Running is driving yourself birdshit crazy over the perfectly engineered mixtape: #13

Mix #13: Cubic Feet Per Second

Having left the hallowed, hushed halls of academia (for the time being) and moved to a climate where hot, moist air curls on top of the City of Austin everyday around 2:30 PM like an enormous, radioactive, soaking wet housecat, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks wondering if I’m getting dumber. I can practically feel the lack of annotated bibliography assignments–and the blowtorch of the Texan summer sun–sucking all the smarts right out of me. Or maybe I’m entering some kind of halcyon Cameron 2.0 era, where I emerge from my desert cocoon of bad animal puns and intellectual fakery to grow mutton chops, take up bonsai pruning, and let Zen koans flutter from my lips like autumn leaves.

As I’m currently unemployed (an advanced humanities degree does not a job make, my friends), I’ve been spending my time watching a lot of PBS and getting back into running. And listening to more dancepop and mid-career Springsteen (thanks, Gwynne!) than is probably healthy. And I’ve rediscovered one of the real joys of putting on a pair of trainers and heading out the door: unearthing trails and weird cultural landmarks in a new city. A couple days ago, I got lost in Zilker Park and ended up near the back entrance to Barton Springs pool. AKA the Park’s seamy wet underbelly where I witnessed three different drum circles taking place surreptitiously in the bushes, and almost ran over a crusty punk trainhopper who’d passed out while taking a dump in what looked to be a cluster of poison oak.

I’m mulling over the idea of signing up for the San Antonio Rock ‘n Roll Marathon in November. Even though it seems depressingly corporate and I’m skeptical about the quality of the “rock ‘n roll” that’s going to be served up every mile on the course. I’m picturing lots of white-guy-in-fedora-Dad-rock blues bands and mangled Skynard covers. I’m also increasingly skittish about leaving Austin city limits (zing), fearing the red-state wilderness of Texas-at-large. I’m hesitant to go anywhere outside the safe boundaries of the city, except down to San Marcos to eat yogurt out of Gwynne’s fridge without her knowing about it, or try (unsuccessfully) to nap on her tiny, tiny, tiny couch with my lumbering, man-child frame.

1 / The Hold Steady – Atlantic City (Springsteen cover)
2 / Ghostland Observatory – Sad Sad City (One of Austin’s finer exports, even if their frontman, Aaron, looks too much like an extra from Smoke Signals. Boy sure can swivel those skinny hips, though.)
3 / Ratatat – Wildcat (the song to which all of my future children will be conceived)
4 / The Knife – We Share Our Mother’s Health
5 / DJ Kaos – Love The Night Away (Tiedie Mix) (Perfect poolside. Or, as the typically bombastic Pitchfork notes: “The bongos are pure Balearic disco, and the gruff, assertive, and sincere vocals firmly in the tradition of Italo classics. But the end result is a passionate dancefloor slow burn of intense beauty, an incomparable summer soundtrack.”)
6 / Memory Cassette – Asleep At A Party
7 / Handsome Furs – All We Want, Baby, Is Everything (There is no more direct path to my heart, I think, than the dark, petrol-choked, ice-paved road of Wolf Parade side projects. From this year’s excellent Face Control. And, as Wikipedia reminds us, “The inspiration behind Face Control involves a peculiar aspect of club culture they observed while on tour in Eastern Europe: if party goers wish to reserve a table at a bar in Moscow, they must pay large sums of money through PayPal or with cash; however, their seat is still not guaranteed – bouncers have the authority to turn reserved patrons away from the bar based solely on appearance, which has been coined ‘face control.’”)
8 / Handsome Furs – Radio Kalininbrad (God, this one too–somehow these epic, swirling, shrieking layers reach that pure vein of nostalgic sonic warmness that previously only My Bloody Valentine, The Radio Dept., Slowdive, or somehow stumbling across an episode of The Wonder Years on cable late at night could hit.) <via Winnie Cooper, duh>
9 / Sonic Youth – Tom Violence
10 / Robots in Disguise – The Sex Has Made Me Stupid
11 / Portland Cello Project f. Laura Gibson – Hands in Pockets (cooldown)

Running is 2.0

http://waffleghost.tumblr.com

because everyone else is doing it.

Running is having reservations

Dear Land ‘O Lakes Butter,

My parents go to Santa Fe almost every year. They drive, stopping for lunch in Pueblo on the way, and spend the weekend buying all kinds of stuff. Chili pepper Christmas lights. Ristras. Santos. Navajo rugs with different earth tones mashing up against one another with their polygonal sawteeth. A ladder built from split cords of poplar wood, bound together with plastic animal gut and sinew. Spindly squash gourd earrings, fashioned together with obsidian. Pastel colors. Zig-zag patterns. Dreamcatchers to keep the incubi at bay. Some nights at home, they page through a guide they got off the Internet on Hopi kachina dolls. They buy the ones that interest them and get them Fedex’d overnight and spend thirty minutes looking at them when they finally arrive. Then they arrange them on the windowsill in dramatic poses. Fighting brave under fluorescent track lighting. Angwusnasomtaka next to runner up golf trophy. Crow Mother next to family heirloom Bavarian beer stein. Dancing Bear (with authenticity certificate signed by the artist) juxtaposed with a book on IRA mutual fund options. Jean Baudrilliard could probably write a whole book about that windowsill.

One year on the way down to Arizona for a backpacking trip, my dad and I stayed in a Motel 8 on the Navajo Reservation, in Kayenta. I remember a lot of driving. Some of the Navajos walk. You’ll be thirty miles out from the nearest town on a two-lane road, surrounded by juniper and sage and spindly cattle fences and wild moonscaped terraces of crimson dirt and you’ll see a Navajo just out there walking. On the shoulder. It’s usually the old guys and elderly women, in mesh hats and flannel, or bulky, wool skirts. When we got into town, Kayenta was full of sandblasted Quonset huts, gutted F-150s lying like beached mechanical whales in the arid wastes of their front lawns. It was Easter Sunday and the restaurant downstairs in the lobby was serving a special holiday menu. They served a lamb chop so dry it could’ve doubled as a joke on the BBC, paired with some congealed mint chutney and a pile of wilted endives. My dad ate it all. Then spent most of the night in the can, keeping me up with diarrhetic moaning.

(pictured: Louis Tewanima)

One time, when I went to an advanced placement engineering camp at a local university during high school, I roomed with a Shoshoni guy, about five ten, sixteen years old. He spent a lot of time reading Mad. A bunch of Shoshonis were on scholarship at the camp, learning how to mechanically dissect water timers. I don’t remember the guy’s name. Isn’t that horrible? I think it was something like Ivan. I’ll go ahead and call him Ivan, since I doubt he’ll read this. Anyway, one hot evening, Ivan took a thick bundle of dried sage from his bag and hung it in the doorway of our dorm room with extreme care. Sitting at my desk, unable to figure out how to apply a quadratic equation to an especially nasty geometry problem, I swore. Ivan looked at me.
“Apologize to the sage,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You just swore in front of the sage smudge. Apologize.”
“To a plant?”
“Yeah.”
“Apologize to a plant?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t.
And I forgot about it until last Christmas, in front of a painting by Sanford R. Gifford or Bierstadt at the Gilcrease  in Tulsa.

Regards,

-C. Turner

______________________________

Days streaked: 21

Total Miles: 79.1

Today’s running mixxx: The Dodos, Born Ruffians, and 764-HERO

Running is signs mistaken for wonders

Wrote a long-promised letter to a friend in San Francisco last night.

Two new flickr finds:

Pith helmets (pool)
Cthulu-inspired stationary from a lovely steampunk girl in Belgium

______________________________

Days streaked: 20

Total Miles: 74.1

Today’s running mixxx: Jackson Browne

Running is metathesis

Miranda July
PO Box 26596
Los Angeles, CA 90026
USA

Dear Ms. July,

Earlier today, I was putting the finishing touches on the introduction to my Master’s thesis. While discussing the role of animal enclosures in late nineteenth century British colonialism, I accidentally typed “hamster narrative” instead of “master narrative.”

This seemed like the kind of thing that you should be aware of.

It’s even funnier, too, because my thesis is about monstrous animals. And I’m sure there’s got to be an actual monstrous hamster narrative out there in the cultural ether somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cannibal Hamster Holocaust is playing on TBS right now, actually.

Anyway, thanks for You and Me and Everyone We Know–that scene with the goldfish makes me so wonderfully sad. It makes me want to go out and make gravestone rubbings with my best friends, or have another go at writing fiction again.

-C. Turner

______________________________

Days streaked: 19

Total Miles: 71.1

Today’s running mixxx: Efterklang

Running is a latte problems

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Dear Caffeine,

Ours was a long and torrid affair. As we go our separate ways, my heart will still (literally) ache from our final months together. The ink stains of memory are darkest when they are freshest. I will find it hard to shake the fetters of remembrances of our terrible last days. My increasingly whiny dependence on you. My tempestuous bouts of man-child irritability after spending my Wednesday mornings downing two whole pots of coffee. It was fine while the high lasted. I flitted effortlessly as a hummingbird between grading, research, Peggle, and fist-pumping triumphantly at my computer to the latest venom heaped upon James Wood by the judicious pen of Edmond Caldwell. The inevitable crash in the early afternoon, as I would twitch bodily in a kind of tarantella in my socks and boxer briefs on the couch. I’d be wrapped up in crippling dread, too wired to nap, and too tired to do anything but further my love-hate relationship with Suze Orman, the television’s volume level dialed down almost to mute.

With the passing of time, though, these memories will grow dusty and faded, like the furniture in the forgotten dens of our grandparents, and I will be left with sunnier echoes of our time together. Do you remember the halcyon days of my freshman year of college, when we subsisted purely on a diet of six Mountain Dews a day, Robert Smith’s voice, and Top Ramen? I was as whip-thin and jittery as a greyhound on a crash diet. My diastolic pressure and insulin levels are both pleased that we moved through that difficult phase, but I remember it now as though it were a daguerreotype of a field of daisies, hung softly and sweet in the hallway of my mind. I remember, too, the night in eighth grade when my friend Dan M. decided on a dare to shovel an entire package of Pixie Sticks into a 20-ounce bottle of Surge!!, then poured it down the hatch. Dan spent the rest of the night Greco-Roman wrestling his dog, a 125-pound lab mix, to “Master of Puppets.” The dog loved it.

Part of the problem is that I’ve also grown to detest, with all the fire of my loins, people who make jokes about “not being a morning person,” or who have bumper stickers about coffee on their Volvos. You know who I’m talking about. These people generally read Ziggy and wear big sunglasses over their normal glasses when they drive.

Caffeine, don’t cry. It’s ok. We’re saying goodbye for good. You can still come by my crib on weekends to borrow my Battlestar Season 3 box set. Actually, I’ve switched from coffee to green tea the in past few days after our break-up, and so far that seems to be going okay. I’m concerned that entirely giving up caffeine will raise my eventual risk for dementia. I’m terrified I’ll end up “cracked,” as the English say, pottering about the garden in my tweeds, mistaking laurel bushes for my grandchildren. I’m hoping that the switch to green tea–which Japanese television tells me will also help me find friends on public transportation–will help offset my eventual health risks. Plus with its antioxidants and the fact that it’s au courant to carry a bottle of the stuff around urban apartments that have lots of stainless steel accents and exposed brickwork, I want in on a cut of the tea action. Tea might be the best thing since the eucharist was invented. I don’t know. But I want to find out.

I also grew disenchanted with the fact that you’re one of the worst goddamn commodity crops in the world, both in terms of global environmental sustainability and social justice. And, while I could’ve continued to buy fair trade and continued my nerve-splintering life of insomnia, dry mouth, and cuspid staining, it just wasn’t worth it in the end. These nights, I sleep like a parakeet with a black velvet curtain over its cage.

Yours,
C. Turner

P.S. I’m going to a pie party tonight, and you’re not invited. Yeah, that’s right. A pie party. As in a party where everyone sits down and eats pie and uses other Anglicisms, like “oi, this is sich a loverly pie, innit?” Mincemeat and black pudding may or may not be involved. (The number of Dickensians in my graduate program has waned in recent years.)

______________________________

Days streaked: 18

Total Miles: 68.1

Today’s running mixxx: The Acorn and The Magnetic Fields.

Running is accounting

It might appear to the untrained eye that I’ve reneged on my insane promise to both write a letter and write every day for the next couple of months.

For the bean-counters (although I don’t know why you people waste all your time counting beans, when you could be counting something more exciting, like Duchovny pec-jiggles, or the number of alligator attacks on golf courses), here are my latest letter-writing activities, followed by the latest mileage update:

April 7th: Wrote sappy letter to g which would probably make you all barf mightily, as wine-soaked, Greek gods after a poorly concluded symposium, which is why I didn’t post it.

April 8th (today): Talk about a boring letter… I penned a sample cover letter for school district applications in the next couple weeks, and sent it out to my program’s recruiting coordinator for review. Booowwwwwrrrringg. Cover-letter-writing, along with resume-refining and filling out a billion dumb forms, has consumed every second of my waking life the past 48 hours like a swarm of voracious insects in the shape of one of those What Color is Your Parachute? books. I hate job-hunting. I hate interviewing, which inevitably leaves my reservoir of fake smiles (already dangerously low) depleted, and me feeling like I’ve taken a hockey puck to the throat (or “da troat,” if you’re from da U.P.). I especially hate the new, weird smell my bath towels took on over the weekend while I was gone, which makes me think a fat German Shepherd and a skunk made transgressive, interspecies love in my shower while I was gone, then toweled each other off.

Also: the new Decemberists record is awful. Just awful. I feel the same way I did when I first saw Jar-Jar Binks racism his way across the screen as a middle school student brimming with a million little glittery silver stars of hope at the premiere of The Phantom Menace.

______________________________

Days streaked: 17

Total Miles: 64.1

colonna sonora di oggi : Wolf Parade.

Running is Volksgeist

Chris Carter
Executive Producer
The X-Files
20th Century Fox
10201 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035

Monday, April 6, 2009

Dear Mr. Carter,

About this time last year, I worked my way through the first three seasons of The X-Files. Despite the show’s increasingly dated special effects and early-90s wardrobes (Scully’s grey pantsuits! Flannel! Chunky shoes! Cable-knit sweaters!), I have to tell you: few television shows still have the creepy staying power that the X-Files does. Even the show’s occasional forehead-slapping foray into political incorrectness is sort of charming in retrospect. See, for example, the Season One’s episode “Shapes” (Also known as the “Native Americans are werewolves! Who knew?! Awrrrooo!!” episode).

For the record, I think that “Darkness Falls” is, by far, the best episode. Oregon loggers getting cocooned and sucked dry by mutant, bioluminescent swarms of prehistoric green bugs who’ve been released because the loggers clearcut a bunch of old growth? That’s so cool. SO COOL. I can’t even believe how cool that is.

Mr. Carter, do you believe in ghosts? I’m curious if the X-Files episodes you produced were in any way informed by actual paranormal experiences.

I tot. believe in ghosts.

There’s a place in rural Douglas County, Colorado near where I grew up. It is called (rather unimaginatively) the “Ghost Bridge.” There are two legends associated with the bridge, which is way out in the plains and spans a ditch formed by a seasonal creek. The first legend, at least the way I heard it from my friend Staci my junior year of high school, is that a bunch of “Indians were buried out there” and that “their spirits get really pissed off when white drive over their graves in their cars.” The second legend is that a schoolbus went flying over the guardrail back in the early 1970s after hitting a patch of black ice on a particularly cold morning. 30-some high schoolers and the driver were killed. Whose (again, according to Staci) “spirits get really pissed off when anybody drives over the bridge.”

The two legends are held in a weird dialectic whenever anybody goes out to the ghost bridge. You’re supposed to hear *both* the menacing, mossy thump of Indian war drums AND see ghostly children with black eyes screaming soundlessly at you from the far side of the bridge. Which is then supposed to drip blood from its I-beams.

Blood. Blood. Bloooood.

I’ve only been out to the ghost bridge twice, and both times nothing happened except that it was really cold, foggy, creepy, and a couple of cows started humping. One time, Staci claimed to have seen a “ghost school bus” on the road with no driver, but Staci also listened to a *lot* of Whitesnake, which tarnishes her reputation as a witness somewhat in my view.

I myself am a devout believer in ghosts after the most intensely frightening night of my life spent in a haunted bed-and-breakfast in Eureka Springs, Colorado in 2005. The B&B was an old, Victorian-style house owned by a man named Hugh. He’d moved to Eureka, a small mountain town near Colorado Springs, with his partner in 2000. They’d split up within six months. His partner bailed on Hugh because he couldn’t stand the house. It gave him “bad vibes,” pipes would constantly break, rooms would be freezing cold even with the heat on, and he couldn’t be in a room without feeling like the walls were “looking back at him.” Anyway, my parents and I were the only guests for the night and Hugh and I talked for a long time down in the kitchen, drinking, after my folks had gone to bed. Around 11:30, I made to go back upstairs and Hugh asked me to remind him which room he’d put me in. “The Peacock Room,” I said. “Oh,” Hugh said, “That one’s not so bad. With the ghosts.”

The Peacock Room was named because of its wallpaper, emerald green and purple. It was also decorated with bird-ish stuff, including a giant, hanging birdcage in the window and (how scrotum-tighteningly creepy is this) a taxidermied eagle on the dresser. I managed to pass out right away, but then awoke around 2:30 in the morning to a creaking. The birdcage swayed back and forth in the room for the next three hours. I’d left the window closed and there was nothing coming from the air conditioning vent. Except (and this is the thing that still gets me) the sound of somebody breathing. Right next to the bed. There were also footsteps coming from the hall at weird, shuffling intervals. I was too petrified to even get out of bed and reach for my phone for at least an hour, at which point I called my then-girflriend and mightily compromised my masculinity over the phone. I was way too scared to get out of the bed. Instead, I waited until dawn broke, when the birdcage abruptly stopped swinging and the panting ghost was banished back to its day-lair, or whatever. I’m never staying in a bed & breakfast (sorry, “B&B”) again. Ever. Not even if Kevin Sorbo was the owner and baked oatmeal scones wearing in a frilly gingham apron every morning, delivering them hot and fresh to guests’ rooms. Not then, not never.

That’s all for now.

Best wishes,
C. Turner

______________________________

Days streaked: 15

Total Miles: 57.1

colonna sonora di oggi : Common and Jay-Z.

Running is jawbreaking

Ciao ciao from San Marcos, everyone!

To: The short, disheveled man-child sitting next to me during yesterday’s TeXeS teacher competency exam at Texas State University, San Marcos.
From: C. Turner

Dear Sir,

Did you know that some two and half millennia ago, students in Ancient Greece would wear garlands of rosemary around their heads to their exams, believing that it improved their memory?

You know what students in Ancient Greece did not do at their exams? Slowly and maliciously torture a wintergreen lifesaver between their molars until it suddenly cracked in half with a sound like a gunshot. Because they weren’t gigantic walking buttholes, like you.

If I turns out I tanked my exam, and I end up working at a Radio Shack and growing a mustache and pouring rubbing alcohol into my coffee each morning to take the cruel edge off of one miserable day after another, I know exactly who to blame.

Although I’ll admit–I was impressed that you, sockless in your penny loafers and emitting a sour, sickly odor from your mouth-breathing,  managed to hit on that twiggy blonde girl sitting at the front of your row as you turned in your exam, slipping her your number on the back of a receipt. I’m sure she really appreciated that.

God help the youth of Texas if the state decides to certify your dumb face.

-C

______________________________

Days streaked: 14

Total Miles: 54.1

colonna sonora di oggi : grackles and Gwynne.

Running is shipwrecked (flat on your back)

My drawing skills have always been wretched. If my drawing met Amber’s drawing, it’d be like matter and antimatter meeting and the entire universe would go bananas.

But I was tired of typing letters (even Garamond starts to lose its spindly charm after a while), so I decided to do something different for my letter to Hammock:

I’m flying to Austin for the weekend. I’m barely holding myself together. In the best way possible.

Do yourself a favor and watch Hammock: Mono No Aware from Hammock Music on Vimeo

______________________________

Days streaked: 13

Total Miles: TBD

colonna sonora di oggi : the sweet sound of Gwynne’s feet next to mine.