Sectioned Media

mattonrails:

Got the Rails Cookbook on my iPhone (@OReillyMedia), good stuff!

melanyouth:

Part 1 - Ryan Adams

I met Ryan three times, though only really spoke with him once. When I told him my RAA name, he knew who I was, and said that I ‘write a lot of good stuff’, which was totally awesome, obv. He also said some other things about/to me that I will hold in my heart always.

And, as I have managed to mention several times in my blog but am adding here only in order to make this report complete, I bought one of Ryan’s paintings at the auction. I also got the pink 7” record (signed!) which, as it turns out, is not available except in person at the gallery.

Also as it turns out, when you repeatedly meet someone you admire it starts to feel totally normal and you (or I, at least), stop feeling the need to stare at them the whole time as if you will never see them in the flesh ever again.

Part 2 - New York City

I finally put my finger on what I love about that place, and it is that when I am there I feel an overwhelming, visceral love for all of humanity. I feel swept along in a comforting sea of human lives, something I never feel here in Seattle, where a frustrating, bubbling sense of isolation and retractiveness emanates from everyone and everything - including myself.

Part 3 - Everything free has a price

I realized by the second day that the old friend I stayed with, who I had recently reconnected with, is not someone I actually care to be friends with; his negativity was bad enough, but the disingenuousness that followed was just about intolerable.

Also I have completely had it with people who are not alcoholics and/or don’t suffer from mental illlness or depression who insist that prescription psychotropics are physically and psychologically no different from street drugs or booze. Fuck those people - including my ‘friend’ - forever.

Part 4 - RAA peeps

Friday I was having a bad day (see #3) until I was in line for the NYPL event and noticed a woman who had been at the art show. I said to her, “Hey! You bought one of Ryan’s paintings!” and she said “Yeah, so did you!” and we started talking, and she introduced me to her friends, and they were all RAA folk and we recognized each other’s user names, and I sat with them at the thing and then went out to dinner with all of them afterwards, and then my new friend Bean walked to the subway with me, and it was WONDERFUL.

Part 5 - A Culture of Outrage

The friend I stayed with wanted to know if I had time to go to the New Museum, and I told him that nothing I’d heard about it made me want to go, but if he thought there was something good there then I would like to. Turns out he wanted to take me there only so that I could be (he assumed) outraged - as he had been, the multiple times he has gone there - with what people put in museums and call art. He was actually willing to pay - what, $15? - to go get pissed off. No thanks. I don’t have time or money for things I am not interested in, I honestly don’t care if there is bad art in the world (I mean, can you find a more irrelevant thing to be angry about??), and in any case I don’t find outrage in and of itself particularly entertaining anyway. But it made me really think about how it seems like so many people search out things that upset them, and the ways that I sometimes do that too. Toxic!

Part 6 - Truckin’, I’m a-going home…

Ever since I got home, I have been telling people that besides my annual trip to NYC around Christmas, I don’t intend to travel any more this year, and everyone looks at me the same way they did when I would tell them I was going to quit drinking (until I finally did). It is true I love adventure, and constant change, and being the kind of person who goes away all the time, but it is also true that I lose momentum on the things important to my home life whenever I leave home to travel every three or four weeks for months at a time. I have gone on 9 trips so far this year! Also, my roommate who takes care of the old cat when I am gone is moving out, so it will no longer be convenient to take off all the time.

Part 7 - A Change of Heart

Given how irritating I found my host’s constant insistence that everything I saw and loved in New York was actually the manifestation of a horrible state of affairs orchestrated by terrible people (the details of which he felt the need to pontificate upon at length every time I remarked on something I enjoyed), I have decided that while I am living here I will love Seattle, and I will stop letting the things that bother me obscure my perception of the things that are awesome about this place.

Part 8 - What Else I did

I have been to NYC maybe a dozen times in the last three or four years, but this was the first time I had more than a 1/2 day all to myself. Whoo hoo! Besides going to Ryan’s art opening, and then going back twice to see the art again, and going to the NYPL thing, I also went to an AA meeting (and got a phone number!), saw the Robert Frank show at the Met, ate amazing Indian and Greek food and at a tiny creperie, went in a number of boutiquey stores and tried on fabulous things that thankfully didn’t fit so I didn’t spend a bunch of money on clothes; I also walked around the East Village a whole lot and Little Italy and Soho a little; and I drank three Shirley Temples at the Bowery Electric until, tired of waiting, I finally approached Jesse Malin to ask if he and Ryan were gong to play, and then left when he said no. Also, when I went to the Morrison Hotel Gallery the day after the opening to look at the art again, I ended up hanging with Rick Edwards, the gallery’s resident photographer, for an hour or so, and he gave me a sweet gift.

Oh! And I saw Gracie too, and she was really cute - funny me, that I should recognize the dog and not the girl getting coffee with Ryan!!

Altogether a wonderful, very very special visit to the capital of the world!

melanyouth:

(via mills):

I drove home with the windows down. That inexplicable change in the air that all know as the first sign of autumn, a change more than the weatherman’s metrics measure, of more than temperature or humidity or wind, had drawn me backwards through my life into the Octobers of late childhood, when birthdays, Halloweens, jackets with patches, and early, splendid sunsets brought to my chest a rising feeling which even then I knew was a euphoria I’d recall for my entire life.

Some years I feel that change in the air and it is as though I am living many years at once, as though my childhood now occurs again concurrent with my adulthood, and I am supremely happy. Driving home, I nearly shook with happiness.

I thought of how much I love you. It isn’t often that I think this way; generally, your presence is the unending, unnoticed assumption: you are always there, and it is on top of you, through you, beneath you that the stuff of my life is scattered. My attention is drawn to the froth and scum on your waves.

Or worse-

-and it is often worse, because I am an ordinary man and inclined to seek out the source of my problems as far from their actual origin as I can, to start the war on my miseries across the world so I won’t have to fight them here, so to speak, and to remotely attack whatever incidental features you possess as safe-havens for what grates, depresses, upsets, and restrains me, even though I and you know that I am the only safe-haven for my despair and anger, and I am the source of all of my problems-

-I blame you, cursing the clouds for my moodiness, thundering at the rain for interfering with my modest habits, shouting that I wish I could kill the diseases that nourish themselves in my body, kill the ants that bite me for my food and footsteps, kill the grasses that grow high around my little wooden house, kill everything that subverts my geometrical order, my symmetrical obsessions, the smoothly efficient running of my errands. I blame you for the death that comes to all, for the entrails that spill from prey, for the hatchlings eaten in the nest, for the trees starved of light by their own kind, for the suffering we endure, inflict, accidentally engender, fail to prevent. I blame you for the unfairness of your gifts: the beauty concentrated here, the plenty concentrated there, the strength elsewhere, the peace somewhere else; I even detest the wind, that most basic sign of instability and unfairness: air rushing to find its equilibrium, to settle evenly, and never able to do so.

But as I was driving home I looked up through the boughs stretched over the deserted streets, the darkening colors of sunset behind them, the branches seeming to crack in the mild breeze, and I thought to myself: for once I should try, even though I lack the sense or diction for it, to write something nice to the world, since it is, despite my distemper and foolish insistence on comparing it to some imagined perfection which would surely be less perfect, utterly beautiful.

There are men, and then there are men, and then there is Mills, who has never made me cry before, and has managed, with this, to lead us near to something I was not sure he actually knew how to touch.