Stories of the Road, issue 33: The Great Gray North

This blog post is long overdue, but with good reason.  My latest client is headquartered in Vancouver, a city that's been on my top destination list for quite a while.  I was determined to make the best of my time there, thus I resolved to spend my weeknights seeing Vancouver rather than writing about it.

I'm never sure how much my feelings about a new city are influenced by my predispositions.  I've long imagined Vancouver as a Canadian San Francisco, so I had an easy time spotting similarities: the waterfront geography, the West-coast attitudes, the seafood-heavy menus.  There was even a dense fog (which the locals repeatedly assured me was uncharacteristic) languishing in the streets for most of my stay, reinforcing the impression that Vancouver was separated at birth from its American counterpart.

Vancouver's air is charged with the same ineffable energy found in other distinguished metropolitan locations.  I felt it as I walked to pick up dinner after work, wearing a smile that seemed to spring from my chest cavity.  I'm not a spiritual man, but I'm positive that some cities radiate a metaphysical verve yet undefined by science.

The travel requirements for this project were aggressive: Sunday night arrival and Friday afternoon departure for four weeks straight.  Lucy flew in for a ski weekend in between.  I tested my snowboarding skills, which were almost so rusty as to be worthless.  After three hours of scraping down the face of Grouse Mountain in thrift-store snowpants, my ass was ready to mutiny.

The food quality was top notch throughout town.  The sushi restaurant population downtown seems too large to be sustainable.  I never had a bad piece of fish in my time there, and I'm certain that my blood now contains enough mercury to manufacture several thermometers.  Oh, and let's not forget the poutine.

Why hasn't America appropriated this dish yet?  It certainly meets our minimum legal requirements for sodium, cheese, and fried food content.

Kudos to monstro (AKA Steve Wolfhard) and his friends for showing us a good time at Gyoza King.  Lucy drew a fantastic Vancouver travel journal when she vacationed with her dad last fall, so I have to plug it one more time.

Stories of the Road #32: The Lost Post

Hi, all.  It turns out that my work didn't appreciate my last post, which combined the company name and booze, drinking, etc. in such a way that my blog was spotted by their saved Google searches, and I was asked to take it down.  Here are the bonus items from the bottom of the post.

1. Quimby's is hosting a release party for Lucy's book on Tuesday, Oct 14th, starting at 7 PM.  If you're reading this, you should totally come.  Lucy's been busting her ass putting together the presentation for her book tour and Quimby's will be the debut performance.  Come!  Seriously!
2. Lucy & Johnny puppet blog #2 is here!

Stories of the Road, issue 31: The Fonts of Scottsdale

The Sunday night before my first trip to Arizona, I checked the local temperature in Scottsdale at 10 PM.  It was 95 degrees.

Luckily, it's a dry heat, and yes, that makes a difference.  One of the locals told me that their heat index sometimes drops below the real temperature.  This is unheard of in Chicago, where humidity is a malevolent force and the heat index can be likened to the Terror Alert Level (except you actually give a shit about the heat index).

Arizona's insect population is more hoary and nightmarish than that of any state I've visited so far.  My coworker went househunting in the area and spotted three black widows in a single home, nearly walking face-first into a web on the way in the front door.  (An indigenous welcome mat, maybe?)  Housing divisions invade areas with high scorpion populations, but the original tenants are too stubborn to move.  Scorpions glow under black light, and many new homeowners are surprised by what turns up in a black light scan of the backyard.

After hearing stories like these, I was afraid to sit on the ground to stretch after my evening run.  I could only imagine how welcoming the open leg of my shorts looks to a scorpion.

The local flora are no more benign.  I gently touched the spines of a cool-looking cactus and my friend laughed condescendingly before describing the skin irritation and inflammation those spines can cause.  Chill out, Arizona nature!

Two weeks into this assignment, I'm starting to see why people live here: the evenings are 75 degrees and usually rainless, and locals tell me that this moderate weather sticks around all winter while snow plows patrol the streets of Chicago.  Summer precipitation comes in the form of thunderheads that rain furiously for 15 minutes but put on a spectacular lightning show as a prologue and epilogue to their visit.  The buildings are new and polished, and their low profile allows for fantastic views of extended sunsets.

The Southwestern aesthetic is ubiquitous.  Color schemes waver within the bounds of beige and red.  Most of the fonts look like they were lifted from a Chili's menu.  Sand, rocks, and intimidating cacti are the norm.

 

Two quick plugs:

1. Lucy's book, French Milk, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com!  The new & improved version has lots more pages and contains even more John Horstman than before.  How much more?  Buy it and see!
2. My friend Lane made a 3-minute film for the Chicago Film Race, and because his film is rad it was picked to be one of the top 10 finalists.  Please watch it and hopefully vote for it here.  It's titled "Tomorrow."  Click on the picture of the sunrise.

Stories of the Road, issue 30: Invading Mennonite territory

Thanks to everyone who made our party a rousing success!  Pam's piñata was a smash hit (ha!) and we damn near drank the place dry.  Also, we raised $55 in donations for my autism walk this May!

The party kicked off an insane 48 hours for me.  After going to bed around 5 AM on Sunday morning, I woke up at 9 to start working - as in work working.  I left the house at 2:30 Sunday afternoon to fly to Morris, MN, which is about a 3-hour drive west of Minneapolis.  After arriving at the hotel at midnight, I proceeded to pull my second-ever work-related all-nighter - the day after our party, mind you - and showed up at the customer's office at 6:30 Monday morning for a sales presentation.  Which, miraculously, I nailed.

After that I flew straight to Atlanta, where it was 70 degrees and sunny all week long.  One coworker was upgraded to convertible for free.  None of us know why.

 

 

Somehow, Lucy's ukelele love song to me (which I also linked to in a previous blog) was one of the featured videos on YouTube's home page last week.  In a two-day stretch, the video pulled in 700,000 views, 5,000 comments, and was favorited about 4,000 times.  How do you follow that up?  With another awesome ukelele love song video, of course!  I am crushed with adorableness.

 

To try and prove that all of the talent in this relationship didn't end up on one side, I put a new song up on the Tiger Stance MySpace page.  You can download it there or listen to it here:

share your files at box.net

Stories of the Road, issue 29: Vermont Trip Puppet Recap

Stories of the Road, issue 28: Escape from LA

Thursday, 12/13, was my last day working in Beverly Hills, so to commemorate the occasion I wore my favorite suit. On our last night in town, our dinner was comprised of great Italian food and cupcakes. The only celebrity I spotted while I was there: Jon Voight, in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton.

LA was the most interesting and most glamorous location of all my work assignments - not my favorite but pretty high up on the list. While there, I could never shake the thought that somewhere, at that very moment, while I labored away in front of a computer reconciling my client's bank statement, people far better-looking than I and far richer than I'll ever be were doing things I can't afford to do with famous people who I'll never meet. Of course you can really say that at any time of day no matter where you are; the idea just seems a little closer, a little more omnipresent in LA. This is a terrible thought to carry around, I know. I blame Bret Easton Ellis.

I spent a lot of time out there thinking about why people (the American public in particular) are so interested in the lives of the rich & famous, about how psychological research has shown that attractive people are perceived as being more intelligent & successful & friendly, about whether or not I even give a damn about being rich or famous one day. It was an interesting experience and I think I came away from it with the right ideas. Spending an extended period of time exposed to that lifestyle can fuck with you, even the people who live there admitted that to me occasionally. LA has an energy and a magnetism that I don't fully understand, and from which I'm not entirely immune.



Thanks to everyone who came out last weekend to make our party such a success! Special thanks to the evening's performers: Oreo Dory, Blazed Doughnuts, Paul Parts, Secret Sceptre, and Daniel Knox. I've posted a gallery with about 20 of the best pictures of the evening. The gallery contains a Blazed Doughnuts video, which is also featured on YouTube - and has somehow collected 150 views before I even told anyone it was up. There's a video of Paul Parts' silhouette playing a song as well, but it's not as nice as any of Victor's videos from that evening.



I walked to the Arlington Park train stop after work on Tuesday and the race track has put up a Christmas light show. It costs $10 to drive through in your car or nothing to walk through if you come in through the back entrance.

Stories of the Road, issue 27: Regarding business dinners

Wow, guys, you know what the only thing better than working an 11-hour day is? You might say "Nothing," but I have the answer: working an 11-hour day and then going out to a business dinner where you talk about work the whole time. Oh, but wait, stop, hold on, there's something still better than that: if you can immerse yourself in that situation but then also be conversationally marginalized the entire time, and then whenever you try to bring the topic off of work you're interrupted with non sequiturs the entire night, that's the only way the night could get even better. I swear, the older I get and the more time I spend in the professional world, the more I realize that people skills don't really have that much to do with getting ahead in the business world.

I can understand the desire to talk about work at a business dinner: everyone can relate to the topic, you get to dish all sorts of gossip, people are talking about their coworkers in a way that they would never do if they were sober, alright, that's great. Still, doesn't anyone appreciate the opportunity to really get to know the people they're working with? And do we really still have to kiss our superiors' asses outside of the office? Isn't that the time that we should be ignoring office politics more than ever in order to rebel against the onus imposed by the workplace where we spent the vast majority of our day?

Admittedly, I'm a very social person, so I'm probably just upset that everyone I work with doesn't interact with other people in the same way that I do. This whole rant makes me a bit of a hypocrite since I believe that people in general weigh communication skills too heavily when assessing someone else's intelligence and now I'm turning around and doing exactly that with my coworkers. I guess at the end of the day this blog could be viewed as a perspective on how people interact differently in social situations. Still, it's disappointing to spend three hours with a group of people that fuel the entire night's discussion with stories about themselves.

By the way, we ate a a restaurant called Koi tonight, which is a sushi place in West Hollywood that was featured in an episode of Entourage (so my coworkers tell me). The CEO of my client told me that he had been there once before for dinner with Michael Bolton and Nicolette Sheridan. There were a few paparazzi outside the restaurant tonight. The inside of the restaurant was filled with fake blonds, fake tans, fake tits, short skirts, long legs, and several older gentlemen escorting several more younger ladies.

Stories of the Road, issue 26: An in-flight bibliography

*NOTE: This is my first post to Blogger, but I have blogged on MySpace for quite a while. To dig through my MySpace blogging history, go here.



After a thoroughly enjoyable month of employment based in the Chicago suburbs, I'm back on the road this week, writing this blog on my 4-1/2 hour flight to LAX. Fortunately, I brought along some excellent reading material that's making me forget that I have felt my legs atrophy significantly over the course of the flight - looks like my traveler's fortitude has suffered from the respite. The nice thing about evening flights is that you can play the cloud shapes game with the patches of light from the towns below; I just passed a crop of lights that looked like a giant beetle.



Malcolm Gladwell has finally returned from a hiatus of several months with a great article on how the FBI's long-revered criminal profiling methodology is really just pseudo-scientific cold reading. He spent his hiatus working on his next book, and although I have no idea what it's about I'm getting antsy just thinking that more Gladwell goodness will soon be rolling off of a printing press somewhere, rife with counterintuitive wisdom backed by rock solid case studies. Try to stay with me here, but there's something similar about Malcolm Gladwell's work and the web services/products that Google provides. In both cases, the simplicity of their packaging makes the content more intuitive. It reminds me of the way the word "elegant" is used in the context of computer programming to describe a solution that implies a harmony of simplicity and robustness. Leonardo da Vinci said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and I think that idea is manifest in output such as Gladwell's Blink and Google's RSS feed manager Google Reader.

But I digress.



I'm also slowly working my way through Naomi Klein's No Logo, which is an examination of the state of advertising, branding and marketing at the end of the 20th century. The big picture so far isn't too surprising - Guess what? Corporations are EVERYWHERE! - but the cited examples of out-of-control branding still strike your gut as foul, such as Fashion Licensing of America's line of Ernest Hemingway furniture ("designed to capture the 'brand personality' of the late writer"), or Nike internally coining the term "bro-ing" to describe its process of borrowing style, attitude and imagery from black urban youth. She just wrapped up a chapter on how the Seattle grunge scene didn't really stand for anything but an aesthetic, making it perfect for brands to swoop in and co-opt. That section is followed with some well-worded passages about how being interested in something ironically is a vapid cop-out, which I LOVED reading because I feel like I've never really understood the "so bad it's good" theory.

* * * * * * *

I'm now in the cab on the way to the Beverly Hills Hilton, where a room awaits me. Let's see if I can still remember my hotel room arrival routine: open suitcase on second bed, put toiletries by the sink, iron and hang shirts... yes, yes, it's all coming back to me.

Lucy & I had a fabulous time this weekend seeing They Might Be Giants at The Vic, eating at our favorite Wicker Park restaurants, and falling asleep during two consecutive attempts to watch Ratatouille. We also had some heavy-duty conversations; it was good to get away from the catch-up we play over the phone every week, and to interact deeply with someone so close to me. Those experiences don't happen every day.