Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Philadelphia Freedom: The Mostly Photographic Version
This is going to be a long one. I’ve got enough photos from my trip to Philly to remind me of a lot of damned good times, and what the hell, I’ma gonna share the joy. I’ll try to organize this in the order in which I saw and did things, so you can trod the ancient colonial whatzis right along with me. Just act like you know what you’re doing. They eat tourists like you for breakfast, I’m told.
I arrived late friday night and just got to the goddamn hotel, right smack in the center of center city, which is a fairly, um, central location. I awoke at leisure and breakfasted - stupidly and expensively - at the hotel, and then wandered the streets for a few hours just refamilarizing myself with the city, which was a lot of fun and very relaxing. Among my stops was City Hall, a magnificent beaux-arts chateau, where I took several crappy out of focus photos of gorgeous architectural details and this cool shot of the outside of an abandoned (I think) subway entrance:
I also found this obscure message set somehow into the very pavement of the very streets down the road a ways:
... so, you make sure you do that, okay? (I took plenty more photos too, and visited the old Wanamaker’s for an organ recital too, but I won’t bother you with all that. We have places to go, man!)
That afternoon I got back to the Reading Terminal Market, which is a nice old food-boutique sort of reminiscent of the Farmer’s Market in LA, but indoors and with better architecture. Outside the market, I encountered this easy rider:
I also bought a disappointing cheesesteak, but I knew I’d do better later on in the trip so I didn’t let it bring me down. Finally it was time to nap, lave my filthy self, and get ready for T-Con. The festivities were being held out in the Northern Liberties district, a decent but do-able walk from my hotel. The stroll took me east through chinatown and the historic district, and then north through a great neighborhood, a fairly vacant industrial area, and back into a happenin’ zone that hadn’t even existed back when I were a lad. Here’s some shots from that journey:
Pungently reminiscent for me - a genuine steam grate, which was steamy and great:
In the window of the Trocadero Club (I think that was what it was, anyway): Dirty Barbies!
Melted into the pavement out near the river, evidence that Erich Von Daanken was right - Freemasons Rule the World:
A pylon of the Ben Franklin Bridge, apparently last painted by Ben himself, while on a serious madiera bender:
Past the bridge, in the creepy industrial emptiness zone (CIEZ), this mural leaped out at me and gave me hope, and the jimjams:
I knew I was getting close when I found this directive scrawled on a security door, pointing me in the correct direction:
At the edge of the N.L. neighborhood, several of these cheerful handbills urged me to guard my purity, or something:
And thus at last I found myself at the startlingly hospitable North Lounge and Lanes or something like that, a clean and pleasant land full of enormous balls and $3.50 pints of PA’s own Yuengling Lager. The hostesses were gracious and gorgeous and the company - honestly, in a post this snarky I can’t even describe it. Bloggers are nice folk, present company excepted, and the 50 or so of us who made it to T-Con ‘08 restored my faith in humanity - and I hadn’t even realized I lost it. I’m not going to troll through all your names, but if I spoke with you for more than 30 seconds, I would have your baby. Or your sandwich. Probably your sandwich, but regardless, you guys rock.
T-Conners, en situ:
the place was pretty dark so this was a long exposure, which has the benefit of actually depicting things as they appeared to me - vague and ethereal. Please note the ghost of Jen, from Run Jen Run (hit up my blogroll if you want to find her) - the primary event organizer and a truly great humanitarian. Jen, thanks!
The lanes themselves:
it was pretty cool to see people bowling in Tron. ‘Nuff said. Or at any rate, I’m unable to say more. There’s some kind of nondisclosure thing.
The next morning I sure as hell was not going to the hotel buffet again so I wandered around for about 90 minutes looking for a decent breakfast - the one I’d wanted in Reading Market was closed (those damned amish and their sundays!). After covering a few miles of cityscape looking for something to eat, I wound up just returning to Reading for a ginormous glass of carrot juice. Actually, that really hit the spot.
I had to change hotels after two nights (a priceline exclusive!) and found myself down at the gritty foot of Penn’s Landing, just off the Delaware River. After checking in I arranged to meet Billmo, with whom I’d lived for two years in college, at a deli near his house down in West Philly on the other side of campus. On my way to the train that would hie me thence, I found these charming fellows out selling barstools:
This was also along the way, on lower north 2nd - a colonial horse trough, with which I’ve taken certain hue and saturation liberties. Hey, give me liberties or give me Yuengling, or, preferably, both, as our founders valiantly slurred into their inkwells…
A surprisingly quick train ride and I was back on campus, where I wasn’t too impressed with the bookstore or its offerings but did rather like the gate that has been cast for the new Addams Fine Arts building - here’s a detail:
The rest of campus was more interesting to me than to you, probably, so I’ll spare you the exhaustive photocoverage. However, quicker than I’d anticipated I got out to 43rd and Locust, where I rejoined my past at Koch’s deli.
While waiting for Bill to arrive I loitered outside the small commercial strip, where I nabbed this shot of one of Philly’s “lifers in tile” mural-memorials:
Koch’s: that place is truly the best. No chairs, but plenty of samples constantly being passed around on sheets of wax paper, the highest quality deli meats, and the best, most substantial sandwiches I’ve ever had. A lovely young woman had the misfortune of being tapped by the manager to serve as cold-cut distributrix ("Hey Blondie! Where are ya? Hot ham, get over here and pass it around, beautiful!” - eventually she went outside to call her mom just to avoid the abuse). I got brisket with onions and pepperjack on a kaiser roll, with pickles and real deli soda,
which I enjoyed mightily on Bill (and wife Mande)’s lovely back porch. I also got a t-shirt, which I discovered was too small right after lunch; I went back to exchange it and got three more meat samples, a cheese sample, and some pickles for the road. I tell ya - Koch’s is the place!
Bill and Mande and I went then from Koch’s to the foot of Chestnut Street, for Belgian beers at Eulogy (which was great, especially the third pitcher of Gulden Draak - a beer I loved even before I was already buzzed on other very good beers) and a stroll along the waterfront to look at war ships from the last century or two. Finally we re-boarded the conveyance and went back up to No.Libs for supper at Standard Tap, a real pubbly pub with big steaks and tasty beers on tap, even if the staff was unable, when asked directly, to tell us where the beers came from. By now it was getting late and B&M dropped me at my hotel, where I crashed profoundly and motionlessly till the dawn.
Upon arising I breakfasted enormously on the free buffet (yay free breakfast buffet!) and took the hotel courtesy van back to my old hotel where I caught a train to the airport. I wound up traveling 11 hours that day, which was palliated by the following factors: I had free drink tickets out the wazoo and damn well used’em; I shaved 2-1/2 hours off my connection in Chicago by getting bumped to a sooner flight; and my flight attendant from Chicago to Oakland was probably the nicest, most professional, most attentive, and prettiest by which I’ve ever had the pleasure of being serviced. I got home before dark and was able to help put Z to bed.
Today was a decent “day back at work” sort of day, with baked goods and cognizable accomplishments. And now it’s late so I declare this vacation recapped, but in summary: TequilaCon ‘08: excellent. Philadelphia in general: awesome and getting steadily better. Old college friends: ever close to my heart. Koch’s deli: as good as it ever was, and that’s saying a lot. New Bloggy friends: come on guys, you know what you mean to me. I love you, guys. Don’t make me cry on my own damn blog.
The end.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Mix It Up
Hey welcome back me, I’ve been to a blogger meetup in philly and damn but I had a good time with it. I’ll have photos of buildings and graffiti and rust stains and all that chuckly sort of thing soon enough (ie, once I’ve gotten around to it), but now I’m sort of tired and just want to slap a new post up here so I can sleep easy tonight. Lucky for me, I’ve got here a letter I wrote to the local paper about a story they recently ran, which I had sort of intended originally to make into a blog post. And just that easily, it is one! Enjoy and watch this space for Photodelphia, upcoming soon....
Partly, it was because it was a physical thing you’d made yourself, a companion that had been with you through the great times that made the mix special, an inextricable association of specific perfect moments with that particular plastic case, that handwriting on that label.... the musical aspects became confounded with the historical aspects, all of it somehow investing the cassette itself with an actual personality. The mix tape was, in a sense, as much about the tape as it was about the mix.
In 1991 I celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time with a close group friends whose weddings I’ve witnessed, children I’ve cradled, lives I’ve shared ever since. It was an extravagantly gluttonous affair, a great, raucous, soul-satisfying feast. We started having these Thanksgivings together every year, starting in 1991. Funksgiving ‘91.
That was the mix I produced as an honorary soundtrack to what I knew would be a momentous event. I really worked hard on it and it came out great - all the segues and builds combining seamlessly into 90 perfect minutes of auditory entertainment for the best dinner party of the year. I gave a copy to our hosts and listened to my own copy for years thereafter, annually adding a new edition each Thanksgiving day, all painstakingly executed, each a proud achievement in its own right: Heal This Chicken ‘92, Gallinaceous Boogie ‘93, Funky Drumstick ‘94, Chipotle Salsa, Hot Yams, Savory....
Ten years on: the medium of ferric oxide had grown moribund, almost irrelevant. I would hand someone a tape and they’d no longer be set up to play it. Though I’d craft new tapes as a gift from my heart, they were increasingly seen as something quaint and pitiful. With Oven Ready 2001, the series staggered to a halt.
Now I’ve got more music than I’ve ever had before, freed from analog fetters and the clunky inconvenience of physical objectification. My iPod holds more of a library than I’d possibly have been able to manage on LPs and cassettes, and I can slap together mixes in moments, adjusting song orders and sound levels with the click of a mouse instead of painstaking cue-ups and re-recordings. The process is now so simple that I no longer save the effort for Thanksgiving, and make new mixes all year long. The Thanksgiving mix is now just my current “on the go” playlist, celebratorily renamed.
I’d built some great new playlists, too, both holiday-oriented and more general, but when I moved my e-library to a new external drive I accidentally ruined them all. Dozens of cleverly named, hard-driving mixes were suddenly rendered empty and null. I didn’t even mind much - they were too easily built to merit mourning. As I deleted from my hard drive the titles that now referred to vacant shells, I thought back to some of those dusty old cassettes I still keep archived in a shopping bag in my closet, persevering, unplayed, in spite of the technoglitches that negated newer, less storied, playlists. The music is still great, though by now a little dated… I can’t quite put my finger on it but it seems that, in the midst of musical plenty the likes of which I could never have imagined ten years ago, something has been lost. I know where it is, but I don’t think I’ll ever really get it back.
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