brief mystery of time

A few words of advice. When planning a lateral cross-continent drive:

1. Don't forget to take time zones into account.
2. Don't forget to understand how time zones work.
3. Don't go to Arizona.

randomchef, ( this means you. )

soundtracks

The Erin Brockovich soundtrack has, since it first came out, been my favorite music for the long dry drive through central California to LA. Thomas Newman's score is driven by themes that are propulsive, matching the constant rhythm of the road, but the mood changes every few minutes, making the gradual transitions of passing scenery seem more eventful than they really are.

And the main themes are somehow sly, suggesting that the bright sun and blue sky are somehow a facade behind which shady dealings are going on. This, of course, sounds like the film; this could mean that I'm getting my ideas more from the memory of the movie than from the music itself, or it could mean that Newman perfectly suited his music to the tone of the film. It probably means both of those.

Even the Sheryl Crow songs support this mood. "Redemption Day", halfway through the album, balefully describes the same atmosphere of corruption that the instrumental music implies. And "Every Day is a Winding Road" closes out the experience by insisting, despite all that, on the road's promise of open possibility. Or at least that's how I hear it.

( Three more... )

photographs

There are three kinds of things that catch my eye from the road.

The first is the vastness of nature. I love open plains, open sea, rolling green hills, the patterns of light and dark that late-day sun makes out of the folds and curves of mountains and foothills. Honestly, I love how the sheer size of the land makes our individual failings irrelevant.

The second, similar in scale but psychologically undermining the first, is evidence of immense human systems. Electrical towers, rows of agriculture, wind turbines lining the crest of a hill, the interstate highway system, even the construction of prefabricated housing developments thrills me a little. As an environmentalist I'm horrified by most of these things, but as a humanist--and as someone who can take hours working out the details of a few lines of program code, or writing a three-minute pop song--I'm awed by them. I've been known to gasp at my first sight of a particularly elegant freeway interchange.

I don't know how to photograph either of these things. My photos of deserts stretching off to a distant mountain range always look like a big shrub in the foreground with only a sliver of sand representing the thing that actually inspired me. And my photos of electrical towers, well, they look like electrical towers. Even I say "So what?" when I look at them later. And it doesn't help that most of my photos, on this trip, are taken, without sighting, from behind the bug-spattered and semi-reflective windows of a speeding car.

The third category is signage. I'm drawn by design sometimes, but more often by unusual phrases or funny errors. I can photograph these, because there's nothing photographic about it: The pictures exist solely to document that a thing existed and I saw it.

Still, when one travels, one must have pictures. So I've put up a Yahoo gallery of the first week. (Click on "the big trip".) I apologize for the few photos that are sideways--I don't have time to figure out how to fix that right now. I don't apologize for the rest of them.

I'm about at my quota for free photo posting at Yahoo; anyone got an idea for next week's batch? Ease of setup and upload is paramount--I don't have time to mess with scripts right now.

Phoenix

Where I live, almost all of the open mikes are in coffeeshops. A few of them serve alcohol, but they're still cafes. This has the advantage that non-performers talking to their friends don't feel they have to shout to be heard, but the drawback that nobody applauds you more than you deserve because they're full of drunken love for the world.

In Phoenix, I went to an open mike in a bar--the Dubliner, an Irish(-ish) pub in a lonely strip mall--with these results:

• No iced mocha for me! :-(


• The first time (I'm aware of) that someone at an open mike has tried to pick me up. It took me a while to catch on, but the offer to make me breakfast "to help you on your trip" was a tipoff, and the vehemence of her reaction to my demurral clinched it. It was kind of an icky moment.


• But not as icky as being introduced to two young women--the sort whose body mass is so low they should probably avoid alcohol completely--and watching them slosh into a car and start the long careen home. I kept thinking someone should offer them a ride, or call them a cab, but Greg didn't do it and neither did I.

That said, this is the first time I've been really impressed by a bar open mike--not that I haven't enjoyed others, but the talent level here was consistently high, the sound quality was good, people were professional on stage and friendly off it. Musically it was my favorite night of the trip so far.

radio

Some radio moments:

• Something I've always enjoyed is the juxtaposition created when you're between two radio markets, and stations at the same frequency start to bleed into each other. On my camping trip this summer I listened to a weather service station playing over an Andrews-Sisters-ish old country song with occasional bits of numbers station filtering in. In New Mexico this week, I heard the new Jennifer Lopez song for the first time, while at the same moment a distant station started to enumerate the various rumors about her breakup with Ben Affleck.


• In Fredericksburg, Texas, I listened to a call-in radio show on which diverse political opinions were treated with respect. The topic was the Rangel-Hollings effort to reinstitute the draft, and the context was a Christian radio station, although few of the discussants mentioned religious grounds for their positions. I was a little surprised to hear this sort of discussion on a religious radio station, but I shouldn't have been--I think in this case it was the host's faith that led him to try to listen to and understand his callers, instead of just score points.
  
  For a while a couple of years ago I kept a Christian station on standard rotation in my car radio. During my afternoon commute there was a show in which people would call in with their spiritual and ethical questions, and a thoughtful, slightly hoarse preacher would answer with interpretation of scripture. A memorable, poignant and awful moment came when a caller, suffering from chronic and acute pain, asked if suicide would really consign him to eternal torment--because, he said, sometimes he just didn't think he could stand to go on.
  
  The host tried to answer, basically, "Yes, you can go on," because God will help you. But the caller kept saying, "Yes, but what if I can't?" The host, you could tell, couldn't say that suicide wasn't a sin, but he kept trying, within the confines of his worldview, to be kind and encouraging and somehow help this caller who had given up hope. It was kind of horrifying and kind of deeply human.


• On the way out of Austin, on another Christian radio station, the hosts expressed outrage on behalf of an Algerian pilot who says his career was ruined by the U.S. government, who made him "a scapegoat because he was a Muslim and a pilot". While this was an unexpected bit of inter-faith support, I suspect it was less pro-Islam than anti-government. The next topic on the show was a planned act of armed resistance against a Michigan act of eminent domain--nobody wants it to come to violence, but when they come to take away a man's house, he has to do something.


• Later on the same station, I heard an ad for organic farming (because that's the way God intended it) followed by an interview with an anti-fluoride activist.


• I heard Randy Newman's formerly-over-the-top sarcastic song "Political Science" used as a transition from Laura Ingraham's show to a commercial: "Let's drop the big one and see what happens."


• In rural Alabama, flipping back to radio after an hour or so of MP3s, I found the station I'd been listening to was now out of range, so I hit the "scan" button, and watched as the receiver spun around and around, trying and failing to lock in on any signal.


• In Atlanta, I listened to WCLK for hours. It's the most I've enjoyed a jazz radio station since I left New Jersey. In California I have KCSM, which is good but sometimes feels weighed down by its sense of history, art, and responsibility. WCLK doesn't make jazz feel like a tradition it's holding up by force of will; it plays jazz because that's the music it plays.

places please

I'd heard about it, but I didn't really understand how beautiful Arizona is. Or how hot.

El Paso struck me as a downtown that is not just failed but actually horrible.

In Texas I made my first significant departure from the interstates, reaching Austin via the two-lane U.S. 290. For the first time on this trip I was seeing people and buildings instead of just cars and skylines. Also it made it easier to swing into a gas station parking lot for another Dr. Pepper.

Texas is the only place I've been that actually mandates a lower speed limit at night than in daylight, apparently not trusting its citizens to adjust for conditions themselves. It's also the only place I can remember seeing a carpool lane that's actually walled off from the rest of the highway.

East of Austin, the tragic but unavoidable incidents in which insects lost their lives to my windshield cascaded into a full-scale massacre. Things didn't let up until Atlanta.

Louisiana is where the open spaces of the West gave way to the claustrophobic deciduous parkways of the East. I have fewer photographs from Louisiana on, but they're probably better.

Night in New Orleans was just frustrating--overpriced and overcrowded, full of visitors and the people who cater to them, dependent on the selling of a myth about itself. Added to that was the frustration of being car-bound in any pre-automotive city. In the morning, though, it was empty and easy.

Objectively, you'd have to say my night in Atlanta was bad. An open mike I'd "confirmed" turned out to be defunct; I ended up with a fast-food burrito and a failed attempt to see a movie. But just driving around in Atlanta makes me happy. I don't know why. In the morning, though, I went to a self-proclaimed "diner" with valet parking and a dress code. What?

Asheville is the Santa Cruz of the South. College students, good vegetarian food, leftist politics, too much art, a strange degree of tourism. But no ocean.