Magical Mystery Tour

Driving to Liverpool from London--3 and a half hours--renting a car--driving on the left side of the road--on the wrong side of the car--with seven people--manual transmission--no one drives stick.

LIVERPOOL OR BUST '08.

-M

Trash, Treasures and Records

It has been a week and an update is needed.

The past seven days have included four thousand miles of travel, extreme jet-lag, meeting and greeting, a fair amount of alcohol consumption, bus tours, boat parties, picture taking, money spending and absolute fun.

In seven days I've learned to appreciate rainy days and mostly the sunnier ones.  It's true that it rains in London but when the sun is out it really is shinning.  The people in this city have been so far nothing but nice.  There are tons of shady characters in the night--which I clearly love and interact with them when I can.  Cabs get cheaper as my faux-British accent gets better.

I was weary about heading to this city while attached to a "program".  I thought this would hinder my exploration--which it probably has but I've still met interesting people from everywhere; so it seems.

This update is vague and pretty much an enjambment, but here are a few favorites of the week:

-Slang

-Strawberry beer

-Builders Arms (local pub)

-The Gardening Club

-jay-walking

-spiral staircases

-Coca-Cola

-chicken kebabs from Partridges

-Amy Winehouse

-Kensington Gardens

-the Indian Market

-business men doing ANYTHING to make the tube

-bagels for 20 pence/Brick Lane

-M

Hallo

I'm here:

and London Bridge is not falling down.

-M

P.S. (more to come)

My first weekend in Brooklyn, Ryan and I spent a good chunk of Saturday's wee hours dancing to Jamaican dancehall at Toro, an Asian fusion restaurant and bar. It's about a block from the edge of the East River in quant, quiet Brooklyn Heights, so when we left at 4 a.m., hungry hungry, we figured we were destined for a big bag of chips.  

Then we found the Park Plaza Restaurant, a glorified diner on the Cadman Park corner of Pineapple Walk. On Fridays and Saturdays, the place goes all-hours; it was like striking gold, if you could eat gold and it were made out of griddle cakes or buffalo chicken. Since then, the diner has been like a lucky, greasy talisman: It's also where I was leaving the night I learned about the pick-up soccer league in BH.  

It's mystical, like sweaty, sweaty clockwork, how everyone arrives at the park across the street at the same time almost every night. That's what a guy on the sidelines told me (more or less) when I asked, at least, so tonight, I went there, too. And it was GREAT. Great. Greatgreatgreatgreatgreat. 

Everyone was super duper nice, supportive, fun. And I hadn't played outside in a loooong time - probably not since I lived at home last summer - so it was like unfolding my legs/myself, or something. It's also the reason I didn't bother to pace myself - at all - and could only play for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Luckily, the teams were getting bigger throughout the game, so I didn't feel bad when I took off early. 

I'll be back, anyway - tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, etc.

I bought this book yesterday. It was a great idea until I flagged 999 things I'd like to do while in London.

-M

New York City is extraordinary. I should have figured, long before I started to write this entry (with cold Thai noodles in a plastic take-out plate on my lap, by the by), how hard it would be to invent new words and ways to explain a city that has been hyper-explained already by an impossible number of authors, essayists, actors, songwriters, people on the street, people on Taxi Cab Confessions, etc. 

So I won't explain the city at all. Surriously. Instead, I'll (try to) explain my life inside it, which started out as lonely as ever and then got better, and which has taught me (cliche cliche cliche, who gives a shit) a handful of important lessons about life, my character, the character of others and how wildly special it is to belong to a little tribe of people with hearts as big as something very, very big.

And I won't focus on the lonely-as-ever city that started to consume me in the first weeks of July either, although that city also smothered me with heat, especially underground, especially as the days passed and the walls and the ceilings of the subway apparently accumulated sunlight and mugginess like a currency and then vanquished commuters. (I'm getting better at the subway.) Instead, I'll focus on the city I'm starting to see behind the city I saw at first. 

So far, I've checked out:

- The Brooklyn Bridge (I live right near it)

- all the super tall buildings that everyone else comes to look at, too

- a lot of gorgeous cityscapes set over the water 

- DUMBO, which is also nearby, and which I lava

- Murakami at The Brooklyn Museum (I'd like him better if he didn't pretend to be an artist with integrity who makes profound statements about other artists with less integrity, and erred on the side of businessman-who-is-exceptionally-good-at-art)

- a lot of other things

So far, I've eaten: 

- a lot of pizza

- a lot of hotdogs

- a lot of pad thai

Otherwise, I'm chugging along, on the hunt still for a part-time job, or at least an internship to fill my Tuesday-through-Friday. I'm waiting to hear back on a couple of applications, and I hope I get to make an excited blog post within the next few days that says "AHHHHHHH," or something like that. 

At WNYC, I've been loving every minute, all my co-workers, all our musical (and non-musical) guests and the opportunities that have arisen for me to help out behind-the-scenes. I played a big part in writing the second half of today's show, featuring Dan Zanes, who stopped by with his wonderful Band of the Moment to play a couple of tracks from Nueva York!, his latest kids record, full of traditional Spanish songs re-imagined through rock-and-roll. They sounded A+. 

I also got to listen to Sarah Rodman, the Globe's pop music critic, get scientific about ABBA on the first half of the show. She and I used to work together, which made for a happy reunion on the phone when I called her to prep for the segment. 

Anywho, I just wanted to swing by and say, I'm alive in New York, I will be posting more frequently (and with more substance - this entry is lame, sorry), and I will start to fill you in more and more about the radio.

<3

Good news

The UK issued me a visa!

The Eye of the City is Turning Green With....Well, Sense.

From "street art" at the Tate Modern to double-decker buses, I am day by day getting more excited for London.

With some research money in my accounts and digi cam ready--I want to focus on how London stays green. Maybe most importantly what the city or individuals are doing to become sustainable.

Well, along with every kitschy thing I can think of, I just found a few days worth of video in an article by TimeOut London.

From allotment to ZWIN (zero waste initiatives), TimeOut does a great job of naming alphabetically the ways London's green culture is thriving.

Although a few consonants are missing from London's list, each city should work on their A-Z's.

-M

Everything

is packed!

VISA, Versa.

Now that I'm within the three month window of leaving the U.S., I'm in the process of applying for my visa.

Last week I filled out a very extensive online form, which asks some too-personal questions, and certain questions which no one really knows the answers to.--It's important that the British consulate knows where you went to school when you were eleven-years-old.

So after filling out all of these forms I get a date to go to the Immigration Office in St. Albans, Vt. Date set for Friday the 13th at 13:00--I'm by no means superstitious, so this hardly phased me.

I've been dreaming of this office looking like a modern day Ellis Island, lines and lines of people waiting for green cards, officials Americanizing names to their liking, grumpy older men forcing you through a metal detector, sterile back rooms where people are searched.

My dreams were crushed. I drove up to a very new looking one story brick building, five minutes late and already assuming that because of my tardiness I will never be able to leave the country of stars and stripes. I was one of two cars in the parking lot--still thinking to myself how all the masses inside got there--they must have bussed them in.

To my dismay there were no crying babies, no drug sniffing dogs--just one slightly grumpy middle-aged man who met me outside the building to ask what business I had being there. I walked in and through the metal detector with no problems. Finally 35 seconds later I was escorted into a back room where a sweet lady in her mid to late 30's told me she was going to take my "biometrics" and said, "Honey, you can place your paper work over here, I promise it will be safe."

Well, Ms. Sweetie took me over to a machine with red lights that took my finger prints and then took a mildly absurd looking digital photo of my face. She explained that they do this as a favor to the British consulate in New York, and I told her how nice that was of "them". All I could really think is that Bush made this deal with them so that they would enter Iraq--I'm sure it's less complicated than that.

All in all, I was in and out in 7 minutes without being degraded, strip searched.

A disappointment.

To the Immigration Office in St. Albans: you did not entertain all of my hopes and dreams.

There are plenty (plenty, plenty, plenty) of reasons I'm excited for my internship at Soundcheck - like the first half of today's show: Sasha Frere-Jones and Jake Paine will evaluate Lil Wayne's claim that he is, in fact, the best rapper on Earth.


Seems a little absurd (in a very fun way), and interesting - I wonder what Sasha (pop music critic for The New Yorker) and Jake (senior editor of hiphopdx.com) have to say. Also, I'm sure they'll be reviewing Tha Carter III on the fly, which itself would be worth listening for; aside from a couple of tracks, the album is pretty burned out - a lot like Lil Wayne, actually.

In today's New York Times, Jim Dwyer touches on the history of Poetry in Motion, an initiative that exposed commuters to classic and contemporary poems for more than 15 years by publishing them in subway cars, in place of advertisements. The project was introduced by the MTA and thrived with help from Barnes and Noble and local cultural institutions.


Last month, it came to an end; now, commuters can look forward to prose excerpts instead.

From Dwyer's article:

Ms. Martinez, of the authority, says the shift can be traced to the resistance she felt over using a selection from “Hamlet,” in which the prince, resigned to the possibility that he could be killed in a duel, says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” A colleague argued that it was prose.

“I thought, ‘Why not prose?’” said Ms. Martinez, a former college English professor.

Whether it's poetry or prose that's scattered throughout the transit system, the importance of this project seems undeniable - especially in such a big and busy place. A small dose of literature can go a long way, maybe more so when it's unexpected: You're being jostled in a subway car by a rush of bodies and briefcases, it's early, you're grumpy, then suddenly, you've got a quiet human reminder - some inspiration for your day, or just a bunch of words that work well enough together to get lodged into your brain.

Less dramatically, Dwyer's article testifies that Poetry in Motion has helped many people get excited about creative writing, and make a place for it in their lives:

“People will remember a first line,” said Brett Lauer, the managing director of the Poetry Society. “They remember where they were going when they first read a poem.” One woman who worked as a waitress and was planning her wedding asked him for the text of “A Bouquet,” a poem by the Chinese poet Bei Dao. An excerpt begins:

Between me and the world

You are a calendar, a compass

Hopefully prose will go over just as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing the placards first hand.

It's 12:34AM EST. I'm in Burlington,VT and have been for nearly a year now. It seems silly to make a post about a place that I'm traveling to in just under three short months--but I'm excited.

I will be living here:
(a block from Buckingham Palace)









(If Dani can post pictures--I will too)

Things to look forward to (myself included):
-Descriptions of funny museums and exhibits
-Pictures of characters met on the street
-British sayings I plan on picking up
-Self-produced dancing videos
-A tour of biker pubs (If they don't have them in London, I'm leaving.)
-Sketches
-Songs about fish&chips
-A video montage of me and Amy Winehouse having great times.

love,
M

BoltBus or Bust

When I first applied for my internship at WNYC, the idea of moving to New York - away from Boston, where I've spent my early adulthood, and back toward the place I spent my early childhood - it seemed like a sort-of-real possibility. Not really real. Even after the station accepted my application, and months and months passed, I wasn't sure I'd make the move in July - I guess because so much of the process was up in the air for a while: I had nowhere to live and no steady source of income outside of Boston. (Actually, I still don't.)

Now that my housing deposit is set for New York, and my housing plan in Boston expires June 27, I feel finally like yes, hi, soon, I will be somewhere else. So, of course, I'm starting to feel like yes, hi, soon, I will need an effective way to visit friends in Boston, and to coax friends into visiting me.


So, I am pretty into BoltBus. Prices seem like they're on par with Fung Wah (cheap cheap), but!, BoltBuses also have:
- lots of leg room
- electrical outlets so you can charge things in transit
- wireless internet

Oh, and according to people on Yelp, they don't smell.

Getting Ready, Getting Started

I've got a little more than three weeks left in Boston before I pack this room and transfer its contents (old lamp with browning lampshade, pictures in frames, bulletin board, clothes, instruments, ten thousand books and notebooks, records, plastic turtle, etc.) to another room, in a different city.

For a long time, that room was purely hypothetical. I knew I had to find a place, but failed to do any of the legwork involved in, I don't know, not living on the streets. Thanks to my university, though, I snagged something quick and easy, at the last minute, and even saved money and many, many hours of (proactive) nail-biting.

I will be living here, at Hotel St. George:


Just kidding. My Hotel St. George is in Brooklyn Heights, and it looks like this:


Less sand, fewer soothing waves, more gum on the streets.

Great news: Google Maps said I just have to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on my bike to get to my new job at WNYC.