Slouching Towards Slackerdom

It's official: Providence is a slacker town.

I'm increasingly of the view that the New York Times chooses content largely for blog-worthiness. How else to explain such a lackadaisical, listless, wandering...oh wait, those are the people the article's about. But the article in question, Towns They Don't Want to Leave, tells you just what you already know—that college towns are havens for hangers-on, some of whom do nothing and others of whom experiment and accomplish—in that special NYT kind of way, which is to spot trends so slowly that everyone's already forgotten about them. And to wrap them up in a top-k listing to give bloggers something to argue.

But, all that's neither here nor there. What (or who) is here is, for instance, a class act as a cheese-maker: according to the Providence Daily Dose, that's Louella Hill, who revolutionized the food sources and products at Brown. The article's central Providence slacker, Megan Hall, is one of the sharpest, liveliest Brown students I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, brimming with great attitude and incadescent energy. It's people like this make Providence a worthy competitor to Davis or Athens, GA. And while I disagree with some of these people about their politics or economics, life would be much, much poorer without them.

(Somewhat disturbing is a mutual friend's claim that the author is a friend of Megan's. A rather relevant fact that ought to have been in the article...if it were in a serious publication, that is.)

The Dog Days of Fall

I was driving back home tonight, turning off East Ave onto Blackstone Blvd, just over a mile-and-a-half from home. The area is generally a little dark—there's a cemetery on one side and a park on the other—and in addition, a road light seemed to be out. In the summer there are often people in the park late into the evening, resulting in a row of cars along the road's edge, but it's been a cold day and an even colder evening, so there was nobody present.

Except for a dog-like shape that crossed the road, paused, and then crossed to the other side.

Having grown up for eighteen years with a succession of three different German Shepherds, I'm pretty finely attuned to their profile. This had a similar profile but something was a bit off, like I was looking at the first cousin of an Alsatian: bushy tail, leaner, just that little bit more lupine. On a hunch I pulled over to look for an owner, saw none, then tracked the animal a bit, and we traded stares....

Coyote!

We've had a few coyote sightings in the towns near Providence, and this of course is a matter of some hand-wringing. In an ironic kind of consistency, the same people who typically engage in NIMBYism about development appear to go NIMBY over coyotes as well. There's a routine controversy over whether to kill them or be more humane, and whether killing them actually decreases or increases their numbers.

My inclination was to do absolutely nothing. The animal probably lived in the expanse of the cemetery, and didn't seem to be straying into “town”. And I would have left it there, except that the divider of Blackstone Blvd. has a wonderful running path that a few people do use in the dark. The last thing I want is to wake up tomorrow and read about an animal attack (it's always slow-news days around here, so you can just imagine what the local media would do with that).

So, with some trepidation, I called 911. They answered immediately and, to his great credit, the sergeant was relaxed about the matter. He seemed to be probing for whether I was hysterical about this. Once I assured him I was not expecting that Something Should Be Done, we agreed that the beast probably lived in the cemetery, had a pleasant exchange, he put me through to inform Animal Control (whose officer was equally relaxed), and the matter ended there.

I've had quite a year where wildlife is concerned (as I discuss at the end of my posting about my sabbatical), but right next door! Now it gets interesting.

Film Festival Time!

Three of the best things about summer in Providence: (usually) great weather, Crazy Burger, and the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

This year's festival was pretty typical in quality, so I approached it as usual. Once it begins, I go into a trance-like state of absolute concentration. The festival sells six-packs of session passes, which is just about as much as a human can consume anyway. This year, over four days, I made it to seven sessions featuring a total of thirty-six movies. Don't let that last number scare you: some were an hour-and-a-half long and some as little as two minutes. That, of course, is the beauty of the festival.

The typical festival movie is just what you'd expect of independent film: pretentious, self-indulgent, and too long (yes, there are five minute movies that are too long). But you could level an equally long litany against traditional movies, too. What stands out in independent film is passion, gutsiness, a realism forced by underproduction, an urgency imposed by tight budgets, and talent forced to stand in the spotlight in all its human, unvarnished glory. It's usually the case that the two-minute shorts are the very best movies: it's no surprise that they are invariably comedies, because they draw directly on the skill embodied in the perfect set-up of a stand-up comedian; though, because they transport this skill into a new dimension, the ones that make a social or political statement are even better. And the visual and production effects of some of these movies entirely belie their film school and other such origins.

As always, the festival had some suprises and some disappointments. My picks from the animated shorts were Fish, but No Cigar; Nasuh; Par Avion (a haiku of a movie: within the first three seconds, the animation succeeded in placing you on the banks of the Seine in Paris); Perpetuum Mobile (Leonardo da Vinci rightly credited as a props designer); and Voodoo Bayou. Of the movies, Entry Level was pleasant and refreshing. Amongst documentaries, Across the Plateau (Chuan Yue Gao Yuan) was a delight, while wordlessly emphasizing the growing Chinese presence in Tibet in two capacities: construction and the military (those two not being entirely independent). And finally, the movie that stole my heart was the short, Rocketboy.

We caught our first festival the week we moved to Providence in 2000, not having known of its existence before. Since then, we've screwed up only one summer, when we accidentally made travel plans for that same weekend. That so traumatized us that we start checking the festival calendar months in advance, so as to not repeat that mistake. The festival continues to grow in size and depth. Like a comet, it invades our life every summer, sprinkling a host of meteors about us, and satiates my entire year's need for movies in a week. Summer, and life, wouldn't be the same without it.

Bush(n)e(l)l of Acorn

I didn't really want to shake Jesse Bushnell's hand.

Normally I'd be glad to, grease and all. But Jesse, whom I'd known as someone from bike rides, from watching the spring classics in his bike shop (The Hub, which doubles up as a furniture shop, The Zoo), and as one of my bike mechanics, had suddenly shot to fame as a principal participant in this summer's most entertaining happening: the maiden voyage of the Acorn, a replica of the US Civil War submarine, the Turtle. As to where Jesse's hands had been, this New York Times article says it all. (Even the droll, coolly ironic tone of the article cannot disguise the glee of a reporter assigned to a story whose copy virtually writes itself.)

So I go down to the Hub:

(Jesse) Dude, how's it going?

(Me) You're asking me? I'm surprised to see you still a free man.

[Grins, pauses, grins again...] Oops!

So here I am, interviewing Jesse Bushnell. What follows is a reconstruction of a conversation; I went in with prepared questions, but life is not a prepared activity when Jesse is around.

What's your connection with the other two?

They're both great friends. The Duke's my best friend.

Mr. Riley was recorded as emerging from the sub with a beer. Do you think it's safe to drink and dive?

The beer was intentional! That was to thin the blood. There's a ton of lead in that thing, so you've got to keep the blood thin, and the alcohol does that.

Given the quote by which the nation now best knows you, I have to ask: boxers or briefs?

Tighty-whities!

Owing to your action, do you think Alberto Gonzales would be justified in upping the terror level to a new color code? Say up to Celeste?

Who's that guy?

Aren't you embarassed about the lack of a propulsion mechanism, given that you work in a bike shop?

Dude, that's what saved us! The FBI told us that if we'd had a screw, they'd have definitely arrested us.

What's your relationship to David Bushnell?

The Duke tells me I'm related.

This unfortunately stole my next few questions, such as: was he related to Nolan Bushnell (of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese fame); whether, like the senior Bushnell, he too planned to migrate to making naval mines; and whether, given that David Bushnell moved to Georgia and adopted the name of David Bush, Jesse was also related to George W. Bush.

Some of the other things Jesse related was how the media glare was so intense he had to be escorted out the back door; how he got bitten by a dog while he was in the East River, and got stung by several jellyfish; and how the FBI descended on him. He said he was at one point bobbing around in the sub, looking out over at the Statue of Liberty and thinking about how cool all this was, when he saw a group of helicopters heading directly at him and began to revise his evaluation. When the Feds eventually got to him they asked him about various aspects of his life, including details of the houseboat on which he lives. He asked them how they knew about it. Their reply: “Because we have agents on it right now.”

The last word should surely go to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly who, with New York sangfroid, called the Acorn the “creative craft of three adventuresome individuals”. Give the man a medal for his understanding that such utterly unfettered and wholly midsdirected creativity is precisely what makes America so insanely great.

Rasoi

Sanjiv Dhar, owner of Kabob and Curry, has just opened his new restaurant, Rasoi. This is an interesting addition to Providence's dining scene. It gives Sanjiv room to experiment with a diverse Indian menu, in a more upscale setting with parking space. And it packs a little more oomph into the strip on East St where it's located, immediately adjacent to Garden Grill, which should help that part of town develop more.

We've visited twice so far. The service is superb, because most of the staff are Kabob and Curry transplants. The food and drinks have varied from good to excellent, but every meal has also come with a comment card. They're trying hard, and I expect it'll soon be as mature a spot as Kabob and Curry.

Ghost Map

Open up Google Maps, visit Providence, zoom in at the highest resolution, and scroll around the Brown campus area. You'll see a grey zone covering the Brown University Athletic Complex, just south of a local maximum in the East Side's undulations.

I recently compiled a Google Maps mash-up of the restaurants on and around Thayer Street. This resulted in a long, thin map of the Thayer area, at the top-right of which were the letters "D" and "A" on two separate lines.

I spent a few moments wondering what this might stand for. Nothing came to mind, so I scrolled the map...to find the legend "Dexter Asylum"!

Was this a prank by one of our alums? Was this a Mountweazel?

Neither, it turns out. There was indeed, on that very site, an institution by that name. A wonderful article on the Rhode Island Historical Society Web site says that the it was an ``institution for the care of the poor, aged and mentally ill of Providence from 1828 to 1957''; the residential growth of the East Side put an end to it.

The question remains, how come it's on one map and not the other? As Pete Hopkins pointed out, as of this writing, Google Maps uses NAVTEQ whereas the API uses TeleAtlas. Sure enough, blogspace is alive with comparisons of the two; a common opinion seems to be that NAVTEQ's data tend to be newer and more accurate, but I am no authority.