I had good practice with my “getting upset at people” skills today.

This lady in her car almost sideswiped me on my bicycle on Oxford St as I was coming back from Harvard Square. I recall a minivan behind me who was being very friendly, waiting until there was room enough to pass me. I recall hearing her car behind the minivan, honking at the minivan because of their patience. The minivan passes at a friendly distance. Then she passes me with about 6 inches of room.

She pulled over further down to pick someone up. She was a big woman, mid-30s, in a grimy t-shirt and a black hoodie, smoking a cigarette. I went up to her and said “Excuse me, did you notice that you almost ran me over back there?” She was very bitchy, she said something about how bicyclists better get out of the middle of the road where cars are supposed to be.

I could tell she knew how close she had gotten to me, but she was convinced she owned the place. I could have told her about the law, but she seemed more than willing to flout it. I could have pointed out how narrow the street was, and how we all have to be extra careful, but she was not a woman of logic. I could have said “Look, regardless of what you believe just happened, will you please watch out for cyclists in the future?”, but she had no heart to take this to.

I said none of these things. I stood there, shocked that she was so rude, frozen. I said something like “I was over by the side of the road…” trailing off in a pleading way, hoping at least to tap into some tiny part of her emotions, and she was like “Yeah, whatever, you were way out in the middle, I don’t have time for this.” We went our separate ways.

She’s in a car, and I’m on a flimsy bicycle. In the eyes of the law we are equal travelers of the road, yet there will never be equality. But lets get to the meat of this encounter—I don’t want to rant on about bicycles vs. cars, because it might as well be Red Sox vs. Yankees, Kerry vs. Bush. And I’ll never see her again.

In confronting her, I specifically wanted to practice being upset with people. I’ve enrolled myself in a self-taught course where I try to get yelled at every once in a while and see how well I handle it. I’ve always known I’m not very good at it, unless being unresponsive and not thinking on my feet is somehow a desirable reaction. What I learned about and paid very close attention to today is this kind of physiological reaction I get when people are really rude with me. I lock up and then, at some point, this odd shiver sets in for a few minutes. You know, that nervousness that paralyzes the mind. Afterward, I go over the situation in my mind a few more times, thinking of what I could have said, etc. before I lay it to rest.

So — my question to you: how do I train myself to skip over the nervousness and get on with the show?

Spent the weekend near Keene, NH with Karl’s family. We went to the Pumpkin Festival in downtown Keene, which last year won the Guinness record for the number of lit pumpkins at once. This year they were trying to beat their own record of 28,952, but they came a little short at 27,584. Still, you’d better believe that’s a lot of pumpkins. Below, this is just one of five or six large scaffolding rigs they had around the town square. Beyond that, there were many long rows and circles of 12 foot high scaffolding rigs wherever they would fit, plus pumpkins lining the streets, pumpkins in the medians, next to parking meters and in the gazebo, all of them lit at 8:30pm by a volunteer staff of about 1,000 people.

Flowers sell. And this is what I’m realizing. Having just paid $135 to the Brickbottom Artists Association to hawk a pile of amatuer photographs at the 2004 Brickbottom Open Studios in November, I’m suddenly very sensitive to what sells and what doesn’t.

If I’m to break even in this show, I need to sell out. I need to sell the fuck out in the most unimaginative ways possible. I’m talking sunflowers, pumpkins, snow-capped mountains, and the cutest fucking New England foliage photos you’ve ever seen. Whatever it takes. Huge oak trees, old stone walls, picket fences, a quaint rusty sign by the highway. Wicker baskets. I’m putting out all the stops, muthafuckahs.

Let me tell you about the colors. They are going to be bright and vivid as all hell. These colors don’t exist in the real world, because the real world is dark and grim and full of shit. That’s why my photographs will sell: they’ll tap the deepest ideals and hopes you had before time and sun and war dulled them down. They’ll hit you over the head like a 95 load box of Tide. The 500 other artists’ work may look pale and interesting, but pale and interesting won’t sell shit. My photos will jump off the fucking walls like a cheetah. Maybe I’ll even have some cheetahs in them. I’ll definitely have monkeys. I’ll be your goddamn monkey if I can get out of it with my hundred-and-thirty-five bucks back.

And I’ll tell you a secret, too. Just so you know. There’s no room for subtlety in this art show. No room for nuance—I don’t have time for that and neither do you. You’re too busy shopping, maundering around looking for a little hope in this dark age. After this, if you don’t buy anything here, you’re off to Wal-Mart next where they probably have better photographs in better frames for a lot cheaper than what I’m selling.

There’s a good article in the Oct 18th issue of The New Yorker by David Owen called “Green Manhattan”. It’s about the environmental economies of scale that arise from the unique level of density in Manhattan. Owen presents a cogent argument that New York City, per capita, is the greenest city in America: people walk, bike, and subway instead of driving. The density means everyone’s energy bills are lower because apartment buildings are so much more energy efficient than individual homes. Manhattan’s geography altogether prevents parking lots and sprawl (he compares it to Houston).

Under his argument, a city with lots of green space (ala. Washington DC) is technically a bad thing—it creates a barrier between people and it spreads the city out more, making bikes and public transit less effective. Wide roads (DC) induce people to drive more while narrower ones (NYC) encourage public transit use.

I believe people need green space for their own sanity, and while he may be right about the barriers they create, he should consider the stressed-out New Yorker’s need to breathe and be in nature (however artificial) once in a while. New York is so dirty on the street level, it’s only when you step back that the environmental benefits become clear.

And there is the possibility—though we can’t rely on it—of much cleaner long-distance personal transportation in the future. Simply using energy to get around is not necessarily a bad thing: if we could drive around on wind power alone, we’d be just fine. The problem is that the production and delivery of energy is such a destructive and inefficient process today.

Check it out if you get a chance.

This movie is the ride of the year! Michael Mann has outdone himself. He understands the whole formula of an action movie, yet it doesn’t feel formulaic. But all the elements are there: he has deep characters. He creates a continuum of bad guys, most of whom you can feel some sort of sympathy for. He has beautiful cinematography and colors and music, intensifying that grit and heat of LA—the ugly starkness of it, the anonymity of the big city. He has the dynamics worked out. This is not just a wall-to-wall blood and guts movie. There are long discussions, lots of strategy, lots of contemplation and character development as suspension builds, and a few violent outbursts here and there as it releases. It’s excellent. Go see it.

Does Starbucks hire an illustrator to visit area stores and fill the chaulkboards with cute pictures of cinnamon buns and sidewalk cafe-style drink menus? Or do they distribute a set of stencils for each season from headquarters for store managers to place over the chaulkboard and draw those perfectly fun and scripty letters?
Or maybe it’s not a chaulkboard at all! Maybe it’s just a piece of plastic that comes from the corporate printing office each month, made to look just like a chaulkboard, complete with the quaint faint lines of past scribblings.

There’s too much excellent music in this world that gets overlooked.

An album series idea. Every four months, go through all the waning major label CDs from the preceding quarter that never got off the ground and pull together the gem songs from these albums. The distinction here is that these artists are not indie at all. They all wanted to be hip hop/pop stars, but it just didn’t work out. The music might still be damn good.

possible titles

- Expensive Music by Broke Artists
- It’s a Ms. (for the female artist off-shoot)
- The Best of Unpopular Music (or just Unpop— why isn’t this a popular genre already?)
- Tepid Greats
- Great Artists Without Sunglasses (the cloudy day series)
- Debt Relief
- Solid Pyrite
- Overlooked and Underpaid