“we took the u-bahn to the eastside gallery”

Posted on November 11, 2009 by alison

I’m thinking a lot about Berlin again for the first time since coming home from my visit last year. Did I not tell you what happened last year? Oh. When I got back from spending ten days in Europe with a friend, the first thing I did was get sick. Berlin was the last stop on our trip, so since I was still thinking about it while recovering on my couch, I ended up reading lots of Wikipedia articles about Germany.

Among other things, I read about the Reichstag fire, the rise of Nazism, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler, Eichmann, Anne Frank, the building of the Berlin Wall, life in East Berlin, reunification, and everything I could about WWII-related monuments in Germany. By the way, when someone calls or emails to ask how you’re doing, don’t say, “I’ve got a cold, so I’m laying on my couch reading about Hitler.” People will worry about you.

At any rate, those topics were in fact very depressing, but I was also fascinated by the way that Germany has dealt with its own painful history. Admirably, the country doesn’t shy away from talking about what happened, but it also doesn’t really go overboard with it either, at least not in a way that I found to be too overwrought. The monuments and memorials I saw in Berlin seemed to be saying, “It’s not truly possible to forget or make up for things that happened, so we’ll just acknowledge it and remember.”

Of course, the fact that I’d just seen in person many of the locations I was reading about added some interest as well.

My cold went away and I went back to work and stopped reading about atrocities.* But now the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has me thinking about it again. Here are some great photo essays I’ve found:

The Big Picture: The Berlin Wall, 20 years gone (photos then and now)

NY Times: A Division Through Time (past/present photos taken at the same angle)

The Guardian: Then and Now (more past/present photos at the same angle)

Germany 1978-9: Berlin (old photos I found via Metafilter)

Since I’ve gotten to the point where Wikipedia articles and their associated links aren’t enough information for me, I’ve asked Metafilter (asked Ask Metafilter? Anyhow) to help me find a good place to start. Since I can count on two hands the number of real nonfiction books I’ve read,** I’m hoping for something thorough but not too dry, in-depth but not too insurmountable.

But here’s the thing. Nothing I read is going to compare to standing there in the exact spot where important events took place. I know that’s an obvious point to make, but look: Oscar Wilde’s arrest is more interesting because I’ve seen the hotel where it happened. The Michael Jackson baby-dangling incident is more interesting because I’ve seen the hotel where THAT happened. I don’t know about all the interesting things that happened in Ecuador, but hey, I might have seen where they happened.

Thinking about German history has given me the travel bug again. My sister likes to travel a lot, too, and one time I heard my dad say, “Gosh, I don’t know where the two of you got such wanderlust.”

I laughed in his face. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, DAD? I said. My dad, who would bring us currency samples*** and gifts and stories every time he left the country on business; my dad and mom, who for awhile took us to a new US state every other summer; my dad and mom, who counted among their friends a couple who went abroad every single year–to Russia, Australia, Peru, Europe, you name it–and brought us gifts and slideshows and stories every time; has no idea what makes his daughters want to travel.

He and my mom also, after taking us to Astros games on Sundays and watching them on TV with me every evening in the summers, wonder why I like baseball. Hey, I can’t help that I got parented properly.

The sad thing is that while my states-I’ve-been-to map looks like this:

my countries-I’ve-been-to map still looks like this:

I went to three places I’ve never been in Europe last year, so next year I think I’m going to go somewhere else I’ve never been. It’d be nice to leave the country every single year, but I’m not a gazillionaire nor do I have any sponsors, so every other year will have to do. Which is too bad, because I’m rarely as happy as when I’m traveling.

So, who wants to ride the entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway with me??!?!?!?

*Mostly. I went through a period a few months later where I was reading lots about Ted Kaczynski and McVeigh and Jeffrey Dahmer and such. What?

**Most notably Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz and William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist by Stephen B. Oates. And by real non-fiction I mean non-Sedaris, because he doesn’t count.

***I still have a little zipper bag full of 80’s money from all sorts of countries.

whoa-oh, black betty

Posted on October 30, 2009 by alison

See this car?

This is the 1996 Acura Integra I’ve been driving since May 1999. My parents got it for me when I was 21. I drove it in Houston, I drive it in Austin, I drove it all around the country. If I’ve given you a ride anywhere within the last ten and a half years, it was in that car. It’s the car I brought Maude home in the day I got her, when she was so terrified she wouldn’t look at me or sit down in the passenger seat. It’s my favorite car I’ve ever driven, and it has more than 171,000 miles on it, only 40,000 of which are not mine.

Or maybe I shouldn’t call the car it. Her name is Betty. Betty the trusty Acura who, despite a few flat tires and some things that were not her fault, has never ever failed me in any significant way.

Betty’s sick, you guys. She’s like an old lady who has retained her sound mind even as her body’s falling apart. The engine runs just fine; I never have any trouble with that. But on Tuesday I went outside, unlocked the car and pulled the handle on the driver’s side to open the door just like I always do.

But the door didn’t open. I pulled harder, and that’s when the door handle broke off in my hand.

Since then I have become one of those people who has to get into their car through the passenger side.

It sucks. It sucks if you’re not wearing a skirt, it sucks worse if you ARE wearing a skirt, it sucks even worse if you’re wearing a skirt and two guys in a pickup truck point and laugh as they watch you try to crawl into your car without flashing anyone.

But this isn’t the first broken thing. A few weeks ago I was in the car and I turned the little lever that washes the back windshield. That lever is supposed to squirt washer fluid onto the back windshield and then run the wiper to clean it. No washer fluid came out, though, so I turned the lever again. And again. Nothing came out, and the wiper kept waving back and forth uselessly. I guess I need to refill the washer fluid, I thought.

When I felt something wet on my shoulder, I looked up to see washer fluid dripping from the dome light.

And before that, I got pulled over downtown on a Friday night. I was on my way to drink one of Paul Rudd’s beers with friends during SXSW, and the cop that stopped me said I had a headlight out.

“Which one?” I asked.

“This one,” the cop said, and he walked over toward the passenger side. When he slammed his hand down on the hood of the car near the headlight, it went back on.

(“Like THE FONZ?” someone asked me later. Yes, it was just like the Fonz.)

The cop wrote me a warning and told me to fix the headlight. Since then I have to Fonz the headlight every now and then.

The fact that I still have this car is one of the many ways in which I’m like my parents, who tend to keep their cars forever. My dad drove both his Chevy Citation* and his Plymouth Grand Voyager into the ground. The fabric on the ceiling of the Citation came unstuck and was sagging down onto his head, so he put a thumbtack through the fabric into the ceiling right above the driver’s seat so he could see to drive. Then he tore the fabric down, and my sister and I would play with the cracking foamy substance that was left on the ceiling. I used to reach up and trace my name in the foam with my finger and bits of it would rain down on me.

We complained to my father for months about the Citation. The radio didn’t work, the seats were sticky vinyl, and the car itself was embarrassing and probably toxic. “It’s a perfectly good car!” my dad would say.

The Plymouth Grand Voyager (which I drove to Senior Prom) was fine until it wasn’t. My dad drove it to work one day, and that afternoon he called to ask my mom to pick him up and take him to the car dealership. He left the poor dead Plymouth in the parking lot of his office for the Salvation Army to pick up. He and my mom STILL have the used Ford Explorer they bought that day.

I don’t know what to do about Betty. The little Headley voice in the back of my head says, “Come on, it runs fine! You have no car payment! It’s a perfectly good car!” The other voice says, “It’s probably going to die in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. You can’t keep getting in and out of the passenger seat like that! You’re 31 years old!”

So, readers, I’d like to ask your opinion. Here are all the facts I can think of:

Car pros:

No car payment
It’s very comfortable
It runs well
After 10 years, I’m awfully good at driving it
Nobody wants to steal it
It’s small and I can park it almost anywhere
But when I fold the back seats down it can carry a shitload
Its airbags and seatbelts are all good
Jeffrey Ross has been in it
It gets great gas mileage
It’s a hatchback, so I never have to drive a group of people anywhere unless they want to squish into the backseat like sardines
NO CAR PAYMENT. Did you get that part?

Car cons:

The A/C doesn’t work very well–if it’s over 90 degrees and the sun’s out, I arrive everywhere covered in sweat, which is half the year in Texas
It’s a black car, which makes the above much worse in the summer
One time I left a pair of boots in there for a few months and they grew mold
The anti-lock brake system doesn’t work
Washer fluid leaks onto the driver
There’s only one door handle, and it’s on the wrong side
The tint is all wrinkled so I can’t see out the back windshield very well
It’s a hatchback, so I can never drive a group of people anywhere unless they want to squish into the backseat like sardines (Shaun used to say getting out of the backseat of my car was like being born)
The retractable antenna started making a CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK sound, so my dad had to replace it with a regular antenna, which is held on with electrical tape
There’s no CD player and the tape player doesn’t work, so I have to listen to my iPod through an FM transmitter/charger thing, but the cigarette lighter stopped working so my iPod doesn’t charge while I’m listening
Years of parking outdoors in Texas have melted all the paint off the roof

So, do you think I should:

Fix everything I can on it and then drive it into the ground
Get a new (well, newER) car soon and sell Betty for scrap metal or maybe have her bolted to one of those billboards where the crumpled car shows that people survived an accident because they were wearing their seatbelts

Right now I have enough for a small (SMALL!) down payment on an early-aughts Honda/Accura of some kind, but I’d rather not use it now if Betty and I can keep going for awhile.

What would you do?

*who names a car after a ticket?

my site was in SoHo/Lofts

Posted on October 26, 2009 by alison

From this article about the end of GeoCities (via):

“My strongest memory of GeoCities was that it was a sort of web ghetto for people who didn’t know how to or didn’t want to bother to get their own URL and ISP,” says web design guru Lance Arthur (glassdog.com). “It did not, as I recall, offer any tools or help, or if it did they were the sort of tools and help that were unhelpful. Its main advantage was cost, being that it was free.”

That’s not how I remember it. Well, GeoCities’ main advantage for me was indeed cost, as I was a sophomore in college when I set mine up in 1997. As such, I didn’t fall into the “didn’t know how” or “didn’t want to bother” camp, but in the “couldn’t afford to” camp. I didn’t know how/didn’t want to bother to investigate free student web space at my school, though, so I signed up for GeoCities.

As I recall, GeoCities didn’t offer any tools or help, UNTIL!! Until it came out with this sort of WYSIWYG-precursor where you could choose backgrounds*, fonts, colors, images, etc, make different sections on the page for different topics/paragraphs, and then look at a preview of your work before confirming it. That was all I knew how to do on the web, so that was what I did for awhile, and I really enjoyed it. And then I noticed a little link at the top that said, “View HTML.” Curious as to what that would look like, I clicked on it.

Of course I was hooked. It wasn’t too hard to figure out which pieces of code did what. All the images started with img src, all the links started with a href, and the fonts started with font face. Everything had quotes and brackets, and it wasn’t long before open bracket a href equals quote http://www.yahoo.com quote close bracket made sense to me.

So I had images and fonts and links and text down, but I had one problem I couldn’t solve. I asked a friend on IRC for help:

Me: How do I make things go next to each other? Like if I want one image on the left side and another on the right and some text in between?
IRC Friend I Don’t Remember Anything About Except He Loved Jewel And His Name Was Tom: Ah! For that, you’re going to need tables.**

And I was off. I learned more tips from some HTML tutorial sites, and from there I graduated to a few other free web-hosting sites before getting a job as a web designer in early 1999. In 2000, I bought this domain and started this website.

My point, I suppose, is this: if people think GeoCities didn’t offer any tools, that’s all right. The way I used it, it was a tool, in and of itself. It’s the whole reason I learned HTML and fell in love with web design, and as such it’s indirectly responsible for my career.

I’m not sure whether to thank it or blame it for that last part.

It’s both sad and not-sad when something like GeoCities goes away. It’s pretty obsolete now, but it’s importance in web history won’t be forgotten, at least not by me. Thankfully I have all my old websites stored away on a hard drive somewhere–all their bad poetry, their homages to Ani DiFranco, their dead links, and their seizure-inducing animated gifs.

Rest assured, I will never, ever show them to anyone.

*I chose a ridiculous lurid orange with some prism-like shapes in it. It did not tessellate properly, and it haunts my dreams.

**I was kind of sad when everyone stopped using tables for layout, only because I’d become really, really good at coding multiple levels of nested tables by hand. But I’m definitely not sad now.