.:Colter:.

For the last week I’ve been driving around New England in a rental car, just exploring the northeast. I’ve been to Providence, Cape Cod, Boston, Portland, various points in New Hampshire and Vermont, and Philadelphia so far. Some destinations were of historical importance (Walden Pond, Sleepy Hollow Cemetary), but most were completely random (Woodstock, Vermont). Here are the lessons I’ve learned:

• The roads in and around Boston and Philadelphia actually make less sense and are more frustrating than New York. NY streets are generally grid-like, whereas Philly and Boston are all triangle patterns and medieval-narrow widths. Trying to get from Berklee College of Music to Fenway Park only a few blocks away, was a Griswoldian nightmare of urban circumnavigation. Also, the suburbs feature parkways that give you no place to turn around, and that are so shrouded in shrubbery that you have no idea if a given exit has an underpass or not. You don’t know what will happen. I drove for 15 minutes down a highway before I took a chance on an overpass.
• Massachusetts apparently has laws against gas nozzle latches. So you have to hold the thing the whole time. This actually sucks worse than New Jersey where you’re not allowed to pump your own gas at all.
• Maps of Massachusetts show a “Walden Pond” deep inside an impenetrable fortress of residential streets in the town of Lynn. Needless to say, this is not the Walden Pond you’re looking for. It’s near Concord, which you’d know if you bothered to look it up.
• Moose collisions are a legitimate threat to your vehicular safety in Maine. Mind you, moose collisions kan be pretti nasti.
• Vermont is a lot like northern Arkansas if every town were like Eureka Springs. Seriously I never once saw a vehicle on blocks, major appliances in a yard, or anything that wasn’t disturbingly picturesque. The entire state is like a watercolor painting, or the set of Gilmore Girls.

More observations as they come to me. I should have written this stuff down earlier but the days have been packed. I’m still not sure what to do with the remainder of the week until the car is due back. I think tomorrow I’ll go up to the Catskills and see what happens.

Oh, and I’d also like to give big ups to Red Roof Inns for having THE most comfortable hotel bed I think I’ve ever slept in. And kudos to the desk clerk who gave me the “all-in” upgrade (king size bed plus free wi-fi) despite my expired AAA card, which made the night only slightly more expensive than the Motel 6′s that have thus far anchored my travels.

August is on its way down. I’ve been here almost 8 months. I’ve gotten a good job and given it up, I’ve explored the city and gone down every road that has caught my attention. I’ve seen shows and hung out with great folks. Yet I’m still not feeling it. I just don’t (yet?) see myself living here for more than a year. I haven’t warmed to New York the way I did to London. I was there for three months, the first few weeks of which were defined by an overriding desire to leave, while the remainder by abiding affection. Part of the reason I chose to try New York was its cultural resemblance to London. So far it hasn’t delivered.

I’m not saying I’m ready to bail, but I’m having a hard time right now envisioning a life here. Even if I found a really good job, I’m already getting tired of…the experience? Here is the short list of complaints:

1. The summer heat. It’s not as bad as Arkansas, but you have to walk around in it. A lot. Plus stuffy hot subway platforms are like dirty, dirty saunas.
2. Grocery shopping is an ordeal. Going to Target even more so.
3. The food isn’t that great. This town loves its comfort food, so the only good stuff is the gourmet stuff, which is prohibitively expensive. Everything cheap is mostly crap. There isn’t a lot of middle ground. When I do find the best food (tastiness at a reasonable price), there is the problem of mileage. I have to cross Manhattan into Tribeca when I want some Vietnamese fried rice as good as Lily’s in LR. And Barbecue? Forget it, unless you want to go all the way up to Harlem[1] to eat at Dinosaur. Which is still only just OK.
4. The pizza comes in two styles: generic NY slice and authentic Italian. That’s a narrow spectrum for me, coming from Little Rock’s wide spectrum of Vino’s, Damgoode Pies, US Pizza, and Shotgun Dan’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’d eat at DiFara’s weekly if I could, but it’s way out in Midwood and takes an hour to prep.
5. I don’t think I could ever play music here. Getting my amp to any gig without a vehicle is going to be either expensive or physically taxing. And even my favorite musicians, the guys who impress me most in the area, are disheartened by the impossibility of making a living as an original band in this town. Compound that with the fact that actually getting a gig here is made difficult enough by all the other people who came here to play music.

That last one reminds me. It seems like there are only 4 reasons to live in New York City:

1. You’re very good at something and you want to do it here with all the other people who are good at something.
2. You want to be famous for doing something you may or may not be good at.
3. You want to be here to observe and/or interact with Groups 1 and 2.
4. Your family is here.

At the end of the day, I think I’m really just a #3. Sure there are things I’m good at, but I don’t think I’m good enough at them to make it worth my while to stay here. Especially since I don’t know what my while is worth. Plus the volumes of #2′s seem to outweigh the population of #1′s by a factor of about 20.

And this is something I’ve been mulling over lately: The New York Celebrity-City Effect. New York City is, in itself, a celebrity. Coming here is like meeting someone famous, and I’d wager that a significant portion of those #2′s are here so that they can see themselves in their minds’ eyes as having New York for their own mental movie backdrop. A quick glance at the top movies of all time shows that New York outpaces Los Angeles as a film setting by almost 2 to 1. NYC is a character all its own[2], providing backdrops for films from such diverse sources as Woody Allen and Spider-Man[3]. That’s the magic of it. But that magic seems to have less spark these days. The artistic community has been all but shoved out of Manhattan by exorbitant rents, with the exception of Harlem, but give it time. Ironically, the cleaning up of the crime here has made nearly every portion of Manhattan a haven almost exclusively for the splendidly wealthy. And Brooklyn is already well on its way down the same path.

It also seems like a lot of people (the #3′s perhaps) move here so that they can have the status of saying “I live in New York City,” to their friends back home, as though simply by relocating they’ve achieved something. Moving here isn’t any harder or easier than moving to Detroit or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. Yet given the number of expatriate Arkansans here, I have to suspect that a lot of people move here for the sake of saying they’ve moved here. New York City is indeed a place of wonder, and I have to admit it does really feel like you’re advancing to a second or third act in your own personal screenplay, but a change of venue isn’t guaranteed to make your life any more or less interesting or fulfilling. At best you get to see more music and art, but when it comes to things that are really important – being creative, having friends and loved ones, enjoying life – these are things you can do anywhere.

So, I came here for the same reason mountain climbers do what they do: “because it’s there.” Now that I know what’s here…maybe I need more time to find the magic, but at this point I think I’ll most likely be back in Arkansas before the year is out. But who knows.

1.) A distance Elizabeth and I lovingly referred to as “Fayetteville” because that’s how long it takes to get there (or here from there) by train.
2.) Los Angeles is too decentralized and homogenous to have any real identity of its own to captivate an audience the way New York does.
3.) And let’s face it, Metropolis and Gotham City are essentially New York stunt doubles.

I’ve got two music reviews in the Arkansas Times this week, as well as two blog entries over at The Deli, a New York music magazine. The Deli is starting me on blog entries before assigning me stuff for their print version. I wrote short bits on Beau Jennings and Shannon McArdle.

For the Times, I reviewed the new CDs by Isaac Alexander and Hayes Carll. It was weird to review Hayes. He and I played together once at Hendrix College in a theatre production my freshman year. It was called “Unchanging Love,” an old-timey tale with lots of songs. Hayes and I were the musicians, sitting off to the side of the stage with our guitars, cranking out the tunes. I’m glad to see he’s doing well with his music career; he was a nice guy. As a music nerd I heartily applaud his choice of producer on the record, Brad Jones. I think I’m one of the only people in the world with a copy of Brad’s only solo CD, Gilt Flake.

We’ve moved! We’re now located at the slightly less verbose address of pointedstick.net/colter rather than pointedstick.net/colter/journal. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away. Adjust your RSS feeds, links and whatnot. My thanks to Heath for his script fu and ill science.

I’ve done some cleaning, trying to fold in the various pages of my website into WordPress. Note at the top of the right-hand column that there are some new links. I’ve also taken out the old, odd navigation graphics that used to be further down, and the /colter/ address now takes you straight here. My website has officially succumbed to the blogging paradigm. Take a look at those new links, I’ve added some new commentary at the top of each for historical perspective.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the old photo log. The Dogpatch pictures and many random others are on Flickr now. I guess I’ll just slowly toss the old pics in over time.

And then there’s the matter of the detritus. I have a lot of pages just sitting on the server that I need to delete. Ironically one of them gets the most traffic of any page on pointedstick, thanks to a link from some apparently very popular site in Australia. I need to set up Google AdSense on that page, but I’m lazy.

I’ve been on Flickr for three years now, and so I thought it might be a good idea to compile a “Best-Of” set. Check it out.

I haven’t been posting many links to pictures, but I have been taking a lot lately. Note the top of the right-hand column which always gives links to most recent six.

Savage Steve Holland, director of such classics as “Better Off Dead” and “One Crazy Summer” is returning to the land of motion picture directing with a new feature!

Ratko: The Dictator’s Son

With an All-Oddball Cast Starring:

Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite!
Adam West!
Mr. Belding from Saved by the Bell!
Curtis Armstrong (longtime Holland sidekick from “Better Off Dead” and “One Crazy Summer,” better known as Booger from “Revenge of the Nerds.”)

With the spate of “all that is 80′s is new again” apparently somebody thought it would be a good idea to give Savage Steve money for a movie. I can’t wait.

If you have a lot of free time on your hands, you can watch the entirety of “One Crazy Summer” in 10-minute chunks on youtube:

Four years ago, Natalie recommended that I contact her friend TJ about writing for a local free magazine he was starting called Localist. I did, and eventually wound up doing several CD reviews and a couple of features (the Boondogs piece is online, but sadly the Ho-Hum piece isn’t). It was great fun, writing for no reason other than the desire to spread the word on music I love (and to dust off my meager writing skills, long dormant since college). I find it amusing that interviewing those bands for free was probably more fun than interviewing some famous acts for money[1].

Eventually Localist‘s editor ascended to Arkansas Times, and suddenly I was freelancing for them. And getting paid! Not much, of course, but enough to put “freelance writer” on my résumé.

And so now TJ is discontinuing the Localist. He’s a busy guy with other projects. I can’t help but feel, though, that Localist has helped to solidify and galvanize the creative community of Central Arkansas. I know it worked wonders for me. Were it not for Localist, I know I’d have fewer friends and even fewer writing opportunities.

1.) It also made me realize even more that the music industry is not a meritocracy, and that every city probably has national-level talent. The only thing that separates the Boondogs from, say, The New Pornographers, is luck, timing, and a good record label.

I’m doing freelance reviews for Arkansas Times again. This week: my thoughts on the new album by The Good Fear.

Also, a fun story. I was sitting in the park yesterday reading a book, when I noticed a guy out of the corner of my eye suddenly stop. I looked up, and he was staring at the trees across the water from me. The bushes below were moving. Slowly ambling out of them and up the tree: four young raccoons and their mother. Over the course of about 10-15 minutes various passersby all stopped and looked, fascinated by this surprising development. It’s good of Nature to occasionally stop us in our tracks to remind us of its casual awesomeness.

Here is the run-down on last week’s trip:

Tuesday – Landed, went up to this house where my cousin David‘s girlfriend was house-sitting. Turns out the house belongs to Hyde from That 70′s Show, and it used to belong to Chuck Berry. I touched a guitar signed by Chuck Berry! And I played bass by a hot tub in which I’m sure Mr. Berry committed felonies numerous and varied.

Wednesday – Went to the House of Blues to see two guitarists of whom I’ve been a big fan of since 9th grade but I’ve never seen them play live: Paul Gilbert and Richie Kotzen. And I was surrounded by LA guitar nerds, the ones who love to cross their arms and pontificate about who rules and who sucks. I’m glad I don’t live near them.

Thursday – David and I went to Amoeba Records to find my mom a Leonard Cohen DVD (she asked for it specifically because that’s how cool she is). Then we watched I Am Legend on David’s Blu-Ray hi-def wide-screen T-V and afterward we freaked out on Lost, ’cause it finally got back to Locke’s storyline.

Friday – I took the bus and walked all over town because I forgot that my Arkansas driver’s license expired in March. I let it because I figured, hey, when am I going to need to drive a car in NYC, right? Oops. Rental car agencies frown on expired licenses. I’ll get that taken care of next week, though. Anyway, I walked up La Brea, where I passed Jason Lee and his wife looking at furniture. I then had lunch at Barney’s Beanery where I sat a few booths over from Jason Schwartzman. After that I met up with my friend Meredith and we saw a really terrible band somewhere.

Saturday – Here’s a fun story. Some years ago my friend Randall gave me a CD by an Austrian guitarist named Alex Machacek (pronounced “MOCK-a-check”), and I became a big fan. He’s as underground as it gets, so few guitarists even know about him. To anyone else, he’s just another jazz-rock-fusion guitarist in LA, but to me he’s on a higher plane from pretty much every other guitar player I know. I’ve talked with him a few times via email and MySpace, and so last week I sent him a message asking him if he had any shows going on. He said he didn’t, but I was welcome to come over for coffee and hang out. So I did. He made me a couple fantastic cups of espresso and we talked about music and guitarists, and he gave me a guitar lesson. The whole thing really made me realize the dichotomy that is Los Angeles: most people freak out over meeting famous people, when perhaps they should be freaking out over truly phenomenal people – artists who do things few can, who push the boundaries of their craft, who represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in a given medium. For musicians, Alex Machacek is such an individual. I uploaded one of his tunes to Muxtape, so check it out there. I don’t think I’ve mentioned Muxtape yet, so take a look at them, too. I have another playlist uploaded here.

That night, David and I went to see the LA Galaxy play the New York Red Bulls. I sat with the Riot Squad, the officially sanctioned corner of the stadium populated entirely by authentic football hooligans. Good times, even though the Galaxy lost. I told no one I was from NYC. For once it was better to say I’m from Arkansas.

Sunday – We went to see Rush in Irvine. I realize of course, as someone who is occasionally paid to write about rock music, that I am almost obligated to say that Rush sucks and progressive rock is a pox on the face of authentic rock and roll, but to that I say quite simply: Bite Me. If you can’t enjoy the refined Canadian flavor of Awesome that is Rush, then you can’t enjoy anything in life without wondering if someone is going to think you’re uncool.

Monday – Flew home. Took all day. Special note to Virgin Airlines: the little TVs in the seats are nice but $7 to see a movie on a tiny screen with headphones? $8 for airline food? No sale.
At least give me a bag of peanuts or something!

Here are some other photographic highlights from the trip:

Pink’s Hot Dogs are apparently spectacular
Billy Bob at Guitar Center?
Giant Magnatone amp on Sunset
The biggest Indiana Jones poster ever
99 Cent Store window display
Very old candy
Old Simpsons promo statues
Vintage Film editing console
Vintage Coca-Cola machine
GORT!
German Muppets
Bungalows
The 50′s live on…
…in Culver City
Refurbishing LAX