Asphalt Eden

I've got dives scheduled every Saturday for the rest of the month and I'm pretty excited to give all my new skills and equipment a good kicking. I've got to remember to bring the camera to the quarry this weekend so I can get a photo of myself taken with the full wetsuit, loaded down with crap. It's a bunch of strangers I'm with this time, not the alumni of my class, but they all seem like relaxed and amiable guys. Me, I'm pretty calm and agreeable in these situations and it's nice to go into it knowing what to expect. The third dive of the day is at night, though, in completely dark water, so I'm a little uptight about that. I have a decent flashlight though, so I guess I'll just choke the fear down and try to get into it.

I bought a couple of White Rainbow records, but I have to admit I can't quite get on this guy's trip. I love psychedelic music of all kinds, and I had these pegged as real winners, but it feels a little thin to me, like an ersatz Manny Göttsching with touches of Jon Hassell and Windy & Carl. The albums I got are okay, but I much prefer playing Ashra and Terry Riley and Heldon. The guy's got an MP3 blog with some friends (I cannot get behind MP3 pirate blogs where whole albums are shared, in case you were wondering—I think it's a harmful practice to artists everywhere) where they diss Steve Roach a little while pumping Steven Halpern. It takes all kinds, I guess. There's a kind of ironic vibe toward the original new age community of the seventies and eighties I detect on the blog—who the hell can tell what's sincere any more, because I sure can't. Everybody wears big, ugly glasses and ridiculous thrift clothes now.

Square and puffy, like an overweight brick, wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot-colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers, he advanced toward Joe Chip, self-satisfaction smirking from every molecule in his body ...

I take back every bad thing I ever said about Philip K. Dick. I've read two of his books in the last week and I'm a believer now. I guess you can see the bricks and mortar of what keeps his books standing, but it doesn't make the edifices any less strong. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a stunner and I'm quite enjoying Ubik as well. If only today's crop of practitioners could be half as inventive and audacious as Dick was. I've got the Library of America omnibus and I give it my highest recommendation.

In other news, I need a career reboot badly. Anybody have suggestions for possible asphalteden-style jobs that don't require additional schooling?

Mom's got screech owls nesting in her backyard and they've a baby now.

If I have to edit on a Sunday, I'm doing it with a pitcher of bellinis.

It was a typical New York crowd for the Stars of the Lid show, with the usual mixture of self-conscious chunk-glasses guys and students; aging installation artists and angular Asian gals; Kant readers and men and women with one attractive facial flaw; sissyboys and their vivacious, baffled girlfriends; people interested in architecture and, well, six or seven guys who looked like me. And then there's that guy (he must be a record collector) with the polka dot shirt (pink dots on black or white dots on black). He's at every show, everywhere. Sometimes he has a goatee. He is always balding from the front to back.

It was a civilized concert, with comfortable seats, and I easily drifted to the merch table for a shirt and CD and got an aisle seat to grab some pictures. I'm getting old and two opening acts seemed like a lot, but they were worth sitting through. Itsnotyouitsme has a terrible name, but the music they did was good solid emo-bient. Simple collections of loops that rose and fell very prettily. The gent on the electric violin was animated enough that it made me feel self-conscious. Hewasfeelingthemusic. I guess. The music felt as though it lacked grit, but I enjoyed it.

Next was Face the Music, a group of freakishly talented 10-15 year old kids who played modern classical, including a difficult piece by John Adams for two pianos. I was both surprised and, I must admit it, horrified by the performance. Such abstruse music played by innocents! It was very weird to hear the sounds come out of their instruments, as though it were some elaborate trick—a canned recording of Gavin Bryars and a bunch of play-acting seventh graders. But the music was very pretty (especially the spiraling tunnels of "Hallelujah Junction" which I had not heard before) and the kids got well-deserved standing ovations. I found that our show was sold out because of all the parents attending. They cleared out when Face the Music was done and left a few empty seats.

Stars of the Lid came out next, at around 10:00, launched right into the sad stuff with "Requiem for Dying Mothers" and it didn't let up for the next hour and a half. The string trio provided nice depth and Christopher Willits even joined for their performance of "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface," though it was difficult to discern just what he contributed to the wall of sound. On the whole, it was one of the more pleasurable ambient concerts I've been to, with cavernous sound and an intriguing projection on the wall of the church. I tried to get some photographs, but I totally botched the camera for no-flash pictures. The below shot was the best I got, sadly enough. There wasn't much to see anyway. I listened to The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid on the way home, just in time to share the PATH back to Hoboken with all of the people who saw Jay Z and Mary J. Blige at MSG that night. It was a Real Nice Night for everybody.


In other news, I pulled a muscle in my shoulder getting out of bed yesterday. I am old.

Like many in my age-group, in the early eighties I was ga-ga over the Choose Your Own Adventure series. I still feel an unusual amount of nostalgia for their ilk, and when I think of them today, they contained every adventure trope a kid of my type in the eighties could want, with a level of adaptable interactivity that was wholly new at the time. My favorite volume in the original series (of which I had only a few) was, surprise, Treasure Diver. My father and I often read this one together (he always read to me when he got home from work, often quite late, and this was a big part of my boyhood), and I could tell he enjoyed its real-world setting more than he would, say, You Are a Shark(!), or Prisoner of the Ant People. According to Gamebooks.org (an amazing site listing and describing all details regarding the incredible array of all such books), Treasure Diver had nineteen discrete endings. To my recollection, twenty-one of these endings resulted in death. I drowned, I was eaten by sharks, I was killed by pirates, I was trapped in an underwater dome belonging to Dr. No, I was eaten by pirates, I suffered from gold doubloon poisoning, I got "the bends" and exploded, I fell in love with Mindy the One-Eyed Stripper and ended up in a South Carolina trailer park with rickets. It was a real horrorshow, and undoubtedly a crucial educational experience for a seven year old.

My favorite series, though, was the Time Machine sequence, where enterprising young boys and girls could experience the Holocaust or the Mexican Revolution, take a break and watch Diff'rent Strokes, and return to something else, perhaps the death of all dinosaurs. Great fun and interesting design. I had the complete series, which was published up until 1988 (I like to stick with things, even if I'm too old and they're out of fashion, duh), though I find I only have the first four of them in my possession today. I read Civil War Secret Agent (was there ever a more appealing confluence?) until the cover came off, and I can still remember phrases from it, and the scene where you meet Harriet Tubman. You couldn't die in the Time Machine books, either, which was of great appeal to me after the endless reincarnation cycle of Treasure Diver. The worst that could happen was getting trapped in time or failing your mission, which is pretty fair on the part of the authors, when you think about it.

I took a few of these books out last night, and tried to read one of the Endless Quest books (Dungeons & Dragons got in on the act), called Pillars of Pentegarn, knowing that my sensible adult intellect, and my knowledge of The Lord of the Rings films, would assist in a quick victory. I was killed three times. I tell you, in these books, as in the life of an editor of sci-fi, it is the arbitrary decisions that reward and the carefully considered ones that kill.

Personally, I must admit I am not much a fan of today's "interactive" things (though learning museums were always quite fun), and I generally tend to enjoy traditional, slow, go at your own pace activities. I like video games, but I refuse to play online games. I enjoy the internet, but I most prefer to read it and not participate (with a few exceptions, obviously) in its circus. I like having choices, but not too many choices—I might even add that the lack of choice, it seems to me, has an untapped capability to grow a person far more than unlimited choices can ever do. I believe in making peace with the decisions made, because you're never allowed to surreptitiously keep your finger on the previous page in case you die horribly when you turn to page 96 in real life (though there have been moments where I've felt I'd peeked). Often the interactive things seem like so much fad, like blogging or Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, just a thing of today to be replaced by something other in the endless parade of distractions, another entertaining blinder. I get tired with all the endless varieties which allow me to indulge small parts of myself (though if they go back to making one kind of jean again, I'll surely die) despite the overall withering of a unified self-image. When I browse the internet, I become tired and unsure, the boat come untethered from the dock, and it's sometimes hard to see the value in any of it, aside from making it easier to buy CDs and ... well, that's almost all I use it for. Buying CDs and reading LJ. That's the whole of the internet for me. Page 23 and page 106. I'll take the backyard, I think, page 574.

A cool, wet morning here and I don't plan to stray far from the bedroom or living room, close to warm liquids and Tylenol, until the evening, at least. My brain and body are working at 60 percent, my thoughts like wilting blooms, so this is an artless rundown for posterity.

I'm officially a certified scuba diver, but it wasn't easy. Two days of "environment experience," the first day of which I felt entirely unprepared for. By way of explanation: I wore unfamiliar equipment (new buoyancy compensator, computer, mask), eighteen pounds of weight, a thick farmer-john wetsuit with an equally thick jumpsuit on top, a hood and gloves, an eighty cubic-foot air tank (weighs about thirty-five pounds). In 48º Dutch Springs lake water (there's a thermocline about twenty feet down from the 51º surface water). The instructor said, "If you can dive under these conditions in a wetsuit and still properly do your skills, you're set to go anywhere." I've never been colder, not even during that rain-soaked trip up the mountain in Wyoming, 1993. I'm 5'8", 150 pounds, little body fat—in other words, Not Built For That Shit.

The first day felt like a high-anxiety disaster. I panicked on my first descent to twenty-five feet and had to get a grip at the training platform. My mask leaked, cold water flowed constantly into my suit (which is supposed to happen, of course), I swallowed air with hungry gasps, and I could only count down the minutes on my dive computer (you've got to clock twenty to count for certification, and the first five felt like thirty). Dive two was even worse, because I, noob that I am, neglected to zip the top of my suit up, meaning a constant, bracing rush of cold lake water (did I mention it was 48º?) onto my chest whenever I moved. Heart attack city. The most cold twenty-four minutes of my life; it's official. I got out of the water, shivering spasmodically, thinking I wasn't cut out for diving, and it was a depressing ride home from there.

I got a chill and was totally wasted for the rest of the day. I sat around and ate hot soup (Bianca took good care of me) and dealt with the lingering cold of the water and, oh yeah, the feverish feeling I had from the damned sunburn I got as a parting gift (it was overcast and I didn't even think to put any sunblock on). So: now lobster-face. I finished Rhialto the Marvelous (one of Vance's very best). I watched the last hour of Atonement (sad movie). I went to bed at 8:30 and had strange undersea dreams of dry-suits and carp, bodies distended with air, weightlessness. I felt as though there was a giant shiver inside of me, struggling to escape.

Day two I approached with something akin to dread, but I'd been convinced the day before by Bianca that I should tough it out and get it over with. I remembered that I'd forgotten to button up the suit, and I imagined zipping it properly would make it more bearable. I did so and did not panic on my first descent to twenty-five feet, where we did an air consumption drill and a compass run from the platform. I started getting a little cold after fifteen minutes, but was able to persevere without any mishap.

The second and final dive was a compass run to a submerged fire truck which lay at around thirty feet or so. My buddies and I got there easily and we then followed the instructor down to our target depth of sixty feet, the furthest I've ever been down under the blue. There were enormous carp and trout down there, beautiful and unaffected by 45º waters. Even scummy algae at the bottom of the lake had an ethereal beauty unseen on dry land. I look forward to the riot of life in the Caribbean this summer. From a technical standpoint, I had some difficulty clearing the air spaces in my ears, but, after a few tries, I managed to get them under control. My new BC, (a back-inflated model manufactured by Aqua Lung), made it easy to hover with reasonable stability without much practice or acclimation. We all left the water feeling happy and accomplished, though bone tired, to receive the signatures for our certifications. I've now logged just over ninety minutes under water.

In all, learning to dive was a happy, rewarding experience, save for a tough first day of open water dives. It isn't cheap, especially if you want to own your own set of gear (I went a frugal route and it still added up significantly at the end), but I can tell already it's a decision I'll feel great about years from now. Tonight, I begin the advanced course....

This spring denotes the 2008 terrarium project I will be undertaking. As you see, I have the vessel above, and will be starting this one in the month of May. I have not decided what the contents will look like quite yet, but I'll be using the Gardening with Terrariums and Sand Sculpture book by Rex Mabe gurdonark sent me a few years ago, vintage 1975, where imagination and container are the only limits. Scuba diving, terrarium construction—these are the kinds of hobbies I always imagined I would entertain myself with. It is only a matter of the doing.

Incredible collection of Chute Libre's pop-art French SF paperback covers. I'd never seen all of these. I'd love to have this kind of design aesthetic on today's genre stuff—it still looks compelling and transgressive, while also appealing to the collector's instinct for uniform editions. It's an audacious use of stock art, since clearly none of the art was created for these editions (ie. the tentacle-prOn Moebius pic above). I like the visceral nastiness of it all, which was a great appeal of New Wave science fiction to me as a teenager, so much more style than substance.

From another perspective, it's a mere iteration of the same old paperback art tropes designed to lure you into buying the book on the quality of the cover. Here, rather than busty Frazetta babes or sensawonda spaceporn, you get a distinctly French perspective: shock the money out of the customer's pockets—doesn't matter what you put on the cover, just make it confrontational and vaguely modern-arty. The same old bullshit, targeted to a different consumer mindset, rather like a lot of the New Wave writers' work, now that I think on it.

Anyway, I find it all much more appealing than the computerized or self-consciously retro stock art that bedecks most tripe published today.

One technique I often use to lull myself to sleep [I have never had trouble sleeping, and I am often asleep four or five minutes after I close my eyes—I'm able to tell from the music playing when we sleep], is a mental tour of some past residence or place I have been. In the spring, the odors of exploding nature bring me back to trips to visit my grandfather in his Florida townhome, and so, this time of year, I tour his house in my mind and fall asleep by the time I make it to the guest bedroom within.

The year before he died, the guest room had changed considerably, his Vietnamese live-in girlfriend (my step-father, a vet, suspects she was a prostitute during the war, which is as salacious and intriguing an imagining as anything I could conjure) filling it with portraits of herself and of her family, and all of the familiar furniture had been removed. All semblance of what I had remembered (a settee overlooking the canal, a couch where I'd watch movies on the little television) was gone, save a fold-out bed for me to sleep on. His office had been moved to another room in the house, and everything once-known was impossible to parse in the original ways. The house in the moments before sleep is unchanged, though, and I can almost hear my grandmother's voice, and the little radio she used to play (this must be a compound memory of when they lived upstairs from us in my childhood home), and the sound of a Norelco electric razor.

The radio station she listened to is of the sort that no longer exists—the one-thousand strings of Mantovani shamelessly co-opting island themes and rhythms experienced by WWII servicemen in the forties have fallen silent. I recall we also used to listen to radio dramas on the same transistor set in the early 1980s, while playing pinochle, and though I know it is not an imagining, it still seems unbelievable.

I read the new Glenn Ganges comic book on the train yesterday. It seemed to me to be about our inherent social incapability to adequately communicate in person to others the complexity of our internal lives, but it may also just have been about experiences during the dot-com boom. A high-school friend of mine made a lot of money in those years, and she hadn't even finished college. She had expensive clothes and makeup. Sometimes I dream about her and she has a designer drug habit and a tasteless, glassy modern home on the cliffs of the Hudson.

When hearing of her success, I remember wondering why I'd decided to go down the road of a writing degree. At this time I cannot even remember my original reasoning, why I wanted to write in the first place. Well, perhaps it is not that. It is not about wanting to write—I simply write, and the act is done. But I can't remember why I felt it necessary to lock in writing as "what I do." I'm not sure where the thought came from, and possible origins recede further and further away with time. I think it is just the same as if I had majored in "undeclared." Being an editor is being the college professor of that graduate program, a Mastery in the Undeclared.

I feel terrible for children today who live their lives on the internet. I am shy enough that so much of my own development of the last few years has been written down for all to see, the warts and the lesions, and the thought of having my pre-teen and teen years on display, all of the drama and histrionics, would be too much for me to bear.

I'm doing my open water dives in Pennsylvania this weekend, so I'll be officially certified on Sunday. Next week we have tickets to go see Stars of the Lid. I'm reading Rhialto the Marvelous. I highly recommend the album Umber by Parks. I am expecting a restorative summer.