Yesterday I went down underneath the Manhattan Bridge to pick up my rejected manuscript from a publisher. Feeling a little blue, I shoved my hands in my pockets, kicked at the dirt like a ragamuffin, and walked all the way back to Greenpoint, sticking as close to the East River as possible. It took two hours.

If you follow Navy Street to Flushing and head north to Kent Avenue, you’ll see the scotch tape and wires that hold the city together: emergency systems and impound lots, chewed up docks and steaming smoke stacks, auto auctions and lost property storage. Ambulances idle next to the river, waiting for the next heart attack. Rings of razor wire cordon off rows of Red Cross trucks and disaster relief vehicles and SWAT jeeps.

And those shattered mansions. Admiral’s Row: ten stately homes dating back to the Civil War, built for naval officers and their families. Look through the barbed wire and you’ll see abandoned tennis courts and a greenhouse and head-splitting bureaucracy. The Army Corps of Engineers still owns the property and, nearly forty years after they were first abandoned, the debate continues about whether to restore the homes or build a supermarket in their place.

I peer through the fence, feeling the sucker punch of wrecked architecture and systemized neglect. Somebody taps me on the shoulder. A guy with muddy shoes asks if I’m a reporter. He runs a hustle, shaking my hand and clapping me on the back. He says he can break me into one of those mansions. He talks some junk about the neighborhood that I can’t follow. He gets pushy. He says I owe him five bucks for his stories. I tell him he owes me ten for my sparkling personality. He gets upset. We argue. We part ways.

I push north. After snaking beneath the legs of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the scene turns orthodox fast. Over 60,000 Satmar hasidim live here. A ramshackle van circles the block, broadcasting Yiddish from a public address system lashed to the roof. The architecture gets heavy and the bicyclists get hip with black glasses and ironic tattoos as the apartment towers give way to warehouses and bars.

To my left, the sun sinks against strange industrial snapshots backed by the familiar Manhattan skyline: shipping containers and parking lots, oil tankers and barges spread before the Chrysler and Empire tops.

Along these four miles, it’s surprising how much of it is fenced off with barbed wire.

* * *
[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Digable Planets – Borough Check (feat. Guru)
from Blowout Comb. Pendulum, 1994 | buy mp3s
Checking Red Hook to Fort Greene. The internet says Blowout Comb “contains lyrics concerning themes of rapping prowess and the inner city” but you already knew that.

[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Roy Ayers – We Live in Brooklyn
Ubiquity, 1972 | buy mp3s
The original.

Late night. A big file finally went into the mail. 32 hours until I’m in a rental car and Slowdive is on stereo:
[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Slowdive – When the Sun Hits
from Souvlaki. Creation, 1993 | buy mp3s

There’s something embarrassing about discussing Twitter. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because we’re grown-ups and we should know better. Perhaps it’s too meta, too much like navel-gazing. Or because the word ‘twitter’ sounds absolutely stupid. Regardless, mentioning Twitter always feels a little unseemly. (I don’t even like seeing the word ‘twitter’ appear on my ‘blog’, another word that I loathe.) Nonetheless, I’m beginning to accept that Twitter has become a regular part of my creative life, so I’m going to discuss it for the next four paragraphs and then I’ll stop:

1. Reading. Out of the blue, a friend recently said, “I don’t know why you bother with Twitter. I don’t want to know that somebody’s having oatmeal for breakfast.” And I said, “Neither do I” but this guy kept telling me that I’m wasting my time and I caught a weirdly antagonistic drift, as if defiance of a gadget were a virtue. Use it or don’t use it, who cares? I like Twitter because it’s low impact and fluid. It’s fun to keep tinkering with the settings to tune into the right balance of news, narrative, linkage, fiction, and conversation. I’ve got politicians, housewives, friends, techno geeks, architects, lawyers and sci-fi writers telling me the news. It’s my personal AM radio station. Except not as scary.

2. Writing. You can easily tailor your reading list. Great. But why write on it? These days there are so many boxes that we can fill with every passing thought, jog, snapshot, meal, journey, and purchase, that I think it’s worth asking why. Why bother telling somebody that you’re the mayor of a convenience store or that you’re getting a speeding ticket? (I’m afraid I’ve done both.) For me, answering this question requires wrestling with this chestnut: We write for ourselves, not for others. It’s a dumb writerly cliché, often attributed to Hemingway (although he called bullshit on it, too: “If I believed that, why would I want my books published?”). Nonetheless, the phrase sticks around because it appeals to a writer’s vanity and it’s a handy excuse for bad writing. It also forces you to pick a team, even if your allegiance is constantly shifting. Untangling the relationship between the personal and the public can be helpful from time to time. I try to break 50/50 between ‘myself’ and ‘others’, but the great thing about the interweb is that there are gentle ‘unfollow’ buttons all over the place, so one need not be too concerned about the ‘others’ part. (For that reason, I’m always humbled that anybody reads my blather here or elsewhere.)

3. Distribution. I decided to unlink my feeds. My neurotic chatter isn’t well-suited to a Facebook status update. I lost a few friends on Facebook after mentioning that there is no God and I still feel badly about it. Because of its reciprocal nature, Facebook is a social hornet’s nest. A classmate from third grade doesn’t need to know that I’m having a crisis of faith just as a coworker shouldn’t know that I’m freaking out in the Sonoran desert at two in the morning. Maybe nobody needs to know these things — and that’s the point: I realized I was using Twitter like a diary. It’s becoming an organizational tool, a place to test drive ideas or jot down phrases: it’s a traditional notepad with the added benefit of leading to unexpected conversations or occasionally introducing me to a like-minded person (or a nemesis, but that’s another essay). After using applications like Momento to map my chatter onto a calendar, this functionality became even more apparent.

4. Usability. Last night I tried to find a tweeter that I wrote while in El Paso, thinking I’d posted something clever about a Border Patrol encounter back in September. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything because the search functionality on Twitter is garbage. Combing through everybody’s chatter is frightening and you can only go back a few weeks. I’m also wary about Twitter’s new partnership with Yahoo, so after reading this great tutorial for setting up my own archive on my server, I had this piece of self-reflexive internet up and running in less than thirty minutes. Seeing all 1622 tweets filled me with a dizzying mixture of pride and shame — but I could finally find my comment about El Paso. Turns out it wasn’t clever after all, but it’s nonetheless surprisingly useful to see what I was banging on about last September (useful for me, probably not for you).

Enough of that. Time to get some actual work done.

This was originally written in longhand. Just a Uni-ball Vision .5mm black ink pen and a standard Molskine notebook. Frustrated by the squiggly auto-corrections of Microsoft Word and the distractions of the world wide web, I write almost everything by hand. My notebook bursts with page after page of choppy, bunched-up scribblings that I can barely decipher. It’s the demented book that the detectives uncover while searching the serial killer’s basement.

I want the crisp and confident handwriting found on an international postcard circa 1922: a smart script cocked at a jaunty angle, replete with generous loops and buxom flourishes that conjure passionate love affairs and brilliant manuscripts. I remember flipping through my grandparents’ wartime letters, my heart flooding with envy. I could never create anything so classy. I have the penmanship of a spastic penguin: tight and jittery, without a shred of dignity.

Everything I learned from my cursive worksheets has atrophied. In high school, I should have refined my penmanship through the writing of countless book reports and social studies papers — but then the computer came on the scene along with the sentence that changed everything: In a 3-5 page TYPED essay . . . Teachers would no longer suffer the panicked scratchings of harried teenagers (who could blame them?). Now my handwriting can be carbon dated to the year when Microsoft Word reached critical mass.

I am forever doomed to repeat the scratchy, introverted scribblings of a nervous eleven-year old. When it comes to penmanship, most of my generation is also stuck in 1991 or thereabouts. Whenever I see someone under forty writing in nice cursive, it is cause for comment — along with a strange mixture of admiration, suspicion, and jealousy.

At what point will handwriting no longer be required? Does it matter if our collective penmanship deteriorates? I’m at a loss for scenarios in which handwriting is a necessity, aside from a half-assed signature for the UPS guy or a few garbled digits on a government form.

The only benefit is esteem. Staring at my inky mess, I am reminded of Mrs Drexel. I’m eleven years old and standing at the blackboard, diagramming a sentence about the location of an imaginary aunt’s imaginary houseplant. I step back from my work and wait for Mrs. Drexel’s judgment: did I successfully locate the gerund? Her permanent scowl becomes a pinched little nightmare as she accelerates toward the chalkboard, her giant plastic glasses raised before her like a windshield.

“Good Lord, Jimmy! Your handwriting is absolutely awful.” She leans in close to the board, raising and lowering her glasses. “Look at it. So small and bunched together.” She straightens and turns to the class. “You know what it means when someone writes like this? It means they’re insecure.” And that was the day I started feeling insecure.

From here on, Glenn Branca’s ‘Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar’ shall be my wake-up music for every morning. I’ll wire my turntable to my alarm clock Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-style, crank the volume all the way to the right, jump out of bed at the three-minute mark, and my days will be glorious.

[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Glenn Branca – Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar
Ascension Records, 1979 | buy mp3

First springlike day of the year and I spent the afternoon sitting by the river in sun, writing things down. Too bad I can’t read my own handwriting.

While frowning at my penmanship, a drunk girl accosted me. She was lost. She was crying. She was in terrible shape, so I walked her to her mother’s apartment. I helped her climb six flights of stairs and got roped into a scary Polish melodrama. Strange how quickly the day can break in an unexpected direction.

Right. Queue the song:
[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
De La Soul – A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays
from De La Soul is Dead. Tommy Boy, 1991 | buy

Nothing gets the blood up like a couple of scary fever dream videos: try Trololololololololo and Alice in Wonderland from 107 years ago. I have no idea from whence this next clip came, but dig the Duran Duran ‘86 Chinatown vibe of Portrait of a Net Artist as a Young Man. A friend once dubbed me ‘Short Attention Span Theater’: Fair enough. This paragraph is proof. Here’s an article about overcoming idea to idea syndrome. Or ruminate about free culture on the world wide web. Money quote: “In the United States, direct government support of the arts peaked during the Cold War, when fear of a Soviet planet prompted a variety of cultural outreach programs at the behest of the State Department.” Now we’re grappling with the border. For evidence, check Fence Ditch Repeat: Iterations of the Border at Juárez/El Paso at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. Or bring the violence home with houseplant death matches. Speaking of free things (and long attention spans), in case you missed Tuesday’s 3-month long Autechre broadcast that worked the nerdier corners of the computernet into a froth, grab a torrent here and enjoy the accompanying spreadsheet.

Many thanks to Jinal Shah, Roger Ebert, Swiss Miss, Sasha Frere Jones, AJ Blum, Tim Maly, Pruned

This week’s Datajack installation will be scored by the permanently unGoogleable production known as Various Artists (aka Thorsten Profrock) via his epic Decay Product long-player from 1997. Generous metallic reverberations meet streamlined analogue murk:

[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Various Artists – Erode
from Decay Product. Chain Reaction, 1997 | buy it

They gather on the dirty carpet. They smell like Velveeta. Lindsay announces that she has a bleeding tooth, which sends shockwaves through the class. Sympathy flows. The children take turns recounting their own dental war stories

Aaron raises his hand. “Guess what everybody?”
“What?”
“I lost two teeth last month.”
Murmurs of approval.
“And you know what else? I played baseball until eight o’clock last night.”
Now everybody’s talking.
“I like pink.”
“There was blood everywhere.”
“I bought some glue.”
“Red’s okay, too.”
“I don’t go to the dentist.”
“Are you married?”

Ms. Bannister finally speaks. She’ll be spending the hour preparing for parent-teacher conferences, so today the class can make anything they like out of popsicle sticks and glue. This causes one of the kids to freak. “But what are we making? Tell us!” He doubles over. “I said, what are we making?!”

“Whatever you want.”

“But we have to make something! Tell us what to do!” He sighs and stares at his shoes.

The kids make what anybody would make with popsicle sticks and glue: they make boxes. Lots of boxes. Four popsicle sticks to form a square, stacked up as high as time and glue will allow. One girl flouts convention and makes a triangle. She MacGyvers some sort of pediment with paperclips and a few Twizzlers. It’s the Flatiron Building. It’s wild. Everybody mobs around her. They eat her pediment.

At least they’re not making ashtrays. I made a gorgeous ashtray in 1985. It looked like an upside-down beehive, painted black with little grooves for your Vantage Lights. My dad used it for a few days and then it held pennies and rubber bands in the laundry room before being retired to the attic. I wonder what will happen to the things these kids make.

Gus waves a popsicle stick in the air and announces his plan to design a building that will hold “everyone in the whole wide world, that way we won’t need to use cars anymore.” Everybody applauds Gus’s eco-friendly vision.

Clean up begins. Ms. Bannister is in a good mood today. Her approach to discipline is sweeter, more rational than usual: “Why do you have a garbage can on your head? Do you think you should be doing that?”

* * *

A few years ago I observed several K-12 classrooms as part of my graduate studies. This excerpt is from a very long piece called ‘Chaos Theory & the Bell’ that will appear next month in my alleged book, I Want to Be a Good Worker.

Good riddance, February. Here’s a bit of audio sunshine as we drag ourselves towards springtime:

[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Sugar Plant – Happy
from Happy/Trance Mellow. Pony Canyon, 1996 | buy mp3s
Give this Japanese duo more attention. After a string of fantastic releases in the mid-1990s, Chinatsu Shoyama and Shin’ichi Ogawa’s sparkling slowcore ballads faded away. All of their releases are highly recommended, especially the Happy/Trance Mellow double LP.

[ See post to enjoy the audio! ]
Linda Scott – I’ve Told Every Little Star
Canadian-American Records, 1961
Syrupy echoplex ballroom surf pop with a bubblegum hook that I wager will bury itself in your head for at least two hours. Something about Scott’s slinky voice strikes a captivating and slightly unnerving note, like a spectral transmission from 1961. Or that scene when the radio mysteriously fires up in the haunted Stephen King Cadillac. Can’t pin it down. Fun fact: Scott was an army medical laboratory technician.

Trying to bone up on economics. Decided to begin with a selection from Adam Smith’s 1776 chestnut, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, not realizing I was cracking open the origin story of Ayn Rand, AM radio, and the American faith in bootstrapping:

Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely . . . With the money one man gives him he purchases food. The old clothes which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old clothes which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, clothes, or lodging.

The bold text is the money quote on the cover of the book. Smith displays an infectious faith in the innate entrepreneurial spirit of all men and you can quickly spot his belief in individual agency buried within today’s right wing bludgeon against social welfare and national health care. Looking through the lens of modern day Republicans, how did Smith’s optimistic line of thinking become so petty and mean? (I’m inserting my own value system here; maybe Smith’s argument remains a bulletproof rejection of government aid?)

It’s tough to grapple with a text that contains so many tempting parallels when the landscape is completely different. Smith rhapsodizes about the pin factory and the tailor. Today we have Wal-Mart and ConAgra.