Month: August 2008

Somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, I tell my girlfriend about my grandfather’s only rule about the cabin in Ryegate Corner, Vermont. “Turn the clocks to the walls,” he said. “Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired.” It’s the same schedule kept by the cows at the Nelson family farm, the closest residence to the red, slope-roofed shack waiting for us 600 miles north. The drive takes roughly 13 hours and throws two unexpected hurdles: the Saw Mill Parkway, which sends us on the world’s shortest trip to Manhattan, and a fruitless search for Taco Bell, which doesn’t seem to exist in Connecticut—at least, not visible from I-84.

Destination: Ryegate Corner, Vermont Location: Central Vermont, on the New Hampshire border Distance from Charlottesville: 646 miles Longest bridge in New Hampshire: http://www.nh.gov/nhdhr/bridges/p53.html Burlington tourism: ci.burlington.vt.us/

In retrospect, Taco Bell seems like a strange thing to crave on a trip to the land majestically called “Northeast Kingdom”—too suburban, maybe—but this is the thin line that you walk during any vacation. Can we successfully avoid our occupations, dabble in recreation and maximize relaxation? The lack of Taco Bells—and our heightened scrutiny of every sign for food—suggests we might be in over our heads.

We arrive at the cabin at 6pm and drop our bags off, then drive across the border to Woodsville, New Hampshire, to grab a bite at Woodsville Pizza, which looks like a Denny’s on the inside but turns out spectacular pies. By 9pm, we’re back at the cabin, stuffed and ready to turn the clock around.

The Northeast Kingdom feels less than regal—the town of Ryegate is overcast during the majority of our stay—but the cabin is the real draw, our castle, a hunting shack that my grandfather bought decades ago and converted into a tiny three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Two bathrooms, actually, if you count the outhouse standing 20′ behind the cabin, and two full baths if you count the outdoor shower, a five-gallon PVC bag attached to a pulley system in a tree near the outhouse. It’s the type of setup that would impress the Clampetts, but might earn low marks from the Swiss Family Robinson.

The interior is a mix of ski lodge odds and ends and photos of past generations of occupants. On a wooden mantel above a TV that receives two stations is a picture of my grandfather using the outdoor shower. His back is to the camera, so that his pinkish rump looks at the camera lens. Next to the photo are two bare-assed imitations, one of my uncle and one of my cousin, as if imposing a third rule for cabin life: “Shower when necessary, and always at your own risk.”

We spend the first day recuperating from the drive and cooking an enormous pot of soup that lasts us nearly the entire stay. That night, we drive 40 miles northeast to Littleton; it’s the equivalent of high school kids cruising asphalt islands in suburbia, but a bit sexier, given the threat of possibly running into a moose. We sing along with Paul Curreri and Devon Sproule, a little Charlottesville in my car, and my girlfriend humors me while I play fake local, pulling over in the small town of Bath so we can look at—not really admire, but sort of gawk at—New Hampshire’s longest covered bridge beneath a stormy sky the color of steel wool.

There’s plenty to do in decent weather—the cabin is within 100 miles of the highest point in the Northeastern U.S. (Mount Washington), a spiderweb network of hiking trails and the Ben & Jerry’s factory—but we’re forced to scale back our outdoor plans. We know that we won’t swim in the Ammonoosuc River at my family’s spot or hike the La Luz Trail, but we’re reluctant to leave until we both feel strongly about doing so.

So, “vacation” starts to lean a bit towards the familiarity of “recreation.” We make repeated trips to Wells River, population 350 or so, to hunt up action. However, the weatherproof activities available to us are few in number—bowling in what looks like an old barn, or getting coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts that may as well function as the town’s civic center—and the town is small enough that businesses keep inconsistent hours. The exception is a fairly new Super Wal-Mart, as noticeable in this town as a UFO; we grab a few films (O.K., Jack Black movies) and then retreat back through the woods to the cabin. 

For a couple days, we stay close to home —listening to music while we cook meals that are simple but feel extravagant, laughing through School of Rock and High Fidelity. You know the part in High Fidelity where John Cusack edits his list of dream jobs to include “owning a record store,” a job he already has? The vacation feels like this—like realizing you’d rather enjoy something humble than lack something spectacular.

After a final day of steady rain, we decide to leave the following morning. The end of the trip is a mess.

I leave the outdoor lights on at the cabin by accident. We again fail to find a Taco Bell in Connecticut, and I seriously begin to wonder if Senator Joe Lieberman has it in for flat-grilled burritos. We hit the storms that sent tornados through parts of Virginia, and spend a half-hour hiding in my parents’ basement in Fredericksburg, listening for winds that sound like trains. I know it’s a half-hour because I’m using my cell phone again, watching a clock. Weeks later, a time-stamped “Notice of Enforcement Action” arrives from the State of New Jersey and informs me that I skipped a toll, then threatens to increase my fine by roughly 2,000 percent if I don’t pay within a few weeks.
 
But I’ll leave you with this: For one afternoon during our stay, we drive west to Burlington, a part of Vermont I’ve never been to, and we shake the cloud cover. We walk through a college town that feels familiar, but only enough to make us aware of how it differs from Charlottesville. We eat dumplings folded in front of us and listen to a high school band play “St. James Infirmary” during the Burlington Jazz Festival, a song that she sings and that I love. The kids try to keep time with their conductor while we sit on a bench, bodies reflecting the sun, and forget about clocks.

There is some special place in my heart reserved for cities and towns well past their prime, an affection that comes, I suppose, from having lived in places like New Haven, Connecticut, and rural eastern North Carolina. So I was delighted when I had the opportunity recently to check out Danville—for few Virginia cities are as far past their prime.

Destination: Danville Location: Down Route 29 near North Carolina border Distance from Charlottesville: 137 miles Danville tourism: visitdanville.com/ Tank Museum: aaftankmuseum.com Danville Museum of Fine Art & History: danvillemuseum.org Danville Braves: dbraves.com

Danville, a city of 45,000 estimated to have lost more than 6 percent of its population since 2000, is a town twice jilted—once, by tobacco, and later, by textiles. Over a hundred years, Dan River Inc. built up a fabric empire on the banks of the Dan in the center of town—and, after being bought by a company in India, pulled the plug on the city in 2006. Unemployment now stands at 7.3 percent.

Sad stuff, I know, but it makes for a great place to escape the hubris, hipness and expense of Charlottesville.

My first stop, Danville’s Tank Museum, was unfortunately far more expensive than I had anticipated. General admission? Ten bucks—a price not even Madame Kluge back in Albemarle would charge to sample her wines. But I swallowed my disappointment and shelled out—only to find the tank museum less an informative display than a psychological profile of an obsessive.

I saw dozens of tanks, each with a typo-riddled caption that detailed make and model, but I didn’t come away with any sense of, say, when tanks started appearing in wars or which countries really led the industry or any other bit of information that would be useful at a cocktail party. But I can tell you that the curator, Bill Gasser, is really into showing off the gory details of war—his bizarrely detailed soldier-mannequin exhibits include fake horse dung and the bloody innards of a wounded man in a display about…well, I forgot to check the caption when I saw the fake spleen.

I’d assumed that the tank museum was quintessential Danville, a relic from the patriotic ’50s perhaps. Turns out, the museum didn’t come to Danville until 2001, relocated from Long Island. Yet it does tell a story of Danville: The city was able to reel in the tank museum by promising the expansive former factory of the Disston Tool Company, one of a long line of manufacturers that split town. When the museum opened, Gasser promised busloads of visitors drawn to Danville just for his tanks. Seven years later, the bus parking lot was occupied only by grass.

For lunch, I stopped at Mary’s Diner and Cafeteria, a heavily trafficked roadside eatery with friendly staff and copious servings of chicken fried chicken, mashed potatoes and dinner rolls. Since I was spending the night in Danville, I asked a couple of Mary’s patrons, both men in their 30s, what there was to do in the evenings.

“What about the Braves?” I asked, pleased with my knowledge of the name of the local minor league team. “They any good?”

“If you don’t mind sweating your balls off,” said one of the men, a local contractor. It was rather hot outside.

“Any places to go out?”

“Well, there’s Back to Bogies.” He described its location before adding, “There won’t be anybody there. Not on a Monday night.” He grunted, which I took either as a rueful condemnation of Danville’s paltry nightlife or as a comment on what an odd duck I was to go out on a weeknight.

Oh well. I headed past Anywhere, USA—Target has just opened up a store, near Lowe’s and the shopping mall—and down into the heart of Danville.

Danville’s downtown is kind of like Charlottesville’s downtown, if you took away the pedestrian mall, the restaurants, the art galleries and the boutique shops. Most downtown Danville storefronts were vacant, which was a shame—I liked the compactness of the area, which stretched uphill from a bend in the river where the empty castle-like factory of Dan River Inc. dominated the vista.

Yet the downtown wasn’t a totally barren wasteland. I stopped into Bronx Boy Bagels, a sandwich shop that serves more than one flavor of coffee. My cup cost a couple of quarters less than it would in Charlottesville. While the bagel shop wasn’t very full, its presence at least signaled that Danville could be reborn. I looked out the window and imagined a revitalized downtown and an artsy edge, with a few Goths and a couple of buskers to liven up the midsummer humidity.

Further down Main Street on Millionaires’ Row, I saw several ostentatious relics of former wealth undergoing renovations. One of those old homes, the Sutherlin mansion, has been converted into a Museum of Fine Arts and History. Some of the art wasn’t bad, though the museum, like much of the town, has a bit too much of an obsession with its antebellum heritage. Danville embraces its status as the “last capitol of the Confederacy”—it just happened to be where Jefferson Davis, on the run from Richmond, spent a week before learning of Robert E. Lee’s Appomattox surrender.

Yet down the street from the Confederate-battle-flag-flying museum is Yené’s Fusion Café and Sushi Bar. Sushi: almost as promising a sign of gentrification as young women with yoga mats.

Looking downhill toward the river, I quickly imagined a new life in Danville—starting an alt weekly, every morning yakking over coffee and bagels down at Bronx Boy, learning to like minor league baseball, strolling along the riverwalk, boozing it up at Back to Bogies with other businessmen and ragging on those snobs up in Charlottesville.

Fellow businessman: “God, I hate those latté liberals up in Charlottesville.”

Me: “Don’t I know it. If only those elitists would build a damn bypass, this town could really be something.”

But I was brought back to reality by Back to Bogie’s beer list, which didn’t include the boutique, high-gravity IPAs that I love to drink. And a life of choosing between Miller Light and Bud Light is just too grim.

A four-day blur of tacos, sun, Lone Star beer, pizza and—of course—bands. That’s the short and easy description of my trip to the annual four-day live music orgy known as South By Southwest.

Destination: South By Southwest Music and Media Conference Location: Austin, Texas Distance from Charlottesville: 1,403 miles Dates for 2009 festival: March 18-22 Website: sxsw.com

Austin, Texas, in mid-March, when SXSW spawns, is a Mecca for music maniacs. You can’t walk (or stumble, as you’ll likely be doing by day four) a few steps without running into a band unloading its gear. You can’t stretch out your arms without knocking some distracted hipster upside the head. And you can’t—absolutely cannot—avoid having your eardrums constantly bombarded by chord after chord, song after song, band after band and show after seemingly endless show.

The first time my feet hit the pavement on Sixth Street, the downtown strip where SXSW’s activities are the most dense, it was clear that I had reached some sort of Holy Grail-ish Xanadu. Austin touts the nickname “Live Music Capital of the World” with good reason. Blocked off from traffic and teeming with band members, bespectacled bloggers and industry types, Sixth Street was like the Downtown Mall but with music spilling out of each and every doorway.

My destination on one afternoon of the festival was The Parish, a nondescript but top-notch midsized concert hall (these come a dime a dozen in Austin) where I met up with our hometown boys in Sparky’s Flaw to catch their Mercury Records showcase. Sandwiched between oddly named U.K. rockers Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong and up-and-coming neo-soul pop star Duffy, the Flaw put on a solid show for the guest-listed crowd of Mercury folks and friends. Free record company t-shirts and CDs strewn across the rear of the venue, an open bar oozing drinks and a wealth of hobnobbing revealed the industry indulgence that laces itself through many of the festival’s sounds.

An essential part of the SXSW experience is narrowly missing something that you really wanted to see. Once I had parted from The Parish, I scurried to a nearby park to catch indie rock veterans Yo La Tengo, only to show up minutes after they had left the stage. I did, however, make it in time to lounge in the grass and listen to the experimental pop of Atlas Sound. The lesson? There’s no missing out at SXSW. You just end up seeing something different than what you had in mind.

And the unanticipated moments of SXSW emerged as its best. South of Sixth Street’s manic bustle and across the Colorado River, South Congress Avenue provided a much more lax vibe. While the music still echoed into the street, an older, laid-back contingency made the scene more of a backyard barbecue and less of a downtown blitzkrieg. Here, it seemed, were the city’s oddball veterans who embody the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.”

At Homeslice Pizza I scarfed down a few slices while watching Detroit rockers The High Strung and listened to an aging, wobbling drunk as he tried to convince me that he was the drummer for punk rock band Bad Religion (he definitely wasn’t).

Across the street, Pabst cans were doled out freely in the rear of folk art gallery Yard Dog while Canadian alt country group The Sadies teamed up with Jon Langford of the Mekons before aging and proudly amateur rock band Half-Japanese took the stage. Brothers Jad and David Fair led their group through quirky discordant punk rock tunes like “Red Dress” and “Charmed Life” while the crowd sipped on brews and enjoyed the afternoon sun. An elderly lady in the front row, who I believe was Mother Fair, rocked out despite the fact that she was supporting herself with a walker. With the audience mostly made up of married couples, old buddies and toddlers, the event was akin to a reunion of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.

Crossing back over the river, I found myself in Waterloo Park on the festival’s final day. I navigated the sea of Wayfarer sunglasses, neon thrift store shirts and three simultaneous stages to catch Brooklyn synth-pop duo Matt & Kim, L.A. weird-rockers No Age and the spaced-out neo-psychedelics of Yeasayer. I skipped the immature pop punk of NOFX to get a good spot for The Breeders, who capped the night and my SXSW experience with a mix of old and new songs as darkness descended.

It was just like any outdoor concert, except that, all across Austin, hundreds of other shows were taking place at the same time and thousands of ears were being fed the candy that they craved so much. And if music is candy, then SXSW is the ultimate sugar high. How else could us music hounds stay on our feet? How else would bands play as many as three or four shows a day? And why else would I, exhausted and only a few hours outside of Austin on the long drive back to Charlottesville, already be hatching a scheme to return next year?

Am I allowed to say “ass”? Too late. At least I have no trepidation about saying “freezing,” “my” and “off.”
 

Destination: Chicago in February Location: The brittle shores of Lake Michigan Distance from Charlottesville: 741 miles Chicago Office of Tourism: cityofchicago.org Art Institute of Chicago: artic.edu Navy Pier: navypier.com Orchestra Hall: cso.org Chicago blues clubs: http://center stage.net/music/clubs/styles/ blues.html Chicago Architecture Foundation: architecture.org

Those four words came together in my mind a lot while I was in Chicago in the winter last year. No masochism was involved in the making of this situation. I went to the bitterly windy city voluntarily, after three things—one harmonic—converged. My dad’s birthday is in early February, and it was his 70th in 2007; as an architect, his favorite American city is architectural-history-laden Chicago; he’s also a music lover, and pianist extraordinaire and living legend Keith Jarrett had scheduled a rare (these days) solo concert at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in mid-February 2007. So my brother got two tickets to the concert and arranged for him and my dad to fly from Seattle, while I got one ticket and arranged to fly from Charlottesville, and there we were for a two-days-and-three-nights birthday bash. 

Enough exposition. Back to the cold. What I’m here to do is not only talk about, but also recommend going to Chicago in the winter, especially if you’re not feeling alive, or even if you are—it’s possible, you see, in Chicago in the winter to feel even more alive than alive. I, for instance, was feeling happy that my brother and I had pulled off doing something big for my dad’s 70th—but there was more to it than that. While I was walking in the single-digit temperature with the two of them down Michigan Avenue toward The Art Institute of Chicago or ogling the storefronts along Miracle Mile, dressed like a moderately but adequately prepared Arctic explorer, confident that a pretty important body part wouldn’t slide off even under extreme duress, my happiness as if froze into place. Prone-to-wavering emotion became almost a crystallized thing I could point to, like an icicle so sharp it could break the skin over a heart. 

All this is getting chillingly abstract, I know, not to mention a tad sentimental. But there are also plenty of concrete reasons for flying midwest in the winter, instead of, say, packing your Bermuda shorts and heading to Bermuda. Take the patches of ice on the Chicago River between bridges, the patterns as if forming immense murals that belong in the Art Institute collection along with the masterpieces by Seurat and Gauguin. I’ve never beheld such natural beauty right smack in the middle of a man-made place. As if on cue, it was snowing lightly as we crossed the river at La Salle Street on our way to a blues club the night before the concert, the flakes as if catching fire in the city lights before falling further through the softer glow cast by the ice. And then the next day there was the view from Navy Pier of Lake Michigan, spreading out like an ocean under a suddenly clear sky, the near surface not far from icing over and looking, to my eyes, beautifully brittle.

All right, I admit, there was something unforgivable about the rattle of an “El” train in my ears as a cruel night wind broke across my eyes while we walked up Randolph Street on our way to dinner before the concert. But there was something bracing about it, too—the rattle as if justifying the wind the way a blues chord validates pain. It was remarkable, though, how I didn’t at any time see any pain on the faces all around me. Chicagoans are true stoics. I saw plenty of hats, of course, but only occasionally did I, as if looking in the mirror, see a section of a scarf over a mouth. I saw many a pair of jeans, and not, as far as I recall, a single pair of wool pants. Maybe the stoicism is a respect for the sheer potency of the cold there, and the joy the respect brings. Stoic joy? As in overviews of the architectural creations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, all things seem possible in Second City in the winter.

This is getting abstract again, and probably overly romanticized. What can I say? That’s how I remember it, and if I did it all over again, I guarantee I wouldn’t run whimpering into the smoke and body heat of a blues club, rather than linger on a bridge and admire the snowflakes. It’s true, I’m not generally a hot-weather person, perhaps on account of my fair skin. As Woody Allen said, “I don’t tan, I stroke.” And I’m aware that if I resided in Buffalo or Minneapolis, I might crack as the brutal winters piled up, and start over-romanticizing the odor of sunscreen. But we’re talking a brief trip here, a chance to soak up a special situation (whether it’s a special occasion or not) before releasing yourself back into the mild, as it were. Oh come on, try it.

By the way, the concert in the toasty warm Orchestra Hall was absolutely fantastic.

Friday, 7:30am. As I walk to the gas station to buy toothpaste, I get a taste of what it is that brought me here. Everywhere I look there are pine trees, tall, deep green and swaying gently in the wind. Outside my hotel window and lining every road, they move like some verdant choir, under the 4,000′ rocky spine of Mount Si, looking exactly like they do on TV.

Destination: Twin Peaks Festival Location: North Bend, Washington Distance from Charlottesville: 2,774 miles Twin Peaks Festival: twinpeaksfest.com Snoqualmie Falls: snoqualmiefalls.com Double R Diner: http://twedescafe.com

Being There. That’s what we’re all looking for, all 100 or so of us, around 74 first timers and 23 returnees from Australia, Spain, Canada, and all over the U.S., the feeling of inhabiting the same physical space as something meaningful and sacred. And where we are is in and around North Bend, Washington, for the 16th annual Twin Peaks Festival—”Twin Peaks,” the ABC TV show directed by oddball filmmaker David Lynch, which aired from April 8, 1990 to June 10, 1991 to much acclaim and wild popularity. If you’ve never heard of “Twin Peaks,” just know that it was about a high school prom queen, Laura Palmer, who was gruesomely murdered, and that it was one of the strangest and most disturbing shows to ever appear on network TV.

Portrait of a die-hard “Twin Peaks” fan: Chris Matthews, 40-ish, with an earring dangling from each ear, is a postal worker with two kids and seven “Twin Peaks”-related tattoos. He has attended every single festival and I ask him if they get boring. “Boring?” It is 9am the first day of the fest, and he is drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon (itself a Lynch reference), music blaring from a little mp3 player outside his hotel room. “It’s like a family reunion,” he says after a while, “only with a different family every year.”

The festival is a three-day affair; breakfast Friday morning (donuts and coffee, two big “Peaks” fetishes), then a trivia contest and a hike to Snoqualmie Falls (heavily featured in the show), followed by Lynch Movie Night in Seattle. Saturday includes a bus tour of filming sites, and the big dinner, with guest celebrities in attendance, the costume contest, and much “Twin Peaks”-tinged merrymaking. Sunday it’s a picnic in the woods (more filming sites), the Tibetan Rock Throw contest (don’t ask) and the Cherry Stem Tying contest (ditto).

Portrait of a whole bunch of die-hard “Twin Peaks” fans: Twenty-three people are taking pictures of what in the show was “Big Ed’s Gas Farm,” a neon-lined, rustic filling station, now totally unrecognizable as such. We snap away, then turn en masse and take photos of a small, white-picket-fence-encircled house across the street, where Big Ed lived. Through the living room window a small child stares at us over the back of the couch, perhaps wondering why a busload of strangers is taking her picture. Later, the scene is repeated at a restaurant, “The Roadhouse” on TV, but now also no longer the same. As our digital shutters whir, someone drives by and shouts, “Get a life!”

At Sunday’s picnic I ask people why they come here, why many of them automatically set aside these three days every year. What it is about the show that inspires such devotion?

“There’s never been a show like ‘Twin Peaks.’”

“The last episode.”

“It’s like the Rolling Stones; the show never ends.”

“It has to be magic.”

Magic, or belief in magic, might explain it. We want to believe that our fantasies can inhabit a place and imbue it with a spirit that can be captured simply by being there. The Twin Peaks Festival is a pilgrimage, a gathering of the faithful, who endure great hardship (cancelled flights, gruesome injuries on drunken, midnight “tours” of filming sites) to partake of cherry pie in the fictional place where “pie goes when it dies,” and photograph each other and the Xs that mark the spots where, for a few flickering moments, Twin Peaks was real.
 
“Look, there it is! The intersection where the One Armed Man drove around and around screaming!”

“Are you sure? I mean, it kinda looks like it…”

“No, totally, that’s it!”

“There’s the Fat Trout trailer park where Theresa Banks lived and Agent Chet Desmond disappeared!”

“And there’s the high school! And that place in the woods where Mike shot that guy! And there’s the Double R diner!”

After the Festival is over, I drive to Seattle and then take the ferry out to Bainbridge Island. Until now, I haven’t felt much of a connection to the fantasy, save for those blowing pine trees, a recurrent image on “Twin Peaks.” I head to the Kiana Lodge, where, on a small, seaweed-covered beach, under a massive dead log, the body of Laura Palmer was found, blue-lipped and pale. And suddenly I feel like I’m on hallowed ground, like I should be leaving flowers. There it is, the final resting place of Laura Palmer, the (fictional) Twin Peaks High School Prom Queen, 1972-1989.

Rest in peace, Laura Palmer, and get a life, Twin Freaks. Or at least something to tide you over until next year’s Festival.