#21: Dublin Drive Time

D'Olier Street, Dublin

While I have slowly surrendered some of my Luddite ways over the past few years, I still like to bemoan what I call the YouTube-ization of everyday life. Very few things in life are worth filming, and still fewer worth re-watching. This does not stop legions of so-called smartphone-wielding urbanites from whipping out their cameras to capture even slightly unusual events with the express intent of posting the clip online as quickly as possible: some dude breakdancing in Grand Central Station, or else the breathtaking magical holiday subway car -- an antique subway train fully restored to its past glory -- that unexpectedly pulled up today at the West 4th Street stop to take me on a rickety, surreal short trip back through time before dropping me off, bewildered, at 2nd Avenue. (Intrigued, New Yorkers? You can find out when to catch the vintage train here.)

Each to one's own, but I can't help pity these video vultures a bit. It's like they're ordering the fast food version of important moments: quality is of no object, only quickness, only grabbiness -- things must be captured at all cost. There's nothing worse than going to a great show where your view of the stage is obstructed by dozens of eager hands wielding so-called smart phones over their heads, the very LIVE show you are trying to watch getting its soul collectively sucked up by so many people out to document the moment. Recently, I reveled in watching the comic John Oliver cheerfully berate an audience member who was filming Oliver's stand-up routine on his iPhone. "What?" Oliver demanded, interrupting his routine to face the bright blue glowing light in the audience. "Is now not good enough for you?"

I confess I've been tempted to do the same, particularly when it comes to places I love. There are few things that make me happier than wandering the streets of Dublin, and once or twice I've been so taken with the view from the quays that I've filmed the length of the Liffey and the parade of blurry strangers tromping over the Ha'Penny Bridge, just so I could take a piece of the experience home with me. The re-watching, alas, is a poor copy of the real moment, and I find that my sketches and notes, with all their messiness and flaws, capture the feel of city better. (And nothing beats the moment itself.)

But I have to change my view on this a little after finding something cool on the interwebz: an interactive YouTube clip that takes you on a drive through the streets of Dublin. Driving in Dublin is not something I have any particular wish to do (give me feet or bicycle wheels any day), so maybe that's the salvation: I have no romantic notions to be quashed. Anyway, I found a neat little clip that takes you past D'Olier Street, where you can just barely make out the location of today's number (on your far left at :29). To my delight, the meandering route then snakes around to College Green, where you can see the bookstore where I used to work at the end of the street at 1:06. There's a whole bunch of videos in the series, and as you're watching you can click on the screen and go to other clips, essentially taking yourself on a mini drive through the dear dirty city.

Inevitably, more than five minutes of this sort of play would probably lead me into a depression (poor copies make me long for the real thing), but I still think it's a pretty cool concept. Curious? Go ahead and take the drive yourself.

#113: From a Dublin Train

Dublin - Galway train

Intrepid shot-through-a-train-window pictures rarely turn out the way I think they will. Shot in a moment of fleeting interest, they are often blurry, unfocused, off-kilter, and yet utterly capture that weird excitement of spotting something -- anything -- through a scratched and foggy train window that will be gone in a matter of seconds. Sometimes I hardly know what I'm shooting, only that a shape or a sign or a flash of color has caught my attention and I feel the compulsion to grab it.

This number I happened to spot on the platform as the Dublin to Galway train was starting its slow chug out of one of the stations. The triangle makes a good frame and the stenciled numbers fit ever so snugly inside. And when I look at it now, far removed, I can still imagine the quiet rocking motion of the train. I can still see the wooden slats of the platform disappearing and the passing green landscape as the train travels westward.

And I can't dwell long on the weird solitary beauty of train travel without my thoughts drifting off to the lovely Robyn Hitchcock song, "I Often Dream of Trains." Ever feel like a song just crawled up into your subconscious and burrowed there and made it its home? This is one of those for me. I have loved it a very long time, almost as long as I've loved trains.

#154: Blue Boat in Galway Bay

Galway Bay, Ireland

On a rainy day in Galway (is there any other kind?), I sat by the window of McDonagh's, greedily consuming a platter of fish and chips, gazing out at the foot traffic as it to-ed and fro-ed, wondering what the hell I was doing in Galway. I'd arrived on the train from Dublin just after noon and had fooled myself that I would somehow save my personal McDonagh's fishfest for dinner, and there I was, twenty minutes off the train, following the crunchy whiff of chipper and drifting toward the counter with visions of cod swimming in my head. I'd already figured it was likely to be the highlight of my day trip, and maybe I was setting myself up for disappointment by making the pilgrimage so early on. But there I was.

Galway and I have a bit of previous between us, and I'd approached the solo journey with some trepidation. My aim was nostalgia, pure and simple. As the train chugged its way west, I did some calculations: it had been well over ten years since I'd last set foot in Galway, and I was anxious to go back and see what remained -- or didn't -- of my fond and not-so-fond memories. On the wild, rocky shores of Galway Bay, I had fallen in love (with the bay) and had my heart broken (on the bay), and landscapes have a way of storing up memories you didn't even know you had, then unleashing them on you with gale force wind. Stepping off a train into so much history can be disorienting. I needed some fried food to ground me.

Beneath a miscellany of framed knick-knacks and vaguely seafaring-related certificates I feasted alone. I noted the sign over the door to McDonagh's that informed me MANAGEMENT RESERVED THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ADMISSION and wondered why the past tense. Nautical knots dangled in a diorama on the wall. Under the hangman's knot and the wagonner's hitch, I poured more salt onto the deliciously salty chips and noted a giant shell from the Irish Naturalist's Journal with the heading: THE OCCURRENCE OF AN EXCEPTIONALLY LARGE ESCALLOP FROM THE WEST OF IRELAND. Was this why I had come to Galway?

Gazing out gloomily at the wet, dismal day, I spent a long time chewing my lunch and reading an aged typed certificate on the wall, which I diligently copied into my notebook, for no other reason than I had no companion or iPhone handy and the grease on my fingers would've easily destroyed any book I was reading. The paper, affixed with a golden seal, read:

We certify that the establishment of P.J. McDonagh restaurant and fish delicatessen is the finest purveyor of marine food of all ports of call of the Soviet fleet in Atlantic and Pacific waters. It is with great pleasure we commend this certificate for fine food and friendly service.

Master of R/V Professor Marti

Chief Mate

Vladimir Pelipenko

Alexander Pavlov

The 24 of March 1989

The Port of Galway

I finished my fish and chips, swallowed the last dregs of warm Coca-Cola, then added my own footnote to the margin:

"The fact that I stopped to copy the entire text tells you a lot about my loneliness, I think."

The author "gettin' all introspective n' shit" on Galway Bay, January 2011

#360: Trolley Trolley Clang Clang

Old Pueblo Trolley Company, Tucson, AZ

Every now and then when I'm in the &7 kitchen cooking up a nice piping hot slice of blog pie, I'll get super excited about my upcoming subject matter ("OMG," I think, looking at the next day's number, "I get to write about TROLLEYS tomorrow!") and immediately begin thinking of clever things I can say, peppering my thoughts with allusions and song titles I can work in, only to do a cursory search online and find that every clever turn of phrase I was going to use has already been beaten to death by journalists and prescient idea-thieves. For example? There I was at the helm of my computer, gazing gormlessly at this picture of a Tucson trolley, when suddenly I was seized with inspiration: "Gee whiz! How about I slip in that hokey old song, 'Clang Clang Clang Went the Trolley'?" Which, I was soon to discover, is the hokey old reference nearly everyone with a pen or an internet connection and the word "trolley" on the brain reaches for first. It's one of those PBR ideas -- you don't drink it because you like it, you drink it because it's the first thing someone hands you when you say, "beer."

It's not a new feeling, this sad realization that in writing as in life, as Willie Shakes himself once lamented, there is "nothing new under the sun." (Though take that same idea, feed it into Samuel Beckett's brain, and what comes out of the machine is one of my favorite opening sentences of a novel ever, the memorable first line from Murphy: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.")

Along these lines, I remember feeling similar disappointment when, while a starving student at NYU, I sat in the abandoned carrells of stern Bobst Library and scribbled a review for one of my theatre classes on the show I'd just seen, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. My opening line? "Jacques Brel is alive and well and playing in Greenwich Village!" And subsequently, every single review I have read of the show since starts with some shudder-inducing variant: "Jacques Brel is alive and well and playing in (insert name of town, name of venue)!" Or "Jacques Brel may no longer be alive and well and living in Paris, but he lives on in this zany new production by Horksville's own Redundant Repertory Theatre!"

Ah, it makes me cringe to look at now, but there is nothing quite so deceptive and dangerous than a writer in the throes of so-called inspiration. That's why I'm much more trusting of the days when I write dutifully, angstily, and doubtfully, laboring over each turn of phrase, feeling more like a pack mule than a glittering weaver of ideas.

#999,999,999,999,999

North Philadelphia, PA

Another round of 365 numbers in 365 days begins at the bubbly pop of midnight tonight as the ball drops in snow-encrusted Times Square and one short-lived, enthusiastic countdown gives way to a much longer, though equally enthusiastic, one. Am I excited for the new year of Ampersand Seven? Heck yes. Apprehensive? A little. After all, it's a commitment, this virtual page-a-day catalogue of typographical treats, and the &7 arsenal is by no means fully stocked. But if I need any reminders of why I did it before and why I'm ready to do it again, it's this picture. Snapped furtively through the window of a hurtling Acela train from Washington, D.C. to New York earlier this year, this bewildering congregation of nines stands as my reminder that you can take the girl away from the number-hunting, but you can't take the number-hunting out of the girl.

This bizarre mural first winked at me on a train trip down to D.C., standing out like a sentinel amid the grim, swiftly passing run-down dregs of north Philadelphia. The bubbly turquoise background and pattern of repeating nines snagged my attention as I was looking up wistfully from the first paragraph of a short story I'd just begun. I knocked Alice Munro's Ontario clean out of my lap in my effort to capture this snippet of blighted post-industrial Philadelphia, but alas, I was not fast enough. I had to wait a full 24 hours before I could spend the entire Philly portion of the train trip back to New York gazing anxiously out the window, camera at the ready, for the weirdly bright vision to reveal itself on the landscape once again. When it did, I was ready. But this was 2010, my reasoning brain told me. Hadn't I given up the number line? And if so, why was I behaving like a demented kid on a safari, nearly breaking my neck for a picture of a bunch of nines painted on a couple of bright turquoise thought bubbles? No, it seemed that even in the new year, my attention continued to be drawn by numbers.

Some of the thrill is the hunt itself. But I've become a collector, and like most collectors, I imagine, I find great joy in sharing the highlights of my collection with anyone whose attention I can cajole long enough to say, "Hey! Would ya look at this crazy bunch of nines on the Cabrun Ink Products Corp. building?" And so after another year of collecting, I'm happy to be back, kicking off another year of linear-themed pictures with some decidedly non-linear digressions and impressions. And no, I won't be counting down from #999,999,999,999,999. Not yet anyway. But you never know. There's always next year.

#215

#215, Dundalk, Ireland

Four weeks, twenty shows, twenty-five states, some nine thousand or so miles later, I am at last back in Brooklyn after a month out on the road with Balthrop, Alabama. I have stared out of van windows at the passing landscape of America. I have visited truck stops and Love's Travel Centers and refilled, in various rest stop bathrooms, a dented Dasani water bottle that lasted me all the way from Chicago to Phoenix. Some drives were short but some pushed the eight, nine, ten hour mark: New York City to Pittsburgh; Tuscon to Louisville; Athens, Ohio back to Brooklyn. We had plenty of diversions along the way to keep us sane: we had Patton Oswalt and Dave Chappelle to make us laugh, the incomparable coal miner's baritone of Lorne Greene to make us wish we were cowboys, and more Wilco and Elliot Smith than you can shake a stick at. We told jokes and filmed the view through the cracked front windshield as the green Highway Gothic signs lumbered past. But along the side of the road, hour by hour, day after day, there was nothing but the infinite weirdness of the United States of America to entertain us. And entertain us it did.

Staring out the windows of a rapidly moving vehicle isn't just a way to pass time; it's also a sort of talent. After I've popped a Dramamine and downed a hot coffee, I'm good to go. Just set me next to the window, put on some tunes, and I'm set.

Back in the middle of the last century, when highways were still young and Subways (the food chain, not the trains) were not even a twinkle in a marketer's eye, there was a lot of bare countryside. Burma Shave signs were there for a bit of excitement, a kind of early version of Times Square, but apart from a few gas station signs or town names, there wasn't much roadside reading material. Enter the "roadside attraction," stuff they made up to make you stop along the way and wonder who came up with this stuff and why you can't quite seem to resist it. Cactus Stuff: Exit 72. North Dakota Cowboy Museum: Exit 27. The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot, Crazy Mountains, Buffalo Skulls, the World's Largest Rocking Chair. I may not have seen it all, but I saw signs for it all, which is probably just as good -- if not better -- than the thing itself. After the twinge of disappointment I felt at the sight of the Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere (in Oklahoma, just in case you were looking for it in Sierra Leone), I think it's better to keep some things mysterious.

Billboards and signs are the only reading material I bring for the road. On these little reservoirs of text, you can see America in all its diverse weirdness. The practical and hopeful nuzzle together; the comedic and tragic come to blows. Buy this, stop here, look out for that: America is nothing if not eager to tell you -- or sell you -- something. Ads are nothing special, but it's the weird stuff I relish: poetry painted on barns, papier mache dinosaurs, the forgotten and unloved museum. So I get really excited when I go to another country and I see a little glimmer of the roadside attraction.

I've spent a lot of time on the Dublin to Belfast Enterprise train. It's a pleasant but unremarkable railroad amble, about three hours or so, with a smattering of stops along the way. I have the stops memorized: Dublin Connolly to Drogheda, Drogheda to Dundalk, then Newry, Portadown, and finally Belfast Central. One of my favorite things on the route is the railroad platform at Dundalk Station. Passing through it the first time many years ago, my eye was caught, appropriately enough by this bit of text, painted in a cheery hand alongside a flower box:

You catch your eye

You'll never see the man who sat across from you

Better look away

I scribbled it down in my small green notebook as the train pulled away, but that was all I'd had time to see. Afterward, staring at the monotonous passing trees and greenery, it seemed like a mirage. What was that all about? Had I dreamt it all up? A few days later, on the trip back down from Belfast, I eagerly anticipated the Dundalk platform and its unexpected poetry. It made the train journey more exciting: just those small bits of text that I hadn't expected seemed to give the trip some larger meaning -- a reason for being. Each time I took the train, I would look forward to that strange poem of unfulfilled desire and feel something of the same whenever the train pulled away.

It was years of occasional trips before I finally stopped over in Dundalk presumably to do some research for my novel but really -- I knew my true motive -- to find out once and for all what the rest of the poem said. I was surprised and delighted to find that poetry was all over the station: scrolling on platform canopies, arching over the Victorian covered walkway, in plain view on the windows of the waiting rooms. There was also a small railway museum on the platform, honoring the old station masters from W. Catterell (1874-1884) to B. McQuaid (1988- ), and providing a young couple a place to make out among the poetry and the white plastic chairs.

And there was this: Time Passing on the 2.15. Why keep images of transit fresh? Anyone who commutes knows how easily they can go stale. So whether you're passing through North Dakota or Drogheda, New York or New Mexico, I'd like to know from my readers: what are the attractions that have made some of your journeys memorable? What are the signs or unexpected images that keep your journeys fresh? And no Subway: sure that's cheating.

#77

#77, train between Vienna & Budapest

In one of the dozens of black binders laying about my apartment, enclosed in a rope-tie envelope, is a clipping from very old issue of Print magazine. The article is called "Trainspotting." While it's just as likely that at the time the article appeared, I was avidly clipping magazine pictures of Ewan MacGregor for his role in the movie by the same name, the article is in fact about trainspotting itself: the odd pastime of watching trains and obsessively remarking on the serial numbers, details, and arrival and departure times. It's what I would spend all my days doing if I was, in fact, an eccentric British man living in, say, Leeds with a walking stick and two mangy dogs who could get away with that sort of thing. In fact, I think all of this number & typography business of mine is just a gateway drug.

The article, written by the designer Philip Krayna, is part photo essay, part meditation on the pleasures of observing not trains in general but more specifically, the typography of railway cars. At the time that I clipped it, I had no interest in photographing numbers or writing about type and space and buildings or trains, but it spoke to me. For who knows what reason, I fell in love with this article and Krayna's accompanying photographs, many of which resemble this 77. I hadn't thought of the article in years. I wonder now if I had it all along in the back of my mind and didn't even realize its influence. It's strange to find the seed of a project that dates back so far. (Was it seven years ago? Ten?) I wanted to share an excerpt from the article here:

My fascination with railroad typography began a few years ago when my car overheated on a desolate stretch of highway in California's San Joaquin Valley. While I waited for the car to cool down, I wandered to a nearby railway siding that paralleled the road.

As I moved among the rows of massive steel boxcars parked on the train tracks, I discovered a larger-than-life specimen book of curious and corroded letterforms. Stenciled onto the sides of the train cars were words and symbols, numbers and safety warnings. They were rusted, repainted, and retouched to create unexpected compositions of type and color. Time and the elements had further worn these letters, and sometimes their messages were cryptic or indecipherable. One boxcar, scrawled with mathematical calculations, had been used as a giant blackboard, perhaps for the trackside reckonings of a brakeman.

. . . More than a hundred years ago, Warner Bailey, a clerk working for the Boston and Maine Railroad, noticed a plethora of lettering styles painted on boxcars. As he traveled throughout the Northeast on business trips, he sketched the various ampersands he saw during his free time. He counted more than 140 type styles, which he meticulously copied into his notebook like an industrial-age scribe.

I would love a glimpse of that notebook of hand-drawn ampersands.

Krayna's article is beautifully written, and the article's pictures are no less beguiling. I'd link to it but, ya know, these were them dark ages. In the meantime, my mind will turn over certain phrases and store them away for future blog titles once I've moved on to my true calling, when typespotting gives way to trainspotting: "Curious and Corroded." "Trackside Reckonings of a Brakeman." And so on, and so on.