I Am A Camera

I've got sex on the knee. Er, brain.

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:18:23 -0500

[I wrote this earlier tonight for inclusion at my main personal blog, located at jasonpettus.com, the oldest presence online I now still maintain. But the guy who hosts my sites for free there is in the middle of switching them to new servers (Linux-based, more-MySQL-friendly servers); and that has my upload process at MovableType all screwed up right now, which is preventing me from posting this journal entry at my main blog right now. Which is why I've decided to publish it here for now instead, because I'm all gung-ho for what I've said here today, and want to publish it to the general public while I'm still feeling all gung-ho for it, which I know for a fact will wear off in just a couple days from now. Which, er, is why I wanted to publish it. So...um, there.]

(WARNING! Today's journal entry is especially confessional and dirty, and this from a website explicitly known for being confessional and dirty. Those who only know me as a nerdy conservative arts administrator, and who are unaware of my past as a liberal gonzo sex columnist, should take particular caution today.)

Regular readers know that I listen to podcasts on a daily basis, and that one of the ones I like the most is called the "SModcast," put together by filmmakers Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier (one of Smith's old college buddies and the producer of all his films, for those who don't know), which is basically like a Kevin Smith film come to nonfiction life; he and Scott basically sit around in front of a microphone for an hour each week, talking about whatever random shit just happens to pop into their heads, the two of them slowly building these elaborate hypothetical situations that they're constantly presenting to the other, just to see how the other would react and what crazy shit they'll have to say about it. And I was listening to the latest episode earlier today, while I was running my errands, where among other things they got to talking about sexual orientation, and started asking all these outrageous theoretical questions to each other about what defines it all. What if you're a dude, for example, and have spent your whole adult life sucking dick, but suddenly switch to pussy in your thirties or forties? If you switch back to dick after just one pussy, does that pussy still count, and are you now bisexual instead of gay? What if you've never actually had sex, but all your fantasies are about sucking dick? Is it fair to say that a person has a sexual orientation at all if they've never actually had sex? They're ridiculous questions, of course, handled in a juvenile and hilarious way by the two of them, which sums up Smith's career as a filmmaker in a nutshell; not that he's any genius, but that he has a natural knack at posing interesting questions, and wallowing in certain subjects for awhile even while never really coming up with a cohesive answer.

At a certain point in the discussion, Smith declares his own opinion about it all; that as far as he's concerned, unless you've actually handled someone else's genitals in a sexual way at least once, it's unfair to say that that person has any sexual orientation at all, and should instead still be considered a sexless child. And Mosier replies with, "So, like, unless someone sucks a dick for the first time, right?" and Smith replies, "Well, no, dude, I'm saying the first time someone even rubs their dick against your knee or whatever." And Mosier laughs at this in an absurdist way, as if thinking, "What teenager out there is rubbing his dick against other teenagers' knees?" But I gotta tell you, very honestly, as soon as Smith said that, my own mind immediately flashed back on an experience I had back in high school, one I haven't thought of literally in decades, not only one of the very first legitimately erotic experiences I had with another person, but still one of my favorite sexual memories of all time. Plus it's a story I've never talked about in public before, and that's unusual when it comes to my past as a confessional nonfiction writer, so thought it'd be fun to talk about it here at my journal today.

See, I was one of those classic late bloomers; nerdy, dysfunctional, straightedge and afraid of the world as a teen, slowly coming out of my shell during college, then really making up for lost time between 25 and 35, finally settling down in middle age to a place where most other people my age are, no matter what the order of our experiences. (By the way, this is but one of many things I treasure about moving into middle-age, the chance for all the people in my age group to finally mellow out into deep empathy with each other, since by 40 we all seem to have finally had the same collective set of experiences; despite how today's entry might possibly sound by the end of it, I do not miss my youth in any way whatsoever, and in general am highly glad to be moving into middle-age myself.) The story of my undergraduate sexual awakening is pretty typical (dorm + liquor + adventurous girls = yay!), but the point I want to make is that my high-school years were defined mostly through the filter of sexual frustration, an overwhelming prism that colored every single other subject in my life back then.

Like many others nerds, I was a band geek, at a high school that had a highly competitive marching band (one of the endless surprisingly competitive things in the American Midwest that full-grown adults encourage among children on a regular basis, for international readers who don't know); and like any other band geek, my autumns in rural Missouri mostly consisted of paling around with my fellow band geeks, piling into old family cars from the '60s and '70s that had been downgraded over the years into the status of "teenage child's main car" -- for example, the car I drove daily all throughout high school was a 1978 dark-brown Mercury Marquis with bright chrome '60s-style tailfins, one that could comfortably fit eight or nine teenagers if you can believe that shit, as long as a certain amount of people were all piled up and sitting on each other's laps and crap. This is how it always seemed to be in friends' cars, in fact, during trips to and from school and during road trips, during Friday nights out to the graveyard or diner or whatever other nerdy straightedge punk/goth band-geek thing we were doing; it always seemed to be seven or eight or nine teens all piling into one car together very dangerously, instead of doing the sensible thing and traveling in two or three cars to our destination. Ce la vie, I suppose the French would say; or to put it in the American vernacular, "What's the point of even being a teenager, if you can't pile into a giant outdated family car seven or eight or nine at a time?" Indeed -- what's the point of even being a teenager, if you can't do this?

And it was during one of these trips that yet another one of these casual-acquaintance band-geek friends needed to scoot in and sit on my lap during the ride, a tough and wiry little female saxophone player I didn't know very well, a redneck with short blonde hair who was tough and mean and smoked at the age of fifteen. Sheesh, the things that went on back then, you know? Hard to believe that I went to high school in the '80s and that our campus still had an official legally-sactioned smoking area for fifteen-year-olds; hard to believe that such things were accepted and tolerated even so recently as 25 years ago. Anyway, so this tough redneck smoking short-haired sax player crawled in like usual, after all us guys first got in and were sitting across the backseat as usual; except that instead of sitting kinda crookedly and in as chaste a way as possible under those circumstances, like all the other girls back in high school did it, this girl sat directly on top of my own lap in a very Euclidian fashion, so that our...um, parts lined up. And then proceeded to stay in that position for the 45 minutes it took to get from my rural high school to her rural home, while making several pit-stops along the way to drop off others and fill the gas tank.

And it was...whoo. Oh shit, I'm getting all squirmy just thinking about it again, 25 fuckin' years after it first happened! And now that I'm really thinking about it in an analytical way for the first time in my life, I realize that it's because it was the first moment in my life when someone else's sexual organs went from theoretical in my brain to very real and concrete, the first time I really understood in any way whatsoever what it's like to interact with another person's genitals. Because, man, 25 years later, I have to admit that I still distinctly remember the physical sensations of this girl's inflamed vagina on my inflamed penis, even through two sets of jeans, even in full view of seven other teenagers and trying to pretend to them that nothing was happening. I remember her oh-so-gently shifting the hard seam on her denim that ran between her legs; how it pushed against the head of my penis oh-so-subtly, how I realized that it was pushing against her clitoris at the same time, that the sensations I was feeling led to no other interpretation than that the seam was nicely bisecting the folds of her...er, womanhood, and that those two halves were currently located just on either side of the insanely hard teenage cock of mine that was itself about to rip out of its own 501 confines and it own insanely well-designed seams.

That's the thing I really want to emphasize, in order for the main point I'll be making later to make sense, that as an enlightened '80s teen I was already fully aware of the biology behind the baby-making process itself; I had understood the female parts from a medical sense all the way from seventh grade, the medical sense of the male parts too, completely understood how a baby was actually made and how to prevent that from happening if that's what you and your partner decided. But shit, that's a long way from understanding how sex actually works, you know? This experience I'm talking about today, the one with the tough redneck sax player sitting on my lap, was the first time I had actually been confronted in the physical world with someone else's genitals; the first time, for example, I understood that the pussy of a horny woman emits its own heat source, which in reality was also the first time I really understood (I mean, very seriously, very internally understood) that yes, females get horny too. The first time it truly occurred to me that women might in fact desire men in the same desperate, almost out-of-control way that men desire women. The first time it occurred to me that a woman might, you know, God forbid, like me in that way.

Now, for those expecting a great payoff to this story, I'm going to have to unfortunately disappoint you; this woman and I never hooked up, never in fact even acknowledged the experience we had in the car that day. Or, well, other than her at a certain point literally grabbing my outer thigh with her hand, the thigh that was next to the car door and away from everyone else, and holding on for a few minutes while I lightly brushed against her hand with my own; this was the closest we ever got to acknowledging to each other the teenage sexual experience we were going through in the moment, the closest we ever got to plainly admitting to each other how incredibly turned-on we were at that moment. And really, if I want to be completely honest about my high-school life, I need to plainly admit that I was not exactly the antisocial geek I like to sometimes portray myself as; if you really look at what actually happened to me in high school, in fact, you'll see that in reality there were actually a whole string of tough, lower-class, introverted redneck girls who expressed a very nakedly aggressive interest in me back then, girls who would go on in the '90s to be the exact sullen riot-grrrl bassists and slam-poets I fucked on a monthly basis all throughout that decade, girls who would've happily given me the chance to literally get some pussy every two or three days all during high school, if I had only had the courage to respond to their insanely obvious flirtations.

This is the thing I've never liked to admit about my high-school years, because it doesn't fit into that funny, easy-to-understand story, of the introverted nerd who no one loved and who only came into his own as an artsy undergraduate. But the fact is that it's my own neuroses that largely held me back in those years, a subject for example that I think author Joe Meno explored fantastically in his first novel Hairstyles of the Damned, despite me giving it an only so-so review at CCLaP. (And don't worry, all you Meno fans; I ended up giving a much better review to his later novel The Boy Detective Fails.) While these women were giving me insanely obvious hints as to their attraction, all to no avail, I myself was giving insanely obvious hints of my own attraction to others, again to no avail; and thus is the nerdy, dysfunctional, immature circle of high-school life, will the circle be unbroken, amen, amen. I could've literally been swimming in pussy in high school, I realize a quarter of a century later, and with women I secretly found really attractive too; and that was the whole problem, of course, is that I found them only secretly attractive, namely because I wasn't mature enough to understand why I was really attracted to them, and thus was never in a position to actually act on these impulses.

This is why I say that I will ultimately never really miss my youth, although I confess that I too am sometimes guilty of nostalgic reminisces about it all. And let's face it, that the only reason I've been thinking about this so much recently in the first place is because I'm once again going through a long dry spell; it has in fact been a whopping four years since I've last had sex with another person, or indeed even kissed another person or even intimately touched another person. And that's for a variety of complicated reasons, which boils down to "I'm not in a position to do so;" and that's no so bad unto itself, but does tend to drive me a little crazy during the height of the summer here in Chicago, that period of the year when it's hot and sweaty and muggy every single day here, with a whole nicely-tanned city population running around the sidewalks wearing almost nothing at all, while I'm biking every day and being very active, taking in about three times the amount of food I do during the winter when I'm inactive, three times the energy, three times the...er, horniness. Um, yeah. There, I said it. I need to get laid. There, I said it.

Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do so, for reasons I've detailed here in the past: Because I'm mostly unemployed and usually broke these days, for example, making traditional dating out of the question; because I'm a small-business owner now, for another example, so have given up the sexual-swinging I partook in from 2002 to 2004, so that no conservatives or other enemies can use such a thing as a weapon against me and the running of CCLaP. And because my mouth is all fucked up these days too, because of going through a bunch of dental work these days which basically involves the implanting of 32 fake teeth, which has me extremely self-conscious these days about the entire idea of kissing another human being. And if you can't kiss another human being, what the fuck is the point of having sex with them? Which is my third point, that it kinda defeats the purpose to actually hire a prostitute, plus there being a much more important reason why I could never fuck a prostitute; because back when I was a broke Henry-Miller-worshipping raconteur myself, I too when younger once traded money and economic goods for sexual favors in a variety of situations (never as formal prostitution, although many times as an artsy alternative; see Miller's "Rosy Crucifixion" series for more). And all of those experiences left me extremely creeped out, which is why I could never in good conscience actually pay someone else to arbitrarily have sex with me, no matter how horny I am at any given moment, and no matter how few options I have for having sex in a non-prostitution way.

And that's maybe the final irony of the entire situation; that given the way my brain is working these days when it comes to the subject, it might very well ultimately be futile to have sex with a prostitute anyway, as far as the ultimate goal of simply being less horny in my life. Because, as today's entry has hopefully fuckin-yak-yak-yak proven now, what I've recently realized is that it's actually intimacy that I'm profoundly missing, not just the sex act itself. And that's funny for me, frankly, as I right now face the longest time in my entire post-virginity life I've gone without sex, a mere half-decade after I was a cultishly popular sex columnist who did more crazy fucking than you could ever hope to do in your own life, you goddamn loser; that when all is said and done, what I'm really pining for in my life these days are those teenage intimate moments like I described earlier, those moments when almost nothing explicit is going on but everything emotional is happening. In fact, I was just talking about this with a fellow middle-aged friend of mine, someone going through her own crises these days, family-related ones which is why I won't be going into it in any more detail; let's just say that she's finding it rewarding these days to dump a bunch of shit on me, and I'm finding it rewarding to dump a bunch of shit on her, and this is what's making it rewarding for the two of us to occasionally spend an evening together these days, drinking and blabbing secrets about our crappy lives and dumping a whole bunch of unexpected shit on each other.

The last time I hung out with this woman, I ended up detailing this whole way I've been feeling about sex lately, which funnily enough makes most of my female friends sorta unpleasantly shake their heads when I mention it and say, "What the fuck are you talking about?," while making my male friends nod their heads in recognition while I mention it and say, "Yes, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about." And that is -- I've been feeling lately like I've been getting back in touch again with a lot of what I consider the "female side" of my sexuality. Or, to put it a little more bluntly....Now that I've gone four years without any intimate contact whatsoever, I'm starting to think of the entire sexual cycle, the entire lovemaking process, not as an elaborate ritual towards the two of you eventually reaching orgasm, but rather as a self-sustaining activity unto itself, one that should be enjoyed on its own terms even if it never does lead to a "Level Two."

And this leads then to yet another weird confession: That in these post-sex years I'm going through right now, these years where I instead delve whole-heartedly into the entirely nerdy and erudite world of language, words, writing, literature, semiotics and semantics, what is really becoming both a priority and a tangible fantasy for me sexually is precisely the non-language, non-intellectual, non-semantic part of sex. Er...you know. The world of grunting and squealing. The world of pushing and pulling. The world of bodily fluids. Er, other people's bodily fluids. Er, other people's bodily fluids sprayed across your own body parts. This is a universal part of sex, no matter which gender or orientation you're talking about, no matter how little or how much that particular person emits...stuff, from their...body, when they're...glad to see you. Even when it's a tiny bit, even when it's a whole lot, even when it's disgusting, even when it's non-existent; it's the fact that our partner wants to share that moment with us that ultimately gets us turned on, not whatever it is that actually happens in that moment.

I've been thinking about that a lot in the last couple of days, to tell you the truth; of just how turned-on I was, for example, back 25 years ago, during this random packed car trip in high school, even with nothing actually happening, even with her and I never once even officially acknowledging the experience to each other. And really, isn't this human sexuality in a nutshell? Isn't it really all about the elaborate stories we build in our heads, regarding whatever specific subject just happens to turn us on? And this, frankly, is ultimately why I love Kevin Smith as a creative professional, why I will most likely spend the rest of my life being one of his apologists, and explaining very patiently why you should actually secretly love that one movie of his that everyone else just happened to passionately despise (which can be said more and more about all the movies he's made past his original Clerks -- but whoo, talk about a subject best tabled for another time). Kevin Smith makes me think about weird shit, which I believe is ultimately the only justification you need for being a big fan of his; yes, his scripts are mostly trite, yes his production values are virtually non-existent, yes he's basically the arts equivalent of some frat-boy loser extending his perpetual adolescence longer and longer and longer and fucking longer and fucking longer and FUCKING LONGER.

I will always love Kevin Smith, though, because he makes me think about stuff that no other public intellectual makes me think about. He makes me think about teenage virginity-era sexuality versus adult cynical sex-columnist sexuality, and he makes me think about it in a way I rarely hear other sex writers talk about it, much less some fuckin' mope like him. Plus he makes me think about it in a complex way, no matter how simplistic he himself is. I admire that, and I respect that, and it's what makes me watch every fucking Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier movie that comes out, because believe me, I've seen every single one of them now (except Jersey Girl, of course, because no one's seen that, a fact I hope to finally change in my own life this fall). It's why I continue to think of these subjects as important ones to muse upon, which is the reason I continue to write entries of this type at my personal journal, despite being far away these days from the confessional ~~trainwreck~~ pop-culture journalist I used to be back in the '90s.

Okay, that's it for today. Goodbye.

Send to a friend

Oh, and did I mention that my new book is out?

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:31:08 -0500

Photos07

Yeah, I know, every couple of weeks I throw a new entry up here about how I'm going to start posting regularly soon, just to disappear again for another couple of weeks. What can I say? The weather continues to be terrible here in Chicago, which means I haven't gotten into the habit yet of bicycling and getting out each day, which means I haven't gotten into the habit yet of updating this moblog regularly. In the meanwhile, though, I wanted to mention that my new book of photos is now out, Cellphone Photos 2007; it's a reprinting of my favorite 200 or so Palm Treo photos of 2007, of the 900 or so I featured both here and at my Flickr account last year, laid out in convenient PDF form (both American and European versions) for sending quickly to a laserprinter at work when your no-good boss isn't looking. Anyway, feel free to click over to the book page to download a copy for free if you want. And I promise, regular updates here starting soon! I swear to fuckin' God!!!

Send to a friend

New video! "Opening Day, Wrigley Field, 2008 season"

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:59:43 -0500

Bikemapwrigleyfieldopeningday

(Are you a YouTube person? Here's the link to the YouTube version of this video.)

Greetings, humans! Spring has officially begun here in Chicago, even if the weather hasn't caught up to it yet; it means that not only bicycling season will be starting again soon, but also the goofy little cellphone videos I regularly do during bicycling season, most of which act as supplements to the various bicycle maps I've created for use in both Google Maps and Google Earth. (I'm hoping to ramp up the amount of videos I do this year, in fact; hopefully by the time Labor Day rolls around this September, I will have shot and posted 10 to 15 of them.) Here, my first cellphone video of 2008, shot on opening day of the Chicago Cubs 2008 baseball season, which happens to be the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs won the World Series, a historically significant occasion that has already garnered a ton of national press, before the baseball season has even begun. Unfortunately it was a crappy, rainy day today, so I don't have a lot to share from the actual opening-day festivities; rest assured that I will be shooting another video around Wrigley Field later this summer (located, by the way, a mere four blocks from my apartment), giving a better tour of the neighborhood and showing what a more typical game day in the Wrigleyville neighborhood is like. For now, I hope you enjoy.

Send to a friend

Wow, look at how many places I bicycled last year!

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:34:47 -0500

Jpmapsmaster

So, just a few weeks left until it's finally bicycling season again here in Chicago; long-time followers of the moblog, in fact, know that I first got heavily involved with bicycling last year, when not coincidentally I initially quit smoking. Of course, this being nerdy GTD me, I needed to invent an elaborate project for myself in order to justify all that bicycling in the first place; and this was right at the same time (spring 2007) that Google first allowed people to sign up for an account and start creating customized mashup maps through their official API, which convinced me to start doing such a thing too. But alas, because of the complexity of these maps (but more on that in a bit), I ended up doing a lot more trips than I had time to sit down and put together into a mashup; and I promised myself that over the winter I'd finally sit down and finish them, before it was time for bicycling season 2008 and yet more riding/photographing/mapping.

Anyway, it just occurred to me this weekend that I don't have much time left, so I better get started; and the first step, of course, was to sit down and look through all the photos and notes I took last year when actually on the bike trips, and determine exactly how much work I have ahead of me. The good news? It turns out that I actually biked a lot more and a lot farther than I had been remembering in my head, boding well for my chances of even longer and more regular trips this spring and summer. The bad news? I have 11 maps that need to be created, and so far only three of them "done" (and by "done" I of course mean "eh, like 80 percent done").

So, I just sat down on my other Mac (the one with Photoshop) and made a master map of all the mini-projects I'm shooting to finish by the beginning of May; this image, then, will also serve as a master map to interior pages over at the section of my personal website where you can always find the latest grand total of finished mashups. Anyway, so here we go with the descriptions...hold yr breath...

1 through 5: Chicago Lakeshore Path. An uninterrupted 18-mile bike and runner path stretching nearly from the north edge to the south edge of the city, surrounded nearly at all times by public parkland, a holdover from Edwardian times when the "City Beautiful" movement managed to get the entire Chicago lakefront declared a "public resource."

1) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park North. Upper half of the seven-mile Lincoln Park, one of the largest city parks in the entire United States. Riding the length of Lincoln Park is a lesson in American history and architecture, in that the park was designed in regular stages from 1860 to 1960; here in the north half are the sections created between 1910 and the '60s.

2) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park South. The lower half of the park just described, the sections designed from 1860 to 1900, containing the vast majority of the historical destinations the park is most known for.

3) Lakeshore path: North Avenue to the Loop. Want a smart alternative the next time you come into the inner city for a holiday like the 4th of July? Why not park your car on the northside and bike the rest of the way in? Although not regularly used by a lot of people, there is a perfectly safe and in fact delightful section of the lakefront path that stretches from the end of Lincoln Park to the Loop, including easy stops at Navy Pier, River North, the Chicago River and Millennium Park. It's only six miles from Montrose to the Loop by bicycle; why not try it the next time you're down there on holiday, avoiding the snarl of vehicular traffic that always forms during such events?

4) Lakeshore path: Loop to 57th Street. For many years the Hyde Park area of the city's southside was built up along the lakefront, but nothing else between there and the Loop; that finally changed throughout the mid-20th century, especially once a series of corporations and civic groups came in and sponsored the landscaping of vast tracts of the land. Although not as historic as the northside's better-known path, this slice of Chicago's lakefront is a beautiful and uncluttered space, perfect for lazy weekend rides as well as weekday wind sprints for more serious riders.

5) Lakeshore path: South Campus. The extreme south tip of the city-sponsored 18-mile lakeshore bike/running path, encompassing several historic areas: Hyde Park, the University of Chicago campus, the Museum of Science and Industry, Jackson Park, and the South Shore Cultural Center, spanning roughly 57th to 79th Streets.

6) Northside to the Loop, via Southport/Lincoln Avenues. Hey, city-dweller creative-class fucks! You know how the mayor and your hippie neighbor keep crowing about how easy it actually is to bicycle from your place to your office in the Loop each day? Keep wondering if it's actually true? Here's one of what will hopefully be an always expanding series of maps, looking at various inner-city routes from residential neighborhoods to the Loop, all of them lying along streets with dedicated, legally-protected bike lanes. Featuring not only the routes themselves, but various practical tips about city bicycling embedded in my photos and videos.

7) Northside to the Loop, via Halsted/Milwaukee Avenues. Exactly the same as map 6, but this time using the city bike lane on Halsted, passing through such neighborhoods as Boys Town, Old Town, Goose Island, Fulton Market, River West and more.

8) Burnham's Boulevards and the West Side Parks (north half). As part of the "City Beautiful" movement's 1909 overhaul of the city, architect Daniel Burnham recommended building a "green ring" through the most congested neighborhoods at the time, allowing not only for rapid middle-class development but also a small slice of healthiness in the middle of the most packed places in the city. At the same time, then, a group of Gilded Age entrepreneurs started a series of grand, giant public parks on the west side of the city as well (where the vast majority of the city's immigrants lived at the time); these were linked to Burnham's green boulevard system, to form a legitimate grand green circle all the way around the city's downtown, a few miles out in distance from the Loop's center. My map, then, is just of the north half of this circle; it includes Diversey Boulevard at Lincoln Park (including the Goethe statue, Hamilton garden, Elks headquarters and more), Logan Square, Garfield Park and more.

9) Northside Neighborhood Parks. It's the giant civic parks of the Victorian Age that get all the press in Chicago; but did you know that the park district here actually maintains over 550 public spaces? The vast majority of them, in fact, were created and first maintained by private neighborhood organizations, before the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal consolidated all the groups into one unified government administration. In this map, a winding and detailed route that will take a bicyclist to over 65 small neighborhood parks on the northside, ranging from a mile or two in size to sometimes the length of someone's backyard; the total route lasts 25 miles, with of course many opportunities to stop for food, shopping, coffee and more.

10) Northside to the Westside, via the "Industrial District." Here, a supplemental add-on to either map 6 (inner-city path on Lincoln) or 7 (inner-city path on Halsted) for getting over to such hipster westside neighborhoods as Wicker Park and Bucktown, specifically by riding through the last area of the northside left with working factories, smokestacks and more. A fascinating route to take at least once, especially for those who enjoy photographing urban industrial areas.

11) Near South Historic Neighborhoods. Did you know that there are half a dozen nationally important historic neighborhoods all butting against each other in Chicago's Near South Side? There are! Here, a map detailing them all, including the IIT campus, Bronzeville, Prairie Avenue, the Museum Campus, Chinatown, Printers Row and the South Loop.

Whew, okay, that's it! And three of these are now "done," like I said (i.e. 80 percent done), which you can find over here for now; and hopefully by May, like I said, I'm going to have all 11 of these maps finished and online, and with downloadable KMLs as well for Google Earth (for those who like their maps in 3D and spinnable and all that shit), and with a brand-new interface as well over at the section of my personal site where people will be able to find all these. And that's it! See you later, fuckers!

Send to a friend

Hey hey! It's an audio blog entry!

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:01:29 -0500

Fivethings

Jason Pettus: Personal audio

I decided for some reason to do an audio report for this personal blog of mine, posted here above; but I'm also aware of how much time such online audio reports suck up, especially personal navel-gazing ones like this, which is why I deliberately kept it to under seven and a half minutes (even though I promise in the actual podcast that I would keep it under six -- I know, I failed!). Five topics are covered here: the new Movable Type 4 installation that will be happening at my main personal site soon; how to send me audio comments for the CCLaP Podcast if you want; a general thanks to CCLaP readers, and befuddlement over why there's not more feedback there; a formal apology for the continued delays with my customized bicycle maps I've been creating this year, and an explanation for why they're so late to begin with; and an open plea for more submissions of artistic work to CCLaP, given that I will finally be opening the Flash-based virtual photography gallery later this month, and of course publishing the center's first paper book (a cutting-edge novel) this winter. Enjoy the smug self-satisfaction, everyone!

Send to a friend

I shot another bike-map video this week.

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 21:43:23 -0500

Bikemapwellespark

I had some errands to run earlier this week in Lincoln Square, so thought I'd stop at Welles Park and do yet another cellphone-camera video for the collection of bicycle maps for Google Maps and Google Earth I've been compiling this year. This video is specifically for the "northside neighborhood parks" map found there; it talks a little about the history of the neighborhood park program in Chicago, then gives you an overview of Welles Park in particular, an excellent example of a medium-sized community park in a working-class neighborhood.

Are you wondering, by the way, why none of my recent bike videos have shown up on my maps yet, or why no new maps have been posted since early July? Well, that's because I'm too busy actually bicycling these days, while the weather is still warm, plus running my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which wasn't open yet earlier this summer when I got the first three maps finished and posted. But in just another two months or so, it's suddenly going to be too cold and nasty again to go bicycling on a regular basis, and will stay that way for another six months or so; I figure better to just go ahead and run around and collect up all the raw data for these maps now, while the weather is still good, then spend the winter slowly getting the rest of the maps done at home while hiding from the cold and snow. That way I'll have a good seven or eight maps ready by next spring, when it'll be time to start bicycling again every day, and with all those map placemarks fully integrated by then into Google Local Search.

Did you know that, by the way? That whenever you create a customized Google map, whenever you add a placemark for a specific situation that contains either text or a photo or audio or video, it gets added to the overall Google Maps database? That way, whenever someone does a search on, say, "Wrigley Field," they'll not only get the official Google search result, but the option to view user-created content as well; and any person on the planet who chooses that option, then, will see your placemark right next to the official Google one. Pretty cool, I have to admit, and pretty smart of Google to add all this precious original content to their overall database.

The obvious goal, then, is that people will also combine Google's SketchUp to this all, a free and easy-to-use CAD/CAM program that allows people to create 3D buildings, then automatically load THEM into Google Earth and the Google database as well. If a chamber of commerce could get their stuff together, for example, they could get all the businesses in their organization to fill out a detailed placemark about themselves, plus get someone to make a fully textured 3D version of the business (or maybe the chamber of commerce hiring some computer geek to do all the buildings at once, hint hint, hint hint). The chamber of commerce, then, could create a customized Google map with all these businesses within it, which could be used in all the following ways...

--Adding to the Google online database, for people to stumble across randomly or while searching on a specific topic;

--As a downloadable Google Earth file, at the chamber of commerce's website;

--As a cool standalone demo for visitors at the chamber of commerce offices, or even city hall;

--As a source of press for those businesses; it's not that often, after all (or yet, anyway), that chambers of commerce band together and create a media-rich 3D customized map of all their businesses at Google.

This is what I'm trying to do with my bike maps, after all; not only add a little to the overall Google database, to increase the overall value of the info there, but also to drive traffic to my website "long tail" style, ergo the arts center as well, not to mention do a little boosterism for the city of Chicago, not to mention explain a little about my theories concerning city planning and urban renewal. Oh, plus give smart tourists an idea of other things they can do while visiting here besides going down to Navy Fucking Pier, plus give locals ideas for cool day trips they can make right within the city itself, on a boring Sunday where not much of all is going on, without having to worry about hotels or train rides back and the like. See how many different benefits you get from investing once in a technology like this?

Send to a friend

I've worked out my first longish bike ride; it's happening Saturday!

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Thu, 03 May 2007 18:59:15 -0500

As always, a quick recap first for those who need it...

Because of my looming 40th birthday, I've decided to make a number of big changes to my lifestyle this year; among other things, I've decided to try biking between 3 and 5 miles (5 to 10 km) on every day this year it gets over 60 degrees (15 C), and every couple of weeks to put in a longish bike ride in order to build up my endurance. By the end of the summer I'm hoping for such rides to be 30 to 50 miles in length (50 to 80 km), but for now I'm shooting for more like 10 to 15 miles (15 to 25 km); so one of the things I'm doing these days is thinking of various fun trips in the city I could make that would be that total distance, either one-way or round-trip. (Bikes are allowed on all city trains and buses, making one-way bike trips quite easy.)

Anyway, an upcoming promotional event from one corner of the literary industry has inspired what I think is going to be my first longish trip of the year; it's happening this Saturday, in fact, where I will bike all over the north side of the city to celebrate national Free Comic Book Day. I worked out a route on Google Maps, in fact, that lasts 12 miles total, that would not only take me to three comic-book stores participating in the promotion, but up almost the entire length of Lincoln Park as well, including such landmarks of heavy interest as the zoo, the conservatory, the Lorenzo Taft sculpture of Lincoln, the last grave left in Lincoln Park (from when it was a cemetery in the 1800s), two museums, a historic belltower, a mysterious totem pole and a lot more. And such a route of course is especially cool for two reasons:

1) Because I'm actually excited about Free Comic Book Day this year: instead of the usual exclusive collection of lame superhero comics specially given out in the past, this year includes such indie favorites as a Victorian detective story from Eddie Campbell (From Hell), a collection of never-before reprinted Peanuts strips, and more;

and 2), ever since Google introduced the ability to build highly sophisticated custom maps -- ones that can not only have text, photos and videos embedded within the route, along with mile markers and multiple colors, but can also be exported en-masse as a Google Earth (.kml) file -- I've wanted to make one! But to make one, I need to actually go out and ride the route of the map I want to make, and take all the photos and videos that will be in the mashup.

Anyway, like I said, the full route takes me a total of 12 miles (20 km), and takes me by enough interesting stuff to add at least a dozen and a half points to my finished Google map afterwards. The rough breakdown is shown below:

Mapfreecomicslincolnpark

*) My home, Uptown; start/finish.
1) Chicago Comics, 3244 N Clark. Total distance: 1.25 miles.
2) Graham Crackers Comics, 2562 N Clark. Total distance: 2.45 miles.
3) Brainstorm Comics, 1648 W North Ave. Total distance: 5 miles.
4) Southern tip of Lincoln Park: Chicago History Museum, Taft sculpture and more. Total distance: 6.85 miles.
5) Historic Art Deco cafe at southern edge of zoo. Total distance: 7.45 miles.
6) Conservatory. Total distance: 7.8 miles.
7) Chicago Nature Museum. Total distance: 8 miles.
8) North Pond Cafe. Total distance: 8.3 miles.
9) Elks national headquarters and veteran memorial, a ridiculously magnificent structure that must be seen to be believed. Total distance: 8.6 miles. Also in this section, Goethe sculpture and garden.
10) Back officially on the lakefront path, in this case at Diversey. Total distance: 9.1 miles.
11) Start of Belmont Harbor. Total distance: 9.6 miles.
12) "Dog Beach" at Belmont Harbor. Total distance: 10 miles.
13) Mysterious totem pole, near Addison. (I'll explain where it came from in my eventual map.) Total distance: 10.35 miles.
14) Waveland Clubhouse and Bell Tower, recently restored to its original historic condition. Total distance: 10.65 miles.
15) The mysterious "Peace Garden" at Buena Avenue, beautifully landscaped but with almost no official information existing concerning its origin. Total distance: 11.25 miles.
*) Back home. Total distance: 12 miles.

So anyway, like I said, I'm going to try to very slowly make such a trip this coming Saturday, on national Free Comic Book Day; in fact, I asked my oral surgeon today during my check-up if it'd be okay to do such a thing, just a week after my latest bout of surgery, and he said sure. Then I'll upload the photos to Picasa (owned by Google), and the video to YouTube (also owned by Google), so that I'll be ready to import it all into my custom Google map, which will eventually be imported as a whole into Google Earth. Whew, that's a lot of synergy! So wish me luck; and of course if you live in Chicago and want to join me for part of the trip, or a coffee/drink somewhere along the way (I'll be spending the entire day to go its length, so obviously will be taking it easy and making a lot of stops), just drop me a line and let me know.

Send to a friend

I've got three Joost invites, if anyone wants one.

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:53:05 -0500

UPDATE, 3:31PM: Invites spoken for! Jeez, that was fast!

Did you know that I've been doing a whole lot of research lately into the various options out there for online video? It's for a freelance project I'm not at liberty to discuss in public right now, but I can admit that these days I'm dealing with something like a dozen different services on a regular basis, some that deal with legal videos and some that don't. One that I'm interacting with these days is the much-hyped Joost, the indie-friendly open-source high-definition project started by the same guys who invented Skype, although admittedly I haven't used it much yet because I'm in the middle of trying to figure out BitTorrent, and it's hard to figure out BitTorrent. Anyway, it's an invite-only beta at Joost right now, and I just received three invitations I'm allowed to give out; so if you want one, just drop me a line at ilikejason [at] gmail.com, and I'll give them to the first three people I hear from. Don't forget, you'll need a fairly new computer with a decently fast processor, as well as the cards and drivers needed to deal well with streaming high-quality video; the good news, though, is that Joost is available for both Mac and Windows. Anyway, just drop me a line if you're interested...and needless to say, when I'm in a position to do so, I'll be putting up a whole series of detailed entries about my video research, including simplified instructions for using a typical BitTorrent client. It's about fucking time someone wrote something like that!

Send to a friend