Radiohead Free Europe

This is a purely informational blog, intended as a base for those who have not yet explored the realms of podcasting. For those of us with commutes, it provides a welcome calm in the morning that would instead be spent listening to the new Ryan Adams which would result feeling dejected all day (Good album by the way, but made for drinking and not for morning cheeriness).

Here are some I enjoy:
1. Everything with NPR before it, which includes: NPR Books, NPR Music, NPR Movies, NPR All Things Considered, NPR On the Media, and NPR Story of the Day

I didn't really feel that old when I graduated from college, just a nother academic achievement that will hopefully not be the last. And I didn't feel that old getting my first apartment, probably because it's size resembles a college room. But I did feel old when I realized that I knew what day of the week it was because of what episode of NPR I would get on my ipod. On the Media came on friday, so I'd listen to it on Monday. Books on Tuesday. Music on Wednesday. Story of the Day, well, everyday.

They are all perfect, and I particularly like On the Media.

2. ABC Nightline.
I am not against TV's. But the effort required and the money mandated to get a regular service-cable or satellite-seems a little absurd considering we probably wouldn't watch much. That, or I'd spend all day watching beautiful Giada De Laurentiis create some Italian meal on the Food Network instead of finishing Don Quixote (page 685 or 950 as of now). So this is my only outlet to the outside world that I don't have to read.

Nightline, I'm sure, you've all at least seen once. Even without the images, it manages to convey the message surprisingly well.

3. Cinecast.
Obviously, it would seem that a podcast called Cinecast would appeal to my snobbish mentality, the inner critic. And it does. Maybe it's just the fact that they openly talk about their netflicks account or that they often tell their audience that they didn't see the movie of the week because they were busy with their kid. It's not that I agree with them, they have a pretty bad knowledge of older movies. But they are like me. They like good movies, and get excited when they see one. Yet, unlike Ebert and the such, aren't afraid to just rip on a bad one.

They disagree with each other often, but they are so damn civil the whole time, they could be talking about anything that interests me. Like good friends, they are a comfort.

4. Podictionary
I can't spell. As I writer I find this troubling, but not all together unsolvable, since handy little spell check and numerous checks at www.dictionary.com is all you really need. But I mix up tenses, have no idea where comas go, and am essentially ignorant of good grammar. I've tried numerous easy-ways-out, subscribing to word of the day e-mails, buying grammar books with great titles, but nothing has really worked.

But I really like this one. Each day they take a word, dissect it, tell you the origin, and then go off on a little tangent about anything that interest them along the way. It's short, and really my only educational class the whole day.

5. Travel with Rick Steves
Rick Steves is a loon, but an informative one. My parents swear by his European guidebooks, because he is unpretentious, respectful to the culture, and very American. He disdains large American group tours and tourist traps, preferring the local hotels and cuisine. But he's also 50, from Seattle and talks like a woman.

Go for the talk about Italy, stay for him discussing wine like a giddy 15 year old out for his first drink. I laughed for an hour.

The Creation of the 59th Street Bridge

Once again...the night went on too long, money disentigrated, and I awoke with the unbearable feeling of regret. Not that the night didn't exist as something beautiful and crazy. Friends were there and good stories told. We wandered around, and we all laughed. It was a group of college friends, and I remember thinking how interesting we are were in what we were doing in large American cities.

...no the regret had nothing to do with the night. I did act foolish on the subway repeating and repeating things again and again to the smacking of foreheads of friends, but it was the morning after. I have lost all bodily resistence against hangovers, having apparently washed them all away over the course of four great college years. So I feel every drink the day after, and they all hurt. Here is how I try to survive: I eat greasy food, watch a movie, take a nap, clean my room, wash dishes, take a shower...and everytime I feel regret for having wasted the day. I decided to at least set up plans for the night. I called five people. I got five voice mails.

So I spent the better part of the day in my room, trying shake the headthrobs, until I had enough. I got dressed and headed for 59th street food emporium. We needed paper towels. I exited my apartment into the blue and green of a beautiful Manhattan day. I really do love this place, I thought.

Just as I'm about to enter the food emporium, my phone rings. I'm expecting a call. Five of them, actually, but one is a good start. I start talking to this guy I think is Paul, but he quickly asks me if I know who it is, and I freak out. Jesus, who is this? I think it's Paul, but maybe it's Jake. He laughs. And then it hits, its Austin from high school. It has been a long time. "You sound like my friend Paul." "No," he says "Your friend must sound like me. I've known you for longer."

So prophetic.

We were good friends and he does this. He calls every eight months or so, just so he can update me on what he is doing. He started a band. "we are awesome and play really heavy metal." He has a girlfriend. "She's four years younger, but that's cool. My brother and his wife are five years a part. And so are my parents. I think it's fine."

In some ways it feels nice to think that a past friend cares enough to call. But each one of these calls is unsatisfying, and I can't really figure out why. We are completely different, but have always kind of been. He likes hard rock, lives with his dad in the same town he was born. He didn't go to college. He takes drugs, or did, or kind of does a little bit. He is a hardcore republican. We have never, to my knowledge, agreed on anything.

But he also knows me when I was in high school, when I was completely bored with the small town I grew up in. And we used to have fun. We'd play guitar together for hours, drink at his house and go to parties. Nothing was ever that boring with him.
Not that it was ever that great, and I quickly realized that in college when, like most people who go to college, I got a new group of friends.

But, like he said, he knew me before everyone else. So while I might pretend that I'm living this glorious Manhattan struggling artist life, he can make fun of my singing on some songs I made six years ago.

"Yeah, I just found that CD you made a long time ago, and man, your voice, it's so funny."

I still feel like shit. My head hurts, and I have to listen to mistakes I made in high school with friends I don't talk to anymore. Thanks Austin. It's great to hear from you. For some reason, he can make me feel like this faster than anyone. I shouldn't care what a guy who only watches the Fox Channel and lives with his dad thinks, but I do. It's because, he knew me.

I always wrote this off as being pecular but unimportant. I don't respect him but I spend entirelly too much time constructing devastating politic counterpoints to imaginary conversations with him, just so in my head I could beat him. But what do I have to beat him? There is no contest.

I'm not even the same person that I was in high school. But is this reinvention a evolving of my character or a mask hiding the real me that people once knew. Why do old friends think they know you better than reasonably new ones that you talk to more?

We always make sense to ourselves, complete chronology helps us understand the array of events that have happened to us. And we have all these friends that come in at different points along the way, and they try to understand us through these isolated experiences. So I suppose that older friends are better able to put the experiences in order, to sift through the random encounters and find a truer sense of yourself. But I think that I am just scared by someone that presents a more dumbed-down, TV version of my character that makes complete sense, or at least more than the obscenly intricate one I want to have. He exists as this sort of god over the understanding of my daily life.

That really disturbs me. I really wish he would never call again.

CRASH

For all the in depth probing of one of America's biggest weaknesses, the worst thing about Crash is how little there is actually to discuss. It's not a documentary. And while it might claim to look realistic, the characters certainly are not. Instead it comes off like a glossy Pulp Fiction with none of the wit. In fact, it actually has more in common with the recent influx of oscar nominated Clint Eastwood movies. Get a group of a dozen faces and let them stare dourly with big weepy eyes for two hours trying in vain not to crack a smile.

I can't think of a single talking point about the movies theme, hatred and racism in the years after 9/11, because I was too busy being clubbed over the head with it. Great ideas in movies are transferred by character's actions and speech, but the ideas in this movie are too paramount to let the characters act.

Thus, all the characters appear to be caught in limbo waiting for the next scene to be written while the heavy handed script clumps along. When Sandra Bullock ponders why she is always angry and upset with the world, she doesn't seem to be so much questioning herself, as she is questioning the director.

The only character who does show some sort of human emotion is the Hispanic Locksmith, and while it's a welcome respite, the tactic used to show this is cliched and over done. Take a questionable man. Take a young child. If the child loves the man then the man is good.

The only theme that did work was Ludacris's character that seems to be jabbing at his real life persona.

My favorite drug. Six Years of Addiction

It started simply. I could indulge in watching The Wolf in Pulp Fiction slowly sipping a cup or describe a loving portrait of watching my grandmother order coffee after a long Italian meal, but honestly I needed to stay awake. My high school Spanish teacher had already pulled me aside, "Nick are you getting enough sleep?" I couldn't offer up any witty things to say, and my grades were coming in not a promising way. I needed to shape up.

It started with gas station Cappuccino (A drink related more to sugared milk than coffee), but quickly degenerated to coffee with lots of cream and lots of sugar. Then just a little of both. Then just cream. Finally, black.

I'm not quite sure how long this took, when the sugar started to seem excessive, and when exactly cream felt plain wrong. I enjoyed both in Lattes, which I guess would technically have to have cream, and just sugar with expresso, but a cup of coffee, surely American, not Americano, needed to be black.

The excessive heights that I went to with coffee, the number of contraptions I've used to make it with, the amount of time I'm willing to spend looking around for coffee shops, has always been checked by one uncontrollable factor. I may love my coffee. I may enjoy nothing more than a finally tuned cup. But I also need it. Coffee is better than no coffee.

In the absence of good places and enough money, I'll drink it from convenient stores, break rooms, and vending machines. Pre-ground Maxwell. Instant coffee. I've taken day old, horrible smelling folgers coffee, slopped it out in a Styrofoam cup, and zapped it in the microwave.

I'm an addict. I imagine alcoholics doing much the same thing.

But am I? Can you be an addict on something that is so prescribed and accepted in culture. What do you get with a meal at breakfast? Coffee. McDonalds' coffee. Dunken Donuts Coffee. The French have croissant and coffee. The Italians have expresso bars. What would a diner be without a waitress refilling everyone's cup?

Honestly, for all my indulgence, my complete dependence on coffee to get my functioning in the morning, I don't feel I've ever crossed the line. Most days I have two cups, some I only have one. Rarely do I have three. I'm hardly a model of those certain people who drink whole pots of coffee, chain drinkers, people that can't go an hour without something there.

I just need one. In the morning. Very hot. Preferably good, but at least drinkable.

But this has gone on for six years Roughly two cups a day. Around 4,380 cups. 35,040 ounces. This figure does not count, however, other coffee products including lattes, cappuccinos, and expressos, which I consider an indulgence and not apart of the regular black coffee routine. I'll add another 300 cups for those.

The Starbucks rate, a figure that doesn't have much to do with what company I drink from than just a universally standard rate, is or was around $1.40. This means I've spent around $6,132 on coffee. Adding the 300 cups from miscellaneous purchases, which average around $3 and equals $900, the total amount is in the neighborhood of $7,032.

Hell, that couldn't even buy a small car. Not bad for a six year supply of my favorite drug.

Strange talk has floated around my apartment regarding the act of doing nothing at work. Max and Blake related to me the difficult struggles they had had trying to find something productive to do with themselves while they sat in their cubicles. They went so far to say that they tried to extenuate any work given to them so they could at least pretend like they were making an effort. Spreadsheets were opened but never updated. During this time they would blog to their hearts content, discuss each other's blog, and esstentially create an entire digital community with other bloggers around the Manhattan area. Though many hours have undoubtedly been spent with this community, no tangible evidence its existence can be found.

Meanwhile, for the past month I've been working under the yoke of a large middle aged man, heavy in accent and downright excessive in his complaining, at a jewelry company. There I spent eight and a half hours cataloging jewelry, counting jewelry, and doing other exceedingly boring things all related to jewelry. Each day I had two fifteen minute breaks, a thirty minute lunch break, and no internet access.
My world was the real world, filled with people counting and recounting little pieces of metal trying to get work completed on schedule. Max and Blake lived in the fake world filled with hour and half long lunch breaks, beautiful women behind every cubicle (though I think this applies much more to Max), and as I have said, sufficient time for blogging to one's content.

They both got paid more than me, had shorter commute times (mine was about an hour), and I believed made their entire world up. I became interested in this fake world, so much so, that I quit at the jewelry company and became a temp again.
So what kind of life is someone who sits around for eight hours a day doing very nearly nothing?

There are a couple different opinions.

1. Dilbert/Office Space Land of Eventual Death



The case could be made that this world of little responsibility calls to mind this famous (though extinct, right?) cartoon and cult classic movie, where employees of an anonoymous company struggle through the daily grind of applying ones efforts towards a job impossible to care about.

Temps, likewise, are sequestered away. Though they may have no work, they still can't skip work and hang out in central park. But temp work is rather different than the slow eventual death that comes to these people, for this is not the resting point for temps, since it is in their nature to not stay anywhere for long.

2. The Leisure Time of the Land Gentry



These people of inherited wealth have things they need to accomplish in their day like paying bills, ordernig dinner, and using the restroom. But most of the day is spent trying to occupy oneself. This lead to such inventions such as billards, reading Jane Austen, and dressing up like a Dandy.

Likewise, members of this fake world have certain responsibilities, but nothing that can really make up for the fact that between 2 and 4 time stands still and winks at you because you already took your lunch break and no calls are coming in. Thus explains the creation of blogs, on-line gaming, and the New York Times Online.
There are differences. However grand Temps might feel, they still have no health insurance, money, or dandy clothing.

The end result is rather a mix between these two. Life in this fake world of a temp is neither depressing or uplifting. It compleats no part of your soul, but neither does it take any away. No significant friends are made, though conversation does occur. We seem to be relagated to some kind of alternate world for those with career aspirations beyond a receptionist, though not enough to actually stop being one. Much reading can be accomplished, but not much good writing.

Those with answers on what's best to do between 2 and 4 please respond.