“Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.”

-Sigmund Freud

I wish he hadn’t done enough coke to kill a horse, nor that most of his extrapollated work has been well-refuted by now.  Sometimes the things he says are really spot on.

I’m proud to say I’ve done this:

Today, I am flying from here:

To a location 2,158 miles away, where things should be different.  Au contraire.  I will likely see and walk on this:

Replicas of things always creep me out.  Replicas of the place I call home with the inclusion of neon lights?  Well, we’ll see how this goes…

My brain is already feeling more fractal than a Derrida hypothesis and I can feel the spirits of DeLillo, Pynchon, Wallace, and Thompson descending upon me.

Wish me luck.

That last post was a little harsh.  Anyway.  This is what’s really been happening:

On Thursday, I rode the subway all the way through Brooklyn, to the AirTrain, straight to the ever-festive, newly remodeled Terminal 5 at JFK.  I fly in and out of this terminal quite often, as I’m building JetBlue points for free trips to such charmingly demure locales as Bogota, Colombia soon.  Nonetheless, it never ceases to amaze me.  This place makes me feel like Schaumburg, Illinois took a Woodfield Mall-sized dump on Queens and JetBlue decided to jump on the shitstorm that ensued and open shop.  What results is an airport terminal complete with fountains, skylights, plants, a LaCoste store, numerous places to get drunk and eat Buffalo wings, and a food court:

A quick vid of Terminal 5:

Continue Reading »

I’m currently in Illinois, in the suburbs of Chicago, and I just got done paying all of my medical bills.

I think this is about how I should be feeling.

Laced and happy, seething underneath.  Where is Brooklyn?  Where is cheap coffee?  Why is it that I have to drive a car everywhere in this town?

Most of you know that I get around this city on a bicycle as much as possible (yes, my surgeon okay’d me to ride again.  I’m so happy).  There was an article in the New York Times recently that proposed some interesting viewpoints on how cyclists are viewed in this city these days.

It’s an interesting article, even if I don’t agree with the “proposals” he makes (I’m a bit more militant about demanding respect from everyone despite me running red lights.  I do endorse more signalling though.), at least it gives some perspective on how we’re actually seen by pedestrians.  If nothing else, that’s a bad-ass picture of Tone on the front page, rocking the same frame that I’m riding.

Click through here.

I was turned on to this project by my friend, Anna.

21 Maps of New York, real and imagined by amazing artists.  It really draws out the idea that this place, where I am, where you are, wherever we go, is just as much experiential as it is the numbers on the buildings on the labeled streets.  It makes all this asphalt animated.

My favorite: Lordy Rodriguez re-imagines Manhattan in an almost Blade Runner mindset.  Fragmented, angry, outposts of calm, a downtown financial district fortified by a wall and extensive security.

See the entire project here.

I’ve been having flashbacks.

Download a full wallpaper size here.

A while back, I was given the challenge of writing a short piece about “air.”  That was the only guideline.  I wrote about all the things that air does, who it goes in and out of, what it effects in our day and age, how it’s changed.

Long story short, I made a case that the air is really heavy these days.  That it’s hard to breathe because of all that is going on and every little thing that every single person does is right in front of us.  Sometimes it can even hurt people.

But sometimes it brings them together, for better or worse.  I made an audio recording of it, with a little experimental work backing it. Continue Reading »

There is a hole in Midtown Manhattan.  Not Central Park.  That is an honest park.  Between 40th and 42nd Streets, and between 5th and 6th Avenues, there is a hole called Bryant Park and it is the strangest place I’ve experienced in this town so far.  It’s a place that changes just as fast as all the ghosts that pass over it, underneath it (it’s a hub for five subway lines), walk through the always-lush grass everyday in the summer.

Six months ago I laid in that grass with a pair of jean shorts on and sunglasses, surrounded by friends.  We drank wine straight from the bottle and joined nearly three-thousand other people in cheering as Paul Newman was projected on a giant screen at the West end of the park.  We all sighed together as his character, Hud, mourned the brutal murder of his herd of cows, the only family he had.  We all strangely moved together.

Right now, it’s completely different.  There are construction crews carting off sections of an ice rink that lived atop the hole in Manhattan all winter.  Unlike after the movie, I won’t be riding a bike through the city back to my apartment.  Like the ferocious building and changing of the winter wonderland due to uncontrollable weather change and the city’s ability to sell something everywhere, a doctor recently cut into my knee in three places and pulled a wayward meniscus from where it had been lodged in the joint.  A limp, slightly slower than normal walking pace is the maximum speed that I can move at.  These days, I am forced to walk alone.

But there are times, in this exact spot, when everything is perfectly all right.  Every once in a while, usually with a stiff autumn wind at your back, you’ll find yourself walking towards a friend you’d given up on.  She’s sitting at a table and she sees you from one-hundred feet away, her gaze never breaks from you, nor does her smile.  She hands you a coffee as you sit down, she’s been waiting.  Nothing remarkable has happened, just a normal day that she’s wanted to share with you.  And that’s when you realize that you can’t keep it all straight.  The constant crowds, the maze-like building interiors, the absurd address system that has you crossing the same block three times before finding your destination, the advertising bombardment.  All the changes always happening faster and fasterfaster.

And that’s when she’ll ask how your day was.  You’ll realize that here, now, in this park, with these ghosts moving around you, this is really okay.