Xark!

Road Rules

As a person who walks, runs, drives, and now, bikes, up and down some of the same Nashville roads, I feel qualified to offer a few rules for proper etiquette regardless of how one travels.  I do not take this list as exhaustive, nor do I think ever rule is beyond question.  I do, however, think it to be something of a good start.  I welcome amendments, suggestions, and arguments.

Walkers:

1. 
   1. Stay on the sidewalk.  Even if you’re power walking for exercise, the impact on your knees is not as great as that for even the slowest runners.  You’ll just jam up any other pathway.
2. If you’re walking with a friend or friends, it’s fine to walk side by side.  However, one of you needs to move aside when someone walks toward you in the opposite direction.  Remember, think of your “extra” walker as being in the passing lane.
3. If you’re wearing an iPod, stay to the right.  Don’t sway into the left lane, as you’re not going to hear approaching folks. 
4. If you have a dog walking with you, (A) keep it on a leash, (B) don’t let it wander up to people uninvited—some of us are terrified of even your nice dog, (C) bring a bag to pick up poop.

Nine Quick Thoughts from the Road

Having just gotten back home from two quick trips--one to the University of North Carolina where I was giving a talk and meeting with grad students in the Communication Studies Department and one to New Orleans for a colloquium with Brazilian scholars where I gave a short talk about research concerning cell phones and driving--I would like to offer the following observations and recommendations:

1. To the Charlotte NC airport:  Get the attendants out of the Men’s restrooms.  The last thing I want to do when I travel is get harassed by a guy handing me towels and expecting a tip—especially when you have automatic towel dispensers in the restroom.  No, I don’t need a splash of cologne nor do I want a breath mint.  I’m not hitting on anyone; I’m just trying to get to the next town.  Honestly, I would almost book a more expensive flight to avoid this.

Human as Weak Link

As I've mentioned before, over the last several years, I have become interested in the ways in which arguments in "popular culture" discuss the merging of the human body with a variety of popular technologies.  In the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and other media theorists, I start with the premise that all technology, including what we traditionally think of as "media," can be thought of as human prosthetics.
 

For example, the car acts in part as a prosthetic body that makes us run faster than our natural legs; the phone is a prosthetic for our voice.  While there are a number of ways of approaching these ongoing transitions between human body/consciousness and media (a topic Donna Haraway famously discussed years ago in her Cyborg Manifesto), I've always been interested in seeing how the interaction between human and technology is discussed in popular news, mainly newspapers and magazines.

 

In general, the discussions range on a continuum that stretches from a stress on human agency and freedom to a focus on a dystopic demise of humanity.  For example, when one looks at news coverage and feature articles about the use of DVD players in cars, one will predictably see a variety of experts marched out to argue over whether the DVD players are "good" because they allow us to have our desires for movies and entertainment to be satisfied whenever we like (while simultaneously acting as a baby sitter for bored children on long trips) or they are seen as "bad" because they ultimately replace the need for human conversation and thus lead to an alteration and devolution of the family.

 

Testing Google Maps feature

I'm using Google Maps to set up an online version of a piece I'm doing about five mountain getaways within 300 miles of the Lowcountry. The features are kinda cool, and I'll be working on them for the next few days, but here's a link to what I've got so far...

School Shopping

My Bonnie and I just took Christopher, a rising Senior, on a tour of colleges in North Carolina.  When we set out, we chose five different colleges or universities in order to give him a taste of different “types” of schools.  The idea was this:  when he says, “I’m interested in LARGE STATE school.  What’s it like?,” we could say, “Do you remember UNC-CH?” or “I’m interested in SMALL HIPPIE school.  What’s it like?,” we could remind him about our visit to Warren Wilson. 

After attending official university tours at UNC-Asheville, Warren Wilson College, Wake Forest University, Davidson University, and UNC-Chapel Hill, we feel a bit jaded. Here’s some of what we learned:

God's Own Road Food

One of the secret pleasures of any road trip is the freedom the traveler has to eat and drink foods that they would normally avoid at home.  After a ten hour trip, my car is often littered with Diet Coke bottles, chip bags, and an array of fast food wrappers.  Despite my affection for all of these delicacies, the greatest of all road foods can only be found at QuikTrip convenience stores.  While I’m sure that there are also fine imitations, QuikTrip’s Chicken Taquito is God’s own secret road food (I cannot speak for its cousin, the Beef Taquito, because I’ve never eaten one.  Why do so when the Chicken is God’s own little snack?).  Some of you may want to nominate other foods, but you’ll have to match, and overcome, the following Taquito strengths:

Things I learned on vacation

• The LEAF is amazing, if only for the fact that so many people from so many age ranges can spend a weekend together sharing port-a-potties without anybody kicking anybody else's ass.
• If I'm just sitting around listening to music, I'm not partial to New Orleans style brass jazz. On the other hand, if I'm in a crowd of people and the band (the Madison Elites) is standing in the middle of that crowd bobbing and dancing and blowing with huge Dizzy Gillespie cheeks, that's a party.
• If you lean your backpack against the wall and sit on a bench on the street in downtown in Black Mountain, N.C., nice people will stop and talk to you.
• Tommy Womack is brilliant (Sloop played us the track Alpha Male & The Canine Mystery Blood and I was kinda amazed by how clever and honest and 40-ish it was).
• The bluegrass group Chatham County Line has a really nice retro visual stage style and the members write their own songs. I remember when bluegrass groups tried to look like the Eagles and the fans complained when anybody played a song that was written after 1965.
• The Carolina Chocolate Drops scored high marks for talent, but a couple of people said the members weren't all that nice when they talked to them around the campus. Which is one of the things about a festival, apparently: the performers get judged as human beings off-stage, too. Here's the interesting thing about my reaction (to me): I reserved judgment on their personal niceness, since I didn't have the experience myself, but when it came around to buying CDs at the tunes table, that negative report was probably the deciding factor in me buying a CD by the Duhks rather than by CCD. So accurate or not, that word-of-mouth influenced one of my decisions.
• Ichabod's, which I remember as a dive bar in Blowing Rock, is now a dive bar AND an Italian restaurant. But the same owner is still there, and the people are still very friendly, and I had four PBRs and talked to three barflies and a bartender before 4 p.m.
• If you go to the LEAF, the $25 culinary passport is a good deal, because you not only get three meals at Eden Hall, you also avoid having to pay by the pound for the food. But DON'T buy your passports online (you pay a $4.25 service charge on the transaction) and DON'T buy the five-meal pass, which actually has a HIGHER unit cost than the three-meal pass. I guess they're figuring that hippies don't do math... or maybe the people doing the pricing are hippies and don't do math...
• The middle of May, just before Memorial Day, is a great time to go to the Blue Ridge, particularly early in the week. We had the run of everything, everywhere we went.
• Coffee shops in Blowing Rock don't open in the morning.
• A good place to get coffee in Boone is called Grateful Grounds, which is a Grateful Dead-themed coffee shop and a bead shop, on King Street. I make this statement because Sloop hates the Grateful Dead, but liked the latte he got there on Monday so much that he wanted to go back on Tuesday.
• Robert Huffman might just have the funniest deadpan delivery I've ever heard. On Monday morning Sloop asked him how he'd slept. Robert's answer: "Like an old man in a tent." That's a funny line, but it's not nearly as funny if you didn't hear Robert say it.
• If you attach a tin cup to your belt loop with a lash strap for a morning hike and then forget that you've done this, so that you go out in public with a tin cup attached to your belt-loop, you'll never hear the end of this from your old college roommates. Bastards.
• If you're ever stuck in a downpour and you run into an event tent in the dark to get dry during a concert, you might get lucky and run into a really cool someone (Nicole) you met at Moe's Crosstown Tavern and her husband (Buck) and then get introduced to their really creative friends (Farrah and Mitchell), all of whom live in your neighborhood a couple of hundred miles away. So I recommend you try that sometime.
• Farrah has a documentary out on DVD called Falling Together in New Orleans and I got to see it in the children's tent at LEAF on Saturday night. Wow. These are stories that I just don't get from the legacy media. Plus it's just exciting to find out about creative people in my own community. Still, it makes me wonder: Why do I have to go to the main event tent in Black Mountain, N.C., to find out about a documentary filmmaker from my own town?
• There's a good place to stop for lunch in Old Fort, N.C. It's called the Trainwatcher Cafe, and Sloop says the vegetarian sandwich really is great, like it says on the menu.
• The band that stuck with me the most from the festival was this group called Menage.
• The old Holly's Tavern in Blowing Rock is now called Canyons, and Beth, the waitress over at Knight's on Main, says you can still sit there on the deck and have a beer, just like the old days. We never went in to check it out, but that really is the best view I've every seen from a bar.
• John Sloop and Robert Huffman are both brilliant men, but neither one of them is capable of remembering how to get to the Blowing Rock Assembly Grounds, where both of them worked for months back in the 1980s. I'm not sure what that says about either one of them, but I do know this: I wouldn't have brought this up if it weren't for all the shit they gave me about that damn tin cup. Heh heh heh...
• I get really confused by contra dancing.
  
• WNCW FM 88.7 really is the best radio station on planet Earth. And you can listen to it on your computer via the magic of the Internets.

Magic Bus

Before I get very far into this post, I ask you to read as generously as possible.  It’s not that the ideas here are complex or half-baked, it’s more that I fear that this will come off as rather benign or trite unless the reader actively helps by making it their own.  My motivation to write about this potentially touchy-feely topic—the influence of attitudes and dispositions—comes from an organic experience in my own life: the daily commute to work.

For the past two years, I’ve gotten up every morning to take the bus in to campus.  As I have mentioned here before, my employer pays bus fares for all of its employees (ostensibly because it cuts down on campus parking costs and provides Vanderbilt with a greener image).  For the first year, I commuted from Bellevue, one of Nashville’s suburbs.  The ride in was about 25 minutes, so the 25-30 of us on the bus each morning—and the even larger crowd going home every afternoon--had a strong sense of community.  We discussed news and politics together; we traded war stories about our different work places; hell, several of us even went out for beers on a couple of occasions.  While I can’t see it was my favorite part of the week, the friendship and camaraderie certainly helped start and end the work day in a pleasant enough fashion, assuring that I went into the office with a fairly positive attitude.

Car Talk

One of my current “academic” projects is a series of essays/investigations concerning citizenship, automobiles (mobility in general) and different means of communication (e.g., cell phones, GPS, dvd players).  Don’t laugh; it might sound a bit esoteric and liberal arts/cultural studies-esque (as, indeed, it is), but there are some interesting angles to the project that everyone might find engaging.  I hope to use this brief essay as a way to do something I don’t often get to do in my academic writing—provide a brief gut-level response to the discussions I’m reading.  While I generally write about the “meaning” of a particular cultural conversation, here I want to add to that conversation.

Before I get to my central point-that I don’t like the idea of dvd players being used in cars—let me make something clear:  I love almost all gadgets and all forms of mediation, and not only do I think people should purchase whatever they want to, but I think they should be able to legally use them however they like.  Nonetheless, when it comes to these dvd players in cars, I believe we’re losing something very valuable when we use them, especially on long trips.  My experience with these in-set dvd players is admittedly very limited:  thus far, my experience only includes those times when I’ve been sitting in the back of a stifling hot minivan with screaming nephews and nieces. As soon as the noise reaches a certain volume, the parents flip the screens down, plop in a kid’s film, hand the kids their headsets, and sit back to enjoy the inevitable silence that follows.  After a moment or two, with the kids engrossed in their narrative, the adults are able to talk to one another, and the trip takes place in an admittedly more enjoyable climate.  So far, so good.

Yum Yum's: World's Best Hotdog

The memory of loving a hotdog is kind of like that of a charming but alcoholic ex-spouse. Sure, you know they were bad for you, but O When Things Were Good, They Were Great.

So it is with the all-the-way dog at Yum Yum, the ice cream and hotdog joint on Spring Garden Road in the College Hill section of Greensboro, NC.  I spent six years growing up just a few blocks away in the 1970s, and a Yum Yum dog with an RC Cola remains one of the most pure memories from my childhood.

Here's why they're different -- and for my money, better -- than any other hotdog on the planet: The Yum Yum all-the-way is a fusion of dog, chili, slaw, onion AND BUN into an enigmatic culinary unity, an elemental combination inexplicable by deconstruction into its original component parts. It comes wrapped in plain paper, two to a white paper bag, and each sells for just $1.50.

And so far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed about this meal is the RC Cola. Today it comes in a plastic bottle instead of a glass one.