them being propositioned or puked on. The sushi place was not what we expected - lots of purple and glass, it looked like a club, kind of. But it was fine, you know, fish is fish. We always end up eating sushi when we travel. At any other restaurant the kid options are as follows:

1. hotdog
2. grilled cheese
3. chicken turds
4. cheeseburger
5. maybe spaghetti

... and several days of a diet like that is just ugly. At sushi places they eat edamame and tofu and miso soup and fish.

When I took the kids to the bathroom to wash hands I noticed that the big guy at the table next to us was kind of... paved... in diamonds. Big studs in the ears and two wide bracelets on one arm. "Musician?" I thought to myself. "Gangster? Bet he's a ballplayer." He was a black guy with a shaped short beard and he spoke staccato Dominican Spanish into a cell phone. He acquired at least three hangers-on while he ate his sushi and watched the irritating Tom Brady get sacked on the overhead TV.

So the next day I looked through the Indians and Red Sox rosters, and found that we were sitting next to David Ortiz, designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox! Big Papi, they call him. Beloved, in Boston anyway.



Game 3:
The next night we were up in Bob's sister T's swanky new apartment facing the lake. Big beautiful views, including the stadiums and the blimp. Of course, we turned the game on, and once again, Cleveland won.



Game 4:
Last night we were back home here. We watched the game. Cleveland won. I am more than mildly not-disappointed. I am, in fact, looking forward to Thursday's game. I am thinking to myself, "Wouldn't that be something, if for the first time in 43 years, Cleveland won a championship? This is kind of exciting. But, uh, HOW many games are we talking about?"

I spent the first seventeen years of my life actively avoiding sports. I spent the next seventeen years peripherally aware of sporting events and teams, and the last five gradually getting used to the fact that athletic prowess can be kind of compelling.

Things have changed since I was the most uncoordinated kid in the Baltimore metropolitan area. For one thing, nobody expects me to do sports now - I have a knowledgeable, physically competent husband to teach my boys how to throw and catch, kick and hit, and to explain to them how the Earned Run Average is calculated.

For another, the Baltimore teams of my youth have undergone a molecular shift. The high-achieving Orioles that everyone used to brag about are treated with contempt even at home, and the Baltimore Colts, well, the Colts live in Indianapolis.

It's kind of a funny thing: my first year in Cleveland was 1984, the year that the Colts ran off in the middle of the night. I had heard something about it, but in Cleveland, my god, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. People teased me about it! I was dumbfounded and amused. I didn't even pretend to understand, but I did kind of enjoy it years later when the Browns quit Cleveland to come be Baltimore Ravens.

"Ravens" is not a bad name for a Baltimore sports team, but I cannot bring myself to like them (I'm not alone, either!). I sort of can't remember why, though. Maybe that's just how it works.

They clean up good

paying attention to the vows, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We are back from the PNW. My brother's wedding, then a few days marching around Seattle, watchin em throw fish, eating pho, checking out the new library, hanging out with our friends. The Sci Fi Museum was particularly great. I bought a dodo. Sunsets, lots of sunsets.

Bob forgot to pack cufflinks (who remembers cufflinks?) so he used the doodads from the kids' Crocs. Suave! Mr Four passed out during the reception, and the bride was a knockout.

It was a great vacation, it was a beautiful wedding, and it was a nightmare of travel. Fucking airlines. Miserable asshole airline personnel. We are so lucky that these boys didn't LOSE their MINDS - cause god knows I came close. Arrived back at the homestead at close to 5am, after boarding a plane in Seattle at 11:30am. All done now.

Magic Beach House

00014, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian. Photo by Dee Pipik.

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel.
The Somebodies by N.E. Bode.
Drita My Homegirl by Jenny Lombard.
Victory by Susan Cooper.
Brainboy and the Deathmaster by Tor Seidel.
Varjak Paw by SF Said.
Mixed Magics by Diana Wynne Jones.
Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall.
Secrets of Dripping Fang by Dan Greenburg.
Nicholas by Goscinny and Sempe.
Melvin Beederman, Superhero by Greg Trine.

Seriously, that's what I did on my summer vacation, and I couldn't be more thrilled about it. Cousin Stretch read Magic Tree House books and I read everything else. See the pictures here.

Keep on rollin'

We took a trip to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge last weekend to see the bald eagles (live cam here). We climbed on stuff and played a lot and had fun. Big Man's favorite thing he saw was "the Bay". He liked the big fallen tree but he liked the Bay more.



Click the top photo for a slideshow or click here to see all the photos. The big fallen tree was trippy.