The Urban Sherpa, a blog by Christopher DeWan

(a blog by Allen Smithee...)

Microblog Killed the Internet Star rating=2 new!

June 26, 2009
File under: Future is Now, Under the Hood

Who has time for blogging, what with all the Twittering, all the links posted to Facebook, all the quotes posted to Tumblr, all the photos pushed up to Flickr?

The age of easy Internet publishing—so easy that you can do most of it from your telephone!—is also rendering the act of actual writing to be somewhat difficult, extraneous, and neglected—at least writing anything more substantial than 140 characters. It is something now reserved only for the vast expanses of leisure time we have on international flights, long weekend getaways in the country, and time spent safely off the Internet, in refuge from the steady stream of microthoughts parceled out with thumbs into small portable devices. That is to say, rarely to never—till we forcibly wrest ourselves away from the chatter for a few elusive, peaceful moments of restive thought and creative repose.

Maybe tomorrow.

(Maybe I'll tweet about it.)

top

Panchito's: The Worst Mexican Food on the Planet rating=2 new!

June 22, 2009
File under: Eat This, Heart NY

Panchito's, the Mexican restaurant at 105 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village in New York City, doesn't seem like the sort of place that would inspire superlatives: the entire block is given over to sloppy, unassuming restaurants of all ethnicities, aimed presumably at the students of nearby NYU—Indian, Ethiopian, Middle Eastern.

But it turns out that Panchito's is exemplary in more ways than one.

Panchito's is, first of all, the largest restaurant in all of Greenwich Village, laid out on a scale so large that its cavernous dining rooms could fit a dozen or more Village-sized trattorias and bistros.

The menu immediately greets you with a second superlative: Panchito's, it turns out, is home of the "best margarita in New York." Fine print later goes on to clarify, the margarita is actually considered one of the top six best margaritas, though by whom is anyone's guess. (The menu itself is a contender for another superlative—Worst Graphic Design—though that's a contest that will be waged bitterly through all of Chinatown before the label can be definitively applied.)

You order one of these margaritas. It sets you back $10, and when it arrives at your table, it's lukewarm. A lukewarm margarita defies a law or two of physics.

A small bowl of stale unsalted corn chips eventually finds its way to the table. You shouldn't judge a book by its cover and you shouldn't judge a Mexican place by its chips. Still, there's no denying: these chips are bad. The comparison with cardboard is obvious but unavoidable. The chips are accompanied by a small plastic ramekin of vinegar and sugar that they call salsa.

You didn't actually realize it was possible to make bad salsa, till now.

The entree arrives. It is served without silverware, till someone notices and brings a miniature knife and fork, like for children or dolls. The plate of food is the saddest looking plate of Mexican food you've ever seen. The menu, which bragged about "three different kinds of beans!," didn't warn you that the beans would be overcooked into a crunchy powder, nor that they'd be lacquered in an inch of (is that Velveeta?) cheese. Two tacos remind you of the cafeteria at summer camp. One of them literally has a few slices of unseasoned, sauteed flavorless white mushrooms and a chunk of unmelted cheese. The rice (the best thing on the menu, by far, if you can find it under the cheese) has a single green pea in it—for flavor? for nourishment? an accident?

"Is everything alright?," the waitress asks, pointing at the mostly ignored pile of food. "You want more chips?"

"Yes!" But maybe somewhere else...

top

Blog of the Last Man on Earth (pt. 8) rating=4 new!

June 17, 2009
File under: Last Man, Mythic Proportions

Thursday or maybe Sunday

Of course I wasn't watching the DVDs. Electricity had been out for days, weeks, who knows how long?

Instead, I stood the DVD box on top of my television, and I watched the box. I stared at Amélie for hours, days, who knows how long? And she stared back.

"Hello," I said.

"Bonjour," she replied. And proceeded to tell me, in detail, in French, everything that had happened in her movie, to the best of her memory. I don't know French, so she would stop periodically to recap in English.

"Thank you," I said.

"De rien," she replied. "It's nothing."

It was, without a doubt, the best movie I've ever heard.

Some Time Later

I find that the people I used to know are beginning to blur in my mind. I remember a funny story, something I did once with a guy named Adam. I laughed out loud when I remembered this story. Fun times. Then I realized, "Oh. That wasn't Adam." And I couldn't remember who it was.

Since no one has any further use for street signs, I've begun to paint them over with the names of the people I knew. I walk around during the day with a can of green paint in one hand and a can of white paint in the other, and I gradually re-map the city: Jonathan Street. Caroline Boulevard. Adam Lane. Before I forget.

I rename Broadway after my mother, whatever her name was.

Middle of the Night, I Think

I had a nightmare that everything that's happened recently was in fact only a dream. In the nightmare, I woke up, and the world was still full of people, same as it ever was. My alarm clock chimed and beckoned me to another workday, and I was filled with great emptiness.

Then I woke from the dream, and the night was still, and the city was empty, and everything was as it had been.

I went to the bathroom for a glass of water, and noticed the black hole on my cheek had grown, now big enough to fit a finger.

Later

"What do you want to do?," Amélie asked. "Ce qui vous veulent faire?"

"I want to write a manifesto."

"Bah!" She wrinkled her nose. "Your life is a manifesto."

My life is a manifesto.

Daytime and Tomorrow

I have more paint now. I roam the city, and one by one, I'm painting over all of its billboards.

Left to our own devices, maybe we all become artists.

I am painting enormous murals, scenes I remember from my life. As I paint, I remember everything, everything I ever did, everyone I ever knew. I remember long forgotten years and feelings of communion; holding hands at the junior high dance; the encouragements of my second grade teacher; the mobile of ceramic swans hanging over my crib. I remember sweeping forests sprawling far as the eye could see, rolling oceans, endless plains. I remember mustard gas and sinking ships, bullets and bayonets and the sticky warmth of my own blood; I remember rounding Cape Horn, scaling Everest, building the Pyramids brick by brick, walking light-footed on the Moon. I remember the center of the galaxy, the center of the universe, the sound of vacuum. I remember the Big Bang, like a gasp of breath, like a baby's laugh, like the anticipation of an orgasm, like the spasm of fear that comes alongside true love, the true fear of loss; and I remember, before that, the bottomless silence—like the silence I hear now.

It is all right.

top

Demonology rating=3 new!

June 16, 2009
File under: Love Stinks, Mythic Proportions

Demon lover

My friends tell me I should get rid of my demon lover. The scars and burns she leaves on me are unsightly, they tell me. Her brazier is sure to burn my house to the ground. "She won't even tell you her real name!"

They don't understand anything.

I don't mind the bite marks or the scalding iron. I don't mind her sharp teeth or dirty claws. I don't mind when she curses my family in Aramaic.

It's endearing.

My demon lover understands me like no other. "Forever is how long I will understand you." When I wander alone forty days in the desert, she speaks to me—she and she alone—and everything she tells me is true.

"I understand you" (her head fitting perfectly on my shoulder). "We're both fallen angels."

top

New law of thermodynamics rating=3 new!

June 13, 2009
File under: Heart NY, Pithyisms

Not in service

An object in motion tends to stay in motion ... unless it is an MTA subway.

.
top
Read more of The Urban Sherpa->

Read the Best of The Urban Sherpa->
Read the best recent entries of The Urban Sherpa->
Feeling lucky?->