wiggolation

DJ Soul Jah and gang from Japan spinning at Rain.

Shea Stadium, Home of the New York Mets.

Today was great--I did one of those childhood things and rode my Pee-Wee Herman beach cruiser all around Brooklyn all day. I got a nice sunburn on top of my sunburn from Coney Island Sunday. Good thing I've got white Irish skin to bear it all. Well, I set out wanting to find an all-water route to Asia, I mean, Flushing, and at best got a lung full of humid, dirty air. But boy was it fun. I learned two things today about Brooklyn: One, there's no way in hell the pipe dream of commuting to work by bike is going to pan out and, Two, there's a lot of freakin' ethnic food in Brooklyn. Not to mention cemeteries, Irish pubs, Pakistani and Indian music shops. It's a colorful spread of humanity out here.


Main Street, Flushing, Queens (near my school).

Coney Island.


Da hood.


Da hood again.


More of da hood.

Celebrity Spotting
Last night we went out for Marcin's last hurrah. We met up at a bar called 'Joey's' in the East Village and found none other than Nicole Kidman sitting in it. I of course took plenty of time to order my drink as the view from the bar was ideal gazing ground. She looked very beautiful. At one point she laughed out loud and her laugh sounded just like it did in the movies, that rather high-pitched lovely girly laugh.

Later she asked me why I was waiting so long to ask her if she wanted a drink. I told her I was in the middle of a heady chat about the future of Polish photography and she'd have to wait.

Well, that last part is not really true. But the rest is.

First nice day in NYC in ages. It's been so muggy it's felt like 90 or so every day. Today though it's sunny and breezy and not too humid. That, combined with the variety of street vendors and the food market outside my door, makes for a good scene here in the new homestead, Brooklyn.

Otherwise everything has been dedicated to making an empty apartment into a home of some sort. Went out to IKEA and made a lot of purchases I can't afford. Still, it'll be nice to have furniture. Sitting, eating, and reading on the floor is fun for about a day or so.

The building I'm in is pretty old so there are not a lot of electrical outlets and we've had to improvise and get acrobatic with extension cords and power strips. It's going to be fun trying to get all the stereo junk and computer junk and TV junk plugged in, if even possible. The super said not to be surprised if the power goes out often, especially if we have more than a couple electric appliances turned on. So much for blender drinks! Gone are the days of multiple computer peripheries on at once. This is roughin' it. Argh. Well, at least I can still watch Samurai Saturdays on IFC.

One of these days I've got to get down to planning some units for the beginning of the semester. I have to report to school on Sept. 2nd and I begin teaching on Sept. 8th. I figure most of my planning will have to be flexible since I still don't know much about my classes yet. There was some talk about me teaching the higher level ESL students this year but I haven't heard anything official on that. I may end up with the beginning and intermediate levels again. Either way I think I'll be able to work with each group. I feel I can offer more as a teacher after taking the learning disabilities and phonetics and phonology classes this summer. Now that I think of it I don't know if I'll be able to do anything close to extensive planning until I meet my class the first week of school. Moreover, last year I had only a small number of students the first two weeks. Either way it's going to be better this year, at least as far as the controlled, teacher variables go. Who know what the students will be like.

It's now back to making room for the delivery men on Tuesday.

A New Home in Brooklyn

Moved house and aged a few years in the process. What hell! Never, ever move. It’s the worst self-torture going, I swear. It was just T and I moving all our junk from Manhattan to Williamsburg. A third person would have made a huge difference, and though I got some nice offers to help all were from people who had to work the day I had to move. I never really appreciated what the term ‘3 floor walk-up apartment’ really meant until about 48 hours ago….

Anyway, everything is pretty cool in the new flat. There was some crap I had to deal with when getting some guys down the block to deliver my new stove and fridge, but most everything else is working out fine. I dig the bigger place and the cleanliness of the apartment. We’ve got a lot set up already but there are a good few furnishings to buy and have delivered from IKEA. Key word there being ‘delivered’, as in ‘that you can put in the bedroom, sir, thank you very much’. No more moving for me for AT LEAST a year. I don’t care who’s moving; I’m giving the shit up. My body aches like a mofo….

As for the area things are pretty cool too. Although we spent most of today and yesterday indoors unpacking and setting up, we got to head over to Bedford Avenue and enjoy some bevies and have some dinner. It’s a nice neighborhood we’re in, and it’s so different from the Upper West Side. Things here seem much more laid-back, even slow or ‘on hold’. Not surprisingly we found a beer garden, the first I’ve seen in NYC. I feel a lot less stress now that I’m off the island. At the moment I’m sitting here with all the windows open and can hear almost dead silence outside. If I were at 91st and Broadway it’d be sirens, horns, drunks yapping outside Carmine’s, and planes overhead….

There are also a lot of shops that we passed by that seem interesting—music shops, clothes shops, hard-to-know-what-they’re-sellin’ shops. They seem to be everywhere you look. And I ate the tastiest bagel I think I ever had today at ‘The Bagel Store’ on Bedford. Not a bad start. To boot the garden was having 3 dollar Coronas. Yeah, Brooklyn’s all right…

As soon as I’m able to walk without soreness again I’m going to explore some more. Till then it’s water and R&R.

Hello, Brooklyn.

PS The final for Phonetics and Phonology was pretty tough though less so than the midterm. As for Learning dis/Abilities I still haven't heard from the instructor. Haven't heard from her since before the blackout. Spooky.

I just love the student residence culture sometimes: I just picked up two desks/computer tables and a record player for 50 bucks! Echo and the Bunnymen and the old crackles never sounded so sweet.

The phonetic transcription stuff is taking longer than I thought it would. It's interesting work though. The voice recorder and the software that came with it work great. After listening over and over and over to the recorded speech in slow mode you start to freak out a little, as if you were in a horror movie in which the audio starts to sound slow and dreamlike. Anyway, I ended up not wanting to wait till Marcin came out last night and went instead down to the front desk of my building and interviewed the guy who works the desk. He's from the Philippines and is pretty funny. He laughed throughout the entire dialogue. If I can just finish this thing today I can rest a little easier going into the exam tomorrow. But it'll take about five more hours if I work straight.

Otherwise on the Ovation channel, 'the arts network', there was an hour-long documentary on the life and times of Frank McCourt. Pretty interesting guy. High school teacher in NYC, writer, Irish expat.

Finally, a real sporting event in Illinois! It's this Sunday, and not to be missed....

Picked up a digital voice recorder to use in my ESL classes and in my Phonetics and Phonology class, for which I have to record the speech of nonnative speakers of English and later transcribe what they say. Anyway, it's a neat toy. You can download all the data to your PC, edit it, burn copies, etc.

It just dawned on me that you could use such a device to document oral agreements between renters and landlords!! A little late in my case, but there's always next time....

Groove is a step back in time, back to the rave days and 'alternative' and new wave music. Pretty darn funny.

IFC rocks.

Fiat lux!

Well, the blackout of '03 was not really as exciting as someone in Chicago said it looked on TV. Go figure.

I was in the computer lab at the College polishing a final paper for my LD class when everything went dead--computers, lights, my cigar. I figured shit would be back on in no time but after about fifteen minutes we got word that the outage was city-wide. I thought it was a terrorist attack. Well, I thought it could be anyway.

So a friend and I walked around the College for a bit before being asked to leave the building. 'But what about my LD class and paper?' Well, everything was cancelled as the building was being evacuated. Not to mention it got dark fast. To make a long story short I ended up at my friends' new apartment where we fried some shrimp and drank Presidente and shot the shit from their rooftop.

The best part of it all was watching the sun set behind the dark cityscape of midtown Manhattan: all dark, real country dark. That was cool.

The scene felt a little eerie and creepy at times but we felt safe ten floors up looking down on the crowded, lightless streets, beer in hand.

OK, this is awesome. ONL is covering the major classics in Europe, the Tour of Spain (daily, live!), and the NYC Championship race and the San Fran Grand Prix. How freaking cool is that? (The ONL cycling schedule is here.)

I think I might actually appear on the NYC race coverage as my putrid white flesh was to be seen fixed all damn day right by the start/finish, and I kept putting my big head in the camera when Chris Horner was being interviewed by OLN. Really, I was just trying to get a good photo! If OLN has good editors, they cut me out. 'Try to get rid of that annoying white guy with the digital camera and backpack. Who does he think he is, in there without a press pass?'

That'll make two times I will have gotten on TV. The other being on St. Patrick's Day in Prague. But that's another very Guinnessy story....

What a fun Learning Disabilities class today. No, that's not a bad attempt at a joke. We had a debate with four different teams in front of a mock board of education. The groups were divided up into the four areas of learning disabilities we studied this summer: The Medical Model, The Information Processing Model, The Socio-cultural Model, and The Socio-constructivist Model. The group I was in, the Info Process Model, won. That was fun. We really got into it and had it out with all the other groups, pointing out their faults and our strengths, of course. It reminded me of C-SPAN when they show the British Parliament fops attacking each other back and forth. Good fun for sure, although some of the people in class were taking things a little too seriously; you always seem to get a few of those types. I think they must be the students from Jersey. They're the same ones who struggle to navigate their SUVs through Manhattan. They just stick out.

I think I'm going to do more debates in my ESL classes this year. They're great for conversation practice and most people get pretty charged up over certain issues. Of course you have to be selective when you pick topics for debate. As Dr. Schaeffer used to say, 'Don't talk to me in your papers about abortion, Jesus, or your significant others!' I second that one, mein Herr.

That's one thing off the list of things to do anyway.

Also: the instructor read our response papers to Gattaca and decided she was going to compile the most salient bits from a number of the papers and make a journal article out of them. The paper will be about the use of film in learning disabilities education. Now I knew there had to be a way to get published without really trying, but this is too easy.

Now it's time to call about fifteen different companies to inform them of my address change. Then on to phonetics homework, which should take me into the wee hours.

Tuesday night couldn't come fast enough....

This last week of school looks to be pretty damn busy. By next Monday I will have

--recorded and transcribed ten minutes' worth of a nonnative English speaker's speech and made a full phonetic analysis of its patterns and characteristics and qualities;
--completed a fourth and final phonetics homework assignment;
--tried in earnest to pass a bloody hellish phonetics and phonology final to salvage a decent grade in the course;
--compiled notes for a graded debate in learning disabilities; and
--written a final paper on trends in learning disabilities.

Somehow, while donig all that, I'll have to

--rent a truck to move my junk when I move next week (minutes after the phonology final);
--buy and transport a replacement bed for my soon-to-be-old apartment (when I got a futon I momentarily put the bed that was assigned to my room in the corridor, and someone stole it! 'I luv NYC');
--pack all my shit (!!); and
--clean my new and soon-to-be-old apartments.

Good thing there's coffee in the world.

Next Tuesday night it'll be more like, 'Good thing there's beer in the world.'

The last week of summer school is here. Four more classes and two papers and one final exam to go. Can't wait.

Unfortunately the final is next Monday. Most profs seems to adhere to the unwritten rule that you don't give a final on a Monday if the semester ends on a Monday. For me this is not a problem, and could be a blessing in that I'll have the weekend to review some of the material, but for a few friends of mine it's a big deal as they are taking off to exotic locales before then. I knew there were benefits to staying at home over the break. I knew it.

I've had the habit lately of staying up late, till about 2 or 3 A.M., every night. It is such a quiet time here in the big city, and I get an amazing amount of reading and homework done. The problem is of course that I will have to switch back to the 6:30 A.M. wake-up every week day, starting September 2nd.

This summer has been pretty lame as far as summer fun and relaxation go. I mean, the trip to Maine was excellent. I had some good days out there with Jim. But it has been more or less grinding away at school work since then. I will have to scrap my plans to go to D.C. for a weekend as I am too busy with the move looming over me. It's expensive as hell getting into a decent apartment in NYC. I basically have had to bury my last three checks deep in the cellar vault. It hasn't been easy. Well, I plan to make the most of my ten days off before school starts. Even if it means furnishing and 'decorating' my new place, it'll be better than not being on vacation wishing I were. ('Decorating' for me consists of putting up dog-eared posters of rock and roll wastoids and has-beens.)

At least I'm on track with the moving process: I paid my up-front, moving-in monies, called the gas and electric people, bought a welcome mat that says 'Go Away', and am armed with various toxic chemicals with which I will score my new home before I actually bring my junk over there....

And this, dear reader, is your humble narrator's big thrill of summer 2003. The 'big o'.

Giving Friendster a go. A friend made me try it. Really!

Well, the idea is kind of neat. With any luck I'll hook up with cyclists in Brooklyn.

I heard Requiem for a Dream was a good film but I thought it was boring and contrived. It reminded me of Magnolia and Trainspotting, two films I liked a lot. Requiem just didn't do anything for me. About the only thing I dug about this film was that it is set in Brooklyn. Call me biased.

Otherwise it is time for me to start packing my things up so that I can move as smoothly as possible next Tuesday. I don't have a ton of stuff but it's still hard to know where to begin. It's not going to be fun moving the same week as my classes finish up and final papers and such are due. And then there're finals to take. Then there are all the loan sharks and hitmen to call. Gotta let 'em know I'm moving so they can come pay their routine visits in the middle of the night, brass knuckles in hand....

On the bright side at least I got a place to move to.

Finally, after a few challenging weeks of calling real estate agents and brokers, surfing craigslist, and running around all over the greater New York metropolis, I signed a lease and have a place to live for the next year.

I'll be living in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood of Brooklyn, in East Williamsburg (see a map). It's a respectable one-bedroom apartment with almost double the space of my current digs on the Upper West Side. It's right next to an elementary school, just off bustling Graham Avenue, and near the subway. I'll be closer to Flushing, and with the subway trains just down the street I'll be shaving almost a half hour off my commute to work, which is currently over an hour. I'll be pretty far from Columbia now, but that has its advantages too....

But the main thing is that the area is much more attractive to me than a lot of Manhattan. It's just a different vibe out there in Brooklyn. Of course it's cheaper, which helps. I was a little wary of moving too close to certain 'up-and-coming' and 'hip' areas lest I found myself living among the gentrification set. I'm happy to say that where I'll be living for the next year or so it's pretty down-to-earth. (For more on what's 'cool' and what's not, read this. Couldn't have said it better myself.)

Besides, there's a 24/7 Dunkin' Donuts across the street!

Once again the Allstars proved they can really rock the blues. For almost three hours the boys from Mississippi played a number of extended, improvisational jams in between tracks from their four studio albums. Their no-frills but powerful performances are a great break from many of today's overdone, flashy shows. They remind you of what rock and roll is about--authentic blues delivered through blistering guitar-driven rock.

That they jammed at the Bowery Ballroom made it all the better. It's a compact but gorgeous venue not unlike the larger Aragon Ballroom in Chicago.

Blast off... we're still here



Watched Gattaca for the first time for my Learning Disabilities class. I liked it, though I'd heard it was 'boring'. I'm not really impressed with most sci-fi (Kubrik excepted, and the first Star Wars--call me old) with all its blah blah blah BS and cliched spacey, sterile, robotic, ET crap. Just not my bag, baby. In fact almost every sci-fi I've ever seen has been pretty unimpressive.

Anyway Gattaca was cool to watch in the context of learning disabilities and special education. The great difficulty that Vincent (Ethan Hawke) has to overcome to attain his goal is a handy metaphor for many special ed kids who often grow up being told directly and otherwise to forget about aiming high in life and give up trying to be 'normal'. Vincent's determination helps him reach the stars, literally. That kind of thing. But I believe in that stuff in the end, so I liked identifying bits here and there that paralleled some of the shit LD kids have to deal with. There was a lot of Hollywoody crap too, but I was able to enjoy the idealistic aims of the film.

The only thing I hate about a lot of films and books though is that there is often a real sense of unoriginality. I mean, the old, worn-out aim of blasting off into another world is just so depressingly dead. What's wrong with this world? OK, bad question. But I still think it's more fascinating than that great freezing vacuum of blackness on high that our government and TV want us to believe is 'waiting to be conquered' and 'the great unknown'. I'm not AGAINST space exploration, but I see it as a great scientifc endeavor, and nothing more than that. I have never held any belief that there was anything out there, and I still don't.

As for the freaks at Gattaca Corp., don't let the Ubermenchen win! Vive diversity.

--------------

Meanwhile, while sitting in the park in New York City...

Pro-cycling in Manhattan? Caught on...my digital?

Some photos I took at the New York City Cycling Championship got published on www.cyclingnews.com!! (To view them you'll need to scroll down the page a bit after you link to it.)


The early break, that would stay away till the end, is chased hard by the peleton.

A big thrill for me as I have wanted to get into cycling journalism since I can remember. They're not the worst photos I've ever seen either. And they were taken with my modest 2.0 megapixel Sony Cybershot. I think I could take even better ones with a real camera. Who knows, maybe I'll look into buying a real one over winter. Something to think about anyway....


Pulling the peleton up to the break--in vain.

So much for staying home and studying!


Nothstein, Antonio Cruz (US Postal), and Horner trying to shake the rest of the break.

The race itself was pretty cool, and very fast, hovering between 29 and 30 mph for the 100K. Those guys are awesome. The course was basically a figure 8, just near the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. There was a good-quality field, including a few guys from ONCE, the top Spanish team--and world number two after US Postal. Then there was the winner, Marty Nothstein (Navigators), an Olympic Gold medallist on the track (he's transformed himself into a top roadster quickly). Listening to him do post-race interviews he seemed to be a really nice guy.


After a big effort, Horner cools down in the rain.

Chris Horner (Team Saturn) was also there and riding hard all day. He's so strong. (Bobby Julich once told me a funny story about how Horner left European cycling because his French team directors wouldn't let him have Doritos or McDonald's as they are terribly strict about race weight of their riders!) Well, he's doing just fine here in the US, and probably making six figures. Wonder if he'd have gone far in the grand tours of Euroland though.


A deligthed Marty Nothstein. "$10,000 for a day's work? I'll take it."

Anyway, the day was superb weather-wise until the very last seconds of the race, when the skies opened up and it rained super hard for about a half hour straight. Unbelievable! I got a good soaking and partially destroyed my Phonology textbook and notes, which were in my watter-logged backpack. Oops! I just couldn't pass up the chance to snap close-ups like that. Call me stupid.

Funny thing was I didn't even plan to take that many photos at the race, and I certainly didn't plan on sending them off to get published. But as soon as I began taking them I thought I should try to get them published somewhere.


The podium.

Yes, Tyler Hamilton (CSC, fourth in the TdF this year) was there too. He looked good up in the press box chatting with Paul Sherwen. It was exciting to be standing a couple of feet from these guys, after having watched them on TV for 21 days straight as they toured France. Tyler took off in the middle of the race but it was neat he came out. He couldn't race of course as he fractured his collar bone back in stage one of the TdF. (I knew he was a small guy but man did he look tiny. Those guys look so muscular and big in the photos and on TV--and they are certainly as fit as can be--but in person they seem really thin and small. Of course they are arguably some of the fittest athletes around.)


Chris Horner talking to OLN. "Yeah, I think Doritos make you faster!"

All in all it was a great day for US cycling. Can't wait till next August. Maybe I'll have real camera then and sell some photos!

Ha, ha, ha

King of Comedy. Dark portrayal of a struggling comedian (De Niro) who just has to get on prime time to show the world he's a genius comic. Thing is he's terrible.

It's interesting to see De Niro in such an embarrassing role. Very much the opposite from anything else he's done. I still think Sandra Bernhard is the ugliest person in film. She so raunchy, but perfect for the role of obsessive stalker.

Rehired

Today I got the letter I was waiting for; I've been rehired to teach at the same school in Flushing. One less thing to worry about. Actually I have pretty positive thoughts about teaching in Queens a second year. Not to mention that it'll look better on my resume and be better for me as I'm already settled in at the school. This summer I've sometimes ALMOST missed the place.

If I could just nail down a flat now I'd be just busy with summer classes and life would be fine.

Don't watch Little Odessa. Painfully boring and long. First Tim Roth movie I didn't like.

And what about those crazy Finns?

'The Durango 45 purred away real horrorshow'

Spanking the Monkey rather twisted but funny. Otherwise I bought Clockwork Orange on DVD and watched it for the twentieth time. This movie gets better and better. The audio is so much more an integral part of the movie when it comes through a good surround sound system.

Otherwise the apartment hunt continues. Saw three places yesterday, one on the Upper East Side and two in Brooklyn. The first broker I met asked where I was from and when I said Chicago area he said he was from Oak Lawn. Small world. It was good to get out and walk through Brooklyn neighborhoods. Williamsburg is a neat area with lots of good restaurants, bars, cafes, bookstores. I may take one of the two places I looked at there, assuming I can get them. One is near the East River, the other near Flushing Ave. and Broadway on Graham. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but at this point I'm no too picky and would be happy with a bustop shelter, as long as I could rig an espresso machine up somehow.

At the end of it all it'll be great to live in a real neighborhood again. The Upper West Side has nothing much to offer me anymore, seeing as I'm not a middle-aged shopping fanatic with too much money in his bank account. Though it'll be hard not to miss Central Park.