A story from the trail...

So, a group of nine decided we'd best hike from Max Patch to Hot Springs along the Appalachian trail over three days using a couple of tarps and a bit of common sense. This stretch is a little north of Asheville (Western North Carolina) and quite the best to escape the Piedmont's (Central North Carolina) blazing summer heat.

Well, if you see that wonderful view above (totally not my pic, but from 'Visit Madison County's' site so I figured they wouldn't mind), you'll notice the wonderful views and endless meadow and then you'll notice the clouds. Oh they seem so white and fluffy, so harmless. Right.

As soon as we left the bald, the storm hit, the thunder rolled, and the rain poured down... for three days.

The greatest moment was approaching the tarps on the final night after eating dinner and finding a shallow stream running through the center of the tarp and over most of our backpacks. So, we left in the dark and the rain and slept in the shelter. Nine of us slept in the shelter. There was much spooning.

Check it out.

Oh, and there were only two guys.
Tales from the trail.

Maps/charts. Two interesting discoveries the internet gave to me.

This may just be the most interesting map search I've ever seen. It nearly shows the history of a place by its maps... Thanks so much to the David Rumsey Map Collection for its sublime interesting-ness.

http://rumsey.mapranksearch.com/

Oh, and heres a chart history of the world, divined from the same site. How interesting. I want one for my wall.

(I also found it on Slate... which is sortof cheating.)

See it BIGGER

I bussed/expodited your table

I bus your tables my friends. When you finish your especially delicious Italian cuisine doctored up by my boss, a Gordon Ramsey look-alike, I gather up your crumby dishes into my arm and take them back to our all-Hispanic kitchen staff, who roll their eyes and laugh. "Ahhh Rammboo," they say. Who knows why I'm Rambo to them. Then if there's hot food with a ticket on it, and a bell rings, and the chef yells, "Why the fuck is no one running food?!", I'll speed walk over and gather up two or three plates frowning and cursing cause they're burning my arm, check the ticket table and number, pray that I run into no one as I pass through the door, then the curtain as I go into the dining room and smile pleasantly asking who had the Pollo Ripiedo with the pasta side and the gluten-free dairy-free chicken parm (which makes no sense because typically you use bread-crumbs and also cheese in chicken parm, so its like, naked).


Then, if I'm lucky, I'll take a sip of my one-third ginger ale, one-third sprite, one-third coke, add lime and a shot of grenadine drink. But of course, after a sip the bread is ready and I rush back to the kitchen where a lounging/texting server tells me table three needs bread and outside two tables have just sat and have no water. So I'll pull bread out of the oven, put it in the bread warmer, gather a couple buns to walk to the table where they want butter. So, I'll go back to the kitchen, get butter, hear the ding of the bell which means food is ready to be run and I'll face an option... Shall I deliver butter, water, or food? I'll suffer the wrath of the waiting customers, lounging servers, or angry chef. 


Anyways, its a wonderful job to have and I make $8/hr after taxes and I pray to God I can quit as soon as I start school because I hate it and am convinced I could make so much more money doing a thousand different things.


But, truly, it has taught me a thousand invaluable life skills. Like, after waiting for 30 minutes for food, understanding that everyone in the restaurant is probably just as frustrated as myself, cooling down and loving this 20 year old kid who is in charge of getting me my food. It has also taught me I never want to bus tables again.

Taken with the last great wilderness...

This Alaska captures more people in its grand green net than anywhere else I've seen or been. Take me there again. 

Slavery: Thoughts

Slavery still exists.

That's the buzz phrase now, something I've been told time and time again by people who should know that I know.

But its true too. Slavery is around, and humans belong to other humans. They're being kept on the edge of a primitive existence doling out prostituted sex and exploited manual labour.

The key to slavery across the scope of history is the same: the free will of one person is subdued through force by another human. Someone no longer can choose for themselves, while the one who chooses wields a whip or chains or access to food or family or sleep.

An estimated 27 million slaves are scattered across the globe today, hidden in the shadows of even the most modern and advanced countries. They're trapped and hopeless.

I personally think its abysmal that the human race could come so far only to have such a grandiose sin uneradicated in its lap. But the worlds like that. Look under its carpet today and you'll find the land in the shadows.

As M ranted in  Skyfall:

Well, I suppose I see a different world than you do, and the truth is that what I see frightens me. I'm frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They're not nations, they're individuals. And look around you. Who do you fear? Can you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No! Our world is not more transparent now, it's more opaque! It's in the shadows. That's where we must do battle. 

We always ban things. No drugs. No abortions. No alcohol. No slavery. Its like walking into church and seeing all the smiling faces and feeling miserable but smiling yourself. The world thinks its better on its bantering chin, but truly its more broken than ever, creating so many noises and lights and sounds that block out the cries of people hidden in the brothels and fields and factories.

And when we look at who the enemy is, all we have done is force him to go underground. Once we knew the slaveowner. Now, the slaveowner could be any of us. We cover up our sins, our faults, our slaveowners. How, instead, do you change the hearts of a nation so that they understand the darkness in the chains they've attached to their slaves? Because law does nothing. Law is only a bandage, while the true wound festers mightily under a red, white, and blue flag?

We have more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history. How do we engage the shadows?

The Great Gatsby: a Review of Reviews

There's a thousand and one opinions on Baz Luhrman's new film; here's a catalogue of a few and mine at the end.

Imdb: 7.5/10
Rotton Tomatoes: 49%
Metacritic: 55%

Joshua Rothman at the New Yorker states it like this:

Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic.

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian like this:

As for [Luhrman's] Gatsby, it is bombastic and excessive, like a 144-minute trailer for itself, at once pedantic and yet unreflective, as if Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce had created the film on the basis of a brief, bullet-pointed executive summary of the book prepared by a corporate assistant. 

A. O. Scott at the New York Times like this:

The result is less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward, lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence.

Stephen Marche at Esquire like this:

Here's the thing: Luhrmann's movie, and the vast array of marketting that surrounds it, is phony. But so is Gatsby. Gatsby is tasteless and vulgar and spends too much money. Gatsby is the original icon of hype. Which is why his story remains so relevant. The movie could easily have been set in Silicon Valley today. The illusions that Gatsby and Luhrmann create are lies and ultimately cheap and corrupt, but their spell is nonetheless powerful. The critics are unintentionally paying Luhrmann a compliment, I think; his version is not so much a film about Gatsby as the film Gatsby would make about himself. It's the most Gatsbyesque Gatsby possible. What better standard is there for adaptation?

David Denby at the New Yorker like this:

Luhrmann's vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he's less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

And so it goes on. The great agreement is the absolute presence of light and noise and dancing that makes much of Gatsby a raging party scene. But, personally, I liked that. Amidst the noise and chaos and excess, even if Luhrman literally painted the films points on the screen, I liked it. Its the perfect movie of excess made by a man know for excess about a man so excessively excessive in trying to win back the one thing he can't have. The point is that it doesn't work. Excess and money can't reclaim the past, or form love, or give us our green light. The excess is empty, and when people say this movie is shallow, I think its supposed to be. Its supposed to be the shallowest of all. And that's why I love it.

Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend's new album "Modern Vampires of the City" was released yesterday and I haven't quite loved an album like this before. It's different than their previous, darker and dimmer but so much deeper.

Here's Ya Hey, and VW confronting God.

Then Step, my second favorite, with a chorus stolen from classic hip/hop which had a melody stolen from Bread: