GlitchNYC.com

A First Taste of New Orleans

Everything is a bit muddled in New Orleans. The accents, the spices in the Gumbo, the waters of the Mississippi, even the history.

At first brush, the French Quarter seems a historical center-point spoiled by tourism. The bars that literally line the streets, separated only by Voo-Doo T-Shirt vending tourist traps, have great walls of rotating slurpee machines, all ready to dole out multi-flavored lightly alcoholic beverages at the pull of a lever.

As you get closer to the essence of New Orleans, though, you begin to realize that this isn't a seedy surface painted on by tourism - this is the continuance of a tradition that goes back almost 300 years.

At different times in its history, New Orleans has been controlled by the French, the Spanish (during the inquisition) and then finally, the American Government. Code Noir, or a set of laws which allowed but limited slavery, contributed to the large population of Free People of Color and that population helped further diversify New Orleans' history.

All of this history even predates the Civil War, and the well of history for each tour guide to draw from is rich and long.

If you make your way to New Orleans, expect to be surprised by the grit of the real industry driving this city: tourism. New Orleans is and always has been a "Service Oriented" city, and it's current status isn't a corruption of the history, it's a celebration of it. Once you embrace that, there are tales waiting to be woven by the expert guides in almost every square inch of soil here.

Photos of the trip

4:04 am | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

MARRIED!

Well, it's been about a week and a half since anythings been posted here, and with good reason! Sara and I are now officially hitched, and we're just back from our Honeymoon in New Orleans.

The wedding was amazing - I really don't know if it could have gone any better, even in hindsight. It's almost statistically impossible for there to be no drama during the wedding itself with 150 of your closest relatives and friends with you, but amazingly we made it through the day completely crisis free, and it was beautiful.

Put concisely, the best advice I can give to those planning a wedding is not to hold yourself to what tradition says you must do. Breaking out of a wedding hall/dance centric wedding gave everyone the ability to enjoy the night as they saw fit, and I think it made everyone just about as happy as can be. Sara and I are considering writing up our experiences for others in a wiki, since the forums on theKnot.com helped so much during our planning, but we'll see how much free time we have as Sara starts her new job.

I'm writing this from the deck of a riverboat as we ramble down the Mississippi towards the Audubon zoo in New Orleans, so I'll end it here. There's more to tell, but I'll be splitting it up into more specific vacation stories as we go.

Thank you to everyone who made the wedding possible, we couldn't have done it without you.

11:59 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Review: Nicola Griffith's Slow River

[* * * * 1/2] of 5

More than a year ago, Sara gave me her copy of Slow River by Nicola Griffith, and it sat on my bedside, unread.

Various excuses kept me from reading it: I wanted to be writing my own material on the subway instead of reading and, for plausible deniability, I didn't want to read a sexy, near-future cyberpunk work which was so similar to what I was working on. It's much easier to claim you haven't plagarized when you haven't read the work in question.

A year later, Lex has fallen by the wayside and I've been reading again so I finally dusted off her old paperback and started into it.

The book ranks up there with some of my favorite books of all time. Published in 1995, Griffith portrays a very familiar future, describing both the real and the unreal with an eye for detail that makes it believable. The book also seems almost pure in its ignorance (and untainted prediction) of the internet hype to come just a few years later. The systems of the future city are plausible and simple enough to be natural outgrowths of our current progress, and are intermingled with the things that invariably stay the same: nature, human emotion, and dimly lit pubs where people talk about sex and money.

The book is told in three fractured time lines, which admittedly makes it a very difficult read if you're not taking it all in a few sittings. It was hard enough remembering what was happening each time I picked the book back up on a subway ride without having to recall where we left off with each timeline, and each transition made me groan, like the season finale of your favorite show which you must wait all summer to see concluded.

Having finished the book, there's really no other way Nicola Griffith could have told the tale. The mystery unravels in each of the timelines (which all involve the main character, Lore) and you piece the story together as Lore does, drawing from each of the story arcs.

The fractured feel of the book also brings an added dimension to Lore's own feeling of being different people; not in the sense of multiple personalities, but in understanding her own human duality and coming to terms with all the various facets of herself. Only in the final chapter, when she begins to understand herself as one person do the storylines collide and conclude the novel.

Nicola Griffith's skill at weaving the story together overrides the annoyance at having to wrench yourself from one timeline to another, and the near future bio-punk epic is required reading... Both literally and figuratively. It was part of Sara's college curriculum, with good reason.

10:45 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

On Safety, Freedom, and Protest in 2004

Whether you're a "Liberal Weiner," or a "Right Wing Nutjob" there's one central theme most of our beliefs. Something that is central to most leftward leaning people, yet is also very traditionally a right wing, republican, feeling: the desire to uphold the constitution and the first 10 amendments.

The past 4 years have been trying for those working to uphold our personal liberties, and those of us traditionally on the left suddenly find ourselves on the flip side of an argument that was all too familiar just before 9/11.

The question is this: what risk, what cost, will you tolerate to cling to your constitutionally defined personal liberties?

When it came to the questions of gun control, many on the left were and are quick to say "sacrifice the liberty of the right to bear arms to protect the victims of abuse of that liberty." The right countered with the famous phrase "It's not about guns, it's about freedom," and we scoffed. We laughed at the idea of a government that would take it's power to limit constitutional freedoms and push further into our right to assemble, our right to free speech. This argument was about people dying at the hands of gun-toting criminals and kids (sometimes accidentally, and sometimes not) finding their way into their right-wing parents arsenal and killing themselves and each other. Republicans were were clinging to "freedom" as an excuse to keep their dangerous toys. Right?

4 years later, the tables have turned.

We're all suddenly understanding that maybe it wasn't just about guns. That maybe there was something to all of that rhetoric about limiting governmental control and the tendency of an empowered federal power to grant it self more and more control.

4 years later, our right to assemble has been deemed a terrorist-aiding activity. Our right to protest takes cops away from managing the already risky RNC here in New York.

Our right to bear arms, (or even protest signs longer than 2 feet, which are deemed weapons) to protect ourselves from a potentially abusive police power as they herd everyone over to the west side highway... Oh wait, we've already given that liberty up, haven't we?

4 years later, we're all suddenly willing to accept some risks to protect those freedoms. We're willing to accept the increased window for terrorist attack, the confusion and mayhem 250,000 people protesting in New York will cause.

The willingness to accept risk has just hit critical mass. The planners of the protests are powerless to corral their own people. The people have made their intent clear: they will protest where they can be heard, far from the fences and free speech zones. They will protest where they can be seen, and be arrested for it, teargassed for it, martyrs of "America as a free speech zone."

And protest has hit our our in-boxes, our cell phones.

Far from the West Side Highway, Smart Mobs will pop up in patterns, disrupting traffic in carefully orchestrated waves, keeping the police force thin and guessing, never able to stop a protesting crowd that uses text messages and cell-chatter to avoid the police and regroup around them.

The news has been brewing in the Internet underground, in emails, on IRC, on Usenet, for almost a year, and it's just now hitting the mainstream news outlets. It's blossoming into full fledged websites like www.xflashmobs.com and being passed from blog to blog, blanketing the Internet with an understanding of the gravity of this event.

This is not going to be an ordinary protest.

It's not about the Republicans, It's about Freedom.

References:

Tyranny in the Name of Freedom, The New York Times

http://www.smartmobs.com/

High-TechLevels Protest Field, The Washington Times

TXTmobs take on the GOP, The Village Voice

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/

http://www.txtmob.com/

http://www.xflashmobs.com/

RNC preps include protest restrictions, CNN.com

2:31 pm | permalink | /life | 2 writebacks |

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I first heard about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow at the con we went to a few months ago. At that point, all it was was a picture of Angelina Jolie in front of a retro-futuristic backdrop on a freebie poster.

The buzz around the movie was that originally, the director had created a 5 minute 'pilot' which was completely generated on his Macintosh, which had then been picked up by a major motion picture house and was being given a full budget to realize it's potential, once again completely generated on computers. 100% bluescreen + actors.

Various interviews confirmed the buzz at the con, adding the detail that it was Jude Law, (Gigolo Joe from AI) who had discovered the director and 5 minute pilot. Apparently, both the stunning effects and stylistic vision based "future" of the early 1900s was enough to get him on-board and he recruited other producers (read: money) and big name talent like Gwyneth Paltrow to join him on the film.

The extended trailer is online now. I've usually got a really decent sense for how a movie will do when it's released, and I wish I could say that I thought this was going to be a great smash hit. I feel roughly the same about it now as I did about "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" before it came out. I'm going to see it and probably love it simply for the Geek Factor, but I don't know if America will bite without at least a familiar retro character or premise to help justify the stylistic theme of the film.

Here's hoping the movie proves me wrong.

5:44 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

In 16 Days We'll be Married

I've been lax at posting here the past few weeks mostly because I feel that I can't do justice to the amazing events that have transpired in that time, so in an effort to purge my writer's block, I've decided to simply do my best to convey the feeling of the many fun nights of the past 14 days.

New York is an amazing city.

Jersey is NOT an amazing state.

It takes a lot to get me to leave my favorite island for the J-State. Someday I'll relate the story of 3 cars breaking down, the sky's opening up, and being stuck in a gas station parking lot for 14 hours in Jersey here on the blog, but for know, just know that my hatred isn't unfounded.

Only the Lure of going to Medieval Times for the first time could get me back in Jersey's clutches, and I was afraid that once again the fates would conspire to keep me trapped in Jersey forever.

Somehow, though, the ominous backdrop of Jersey was a fitting setting for the weird and wonderful cheesiness that is Medieval Times. If you've ever seen The Cable Guy, the actual experience of going to MT is much the same as it is depicted in the movie, but with both more and less glitz at times.

Unlike Ren-Faires, MT freely breaks the illusion, taking you from flashing LED colors in a "commemorative mug" to the actors talking in (thankfully well practiced) accents and decently engrossing plot, back to glow-necklaces and Pepsi, and back again to the show.

The juxtaposition of MT being smack in the middle of Jersey, next to a hotel and a bank, seems to fit remarkably well in light of the dual worlds that MT itself maintains. Once your brain adjusts and suspends disbelief, you're both in the middle of the action and at your table eating, drinking, and buying knick-knacks at once.

Remarkably, the food itself was excellent, and eating with your fingers does satisfy some voracious need you didn't know you had until you start doing it. Meg + Co had gotten me a one size fits all "groom" hat, which, not surprisingly, didn't fit on my massive noggin, so I'm sure i got some chicken grease on the brim as I shifted it up and down to keep the blood from pooling in my brain.

Two things stuck with me as I thought about the night later. First - the show was remarkable. I've been part of and seen my share of stage combat, and these guys broke all the rules, swinging full force withing "strike range" of each others heads and bodies. If the block wasn't there, I don't believe they could have stopped any of the hits, and some of them could have been crippling, dulled sword or not. Either they're really really good, or really careless. Seeing as no one got hurt and they're doing this 7 nights a week, I think they might just be awesome.

The second thing comes from the other "world" of MT, as I walked back from the bathroom complete with plastic ball and chain around my ankle, groom hat, and goofy grin, and two of the waitresses asked me what was going on.

"I'm here for my bachelor's party"

"You're HERE?" one of the girls replied, rolling her eyes at the other girl. They were lost in the business world of MT, unable to see the show, the fun. This was the placed where they worked, decidedly not cool.

"Yeah, it's great" I said, smiling at them. I was proud of it. I loved the cheesiness - I loved that my friends had all gone to such lengths to put it together and to be there - I loved everything about the night. To me, this was 1000 times cooler than being at some seedy strip joint.

One of the girls stopped with her tray and smiled back. I think she saw a little bit of what I saw, and that maybe, just a little bit, her job was once again as cool as I thought it was.

The weeks that followed have been a blur of goodbye celebrations for Christin and other festivities, and then my upstate bachelor's party with my brother and best friend.

The upstate party was wonderful in its own way, giving me time to kick back and just enjoy the company as we played hours of poker and playstation 2. Rye and I have made a tradition of returning to our roots rather than trying to go out and find stuff to do in suburbia, and it has yet to fail us. We played SSX tricky until we couldn't stay awake any longer, and damn near beat the game in a weekend.

2:32 pm | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |