nude highway driving

Amsterdam, 1991

I took this shot of my flat-mate observing the frozen canals. The five of us, sharing a place in London for our semester abroad, decided to take the bus (and ferry) to Amsterdam for a long weekend of Madness & Joy.

Although I figured out MT enough to install it, and HTML enough to tweak little things here and there, I’m still lost on stylesheets and all that muck. I love the way this site looks on my Mac (and all its browsers), but notice when I get to work and use IE on a PC that everything looks bigger and klunkier. I set the width in the body to 60% so that people wouldn’t have to scroll horizontally (on a PC), but this also makes some machines see the text wrap around photos quite crappily.

The coding currently looks like this (the 60% is the only thing I changed from the original MT “clean” stylesheet):

	body {
		margin:0px 0px 20px 0px; width:60%;
		background:#FFF;
		}

My question for you is how to I set the width definitively so that everyone sees the same layout (as long as they all have the same font, of course). I tried changing the body width to 400px in the stylesheet, but all that did was affect my archives, not my main blog. And I’d love to be able to add some extra white space to the left of the sidebar, too …

The blog that comes to mind when I think clean design that looks exactly the same no matter what computer or browser through which I view it is kottke.org. I know, I know - he’s a professional designer and stuff. I don’t want my site to look like his, I just want to control the look of mine. It seems like only a few simple commands would help.

You know it’s going to be a long-ass news day when you go through the national photo wire and not only can you view its entire contents in about 10 minutes but 95% of the art in there is for features or advance weekend packages.

A story that caught my eye on the wire recently led me to this photography exhibit, which I hope, hope hope to catch before it ends. Perhaps I’ll go on my four-day weekend, if I live to see it. I love Allen Ginsberg’s photos of the Beats - they capture the lust for Life that tore nonstop through their arteries and the magic that’s captured so many boyhood hearts. Every picture shows someone I want to hang out with, whether or not I recognize their faces or names.

The first time I saw any of Ginsberg’s photographs was in 1989 in Syracuse, N.Y., in a car tearing back to campus from the local airport. I was sitting in the back seat, freaking out. In the front passenger’s seat, flipping through a collection of old photographs, sat Allen Ginsberg, proclaiming “I love to take pictures, too!” just after I told him I did a lot of photography. “Here are some photos I’ve taken of my friends over the years … have a look.”

I was half captivated by the fact that I was hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, fellow poet, and half captivated by the photos and stories of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. My heroes - his friends. I appreciated Ginsberg’s poetic talents, and wish I had spent more time grilling him on them rather than just his adventures with the crazies. I also wish I hadn’t been so stressed about his penchant for young boys - I’ve never been freaked out by gay people, but with my long (at the time), curly locks and my baby face that definitely did not look 18, I was worried about an awkward come-on and let this prevent me from opening up and taking advantage of some moments alone.

A few of us on the entertainment board took Ginsberg out to dinner before his show, and I remember wanting to show him some of my poetry for guidance … but feeling afraid that he’d tired of that. I did get him talking about his technique a bit, and was surprised to hear him say that he does not believe in rewrites; he lets the verse flow from his soul to the paper and leaves it as it is. I rarely can leave words alone in their original incarnation.

The show was phenomenal; he recently had released the paperback of an anthology, and he read from poems all over the years. Even sang songs and told stories, including a very touching one about his dying father. The room was packed and the energy was strong. Afterward, a few of us went to a local pizza joint and I got Allen’s autograph and Buddhist drawing on a copy of his book for an old friend of mine. We talked a little more, but eventually his attention focused fully on some high school guys who had joined us.

Eight years later I saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti do a reading. Allen had died in the spring, and Ferlinghetti did a little tribute after Anne Waldman graced us with hers. Burroughs later died at the end of the summer.

The tribute was held at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Earlier in my life, I was sure I would end up there. It seemed the perfect fit, destiny. But like way too many plans it slipped through the cracks of time and I forgot about it … until I moved to Boulder the year Allen Ginsberg died. I found myself in the school’s hometown, about to visit its campus for a reading by Lawrence Ferlinghetti! Yet I never made any effort to attend. Maybe I got turned off by the trustafarians that populate the place (I swear to God, if I had been forced to endure one more fucking group drumming session …), or maybe I just chickened out.

I’m thankful I got to meet one of the Beats, and I think it’s fitting I met “the poet” of the bunch. Ever since my father gave me “On The Road” in high school I wanted to live my life in their spirit. Not follow in their footsteps or try to be them, but to celebrate that excited curiosity about experiencing everything and everyone and sucking in moments and experiences as if they were the world’s greatest drugs. You know, be one of the roman candles.

I accomplished this with little effort in high school and college, but it seems to become harder and harder as time goes by. Sadly, I don’t think it’s a natural aging thing - hell, look at Ferlinghetti. I haven’t written a poem in years; I don’t seek out mad people for adventures anymore; I stay at a job I don’t like because I’m good at it and am afraid I won’t be good at what I really want to do.

But I don’t give up. I keep fighting this fight inside my head because there’s still a piece of me that burns, burns, burns … and that burning keeps me alive. My father likes to say that only 10% of the people in this world are truly living and awake, and the rest are merely sleepwalking through existence.

I choose awake.

First off, may I please say how thoroughly tired I am of the California recall? It’s not just about the California economy anymore … or even the battle between Republicans who hate the little people and Democrats who can’t take a stand on anything. It’s now about crap food.
One shit, one vote.

A friend asked me to write what I think about the whole CIA leak scandal. I try not to go political too much - unless I’m flaming pissed about something - because there are so many political blogs out there, and some do it way better than I or many others ever could. I will say that I think this will be one of the more damaging blows against the Redneck Across Town, or at least to his puppetmaster. Not that anyone in the White House is worried - here is their reaction to being asked today if they think the White House will ever find the person who leaked the undercover CIA agent’s name (warning: Yahoo link - won’t last forever).

Even if nothing significant comes out of this, the scandal did bring me a grin last week on the news desk. My boss, who’s a tad naive at times (nothing’s funnier on slow news days than explaining teabagging or salad tossing to him), pulled an analysis piece on the leak for one of our nation pages. He wasn’t thinking when he slugged it, and seeing LEAKANAL03 gave me a much-needed junior-high laugh. Besides, no bloated rant can capture the situation as perfectly as the fourth panel of Tom Tomorrow’s latest creation.

I’m about to descend into Week of Hell ‘03 at work, so posting might soon be scarce or at the very least done late at night while I’m hopped up on bennies, Guinness or horse. Sometimes I forget that at a newspaper, all fecal matter stops at the copy desk, no matter how many cracks it’s slipped through. A noble band of merry masochists we be.