Finally got moving around 4 today and walked to the drugstore to get some supplies. Crossing 179th street, I caught a glimpse of one of the towers of the George Washington Bridge, sheathed in white plastic. So after I made my purchases I walked up a block, past the lower vehicle exit of the bus station, to the northwest corner of 179th and St. Nick. I opened my Pepsi and drank it while leaning on the metal railing in front of the solid metal fencing separating me from the Cross-Manhattan Expressway.

It was a distinctly weird sensation. Something about how, if it was the pre-auto days, there would be this herd of people passing below me, making people sounds and kicking up dust. It would feel busy and crowded. But as it was, it felt...something else. "Crowded" seems like the word because there really weren't any people around; "noisy" is accurate but not all-encompassing. Like being in a factory somehow, I guess, like standing up on top of the scaffolding and surveying the floor below, the machines all working away. I don't mean this in a negative sense, exactly. It's just that if there were no cars there, if there were just people, exposed to the elements, and all lined up, waiting to go through a major transportation nexus, I would be noticed, I guess--the guy up there, up on high, status beside the point, I would be a landmark rather than an anomaly. Now most people couldn't even see me with the roofs blocking their views, and with the choked-up tangle of offramps and bridges surrounding my vantage point, I might not have been visible anyway. It's that same sense of barenness, of somehow seeing a hidden process revealed, that I think all of us feel when we're close to a highway but not in a car. It's something I've always loved, but I don't entirely know why. On my one day off from my summer job a few years back, I spent a decent bit of it sitting by a freeway, playing with a yo-yo and watching the cars.

As much as a car can be liberating and energizing--as much as it can convey that sense of openness and possibility you might feel at the start of a journey--there's something fundamentally sad about auto travel, isn't there? Something different from traveling on a train or by foot. Sure, you might be annoyed at your fellow passengers, but they're there, right next to you. You are traveling as a group. Whereas in a car, you're cut off from the people right next to you. Technically, it makes no sense to feel alone when commuting, but we do. We feel alone when we're running errands or coming back from work in a car, in a different way than we might otherwise.

I stood there and I looked at the cars driving away from me, under my feet, and the buses coming off the precarious-looking ramps into the line-up for the bridge out of this state, off this island. I looked at the Express Service mini-buses running to the shopping center, ferrying loads of people from the bus station either to jobs or to shopping, or both. I wondered where I would go if I could, if I was free of committments and all of that. But probably nowhere. Who wants to go to New Jersey, anyway? I mostly just don't respond well to gray weather, I suppose.

Walking back I saw a girl in a plaid skirt with a backpack, coming home from school. I looked across the street and saw a library. It's all the same, isn't it? School, library, corner store, cars, roads, drugstores, video rental, bedrooms, TVs. Sure, the corner stores smell different, and the libraries are more vertical than horizontal--so's everything--and the bedrooms are smaller, and the cars are alien things now. But it's all the same, fundamentally, isn't it? Isn't it? The same as where I came from, the same as where I'm going, the same as everywhere else. Isn't it?

posted by Mike B. at 4:49 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Listening to "I've Got a Theory" from the Buffy musical episode--man, I forgot how good that song is! Xander's witches retreat, the bunnies interlude...man, that's a good song. And somewhere else in the office "Livin' On a Prayer" is playing! Life is good. And now I'm going to go buy a Black Sheep album to make up for having to buy a Godsmack album earlier. It's for work, man...

posted by Mike B. at 4:35 PM 0 comments

Oh, also, we watched most of Father of the Pride last night, which I enjoyed, although the Seigfried & Roy sideplot wasn't quite as amusing as in the last one I saw. (Big Gulp!) Two highlights: the cub...uh, boy...uh, young male lion (pshew) who's distinctly Bobby-from-King-of-the-Hill-ish, sitting in the bathtub, listening to Tori Amos' "Silent All These Years," and an elderly monkey saying "It was as heavy as Kirstie Alley. Ah, that's not fair, she can't help herself. That joke's not right." Very nice.

Also: a very Bender-sounding gazelle, which is always nice.

posted by Mike B. at 11:18 AM 0 comments

Apparently I've taken over the Flagpole reviews page this week, as there are 5 (!) of mine there, all of which I'm actually really happy with. A few notes on 'em:

- Still stand by my Rilo Kiley review despite their mention on Gilmore Girls last night--we all know Lane needs to evolve in her tastes a bit, god bless her. And man, inter-band dating, there's a subject fraught with more intricacies than I'm entirely sure they'll grant. That said, the goodness that is GG was just highlighted by a brief flip over to Veronica Mars afterwards, on which a boy tried to entice young Ms. Mars (I think) by offering her a ride on his boat, where he assured her "the Strokes would be blasting." Dude, so 2001. At least GG is au courant even if it is a bit gauche.

But man, another really good episode, especially in the back half, with a good speech about rockin' from Gil, the kickass cover (although, man, I wouldn't want to be in a band with Sebastian Bach, that dude's got moves, he'd upstage me every time!) with the Hendrix ("yeah, because Hendrix made it an anthem!") solo in the middle, Suki's politics-wife suit and mannerisms (which Miss Clap was immensely amused by), Jackson's concession/acceptance speech preceded by the kiss, etc. The Paris-Rory exchange near the beginning about the three-minute rule was great, too. My viewing companions pointed out that it was actually a pretty common conversation to have in college, you just never saw it on TV.

- Goddamn but I hate Northern State.

- More on Dizzee later. My only regret is that I didn't use the phrase "smells all Pollard-y."

- In listening to the Meow Meow album more (which I've been doing a lot), I realized that the song that rips off "Radio Song" actually becomes an Imperial Teen song, which is awesome.

- May not have made this clear, but I do really like that Ordinary Boys CD, although I guess I shouldn't. Eh.

posted by Mike B. at 10:37 AM 0 comments

ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #021

This morning on the long train ride I decided to go with Blur's The Great Escape, and I decided to skip ahead a bit after "Charmless Man," as I usually listen to that disc on shorter rides and end up stopping after "Fade Away." But goddamn, the back half of that album is really good! I'd totally forgotten. Like, the lyrics in "Mr. Robinson's Quango" are kind of embarassing, but the arrangement is mind-blowing--I sort of want to make people who get all breathless about the Homosexuals listen to that more closely. And there's the chord changes in "Globe Alone," which rocks more than I'd expected, and the noises in "Dan Abnormal," the cute little Stereolabisms of "Yuko and Hiro" (although, again, kind of embarassing lyrics--Damon'd sort of ridden that train a little too far, eh? Or at least after the first four songs on the album), like that. Very nice.

Oh but also I noticed even more wonderfulness in "Country House" that maybe I'll get into later. If yer lucky. But for now I have to go...input...invoices. Awesome.

posted by Mike B. at 10:05 AM 0 comments