The TV game

I don’t sleep well in hotels. Sometimes this works to my advantage — I got to watch the inauguration of Nelson Mandela early one morning, and I caught a chunk of the Clinton impeachment proceedings from the West Coast. But usually it’s a source of frustration.

At home I sleep on an ancient, lumpy, creaky mattress on sheets usually overdue for laundering. I sleep like a baby (and snore, I’m told, like a jackhammer), yet in hotels I toss and turn all night.

Perhaps it’s the lack of contour sheets. Am I the only person in the world who is exasperated by the fact that hotels refuse to use contour sheets? I am a restless sleeper, and usually wind up on a bare mattress with knotted sheets wrapped around my legs. Every time I get an upgrade to the “Executive Tower” or “Imperial Suite” or whatever the heck they call it, I hope for contour sheets. No luck. Does Bill Gates get contour sheets? Does President Clinton?

Perhaps it’s the smells. Hotels today don’t smell particularly bad (at least when I get a non-smoking room), but they don’t smell like home. There’s always a faint but lingering odor of disinfectant. Evolutionary biologists tell us that the olfactory nerve is connected directly to the most primitive part of our brains (the hippopotamus? the epiglottis? I forget). I have known people who travel with pillows from home, and they claim it really helps.

Or maybe it’s the horrid thing on top of every hotel bed. Even the finer hotels cover their beds with a stiff, uncomfortable covering made from polyester suits rejected by Elvis. It is to a quilt what a hairball is to a tailored suit. Lately I’ve tried stripping it off and wearing a T-shirt rather than sleeping naked. Of course, I can’t strip this monstrosity off without pulling out the flat sheets, guaranteeing that I’ll spend the night stressing over the lack of contour sheets. Besides, child of the 60s that I am, I miss the chance to be bare. I identify with Ben Franklin, who was a great advocate for a daily “air bath.”

Television of course, doesn’t help. Watching all those jolly, healthy, appealing consumers living their bright and shallow lives while I lay alone on the bedspread from hell does not relax me. At home I don’t watch TV, but it’s hard to avoid in a hotel room. Some hotel rooms consist of a television pointed at a bed with a bathroom off to the side. Lately, I have been playing a game I call “The TV Game.” The object of the game is to make it through an entire two or three night stay without turning the television on. I was getting fairly good at it until I checked into an “all suites” hotel, which had, I am not joking, TWO televisions. This visit was going well until I decided to check out the weather channel.

Often I will turn the television on, turn off the sound, and turn on the closed-captioning. I can then read a television show. This isn’t a lot fun with news broadcasts and other live material (you wouldn’t believe what deaf people have to put up with until you try this), but it’s rather pleasant with sitcoms. These are a completely different experience without the laugh tracks. It’s also nice to listen to music as I read TV.

Reading a movie is a new and unique media experience. So far I’ve read two films. Both were dreadful late-night thrillers; one about a haunted Ouija board and one about a mad bomber and a bus that had to keep driving very fast to keep from exploding. Who THINKS of this half-witted rubbish?

Occasionally I turned the sound on to check on the music. It was predictable: strings playing squeaky diminished chords and clacky percussion, all designed to maximize feelings of foreboding. It cheered me up to realize that I was avoiding adrenaline-inducing stimuli, which would have made it impossible to sleep for the rest of the night.

To this day I wonder if I would have enjoyed those flicks if I had heard the words and sound. I doubt it.

If this essay has convinced you that I’m a raving lunatic, remember that you can always sign off this list by sending a firm but understanding message to journeys@aminzade.com.

Interacting with a Fountain

I took a walk around Atlanta. It’s a terrible city for walking, but I try a big loop down Peachtree and over to the famous Centennial Olympic Park. 1996 must have been a hell of a year for the guy who makes those cast-iron grids that go around trees. I walked over hundreds of them, all marked with 1996 and Olympics and some encouraging words about the rebirth of the city.

I turned off Peachtree Street just past the Hotel and Biztraveler District (the usual suspects: Hard Rock Cafi, Planet Hollywood, etc.) , and headed towards the park. From a distance I notice towers that look like jewel-encrusted phalluses. The jewels are lights, or perhaps windows. As I walk closer, I notice that they are probably meant to represent Olympic torches. To me, though, they look like sad, snuffed-out torches. There seems to be some apparatus at the top of each torch that lights up at night, though. I’ll drive by later.

There are large, very open flat brick spaces, all pleasantly bordered in tasteful carved granite, and large rectangular patches of grass looking like some obsessive collectors exhibit of giant pool tables.

It’s flat, but not ugly. In the paved section, each little brick rectangle has something in the middle of it — a bench or a small tree or a sculpture. It makes the park feel like a box of Fanny Farmer chocolates, each little delicacy in its own little crinkled paper cup.

In some sections, the paving stones are organized into attractive patterns, and these have little bronze plaques proclaming them quilts. One is entitled “The Quilt of Origins,” and has a sculpture that looks kind of like socialist-realist workers trapped inside a flat eggshell. There is a “Quilt of Olympic Glory” and it has, as it’s Fanny Farmer chocolate, two small obelisks covered with names (no doubt glorious Olympian ones). There is “The Quilt of Dental Hygiene.” with a large semi-abstract toothbrush. Well, not really, but it would fit right in.

As I walk through the plaza, I look a little closer and notice that, every damn brick has a sponsor’s name engraved on it. In addition, each large granite-bordered rectangle of bricks has as its centerpiece a stone with an engraved number. I assume this is to help the sponsors find their personal bricks. Maybe it’s the granite edging, but walking over those pavers gives me a creepy feeling, as if I’m in a necropolis, walking over the bodies of the people whose names I read — The Ovis’s, the Clarks, Martha and James Smith.

There are some bodies buried here, at least figuratively. My Atlanta friends tell me that an old black neighborhood named Techtown was demolished to make way for the park, though they disagree on whether this was a wholly bad thing. I guess it wasn’t a pleasant place, but for some people it was home. Maybe it’s their souls I feel drifting mournfully around, looking for a barbershop or tavern or church.

Or maybe it’s the relentless flatness of the park that makes me uncomfortable. The open, rectangular horizontality is so out of place in a cityscape. It could be the National Flatness Monument, a celebration of the monotony, a little bit of Iowa in the urban South.

The trees and shrubs (in more of those cast-iron grids — whoever makes these must be the Bill Gates of the landscape equipment world) are short, and the landscape designers have somehow managed to come up with flat fountains.

All this planar surface draws my eye to the stunning verticality of the nearby CNN tower. The distant but somehow powerful presence of the Coca Cola Tower looms to the North. The visual center of the park as I stand in its large, flat plaza (sorry, I can’t think of any more synonyms for flat) is the Chamber of Commerce building. It’s a round, pillared structure that looks like a squat pink version of Grants tomb crossed with one of the futuristic buildings from the capital city of Coruscant in the new Star Wars movie (see www.starwars.com).

Overall, I don’t like Centennial park very much. With one exception (I’ll get to it in a moment), it has all the charm and warmth of a bank lobby. A very 1990s civic space — easy to clean and maintain, but empty and uninviting. I’ve read that the fast-food megachains have teams of engineers who design chairs that look inviting but become uncomfortable after a few minutes of sitting. This park reminds me of those chairs.

Despite all my griping, there is one truly wonderful thing about this place. In the center plaza there is a truly grand and lovable piece of public art. It’s called “The Olympic Ring Fountain, ” one of the few vertical touches in the park. Water spurts out of pipes set flush with the ground. There are dozens of these jets, arranged in the pattern of the Olympic Rings, and they fire in patterns.

The wonderful thing about this fountain is that it is designed to get people to act silly. My first thought was “gee, that’s pretty.” My next thought is “wouldn’t it be cool to be inside the rings.” I noticed that the rings are just big enough that a person who got into the middle of one would not get wet. Immediately after I realized this, the water in one ring cuts off completely. If I was brave enough, I could enter, high and dry. Then, randomly, the water started again. The sequencing of the jets was brilliant. The fountain was teasing and flirting with me, alternately begging and daring me to step in.

There are signs nearby saying that users are free to “interact with the fountain at their own risk.” I saw a couple step in, and get photographed by their friend outside the circle of wetness. I saw three businessmen jump in wearing dress pants and button-down shirts (one get a wet leg). I couldn’t hold myself back. I interacted. At my own risk. I returned to my hotel for dry clothes, and to try to find a decent Barbeque joint. But you read about that yesterday.

Barbecue for Jews

My hotel straddles dead-middle and upper-middle on the Aminzade scale. The specifics: 49″ towel width, Vanilla Bean and Peach Nectar moisturizing soap, Juniper Breeze body lotion, shower cap and a shoe mitt, presented on a a tasteful zenlike wood platform in lieu of wicker. This is nice. I was getting tired of wicker. The porter tells me that Elvis once slept here.

My room also has a terrace. I overlook The Varsity, a sprawling neon-trimmed grease pit of a drive-in restaurant beloved of Georgia Tech students. The Varsity claims to be World’s largest drive-in restaurant and to sell more Coca-Cola than any other single outlet. Field-research note: The onion rings are very good. You can learn what a “bag of rags and an n.i.p.c.” ” is at http://thevarsity.com.

I can also see the freeway. It’s a pleasure to gloat over the poor souls stuck in Atlanta’s notorious rush hour traffic. There are cities with worse traffic, but I’ve never been any place where people complain about the traffic as much.

If I lean out over the balcony, I can see the Coca-Cola building. It’s a blank and meaningless tower of cement and glass, in cross-section like a pinched triangle. It must have been built in the Goizetta years. He was the guy who came up with “New Coke,” missing the whole point of the Coca-Cola Mystique. If they had built this thing in the 1990s, no architect could resist a design evocative of the classic Coke bottle.

Atlanta, of course, is the home of Coca-Cola. People here drink it for breakfast, and there is little sign of Pepsi here. Frankly, I’ve never been able to tell those two brown sugar-waters apart (I’m a Dr. Pepper man myself), but I’ve learned that some Atlantans are fiercely loyal to the stuff. If you want to read a fascinating book about Coca-Cola, I’d recommend “For God, Country and Coca-Cola” by my former colleague Mark Pendergrast. It’s really a history of American capitalism viewed through a Coke bottle. Mark’s book explains how a morphine-addicted Civil War veteran invented Coke as an herbal-medicine tonic. Mark also thinks he’s found the secret recipe, which he includes in an appendix. By the way, there really was some cocaine in it, but not much at all. Today the company buys decocainized coca leaves for the syrup

I am in the Southland and I must have barbecued ribs (and grits for breakfast, but that’s another tale). I did my research: reading guidebooks, and rounding up the names of several quality rib joints, cross-checking with my native guide and old high school friend Chris. Despite my careful preparations, my first efforts to find good barbecue meet with failure. I spent several hours driving through Atlanta’s abundant sprawl before I found Chris’s first suggestion, Son’s Place. It looked great, with a folk-art picture of Son on the side. However I got there at 5:30, and it closed at 4 PM. Returning to my hotel, I call the other restaurants on my list. Each either doesn’t exist any more or doesn’t answer the phone.

I figured that the hotel concierge, a person of African-American heritage, might help. Nope. He tried to send me to some yuppy place nearby. The ribs might have been good (at triple the price), but a glance at the menu makes me reject the place. I can’t bring myself to travel to the Deep South and eat barbecue at a place that offers mesclun greens with balsamic vinaigrette. I want Collards. With pot likker. I’ve also heard that a true aficionado won’t eat in a barbecue joint where all the chairs match.

An emergency call to Chris yields the explanation that few authentic Southern restaurants are open for dinner, and a recommendation: Dusty’s. I’m suspicious (sounds like a tex-mex theme restaurant chain to me), but drive blindly through the darkened city in a frenzied search for meat.

After a long search, I’m rewarded with just what I’m looking for — excellent barbecue, local pig-related art on the wall, unmatched chairs, and hush puppies on the side. As a bonus one of the strangest garnishes I’ve ever seen sits atop my plate: a chitterling. For those of you unfamiliar with soul food or white-trash cuisine, a chitterling (or “chitlin”) is a piece of deep-friend pig intestine. It’s actually quite tasty, though about as unhealthy a morsel as you could find anywhere.

The menu at Dusty’s follows the canonical southern “one meat two sides” plan, sides being corn on the cob, beans, macaroni and cheese, cole slaw and such. No collards with pot likker, though. Dang. I enjoyed an assortment platter with a cold beer and read the local weekly newspapers. These include a paper called “Jewish Atlanta.” I am more than a little surprised to find a stack of these in the entrance to this shrine to porcine pleasure. America is a wonderful place.

You can order your ribs at http://www.dustys.com, though they don’t deliver.

A Footnote

For those of you who haven’t flown in a while, and may not have understood what I meant about gadget pornograpy, let me mention a few of the items offered for sale in my in-flight magazine:

• a pen with a built-in 10-second digital recorder,
• a barbeque fork with a built-in thermometer
• The Suunto Vector Wristop [sic] computer,
• the FootMate in-shower foot scrubber,
• An Orthopedic Cat Bed,
• Soil Guard (TM), a device to “protect your clothes from vehicle bumper grime.”
• the credit-card golf tool kit
• the Stress Express battery-powered toy helicopter
• the Body Fat Monitor Scale (“stores data for five people…not for use by persons with pacemakers”),
• the Ultraclear Battery Operated Blemish Remover (I don’t want to know what this does),
• the Turbo-Groomer a nosehair removal system (“..the first personal groomer with a built in light”)
• the photon microlite flashlight (“smaller than the end of your thumb!”),
• the Triple Action Pen (red ink, black, ink, and pencil “from the makers of the original Astronaut’s Space Pen”),
• StreetPilot GPS (“with the StreetPilot onboard, paper maps seem hopelessly inadquate”),
• the IonicBath Pet Brush (“Our exclusive Zenion Effect(TM) technology…leaves your pet smelling just-back-from-the-groomer’s fresh”)
• The Orvis Magnifier Watch (“..no need to fumble for reading glasses!”),
• The Quictionary scanning pen dictionary (“Glide the optical scanning device over a word…the definition instantly appears”), and
• a microwave-heated ice cream scoop

A nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there

Despite all the terrible things I’ve said, I must admit that the people I met in Gallipolis, from waitresses to trainees at the hospital, were very friendly people: a country kind of friendly.

One afternoon I had lunch with my students at the flagship Bob Evans restaurant. I asked the them why they lived in this area, and they all answered that it was a safe place to live and “a good place to raise kids.” With a bit more probing they all admitted that they had been born there, and I wondered if their real reason was a tribal fear of the outside world and a strange kind of Gallipolitan chauvinism.

The low crime rate seemed like less of a selling point after my lunch mates began an eager conversation about the few but grisly murders that had occurred in the area. “How about that guy who murdered his wife for burning his biscuits?” (then turning to me) “We take our biscuits seriously here. “

No doubt they do. As we drove back to the airport through West Virginia, roadside signs proclaimed a chain of restaurants called “Biscuit World.” My travelling companion didn’t share my fascination with vernacular cuisine, so I didn’t even bother to ask if we could stop. I’ll probably never know how the concepts of “biscuit” and “world” could possibly be linked. Another reason I prefer to travel alone.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the Gallipolitans by calling them insular and tribal. Last year I attended the funeral of a close friend’s father. With the exception of a tour of duty in WWII, he had lived his whole life on a single street corner in a small Massachusetts city, moving once (diagonally across the intersection) in his life. He loved that city, that neighborhood, and that street corner and he was respected and loved by pretty much everyone there. A life like that seems so distant, quaint, and desirable today. Love of place is something I respect. It’s a big part of why I live in Vermont, probably the most beloved state in the union, and I’m sure it’s a big part of why the Gallipolitans choose to stay in their corner of the world.

I think I can sum up Gallipolis by inverting the ancient cliche’ about New York City; “It’s a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there.”

Tomorrow I’ll have a brief footnote to my musings about gadgets, then I’ll be taking a brief break from these missives until my Atlanta trip around the February 8. Sometime soon you’ll hear about why traveling is sexy, sleeping with the television, the Coca-Cola museum, life in Skyland, expense accounts and more.

A break from the thrills and excitements of Gallipolis.

For some men, owning and playing with gadgets seems to be as much fun as sex. I suspect that for some it serves as a substitute. Industrial designers know this, and have begun to make gadgets that look like the yearn to be fondled and caressed. There’s even a term for this school of design: it’s known as “high touch” (as contrasted with “high tech”). A company called Frog Designs is one of the masters of the style.

I have a tortured and ambivalent relationship with gadgets because I lust after them but hate to spend money. I attempt to cope with this by feverishly reading gadget catalogs while telling myself that I should wait for the next version of every item. The only exception to my gadget lust is anything that has to do with golf.

I would propose a theory: the Brookstone Herrington, and Sharper Image catalog (and there are dozens of others) are gadget pornography. Airlines oblige gadget heads by including gadget porn in every seat pocket for guys like me to look at, and any airports host the retail arms of these mail-order companies. By the way, I highly recommend the massage recliner chair at the Sharper Image in Logan’s USAir terminal.

Let me apologize here to most of the women in the audience who are wondering why I’ve crossed the line into complete incoherence. Maybe it would help to give some examples. This year’s two principal gadgets of desire are the Motorola StarTac and the Palm Pilot (The Apple iMac and the Volkswagen New Beetle are, in my book, honorary runners-up).

the Motorola StarTac is a cell phone that is cuter than a pink talking bunny with a lisp and fits in a shirt pocket. Cell phone users know that the smaller your cell phone is, the cooler you are. Yes, I realize that this is the first time in human history when men have bragged “mine is smaller than yours.”

Why haven’t I bought one? Well, I came REALLY close this fall, but y’know, it’s an analog phone, not digital. The next generation of StarTacs will be digital or maybe both. And maybe smaller, though I’m told it’s already hard to dial with those tiny keys.

The Palm Pilot is a personal organizer, one of those things that holds names, addresss, phone numbers, appointments etc. These devices have been around for years, but the Pilot is the first one that actually makes sense. It comes with a “cradle” that is wired to your PC. When you return from a road trip you snap it into the cradle and the Pilot “hot synches” with your desktop computer’s calendar, notepad, address book, etc. It fits in a shirt pocket, too.

Why haven’t I bought one? Well, I came REALLY close this winter, but then I found out about the Palm Pilot VII, due out in a few months. It is so cool — it has a little pop-up antenna. You can get email and surf the web through a wireless network as you walk. It knows your location based on the wireless network, and can show you up a local map or weather forecast wherever you are. Wow. Of course, when the Palm VII ships, I’ll convince myself to lust after the next version which will have color or 3d graphics or be small enough to clip to my sunglasses.

If you are a true gadget head, size matters a lot, since you’ll have a lot of these things to carry around. “It fits in a shirt pocket” is really a theoretical statement for some people, since their shirt pockets were long ago pre-empted by another gadget. I had a student a few weeks ago who carried:

1) a Palm Pilot,

2) an alphanumeric pager, and

3) a Cell Phone.

Really. He wore these on his belt, not in his pocket, though I predict that fishermen’s vests will become acceptable business attire very soon. Hey, I just had an idea! Im going to wait for a device that combines the functionality of a Palm Pilot, a Cell Phone and an Alphanumeric pager and fits in my shirt pocket.

The gadget equivalent of orgasm is having the person in the next seat stare at your device, sheepishly ask about it, and eventually betray deep envy. The exclamations “wow!” or “cool!” must be exchanged. I’ve been both the envier and the envious in this scenario (I think this is a good time to drop the sexual metaphor, OK?) — envied while riding on an Amtrak train with one of the first Macintosh Powerbook Duos (I was riding Amtrak in part because they have AC power and planes don’t) and envious last month of the guy with the recordable CD minidisk player

Wow, that minidisk player was cool. It combined the best features of a tape recorder and a CD Walkman. But I think I’ll wait for one that fits in my shirt pocket.

Tomorrow: wrapup of Gallipolis and Gadgets. Then a pause of a week or so, followed by my trip to Atlanta, why travel is sexy, life in Skyland, expense accounts and others.