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longevity of creations
Friday, February 19 2016
location: Room 2008, Palomar Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
We couldn't get Ramona to exercise any bodily function this morning in Rittenhouse Square, though Eleanor seemed to be performing comparatively normal. But if a dog doesn't want to go and you're on a schedule, there's nothing you can do. We put the dogs back in our room and then borrowed a pair of bicycles from the Palomar for the morning's adventure.
For such a fancy hotel, the loaner bicycles were suprisingly marginal. Gretchen's three speed with paniers wasn't too bad, but the one-speed racing bike (though not a fixy) loaned to me had a low rear tire and needed some handlebar tape. Once we got away from the manic streets of Philadelphia's neighborhood of modest skyscrapers, biking was easy. Google Maps sent us down streets with well-marked bike lanes, and the ubiquity of four-way-stop-sign intersections meant we rarely had to come to a complete stop. The terrain was perfectly flat and there was usually enough smooth asphalt for comfortable biking even with a semi-deflated tire prone to bottoming out. For me, the main discomfort was the frigidness of the blowing air on my bare hands (temperatures at the time were in the mid-30s Fahrenheit). Not having expected to use my hands in the outdoors, I hadn't bothered to bring any gloves on this trip. But I could often bike one-handed, allowing one hand to warm in a pocket while the other provided any necessary steering or braking.
Our destination was the Grindcore Coffee House, a divey vegan hangout catering to the local punkrock/hardcore scene. Immediately Gretchen ran across someone she knew from the New York vegan scene. She was there in Philly with her boyfriend, she said, to attend a hardcore show. She was dressed in black, wore enormous black vegan boots, and had metal studs sticking out in all the right places, though there was a clean newness to her ensemble that didn't quite read as legit. We ordered bagels with flavored faux cream cheese and cappuccinos and then went to the back dining room, where the WiFi password was written in large letters on a chalk board. Evidently anyone willing to make it back there must be for real. Amusingly, Grindcore's bathroom was back there and was in a little room built out of the wall. It would've been even more hardcore had it been a portapotty in the middle of the room. There's also a small library complete with a low shelf full of children's books and another (higher) one featuring back issues of Make Magazine.
The cappuccinos were unexpectedly good, and seemed to go surprisingly well with the hardcore wafting not-too-loudly from the sound system. A couple of the regulars came in. They were in their late teens or early 20s, wore combat boots and black teeshirts and wouldn't have looked the least bit out-of-place in 1989.
On the bike ride back to our hotel, we made a very slight detour to check out the Magic Gardens, the life-long artistic project of an eccentric artist named Isaiah Zagar. Beginning in the late 1960s on then-rundown South Street, he gradually encrusted large swaths of wall with patterns made from mortared shards of tile, plates, bottles, windows, and mirror. At some point he turned his attention to a pair of empty lots that belonged to an absentee landlord, building a labyrinth from bottles, toilets, and numerous rusty old bicycle wheels. When the landlord found out about the state of his lot, the installation was threatened (as all public art is always threatened) with destruction. But before that could happen, money was raised to buy the lots, and now they are opened to the public. Admission is $10 for adults. (There are probably lots of eccentric artists doing similar things all over the world, but usually their lifes' works are bulldozed before a critical mass of people can find out about them.) Soon after we arrived, we sat down to a surprisingly-long documentary about Isaiah Zagar and his works in the South Street neighborhood. He has encrusted many walls and parts of walls in the area, giving it part of what makes it unique. As for the gardens themselves (the lots that had to be purchased from the absentee landlord), Zagar himself describes them as being like a coral reef that has accumulated material in a seemingly organic process. Indeed, from a distance, they look like they might have grown of their own biological will. I can't really say that I like Zagar's work, which tends to be messy, chaotic, and fragile, though some of his wall murals verge on genuinely beautiful from certain distances. I also liked some work he did on a window, where it was difficult even on close inspection to isolate what was a scene from the window's other side and what was from over your shoulder, reflected in a shard of mirror.
Before we left, one of the guys on the staff gave us a brief lecture on Isaiah Zagar. It turns out that he'd been inspired by an artist from Woodstock, New York who had built something called "the House of Mirrors" (which no longer exists).
Back at the Palomar, we returned our loaner bikes and then went out for lunch at Hip City Veg without even visiting our dogs in our room. I ordered the Philly Cheese Steak, which was good but had too much bread and too little of whatever it is they'd made the "cheese" and "steak" from.
Next we took the dogs (who hadn't shit or pissed anywhere in our room) on a walk all the way to the Schuylkill River Dog Park. Ramona managed to poop as we passed diagonally through Rittenhouse Square, but she hadn't urinated since yesterday, and seemed reluctant to even at the dog park (which for some reason is surfaced with astroturf). Perhaps it was the weirdness of that material or the distraction of all the other dogs. By and large, they seemed more outgoing than her. She (and Eleanor too) were being wallflowers at what looked to be an extra-fun dog party. For such a cold day in the middle of a Friday afternoon, there were a surprising number of dogs, the majority of whom were mutts representing various odd breed combinations. There was also, however, a contingent of what looked to be three purebred German Shepherds that mostly stuck together. I referred to them as the "Aryan Brotherhood." For some reason, of all the dogs in the dog park, it was those dogs who seemed most interesting to Ramona.
Eventually it occurred to us that perhaps Ramona would piss if only she could get into a brushy patch on the other side of a low concrete wall, a place where we'd seen other dogs go only to retrieve errant tennis balls. So we encouraged her to follow through on an interest she seemed to be taking in climbing over the wall. Once on the other side, she immediately went back behind a bush and took a very long piss. Evidently she'd finally found something close enough to actual nature for her to relax her bladder sphincter.
On the walk back to the Palomar, Ramona kept expressing discomfort directed at her anus. She'd stop to lick it and occasionally a bit of turd would escape. But something was blocking up the works, and it was making Ramona miserable. Perhaps that had been the cause of her shyness at the dog park. Then, completely unexpectedly, a whole bunch of shit was on the sidewalk. By this point, we'd used up the last of our poopy bags and I was forced to use a fortuitous newspaper. Once laden with several pounds of dog shit, I had to carry it two or three blocks before finding a trash can.
We had some downtime back at the hotel, allowing me to fix myself some kratom tea. I was feeling a tidy little buzz from that when 5:00pm came, and I went by myself down to the lobby to partake of the free wine happy hour. The place was mobbed, and there was no good place to sit. I ended up sitting on a large circular piece of furniture near the front desk (others could sit on this too without being in my space) while making a troll meme on my laptop for my Bible-Based Global Warming Facts Facebook page. The meme showed a picture of a big pickup truck "rolling coal" with the words "ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE, IT IS AN ABOMBINATION (sic) FOR MAN TO SLEEP WITH MAN. THIS ONE OF THE BEST WAYS TO SHOW YOU DON'T DO THAT. DRIVE A CAR THAT BURNS FOSSIL FUELS. YOU DON'T WANT PEOPLE THINKING YOU VOTE FOR MARCO RUBIO (IF YOU TAKE MY MEANING). PAID FOT BY KOCH INDUSTRIES AND THE CONSORTIUM FOR THE USE OF FOSSIL FUELS." After getting my wine glass refilled, I returned to the room.
At a little after 6:00pm, Gretchen and I returned to VStreet for the second dinner in a two days. We were there a little earlier to take advantage of their happy hour, where I could have (for example) a Kenyan lager beer called Tusker for $4. It was nothing special, though it was still a cut above an American macrobrew. I described it to Gretchen as being a "typical third world lager," going on to conjecture that German expat communities are the source of regional beers in the global south, and since these beers are initially targeted at other expats, they're probably better than American macrobrews, which are the fruit of years spent perfecting a beverage designed to be drunk by morons on couches watching football.
Along with the cheap(er) drinks were cheap(er) foods, such a sliders made with mushrooms and Chinese pancakes (those were great) and other things I was less crazy about. For some mysterious reason, we got the full VIP treatment, with lots of free things from the kitchen, including an order of a flavorful fusion taco whose center was made of tofu (they were great, though not as great at the Korean fried tempeh tacos).
Though I hadn't especially loved them, something about seeing all the prolific murals at the Magic Gardens had gotten me thinking about creativity and how best to apply myself in my life. Isaiah Zagar had managed to open a successful gallery shop on South Street and then live the life he'd wanted for himself. People had come to love his art, and his creations came to be preserved even after they sprawled onto the property of a hostile neighbor. I compared his creative output to my own and realized that, professionally at least, I am making things that are only marginally less ephemeral than sand paintings. I'd been duped by the possibility of code to last forever, when the reality is that it almost never does. Some code, of course, has lasted billions of years mostly unchanged. This is true of the DNA sequences representing certain fundamental cellular components and (probably) behaviors. But the code I produce is in the faddish world of web development, where even if the languages themselves don't change, the style of coding in those languages does. I've written a lot of PHP and Javascript in the functional style, which isn't hip in the object-oriented LAMP Stack paradigm that is now in fashion. If I'd done more of my work in C++, it would be less subject to such forces of artificial antiquation, but even in that world it's hard for code to have a life of ten years. I enjoy the problem-solving and precise thinking required by coding, but I don't want to be creating things that have the lifespans of dogs. If Leonardo da Vinci had thought the Mona Lisa was going to turn to dust five years after he painted it, he probably wouldn't've put as much work into it as he did.
I talked about these feelings with Gretchen over dinner tonight, wondering if perhaps I should make a go at a profession that produces more lasting work. I could be happy, I think, making copper lamps, smart lighting, and one-off electronic marvels. The question then becomes: how do I market such things?
Back at our hotel room, we had another HGTV marathon, hate-watching an episode of House Hunters where a dim-witted couple try to find the perfect house in the suburbs of an ugly Texas city (I forget which one). The male half of the couple kept talking about how he wanted a Craftsman, but the only houses they looked at were big ugly (and nearly brand-new) McMansions on tiny lots, each with absurd architectural "features" absentmindedly tacked on (such as a stone turret with something that looks like a vagina near the top). When we're finally shown a supposed "Craftsman," it wasn't built in the 1920s. It was just another huge McMansion with a roof gabled vaguely like a Craftsman.
Later, on House Hunters International, we watched an ernest young man trying to find an acceptable rental in Burma within his $250/month budget. There was plenty of ugly architecture to be seen on that adventure as well, but it was the sort one expects when looking for discount lodging in a third world nation.
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