Though I completed this chapter of my pop music autobiography (20 songs, 80 minutes, mp3 for download) in late September, a few weeks into my first semester at Georgetown, only now in the more apparent denouement of my existential crisis do I feel compelled to write its intentions, framed in the context of two gifts I received in November.

When Indi greeted me a happy birthday, she told me she hadn’t yet sent out my gift, the Lost Buildings DVD. A copy of it arrived shortly before my pilgrimage to Fallingwater a couple weeks later, and I watched it with Shiella, Roanne, and Jerry in Pittsburgh the night before our tour of the house. When I called Indi to tell her about the trip and thank her for the gift, she apologized that my gift was still on her dining room table as she’d hoped to wrap it with a card before sending. The copy I received in the mail the week before didn’t include a receipt; the return address on the padded manila envelope was the NPR store in Chicago. I wondered who might have thought to order a copy on my behalf, who in the world would know how this slim volume occupied the intersection of my interests in architecture, the work of Chris Ware, and This American Life, know such an object existed, and feel inclined to buy me a birthday gift. It was a short list.

After some talk among friends I might have an admirer, I called my parents and discovered it was from them, something they knew I’d like from consulting my wishlist. I asked if they knew how it ended up there, and in the midst of explaining why I wanted it, my mother asked, Why does it matter? I began to think that document of stuff I want is like an answer key to a test, a series of questions about my taste, interests, and aspirations. The maxim it’s the thought that counts found relevance — though it’s a gift I love and something I plainly wanted, the material possession of the gift did not, as I realized gifts are supposed to, signify an understanding of the receiver by the giver.

The Friday after that road trip, I took lunch with Christina. Waiting for our table at a sofa by the bar, she drank a cup of tea and I ordered coffee. A waiter set a tray with a French press and accoutrements on the low table before us. At a break in our conversation, I leaned forward to add cream and sugar, and in my periphery, I noticed she was leaning too.I want to know you take your coffee, she said.

As it’s Christmas morning somewhere in the world now, gifts seem an appropriate subject. I wrote once that though it’s my spoken ambition to calibrate my existence to the basic unit of a transcontinental flight, my worst-kept secret is that I’d like to land somewhere and know, quietly, sincerely, that I’ll be understood. And it could be my fault that it took so long to feel I was approaching what I wanted: although I gave away the answers, perhaps the questions were too obscure. Maybe nobody really got me because I didn’t give enough of myself.

After the Fallingwater trip, Roanne and I discussed the appearance of our mutual interest in architecture in the conversation that prompted the pilgrimage. I observed that I tend to conduct my relationships around a specific range of subjects and that conversations rarely extend into my other interests. We agreed that we owed it to ourselves to have whole relationships, to let networks mingle and see what happens, to make commonplace these moments we are at once comfortable and complete.

And I guess that was the existential crisis — the struggle to be comfortable and completely myself in an existence where so little of myself was applied, among people who really couldn’t be bothered to appreciate with half my zeal a building, public radio, graphic novels, road trips, and everything else. When I say it’s the thought that counts, I mean the thought is everything — a gift without it is scarcely a gift at all. Sentimental as it sounds, these may be the best we have to offer each other: the curiosity, perception, and memory of how we take our coffee, and the space where, without first asking forgiveness, we can be completely who we are.

To those who celebrate it, merry Christmas.

Please forgive the continuing election post-mortem.

This is required viewing for anybody who confuses sporting a lapel pin for true patriotism (nicked from The Daily Dish). I question and doubt my government because I want it to be better, because its impact on the world is undeniable. All those baseball games where people stood respectfully and listened to a celebrity of dubious talent sing the national anthem were just practice for this moment. Eddie Izzard said about the American national anthem: “70% of what people react to is the look, you know, it’s how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say.” But that crowd on St. Mark’s Place knew and believed 100% of what they were saying. The awkward pause before ‘banner,’ where the crowd collectively catches its breath to belt out the last three words of that phrase, gives me chills.

Courtney took this picture of me in the crowd at James Hoban’s. Even if in the future I am happily married with five children, this past Tuesday may still be one of the top 5 best days of my life.

And just as 25 years and 364 days is just a night of sleep away from 26 even, I know that though the president-elect is now preparing for the quantum leap into residence of the Oval Office, the deep, fundamental flaws that bore this cynicism and disbelief have yet to be addressed. The ecstasy that washed over crowds was just rain water; the ground supply still needs to be cleansed of its bitterness. Until then, I still worry. I’m always prepared to be let down, to be told I’m wrong again, to be part of a minority stewing over beer and waiting for vindication.

I’ve been listening to “Changes” by 2pac pretty much constantly since the morning of 5 November. My iTunes library is rarely sorted by artist, but that morning, it was, and this song was at the top of the list. I remember riding around Irvine with Rishi and Ky Vinh, this song blasting and us commenting in between laments about our respective existential crises that it was still relevant in 2005. That two lines of that song — and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president — were rendered moot in one night is why St. Mark’s Place burst into song, why I can’t stop grinning, why I stick my tongue out at the sky not to spite the heavens but to catch a drop of rain.

Hardly five days back from Port-au-Prince and I’m moving the one-quart plastic bag of liquids and aerosols from my rolling suitcase to my duffle bag and filling the rest of the space with clothes appropriate to the current Portland weather—a mild peak of 57 from a low of 52, intermittent rain. And when I return on Wednesday, I’ll have a mere 36 hours before I receive Eric for a two-week stay.

And this seems to be the prevailing pattern for 2008: travel somewhere new, host an old friend (or my mother, as the case was in April). After Eric leaves, I’ll be back in Manila for most of July until the beginning of August, and I’m planning trips to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur during that stay.

Then it’s All Points West, UX Week, and orientation at Georgetown. So much for those unaccountable weekends of concert-going, movie-going, museum-going, and other-country-going, binge drinking to the last. So much for open tomorrows.

I’ll keep my comments about my trip to Haiti brief, and first, yes, I actually was there. Except for my colleagues, it seems my updates about a new passport picture and maladrone were all taken as groundwork for an elaborate ruse, and although there were moments even I didn’t believe it was happening, it did. I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the country, let alone the city of Port-au-Prince, as we were largely confined to the hotel and the tony hillside during our three-day stay, conducting transactions in American English and dollars. Ultimately, we were there to do a job, and after my end of that was torpedoed by possibly the most ill-conceived website launch I’ve witnessed, I’m told we still fulfilled our symbolic purpose, which I have to convince myself counts for something. And as a natural extension of the fact I rarely parted with my DSLR there, I assumed the role of delegation photographer—there’s ample evidence I am not making this up.

Nevertheless, given the thesis I’m planning to write, it was a fruitful trip for my personal academic purposes. And though our itinerary was narrow, we made the best of it, three single guys on straight cash per diem. Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, and I know, I know, I know…

Apropos today’s itinerary, man, is romance in the 21st century a weird beast or what? Sure, good things happen to me when it rains, but whither tornadoes?

“I know you say there’s no-one for you, but here is one.”

Mark Shepard: I recently spent the afternoon in a garden at my favorite watering hole in Brooklyn and sat next to a couple who were chatting. The guy was constantly shifting his attention between his conversation partner and his new iPhone. Now it’s common when talking to someone to glance away periodically at other people or things happening around you (I would suggest this is a fundamental attraction of urban environments), but what’s different here is that Mr. iPhone’s attention is constantly shifting between virtual and actual modes of presence. To me, the interesting questions are: What happens when the virtual and the actual are not understood in terms of a strict dichotomy but rather a continuity or a gradient? How might we design for scenarios like this?

Adam Greenfield: I think of what’s happening in this scenario (and I agree, this is an almost paradigmatic case) as a wholesale redefinition of adjacency.

—Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents.

While my visits to California aren’t rare, my two-week stay last winter has been the longest since I moved away, enough time to expand my itinerary beyond family and close friends to not only to visit with past acquaintances but, with some, to also superimpose physical, spatial relationships over evolving virtual relationships, adding dimensions of tone and motion to the plain text of emails. Enough time to not only gorge myself on the late-night fast food of my inner fat kid but to also pilgrimage to the Salk Institute, to deliver red velvet cake to the ailing, to dance at Harvelle’s on a Sunday night. To not only retrace a Los Angeles past but to discover the Los Angeles present.

And this is incidental music from that visit, that winter, the strangely progressive KROQ playlist as the sun rose over the 110 sound barrier just south of downtown on an early Saturday morning, the iPods of Murky Coffee baristas, tributes to Oscar Peterson, album cuts from second-hand finds at Lovell’s. It’s another chapter in my pop-music autobiography for download (and eventual plastic distribution), 18 songs over nearly 80 minutes, called (yeah seriously) Homewrecking.

My history aside (or probably integral), this isn’t so much about cuckolding as much as it is about a botched divorce from an entire status quo that’s willfully hurtful to the people who necessarily inhabit it. For as much as I fantasize of a life free from coding and production, the limits of my suburban upbringing, and geographic monogamy, there’s sense in sticking it out, building up savings, vesting in the retirement system, and earning my masters. And while it wouldn’t kill me to buck up in the meantime, I (more often than I’m comfortable) think I might regret this course of action in my financially stable but dreary future.

This unwillingness to make a definitive break, to recognize baggage as baggage, seems at odds with my personal crusade of reduction like an aerodynamic glider strapped to a bus. And it’s this imbalance of desiring, between that actual past of concentrated frivolity and the virtuality of distributed but stimulating relationships, a byproduct of that vacation, that’s been the motivating asymmetry of the past few months. That I find the affect-less timbre of Google Talk and Scrabulous conversations with old friends and distant acquaintances often more engaging than diurnal millennials in declining orbit seems a sign that the drudgery and dissipation of my days are just an indefinite prolonging of an even more vacuous existence.

I have this recurring dream where a close friend (likely one of you) and I find ourselves in a smallish, glamour-less room, low ceilinged and its floor dedicated mostly to a swimming pool, the walkable area of the space only a smooth but unpolished concrete border a couple feet wide. Oh, and the pool is filled with oranges instead of water.

I decide that the two of us should try to find the bottom of the pool, and you agree. Sometimes I dive in first and sometimes you do, and I wait at the surface for just a few moments.

“No luck. Your turn,” you say as you surface, and I dive in. I dig through oranges and more oranges and after a while they are colorless pebbled orbs, and soon after I can no longer sense the fragrance of oranges and dust. I wonder if you’re still at the surface, if you’ve left me here to dig through, if you could hear me if I called your name. And though I can still breathe and burrow, I push down oranges to pull myself to the surface and you’re still there. “No luck. Your turn,” I say and so you dive in again and I wonder this time if I’ll be able to hear your call for help, if you know to navigate by scent as well once you can’t sense light or sound or even touch, but then it all smells like oranges and dust. I wonder if you know which way is down. I pace the step-and-a-half between the wall and the pool’s edge, sometimes a few steps laterally, but always returning to the same position I stood so that when you return to the surface you won’t be disoriented. And this dive is longer than the first but you’re back. “No luck,” you say with bright diligence and so I dive in again, longer than the first time and deeper than the first time and so too the stream of thoughts of whether you’ve left the room or whether you’re bored or healthy or cursing me for drawing us into this task. First light then touch then sound then scent. I surface.

No luck. Your turn. It continues, each turn longer than the last. No luck, I’ve got nothing, no dice, keep digging. Your turn. It keeps going and it’s just oranges and oranges and oranges and dust. No luck, your turn. Pacing. No luck, your turn. Oranges and dust. And so on and never to the bottom of the pool. And then I wake up.

Some friends have tried to ascribe meaning to it, to re-draw the setting, but it’s resistant to change. It escalated in frequency in February and March, to the point where the imagined feeling of a pebbled rind of citrus fruit anywhere was enough to unsettle me, to provoke an involuntary twitch or grunt. Still, it never pitches me immediately into consciousness like a nightmare. Perhaps that’s the point.

There are very few things that sour my tone to a shade of violent: talking to my mother about money and anybody about the lack of support for a LAMP infrastructure at HIR are two of those; PC hardware troubleshooting is a third cause of stress, compounded by the occasionally attendant data obliteration. Through January and February, the former have been the subjects of too many conversations over the past couple months, and as I have calmed to the temperament necessary to produce prose, November’s on-board SATA controller went AWOL and took an extraordinary digital music collection as collateral damage.

I’m at war with acronyms.

I took the occasion of Shing’s visit to see the Natural History Museum and Folger Shakespeare Library (Macbeth—with magic by Teller—looks interesting) and inject some culture in her life, as well as five pounds of chicken adobo, French toast, bacon, shots and pickles, and tea. We shared a beer and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at the edge of the ice rink in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. At the Jefferson Memorial, she disparaged the lighting squares; I noted the consistently mis-kerned Os.

The state of California is back in full force, giving a majority of its delegates in the Democratic primary to Senator Clinton and demanding a few hundred dollars from me in alleged back taxes—my usual snark is useless here.

I’m considering the contents of my go bag.

Recent expenditures are running higher than I’d hoped, largely due to home improvement expenses: I ordered a daybed, had a few prints professionally framed, and am still in a painting mood (though not necessarily a sanding-and-taping mood). I’ve taken receipt of my bicycle, severely in need of a tune up, and am working on lighting my living room. Over the weekend, I sanded and stained the baseboard CD shelves I cut from tongue-in-groove flooring last month.

And whither my visit to Cuba? The only itinerary certain so far is New Orleans in April for An Event Apart (AEA), though I haven’t set booked a flight. A five-day in Portland and Seattle (possibly Vancouver as well) this June is still in exploratory stages. I have my lawn tickets for Radiohead at Nissan Pavilion 11 May, but I’m considering hustling those for a Saturday pass to All Points West (APW) in August. Pretty good chance I’ll be in New York this weekend too.

My graduate school applications are done, and for that, I entered my undergraduate transcripts into a spreadsheet line-by-line, calculated the fluctuations in my cumulative grade-point average quarter-to-quarter. I relived every class I took at typing speed—I’m sorry I was such an asshole Fall 2002. Six years ago, I wish someone had pulled me aside and said something like this:

That’s the difference. Between caring and judging. That’s it.

Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.

In late September, I confronted the option of starting a new job closer to my ideal career (on the present web design trajectory) in the city that, from the south where I’d been raised, physically and metaphorically represented the north—San Francisco—with necessary salary and benefits accounted. And, though I lost some sleep to its consideration (and some leave to the interview process), it was an easier decision than I’d expected: I chose to stay here. Having recently taken occupation of an apartment on Capitol Hill and a niche at the office as the idealist who writes snarky memoranda, I’ve come to an understanding with this city—an understanding that includes a pay increase and support through graduate school including tuition reimbursement. Beyond these material benefits, however, I’ve also brought more weight to bear on this spring-board job—applying my zealotry to research projects and finishing what I started on House.gov—and, with a master’s degree likely added to that load, jacked up the elastic potential energy of my résumé. Furthermore, re-arriving at the terms of a permanent settlement is a process I have no desire to undertake, in spite of my fondness for the city itself—when I’m done here, I intend to be through with geographic monogamy.

And that seems to be the iconic story of the past year of my life: passing through airport security, re-examining and sometimes very nearly attaining what I love, and, in the wake of each round-trip flight, reducing my ambitions to mere “acceptable eventualities” and rendering past victories pyrrhic. What once appeared as solid ground years in every direction I find myself re-mapping as mediocrity’s quicksand, and as each day forth has been another step to avoid that weak terrain, I find myself on this long stride—25 hours till midnight (24 songs, 79:45)—reconsidering the circumstances (an absurdly prolonged and subsumed existential crisis, now at mid-life) that have lent the recent passage of time such a tenuous, deliberate pace.

The 24 songs here are vignettes from other playlists—a week of being a passenger in the rare left-hand driver on the A11, work music from sleepless weekends spent on the design of my portfolio site, songs that accompanied the constant re-arrangement of furniture in my new apartment, timely incidentals from jukeboxes and FM radios, and the late-summer North American travel spree—so there are obvious gaps and spared puns (previous drafts followed ‘Ooh La’ by the Kooks with ‘Ooh La La’ by the Faces, expanded from ‘California’ to ‘Look Inside America’ to ‘This Bitter Earth,’ and were bookended with ‘1234′ by Feist and ‘Hotel Yorba’ by the White Stripes with ‘1, 2, 3′ by Camille betwixt, for instance, and I resisted the temptation to arbitrarily include anything by Joy Division). Nevertheless, it has an arc, and at the ends of this final draft are direct references to two films (both with 1970s UCLA pedigree)—Harold and Maude and Killer of Sheep—that approximate the yang and yin, respectively, of my defining films of this past year (if Stray Dog closed with a pop song, that would occupy a place here for similar reasons; I must acknowledge Rushmore’s impact though the aforementioned theme was cut).

And though at the end of the arc, as at the end of this year, the past looks worse for wear and the future seems a museless exercise in sociopathy where my passions are reduced to hobbies, I still have to plant my advancing foot somewhere. And though I no longer have a destination in mind, my itinerary has a few broad parameters: to leverage my existing resources to enliven the journey and to take each step with relish. Some of it may manifest itself as a community of like-minded people with whom I would embark on my graduate studies (hopefully) or a series of occasions to distribute correspondence of increasingly exotic origin, some of it is just a matter of dimmer switches and potted plants and steps trod on sidewalks hither among the glamour of city girls in winter.

The sentiment from Geek Love (though I haven’t had sex with Siamese twins) seems appropriate here: “And I’d figured I’d come to the end of being amazed. Run out of it, like you’d run out of sugar. But when I saw you lovely girls I thought to myself, maybe there’s more to life yet.” However, unlike that hedonist singularity and the allegorical novella of the first part of this narrative, Every day is a song for a holiday, this shift to a more optimistic brand of fatalism is borne of a series of events, of seemingly unassociated verbs, nouns, and a mass of adjectives. But by giving them sequence and contexts, it is my hope that, for you as they have for me, from these passages might emerge a story, like a footpath on a field of grass between two buildings, a patchy and unsanctioned route of convenience through a verdant square, inaccessible to official cartographers and for that belonging more to its travelers.

Good morning all.

I had tried, or I should say, I am still trying and writing and researching and conversing and attempting to construct a narrative that somehow casts the activities of my European vacations and the months between as myth and metaphor, a microcosm of the improvisational information architecture, anomalies of sociology, and decline of western civilization in the first decade of the 21st century. Given the pretentious mess that promises to be, this chapter of my pop-music autobiography may be the closest thing to a straight narrative of my week’s sojourn in Brussels and Paris, 11-19 November 2006, I might extract from that unwieldy text. This chapter and the one that will follow shortly after (a second volume that picks up where this leaves off, mid-January 2007 through my week in England and the beginning of spring—’the fall of Icarus’ and ‘the winter of our discontent,’ as it were) are sourced differently from their predecessors—rather than being a current account of my state of mind and music library, its contents are more dependent on found materials from burned CDs in glove boxes, radio-surfing in Paris (ironic then that this entire mix is in the English language), jazz concerts in Brussels, and one track I’m especially sure will raise eyebrows, from my father’s library during my monthly transcontinental flights to Los Angeles—the aural residues of those aimless but purposeful travels. And though the words and instrumentation are not the more literal musical avatars through which I usually stage my drama, they are perhaps more authentic because they were present at the moments they here represent.

And while the plastic manifest is prepared for those who elect to receive them, those 19 have already been digitally replicated, in their precise order, compressed in a single 128 kbps mp3 file exceeding 79 minutes in length, given the title Every day is a song for a holiday. The cover will be this picture from that overcast Thursday, at the Bourse, where I caught the 95 back to Watermael-Boitsfort:

On Sunday night Ky Vinh and I, over dinner of mussels (though a Vietnamese preparation) and beer at his father’s restaurant in Ixelles, discussed how English as a language is more communicative and transactional than French, which is more expressive, and how as a result of this structural difference, the Anglophonic literary arts tend to emphasize purpose and plot—the totality of the composition—while their Francophonic counterparts are more concerned with diction and meter—the raw materials and their relationships—and so perhaps I perceive this chapter’s weaknesses based on my Anglophone mores. Regardless of whether this theory withstands academic rigor, I will say that the ‘culture of bread’ that exists in Francophone countries, the innately and unequivocally high standard for comestibles—with its attention to raw materials and their relationships—sadly has no equivalent in the United States. The rotisseried chicken I would eat in the United States was purchased in black plastic trays with mass-produced side dishes; on my first morning in Brussels, I joined Ky Vinh and his mother for their weekly tradition of rotisserie chicken and accompanied him to the market on the Ixelles pond to procure it (and stop for a coffee and speculoos beforehand).

He took my Lonely Planet phrasebook for a spin, or rather, he dared me to—he sent me to buy two tomatoes and celery, and later, a baguette (which I did meekly) while he bought a fruit tart at the patisserie adjacent. And while the bird, enormous by European standards, was succulent and the skin roasted golden, the baby potatoes that accompanied the dish had been roasting in a tray beneath the rotisserie in the drippings from the chickens above, the vegetables and fresh meats before my eyes which had been seemingly gamma-corrected for the pornographic standards of American grocery consumers, and the sun’s play with the pond and the majestic houses that stared it down on that cool morning defy my grasp of English adjectives to sufficiently describe them. After twelve hours’ delay arriving to Brussels from Washington, via Chicago, via London, my vacation had taken a decidedly auspicious turn.

The next day in Paris promised rain; we loaded up on diesel and made for A1. I continued to skim my phrasebook, uttering every road sign in a futile attempt to develop a passable French accent. And it seemed natural that in my anticipation of Paris, we should play the soundtrack to the film that pretty much defined the city in this decade: (Le Fabeleux destin d’)Amélie (Poulain). “My cousin plays the piano,” Ky Vinh says as he cues up the fourth track of the CD. “I ask her to play this whenever I visit.”

I spent that Monday in Paris with him and returned Friday morning via train—he met me at the Louvre after work, after the three-hour drive from Brussels, after I’d spent the day as a proper tourist, starting all manner of conversations with “parlais vous Anglais?” Restaurants advertised beaujolais nouveau on their signboards; I had the assiette du beaujolais, he had the roasted chicken. The disadvantageous exchange rate for Americans is seemingly weaponized by fountain drinks—a Coca Cola runs 3€, a 330 ml bottle on a London Underground platform £1.50. We stayed the night at Hotel Ribera in the 16ème Arrondissement after a dead-end search for a decent jazz club.

Two years ago, in the idle months before our inter- and transcontinental migrations, we took a break from our usual discussions of clustering algorithms—he played “Mr. Jones” on a borrowed acoustic guitar, I tanked up with whiskey and cognac and sang, poorly, foregoing the second and singing the third verse straightaway before Ky Vinh acceded to provide vocals as he strummed. He maintained an interest in jazz that intensified since we last met—taking saxophone lessons, collecting the recordings of John Coltrane, scouring YouTube for Thelonious Monk performances. We went to Sounds, his favored jazz bar in Brussels, twice in my week there.

He proposed a sovereign nation whose primary criterion for entry was physical beauty, where the beautiful ingenues of the oppressive governments of Asia, Africa, and especially Eastern Europe would migrate freely as a stepping stone to their desired first-world destinations—either a Schengen country or the United States. The city-state’s immigration board would essentially be a panel of judges akin to a beauty pageant, except actually invested with political force by the state. Tax revenues would be generated through the traffic of ogling tourists and wealthy jetsetters hoping to parlay their fortune and nationality into acquiring a trophy bride.

At Sounds, a striking blonde took residence at the table closest to the stage, nursing a decanter of red wine. Hands folded, tucked underneath her chin, which swayed independently of her shoulders, which remained still. Ky Vinh observed her, observed me observing her, and confirmed vocally what we’d both concluded the moment she passed our table and remained in our peripheral visions: she is granted citizenship, even a government appointment if she so desires. I appointed her the “minister of war,” and Ky Vinh asked the reason. “What you propose is Troy inhabited solely by Helens. You’re going to need a good minister of war.”

On Wednesday night, we opted for Muziek Publique’s program: Tricycle, a contemporary Flemish trio, instrumentation of accordion, bass, and saxophone, playing at the Moliere. And although we were disappointed to find the Moliere an auditorium-style theatre rather than a smoky bar, and Tricycle’s repertoire wasn’t as much jazz as an interpretation of European folk songs with jazz influences, the trio and their auxiliary players were nonetheless entertaining masters of their craft, to the point that I was compelled to spend 15€ to buy their latest CD, “King Size” (and blow my cover when asked to wait for the change or pay with smaller bills). The recorded version of “Belly Button” ends with the sound of a dog barking, also the sound of the Praha room, the spare bedroom of Indi’s house, in the late mornings when her neighbor’s dog howls its discontent most violently. Nouvelle Vague earned their spot during another late-morning waking, hungover on Shing’s sofa the second day of this year. After a breakfast of pho, we went to Acres of Books where I bought my copy of Geek Love.

I woke up first, Saturday at Hotel Ribera, and had a shower before waking Ky Vinh. Our itinerary for the day was Musée d’Orsay and the Basilique du Sacre Cœur; a boat ride on the Seine in the afternoon, time permitting (it didn’t permit). Cleaned up and heading north toward Montmartre and the basilica with a parking ticket and a little late for a croissant, the Andrews Sisters on the radio had put themselves on a loop in our heads—working for the Yankee dollar, indeed. Driving back south towards d’Orsay, he asked me what I thought the disc jockey was saying. “¿Habla qui?” is what it sounded like to me, as I eyed the sidewalks for parking. He said, “That’s ‘Art Blakey’ with a French accent.”

He talked about the thrill of jam sessions in live jazz performance (except drum solos, which didn’t impress him much). My appreciation is not usually for the inherent creativity of improvisation but the recapitulation of the song’s motifs when they’re over.

We bought sandwiches near the Sorbonne and took lunch at the Jardin du Luxembourg (and the fellow in red standing to the left of the palm tree would have been blocking my view of the pond had I been present when the accompanying picture was taken), took our seats facing the pond as 2° 20′ east rotated away from the sun and the branches of the trees seemingly planted in sand appeared at once gilded and frayed in autumnal twilight. It was not only a moment, we both knew while it was still present, we would look upon nostalgically in our future, but as we observed a father help his toddler son pilot a model sailboat on the pond we faced, a moment wherein we recognized the moments in our respective futures for which we would feel nostalgia in a later future still. I realized that I’d learned to recognize the hallmarks of those occasions because they were merely occasions—rare memorable moments of our experience that we knew to savor now that we knew their infrequency.

On Thursday night, after I’d spent the day roving with my camera at the Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts, Grand Place, and the Mannekin Pis, we opted to take in a movie, and I joined him to return overdue CDs and suggested The High Priestess of Soul and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (the latter an unintentional counterpoint to my association of A Love Supreme with Tokyo) for his next set—we played the former on the way to the theater. We watched Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a German-financed film about French perfumers, speaking in English, shown that night with French and Dutch subtitles—the adaptation of a novel about a fatally ambitious perfumer with no scent of his own. (Then again, watching jazz performance in Brussels seemed equally knotted with global history: Belgian performers working in an American musical idiom with the saxophone—a musical instrument of Belgian heritage.) I sipped a can of Hoegaarden during the film, and in the theater, as in Ky Vinh’s car (where I also sipped beer), there were no cup holders—a design decision surely driven by the aforementioned culture of bread, because what sad souls keep a liter of cola nearby any chair they’re bound to spend a few idle moments? Ky Vinh noted that a point from the novel that doesn’t adapt well into the film is how his lack of an olfactory trail aided in his abilities as a murderer (which served his career as a perfumer)—a biological disproportion that predisposes him to professional excellence, as it were. The plot lacked (by my value system), though the production values are superb.

Driving from the theater: Listen, I implored. The vocals seemed to be in a different time signature than the music, just as she starts singing “I’m going back home, I tell y’I'm going back home now”—the piano dares us to imagine that it is indeed being played by the same woman who is providing the vocals, as much as it thanks us for paying attention. Heading back to Brussels on Saturday night, after a stop at the ridiculous Publicis Drugstore on Champs-Elysées to pick up Coke and water (I picked the bottle of St. Georges simply for the design, which alerted me to the typographic harmony of Optima and Gill Sans and later made an appearance in Indi’s redesigned résumé), The Roots came on the CD player as we slogged through traffic towards the Paris peripherique on my last night in town—he pointed out the sonic burst of a needle dropping on vinyl at the beginning of “Star” on Sunday morning and I’d been attuned to the opening seconds of the track since. As we attempted to leave the city (Porte de la Chappelle to the A1 was closed that night), we switched to the radio where I identified the song just ending as a Madeleine Peyroux single. After a week of road trips, we both tired of the CDs we kept in the car—Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new single made the playlist as the sodium lights lining the highway median indicated we were back in Belgium.

This is part of a longer (yes, longer, like a book, you know what that is) travelogue which I’ve tentatively named “The Fall of Icarus,” after the myth, after the painting by Pieter Brueghel in the collection of the Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts, after the subject of the William Carlos Williams poem named for the venue, after the Henri Matisse cutout in the collection of the National Gallery here, reproduced as a wool rug and adorning the floor between my bedroom closets. In considering the myth of Icarus and the people who are my Dædalus and my King Minos and the context that is my Labyrinth, in considering Brueghel’s landscape and Matisse’s reduction, in considering the measures of flailing melody of improvised jazz, in considering the normalization of geographic and emotional straying as a means to security as defined by capitalist societies, in considering the literal act of human beings taking flight—on jetliners and hang gliders and other winged innovations—I’ve come to understand that the greater achievement may not have been in engineering for the land-bound human race the ability of flight but the means of safe landing. Traveling is but the measured solo, a jam session in a live performance, and the return to routine that follows is the recapitulation, the revisitation informed by the improvisation that preceded it.

During my stay, as my experience of Paris in autumn had revealed a metropolis free in the awareness of its twilight, I began to wonder what would follow New York and Hong Kong as the 21st century’s global cities, as they had followed Paris and London of the 19th century. Dubai and Shanghai? Ky Vinh argued that unlike their predecessors, they exist in the context of governments that place restrictions on intellectual movement, with which I agreed. But, looking back at that argument, would that necessarily halt their ascendancy? The architecture of the 20th century favored the heights of finance—banking, insurance, and the singular pursuit of monetary wealth. Perhaps intellectual freedom and its artisanal manifestations would not be the defining characteristics of the 21st century’s defining cities, rather, the bastard form of capitalism to which the 20th century had given rise.

I received a copy of The Cruise as a birthday gift and proceeded to share it with friends of similar tastes or in similar straits on my travels to Los Angeles in November and December. The subject of the documentary observed about New York (while narrating a double-decker bus tour of the city): “When you are sitting in the middle of midtown Manhattan, you are sitting amongst a 20th-century invention, a city that grew up at an explosion, as an explosion, it is an explosion, an experiment, a system of test tubes, gurgling, boiling, out of control, radioactive atoms swirling. Civilization has never looked like this before. This is ludicrousness, and this can not last.”

And what of the rebellious intellectuals who conglomerated in coffee shops and theatres, who provided global cities with cultural capital to match their fiduciary wealth, their venues now annexed by the same machine that threatens their existence? “The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power (puissance).” I had been reading “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine,” the chapter in Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in spare moments on my vacation in preparation for a meeting of my fledgling book club on the Sunday night I was due to return to the States.

Ky Vinh said as he drove me to the airport on Sunday morning, apropos nothing, “I don’t think you’ll be happy working in a regular job.” I returned to work on Monday, at the end of my improvisation, at the end of my solo, thrust back into the routines and motifs, back to security as defined by capitalist societies, back to the state apparatus. I’d read about nomadic war machines and the myth of Icarus and watched jazz performance as intellectual exercises, and as I’ve been tailoring this abridged version of my travelogue, it seems I’ve even vacationed as an intellectual exercise.

And though the words and instrumentation of this chapter are not the more literal musical avatars through which I usually stage my drama, this text may vouch that they are perhaps more authentic. And as I’ve come to realize there is a difference between intellectual exercises and learning, between expanding one’s range of metaphors and enhancing one’s ability to live, between communication and expression, I’ve come to realize that’s worthwhile, even admirable.

(Three thousand words, and I haven’t said a thing about the waffles or frites.)

I’ve been trying to quantify what it means to be older, to understand the process by which one adapts the tropes of the aged. I wonder if an elder conscience is one that no longer adjudicates between what is right and what is wrong but between what can be forgiven and what can not be forgiven, if wisdom is the knowledge of how much injustice one can inflict and withstand and experience the consequence of inflicting and withstanding injustice. It is a fact of our physiology that we become more attuned to bitterness and less attracted to sweetness as we age, but in what science is the bond forged between idealism (or wonderment or creativity or innocence) and saccharinity? Is cynicism the olive of attitude, that briny defense mechanism we only grow to appreciate once we can suck it out of the bottom of a cocktail glass emptied of gin?

“History is only bitter to those who expected it to be sweet” is a quote from Sans Soleil, which I watched again on Saturday night, alone in my apartment as I ate my dinner. It is the kind of cheerful pleasantry that defines this latest compilation of songs and chapter of my pop-music autobiography: We may be tiny, but we’re two of a kind. There’s nearly eighty minutes of 128 kbps mp3 in that one 73 MB file—the plastic manifest will be distributed when I return from Europe, Brussels and Paris, specifically.

In a thick of professional malaise and prolonged existential crisis, optimism takes the form of an affirmative answer to questions like: “Is my culpability for immoral acts offset by my insignificance in the grand design of the universe?” So much for wisdom and experience.

Paper cranes by Shing, made from a piece of paper taken from the end of a plastic-straw wrapper.

And although I have been unable to mitigate my existential crisis for several months now, one way to mitigate its effects is to realize that I am not alone in my cosmic tininess. The title was inspired by a pair of paper cranes that Shing folded after we shared a plate of tacos, folded from squares of paper torn from the end of a wrapper for a plastic straw—the picture of it will be the cover for this album. Last August, I visited her in Vermont on the weekend of her birthday. Across the Atlantic, I will be staying with Ky Vinh for a week.

I have been thinking about the nature of presence and absence in relationships, how friendships are often defined by the mutual intermittent presence of an other—I realized the strange role of intermittence in that definition when Josh visited me the week before last. We joined Cheryl for lunch in Bartholdi Park on the Thursday of his stay, and she asked if he had flown here primarily to visit me—he had. I realized in that exchange that mutual presence now requires a greater sacrifice of time and transportation—in closer proximity to my friends, the beginning and end of our mutual presence was defined by a clock, not a calendar; following the intervention of transcontinental distance, these rendezvous have taken on the necessity of flight, of clean bed linens and a well-stocked refrigerator. Our mutual presence now requires a greater sacrifice, and to those who have visited, I am humbled and grateful.

Over the last week, friends have been sending cards, books, and films (and I thank you)—Saturday, those were followed by phone calls from their celebrations in my honor, despite my absence in Los Angeles and New York. From both gatherings, the first greeting was imbued with the polite enthusiasm that accompanied the initial toast, followed hours later by a satellite link of lesser comprehensibility. Nevertheless, I paused my film to listen, amused and a little saddened; I let my dinner go cold. When I finished my gin, there was no olive at the bottom of the glass. And while I’d like to think that this is a metaphor for my personality, it isn’t. And I like olives.