Interview with a Lockpick
Robert Morris: Am I right in presuming that lockpicking, like most precise skills, requires a good deal of practice?
Lockpicker: Yup! Personally, when I was first picking, I just picked constantly. It wasn't so much about making it harder, it was just that I bought a couple hundred locks right off the bat and would strap padlocks across my chest on my messenger bag strap and pick while I walked. Pick while I was at the bar. Pick at work. Pick while taking people through the tomb. Picked everywhere. Eventually I got better, but it wasn't a decided jump up, just incremental. You learn a lot just pulling shit apart and putting it back together again.
RM: Sure at first, but now?
LP: I had to retrain myself a while back which I think is the closest I can give you to what you're looking for.
RM: But nothing now that you’ve retrained?
LP: So… When I was retraining I literally locked all of my rakes away in a safe deposit box and had only hooks to work with. I needed to relearn completely what I was doing. So, I would grab a bunch of locks, arrange them in a tackle box, and pick through them. I gave myself 5 minutes per lock and tried to cycle through each lock twice in a night. If I could open the lock both times, I retired it.
RM: I suppose what I was asking was are there levels of ever more sophisticated locks that you work through to refine and strengthen your skills? Or are there avenues through which you could expand them?
LP: Not for what I do, no. I'm a speed picker, not a high security picker. The high sec guys are more in the vein of what you're looking for; difficult bittings, security pins, etc. are what I work with and it's why I did my box system. Because I would weed out all the easy stuff quickly then keep facing myself with the harder locks – the ones I could only get once or couldn't get at all – and keep topping the box off every night so that eventually all I had in the box were hard locks and each night I would be able to retire a few of those until I had made it through everything.
RM: What disinclines you from trying your hand at higher security locks?
LP: Impatience. I love knowing how higher security locks work, I love researching locks of the 19th century, I love illustrating various attacks, but I've never had much interest in opening safes or high security locks.
RM: You say impatience, does that mean their sophistication makes the process too involved?
LP: It's not so much that. I mean, I love how complex they are, it's more just their difficulty, as lame as that sounds. It's a whole different world picking high security stuff. I can think my way through some of it, but even great high security pickers, the first time they approach a locking concept are going to require hours, if not days, to pop their first one. I get really excited by their discoveries, but have never had that sort of patience
RM: You mentioned "attacks" in a term very similar to how some people describe chess maneuvers. When you read about or see some of these higher-level guys' discoveries would you equate it to how chess adepts examine problems in magazines?
LP: I think that's completely fair, especially when the complexity is such that it requires the creation of new tools. So, certain locks, if they aren't based on a simple pin tumbler design, require esoteric tools to attack them. Often, the attacker has to come up with these just by deconstructing what the lock is trying to do, and either interfere in that process or bypass that process the creativity of that, of understanding the "opponent" that completely, certainly lends itself to some rich metaphors.
RM: Do you think you'll attempt to advance to that level sometime in the future or is speed picking your set lot?
LP: I actually do a lot outside of speed picking, but the high sec stuff has just never held my interest for long enough. That said? I do get curious. I have friends who insist to me that once I open my first safe I will not be able to stop safecracking which is exactly how it happened with my first lock. I was completely consumed by it as soon as I opened my first so, I figured if the day comes that I open an ASSA Twin, or some S&G Safe I'll dive deep into that. Right now I'm pursuing the history of locks and lockpicking and lockpicking as sport, forensics too. And trying to collect different non-standard methods of attacks for some talks I'm giving. So, I'm not actively going after the high sec stuff, but I'm sure if I took enough time to open one I'd lose another year opening as many as I could.
RM: The history of this endeavor is intriguing. How do antique locks compare to modern ones? Are the approaches essentially the same or are there differences?
LP: Well, the cool thing is that most of the mechanical tech we use today can be found pre-20th century. So, I've been doing a lot of patent diving to find exactly when things came into being. Before the 1850s the pin tumbler lock basically didn't exist, however it did exist, in a simpler form, as far back as 2000 BCE.
RM: Well, all those traps in Indiana Jones had to come from somewhere.
LP: [laughter] So, it's a big question. Modern locks are the result of mass production! Back in the day locksmiths actually made locks. Now, they just service them. The transition was mass production. Locks weren't a common, everyone-has-them sort of thing until, again, the 1800s with Bramah.
RM: Is there a venue for replica locks from antiquity?
LP: Well… Let's talk security by obscurity. So, the reason locks were safe way back when was that each one really was a puzzle in a much more literal sense than they are now. The locksmith knew how the lock functioned and gave a key to the owner that would bypass all of his clever tricks. Sometimes they would even put false keyways on locks to throw people off, all sorts of things.
RM: Like puzzle boxes.
LP: Exactly. But, along with efficiency and affordability, mass production brought with it a big problem. Now everyone know how everyone else’s lock worked. You could literally take your lock apart and know how your neighbor's lock worked. Once you understood the concept you could learn to attack it. Attack your own lock sucessfully and you can attack your neighbor’s. In fact, much of the interesting innovation of the 1800s came from one manufacturer picking another's lock then realizing they could pick their own, too. So, you have this whole disclosure debate: do we try to keep secrets when everyone can find this out for themselves? Do we fully disclose everything? Responsibly disclose? Etc., etc. A lot of what I deal with, actually, are methods of responsible disclosure. But interestingly, you drop a lock no one has seen in a hundred years on something important, it turns out that security by obscurity actually has it's place. An immediate example is bike locks. You know how, in the last 5 years or so, bike lock keys have changed from normal keys to little metal posts with evenly spaced gashes taken out of 2 sides? They are operating disc detainer locks and they are operating really crappy ones at that. However, because disc detainer locks are all but unseen in America they are great security! People ask me about them and I usually say that they should get another 5 years before they've become too popular to ignore and we start seeing cheap tools to pick and bypass them flood into America. But for now, and for a while, they are going to be awesome locks even though if you brought one to Finland they would be able to pop it immediately. Obscurity, in specific instances, can be genuinely secure and dropping an old lock into a modern context could be secure.
RM: So there’s a real cultural divide going on here.
LP: It's funny. As international as everything has become – as global – locks really do remain very regionalized. Pin tumbler locks that we use are not the king of every country. Lever locks are still in huge use in the UK, disc detainers in Finland & Scandinavian countries in general, magnetic locks and crazy high security wafer locks in Asia, whereas we typically only get low sec wafers here. There's a lot out there and it's not always as accessible as so many other things have become.
Interview was conducted over a series of entries in an IRC.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Stay Away from Harvard: The Design Center
Former Infrastructure
After waiting 20 minutes on the platform and another ten once actually on the SL2 (posted schedule states a bus is available every 15 minutes or less) we were on our way through distinctly Soviet Bloc-styled tunnels that took us under the Fort Point canal to the Boston City Courthouse. In my concierge days, I was often accompanied by an apparently homeless man who smelled distinctively of sweat socks but I was not met with that gentleman today. Almost everyone got off at the Courthouse stop (a walking distance half the time from South Station as we'd waited for the bus) and we continued on our way, with one older gentleman remaining behind despite it being the last stop on the line. I'd been to the Design Center once before to pick up my company's race team information and t-shirts so, after the bus wandered around the Design Center in a wide circle, I prepped my backstory to get past the front desk guy and gain entry, and stepped out.
The Design Center is kind of perched out in the harbor, so it was even windier than it was deeper in the city. I had a thought to wander around about as I saw a footbridge that led to parts of South Boston that are actually occupied, but I figured it was too distracting from my primary objective: on to the Design Center. Which was hilariously completely closed. I had no idea this country so revered that quirky 70's show about an inner-city high school teacher. Must have been the words of wisdom the main character always gave at the end. Undeterred, I decided to check out what else the area had to offer. As it turns out, not much. I learned by reading a map at a much later date that there was a former dry dock in the area, the basin of which must have turned into the berth where cruise ships park when picking up people trying to get away from Boston, true to the spirit of being on the Silver Line. Were there happy cruise goers and well-wishers galore? No, of course there wasn't. The entire place looked completely abandoned.
But it did have a dead bird by a trashcan on the second floor!
I did find a few unlocked doors, though. They mostly led to inner hallways, particularly well-designed bathrooms for what by all outward appearances seemed to be an abandoned warehouse. At the end of one hall was a locked door for what looked like a machinists shop. I imagined that some quirky designers completed interesting feats of metallurgy before foisting them on the moneyed classes but that was probably bullshit. There were a few unlocked doors that led to loading docks protected from the open air by thick translucent vinyl strips. What protected whatever was not bolted down from whoever happened to be by with a van or truck was not exactly clear. But hey, Southie's known for its trustworthiness and lack of crime, so it's probably all good.
These guys seemed pretty on the level.
Not wanting to fill up my phone's camera – but mostly because I saw the SL2 approaching a stop, and at 3PM on a holiday schedule, that may be the last time it would come – I dashed off to the bustop, hailing the driver so that he wouldn't strand me in a glorified business park. I thanked him for stopping, but he barely registered my existence and we sat at the stop for another five minutes despite no one else being in sight. I noticed that the old man who had remained when I initially departed was still on the bus, sitting in a different seat. I obliged by sitting far away from him as I could while retaining a window seat.
It did have the loneliest Au Bon Pain on the planet, though!
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Labyrinths 2: Here and There
“Obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all my days.”
I read in an essay as published on Granta’s online edition the following sentence, “But perhaps the truth is that a person only has two permanent residences: the childhood home and the grave.” This was contained in some broader statement on Brodsky but that doesn’t concern me at all. A homily like this, couched so in the declarative language of the analytic essay, stands out, arrests, for better or for worse. We have the completely generalized, de-personalizing “residences;” the generalized, hyper-personalizing “home;” and the finality and universality of “the grave.” These are the three categories, packed to the brim with presumptions in each, into we all must fall were we to accept any forward momentum with the piece in general. It’s a nodding sentence, one that makes you either nod in encouragement with its keen profundity or nod to sleep. I sleep.
The most obvious and, considering the itinerant nature of so many people in my generation, surely the most widely held objection is that there is no one home. I don’t pretend my childhood was anything but one filled with decidedly average experiences (the details are dear, but they are dear only to me), and a remarkable fortune in love and support. Surely the recipe for a poor artist, if you believe in such idiocy. But it was one that has no arresting childhood home.
On one hand, I moved at what Freud might have regarded as a fairly unfortunate period in my developmental life, from Vermont to Maine at age nine. No great abyss, to be sure, but to a boy of nine, an expanse incalculable enough. What still amazes me, however, is how keenly I was old enough, self-conscious enough, to have formed permanent impressions whose memories linger on. I presently remember how I then compared one place to the other with mild but growing disfavor. The first relocation my family made I was far too young to possess then or now any hint of remembrance, so for all that matters that wide lawn on a hill in Vermont was the childhood home made incomplete. Vermont always seemed so much more ancient, lived in, filled with so much more, what I couldn’t have known at the time I’d come to know as character. It was utterly imbued, then, with the magic of a childhood at the mid-point of being experienced.
Needless to say my transition to Maine was a rocky one. Everything about that new home felt tacky and new, though for an outside agent to look at that house as it is now would realize that impression's absurdity. But that, I think, is what distinguishes what is a childhood home from the uncoupled seeking for home that runs a vein through so many of our lives. Every time I say “I’m going home” – from work, or from a bar, or somewhere other than where I spend most of my nights – it feels starkly ingenuine.
Sure enough, my parents’ house when it’s filled with the sounds of my closest family, that has the impression of this mythical home that, while not exactly sought, is often, sorely, missed. I don’t think much of the exercise of trying to discern which environmental factors caused this rift, but at the same time, as this catalog of the home is populated, I find – and I would wager that this is true for many others who feel uncomfortable in delineating exactly what was the “childhood home” – by more and more locales.
The grandfather’s house, with a wide expanding first floor that arched to a point, cozy but immaculate kitchen, close-ceilinged ground floor leading to rocky under-porch patio to the field overlooking Cayuga beyond; the deeply-oaked Great Uncle’s house, as sylvan in its lands as it was in its interior, deceptively nearer than Ithaca but whose journey seemed impossibly longer, housing one of the most tolerant Great Danes to have ever lived; the long lost house in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we always arrived during the night, where it was always midsummer hot, where the faint, almost gone odor of long-dried horseshoe crabs and dust and ancient wood permeated utterly; these places all possessed the imprint of a stark but ghostless antiquity. These are the locations where a lonely boy transplanted to Maine, old enough to know that ghosts exist and knew of their dangers and rewards, could populate with the myths of the timeless spring and unending winters of the original, that unhaunted house in Vermont. For they are not ancient but timeless – never have I entered any of those houses since that final departure; they are all that idyll of home, converging into the one.
I wonder, now, if I was in fact fortunate in this regard as well; fortunate beyond measure. With that seismic break I can point to the geography of my childhood, acknowledge the risen ridge, and hold inviolate the valley that remains innocent forever.
I read in an essay as published on Granta’s online edition the following sentence, “But perhaps the truth is that a person only has two permanent residences: the childhood home and the grave.” This was contained in some broader statement on Brodsky but that doesn’t concern me at all. A homily like this, couched so in the declarative language of the analytic essay, stands out, arrests, for better or for worse. We have the completely generalized, de-personalizing “residences;” the generalized, hyper-personalizing “home;” and the finality and universality of “the grave.” These are the three categories, packed to the brim with presumptions in each, into we all must fall were we to accept any forward momentum with the piece in general. It’s a nodding sentence, one that makes you either nod in encouragement with its keen profundity or nod to sleep. I sleep.
The most obvious and, considering the itinerant nature of so many people in my generation, surely the most widely held objection is that there is no one home. I don’t pretend my childhood was anything but one filled with decidedly average experiences (the details are dear, but they are dear only to me), and a remarkable fortune in love and support. Surely the recipe for a poor artist, if you believe in such idiocy. But it was one that has no arresting childhood home.
On one hand, I moved at what Freud might have regarded as a fairly unfortunate period in my developmental life, from Vermont to Maine at age nine. No great abyss, to be sure, but to a boy of nine, an expanse incalculable enough. What still amazes me, however, is how keenly I was old enough, self-conscious enough, to have formed permanent impressions whose memories linger on. I presently remember how I then compared one place to the other with mild but growing disfavor. The first relocation my family made I was far too young to possess then or now any hint of remembrance, so for all that matters that wide lawn on a hill in Vermont was the childhood home made incomplete. Vermont always seemed so much more ancient, lived in, filled with so much more, what I couldn’t have known at the time I’d come to know as character. It was utterly imbued, then, with the magic of a childhood at the mid-point of being experienced.
Needless to say my transition to Maine was a rocky one. Everything about that new home felt tacky and new, though for an outside agent to look at that house as it is now would realize that impression's absurdity. But that, I think, is what distinguishes what is a childhood home from the uncoupled seeking for home that runs a vein through so many of our lives. Every time I say “I’m going home” – from work, or from a bar, or somewhere other than where I spend most of my nights – it feels starkly ingenuine.
Sure enough, my parents’ house when it’s filled with the sounds of my closest family, that has the impression of this mythical home that, while not exactly sought, is often, sorely, missed. I don’t think much of the exercise of trying to discern which environmental factors caused this rift, but at the same time, as this catalog of the home is populated, I find – and I would wager that this is true for many others who feel uncomfortable in delineating exactly what was the “childhood home” – by more and more locales.
The grandfather’s house, with a wide expanding first floor that arched to a point, cozy but immaculate kitchen, close-ceilinged ground floor leading to rocky under-porch patio to the field overlooking Cayuga beyond; the deeply-oaked Great Uncle’s house, as sylvan in its lands as it was in its interior, deceptively nearer than Ithaca but whose journey seemed impossibly longer, housing one of the most tolerant Great Danes to have ever lived; the long lost house in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we always arrived during the night, where it was always midsummer hot, where the faint, almost gone odor of long-dried horseshoe crabs and dust and ancient wood permeated utterly; these places all possessed the imprint of a stark but ghostless antiquity. These are the locations where a lonely boy transplanted to Maine, old enough to know that ghosts exist and knew of their dangers and rewards, could populate with the myths of the timeless spring and unending winters of the original, that unhaunted house in Vermont. For they are not ancient but timeless – never have I entered any of those houses since that final departure; they are all that idyll of home, converging into the one.
I wonder, now, if I was in fact fortunate in this regard as well; fortunate beyond measure. With that seismic break I can point to the geography of my childhood, acknowledge the risen ridge, and hold inviolate the valley that remains innocent forever.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Labyrinths 1: Beer Review -- Natural Daddy
Chilling in my freezer right now sits a can of Natural Daddy, a high gravity offering from the makers of other such American luminaries as Natty Ice and Natty Light. I don't think there's a regular version of Natty -- there is no Natural Lager that I know of or have seen. A shockingly high 69 (hold all applause until the end) rating on Beer Advocate, I procured this beer after my very few single friends backed out of our plans for Valentine's Day, leaving me to repeat a grim annual ritual.
I figure that chilling this concoction to its coldest fluid state is a good move. I hold no expectations for this beer, so if it's in as ideal a state as possible, maybe I can get to a level of intoxication where I won't notice it once it warms up. To further this end, though my roommates are remarking on how cold the apartment is, I am not going to suggest turning the heat on.
So let's throw on some Metallica and tear this place apart.
A note on the presentation of this beer. The can actually says "Natty Daddy" making no pretense on quality. Good, I like a lack of pretension. Oddly, the Annheuser-Busch logo is nowhere to be seen. You can't be telling me that this isn't even good enough for Tony LaRussa? I'll follow by not giving this stuff the dignity of pouring into a glass.
A- peering into the can, lit by my bedroom lamp some eight feet away, it looks like the kind of urine where someone is recovering from a hangover and isn't quite back to hydrated.
S- very sweet, characterless
T- all right, my deep chilling method appears to have paid off! It's definitely on the sweet side. Asphalty in that special way Natty has, but it doesn't seem to have corroded the aluminum in any detectable way. Very bubbly which is good in your mass volume malt beverages and not much of a hint of the 8% ABV. Some dry grass notes makes it downright within shouting distance of refreshing.
M- thin overall, but not water thin which is what I was expecting and the carbonation gives it a pleasant character. Big bubbles, not small ones, from what my tongue can discern.
D- phew, just burped. That was not pleasant. For $1.75, I think you should get at least 8 more ounces of this stuff, but hey, the desperately single on V-Day can't really be that picky.
And now begins the race against time. It is currently 8:17. I reckon I have 8 minutes to drink this before it becomes toxic.
First chug had no major setbacks, though it was a pretty wimpy chug.
8:19 -- ugh, it's already warming up and thinning out. The bubbles did not last long. Only took two big draws because it had so wildly transformed.
8:21 -- o god, this beer is going south in a hurry, chart to follow.
8:22 -- ashen malt flavor becoming apparent, this is truly a race against the clock. The only better music choice than Metallica would have been the soundtrack to 24.
8:23 -- two minutes, my prediction is coming true. I am wondering about the irony of slamming a deeply inexpensive beer while listening to a band talk about how alcohol abuse messed up their lives.
8:24 -- down the hatch, no looking back.
Well I'm still here, feeling the alcohol radiate into my system. It is pretty cold, I'm going to turn the heat on. The taste fell off a cliff then exploded and was eaten by wolves. It was a valuable experience, no doubt, but not one I would overly recommend. If you need to get drunk in a hurry for cheap, just buy a 40, but the Cambridge liquor store I went to was too fancy for any of the finer 40s on the market. SO that wasn't an option.
I have just learned that this is more alcoholic than Mickey's, my preferred get-drunk-quick 40. A list of other popular 40s Natty Daddy has a higher ABV than:
Mickey's
Old English
Hurricane
Thank god, if this was more alcoholic than Camo High-Gravity I would have been very disappointed. It's just barely less alcoholic than Steel Reserve. Truly a drink of kindgs.
A+
I figure that chilling this concoction to its coldest fluid state is a good move. I hold no expectations for this beer, so if it's in as ideal a state as possible, maybe I can get to a level of intoxication where I won't notice it once it warms up. To further this end, though my roommates are remarking on how cold the apartment is, I am not going to suggest turning the heat on.
So let's throw on some Metallica and tear this place apart.
A note on the presentation of this beer. The can actually says "Natty Daddy" making no pretense on quality. Good, I like a lack of pretension. Oddly, the Annheuser-Busch logo is nowhere to be seen. You can't be telling me that this isn't even good enough for Tony LaRussa? I'll follow by not giving this stuff the dignity of pouring into a glass.
A- peering into the can, lit by my bedroom lamp some eight feet away, it looks like the kind of urine where someone is recovering from a hangover and isn't quite back to hydrated.
S- very sweet, characterless
T- all right, my deep chilling method appears to have paid off! It's definitely on the sweet side. Asphalty in that special way Natty has, but it doesn't seem to have corroded the aluminum in any detectable way. Very bubbly which is good in your mass volume malt beverages and not much of a hint of the 8% ABV. Some dry grass notes makes it downright within shouting distance of refreshing.
M- thin overall, but not water thin which is what I was expecting and the carbonation gives it a pleasant character. Big bubbles, not small ones, from what my tongue can discern.
D- phew, just burped. That was not pleasant. For $1.75, I think you should get at least 8 more ounces of this stuff, but hey, the desperately single on V-Day can't really be that picky.
And now begins the race against time. It is currently 8:17. I reckon I have 8 minutes to drink this before it becomes toxic.
First chug had no major setbacks, though it was a pretty wimpy chug.
8:19 -- ugh, it's already warming up and thinning out. The bubbles did not last long. Only took two big draws because it had so wildly transformed.
8:21 -- o god, this beer is going south in a hurry, chart to follow.
8:22 -- ashen malt flavor becoming apparent, this is truly a race against the clock. The only better music choice than Metallica would have been the soundtrack to 24.
8:23 -- two minutes, my prediction is coming true. I am wondering about the irony of slamming a deeply inexpensive beer while listening to a band talk about how alcohol abuse messed up their lives.
8:24 -- down the hatch, no looking back.
Well I'm still here, feeling the alcohol radiate into my system. It is pretty cold, I'm going to turn the heat on. The taste fell off a cliff then exploded and was eaten by wolves. It was a valuable experience, no doubt, but not one I would overly recommend. If you need to get drunk in a hurry for cheap, just buy a 40, but the Cambridge liquor store I went to was too fancy for any of the finer 40s on the market. SO that wasn't an option.
I have just learned that this is more alcoholic than Mickey's, my preferred get-drunk-quick 40. A list of other popular 40s Natty Daddy has a higher ABV than:
Mickey's
Old English
Hurricane
Thank god, if this was more alcoholic than Camo High-Gravity I would have been very disappointed. It's just barely less alcoholic than Steel Reserve. Truly a drink of kindgs.
A+
Friday, September 23, 2011
Scedule of Events
I'm going to try to bust these out two a week, so here's my schedule for destinations:
Braintree
Design Center
Back of the Hill
Nut Island
Upcoming will be Winthrop, a glowing review of Union Square in Allston, a journey out to Lynn, and a ride on the Mattapan high speed line.
Braintree
Design Center
Back of the Hill
Nut Island
Upcoming will be Winthrop, a glowing review of Union Square in Allston, a journey out to Lynn, and a ride on the Mattapan high speed line.
Shot Heard Round the Livingroom
Like many highly idiosyncronous tastes, anti-tourism is easy to experience, easy to explore individually, and easy to enjoy but notoriously difficult to describe. Like a fetish for donkey masks, the unavoidable question of "why?" is often met with grasping wildly at whatever explanation the enthusiastic but frazzled mind can cling to. But ultimately, one can simply hold up a donkey mask and simply say, "Well what exactly ISN'T arousing?" Not so with anti-tourism, or any vague concept. It's like art or communism in that it's passionately pursued but when it comes to the showdown the only explanation one can offer resembles Jell-O left out too long, one, sad piece of pineapple in mid-suspension just barely hanging on. This is exacerbated by the fact that so few people have heard of anti-tourism; the phrase itself sets off alarms with even the jaded traveler, the modern hipster who drains authority from everything, and even the ordinary chum wondering what exactly I'm yelling about. It doesn't sound right, "anti-tourism;" it's simultaneously interesting and boring which proceeds to final revulsion.
When asked -- and I have been asked, repeatedly, in one case multiple times from the same person -- I offer up this definition: travel is meant to explore the wondrous, the frontiers, but we live in an age where frontiers have all but evaporated. Space is mundane and anyway unobtainable for the regular Joe and I don't know of anyone who wants to vacation at the bottom of the ocean. What, really, is so special about the Taj Mahal? A house built for a second wife and I bet she was a nag. When it comes to brass tacks, is a cruise or an all-expenses paid trip to Milan all that enjoyable? Sure, they can be relaxing or fun in a conventional, amusement park sort of way, and there's the food and the culture, but why spend $5500 on a trip you can get for a Netflix account, some library late fees, and a cooking class? For the experience, is generally the response. For the privilege of being yourself, just somewhere else. Shouldn't there be some meaning?
I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's essay, "Shipping Out" (later to appear as the eponymous final essay in the brilliant "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") and his inverse, the people who would write glowingly and lavishly over such an experience, who coo like grandmothers over a baby, pieing about the same things that people have been talking about in travel writing since Marco Polo pretended he went any further east than the Volga. What boobs. Like Zach Anner has indicated (and I hope we soon will find out how insightful he can be), real travel is not about the perfect vacation, the perfect restaurant, and, o, hey it's Bono!
That's not travel, that's Hollywood. Throughout my childhood, I would visit my far-flung family in such places as London, Edinburgh, Nashville, Genoa, take trips to the Virgin Islands, and to the (later) point, prowl around Boston and its smells. What I found least interesting, least engaging, least worthy of my attention was the very things "everyone does:" be a tourist. I hated it! I thought it was completely phoney to be all agog over places the vast majority of people around you found utterly mundane or forgettable. That is, until I realized that the majority of people around me were other tourists. That made it even worse. The last enjoyable, truly touristy thing I got real interest out of was an automated edu-ride in Oxford and that's because it had spooky ghosts in it and I was ten. The extreme confirmation is this: nobody gives a shit about Gatlinberg. It's kind of a hole and there are two things interesting about it: it's proximity to Dollywood, and how outrageously crappy and bland American culture can get. The natural beauty around it isn't Gatlinberg; Gatlinberg is a strip of road that averages 4 "Olde Tyme Foto" storefronts per half-mile. Hilarious as that may be, is that really embodying the true purpose of travel or is it just demented schadenfreude?
My most beloved travel memory involves hiking up a steep, unforgiving mountain in Wales in a driving, bitter late-December rainstorm, my sister left behind in the clown car we'd rented for the excursion as she had a case of flu so severe I practically feel it infecting me through relativistic time, to see a castle that had been a ruin for longer than America has been a thing. We slipped and fell in the mud, my dad getting the worst of it in nearly splitting his head open on his fall, were soaked through, all but my dad came down with the exact contagion that was then wracking my poor sister, and we all, all were uniformly miserable and cursed the ruin, the rain, and the mountain as we futilely dabbed at the mud caked on our clothes in the understocked parks bathroom. I remember the resident who operated the gate looking at us with incredulity as he opened it to let us attempt to capture what centuries of sieges had not, but I don't remember what look he gave us as we departed: I was elated, I had had too good of a time and all memories after leaving the grounds' parking lot were effaced by my joy.
*****
In the preface to his book of essays, Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, Daniel Kalder cited an enigmatic, obscure and likely apocryphal text, "The Shymkent Declarations." Kalder may be one of the first active, recognized practitioners of anti-tourism -- though he and I diverge on how we go about our esoteric journeying -- and several of these declarations ring profoundly true. "The duty of the traveller therefore is to open up new zones of experience. In our over explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid."
That's the heart of it, but I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. It can be broken down to a desire if not need to go to bad or boring places that are difficult to get to and offer little to no, or only superficial, reward upon arrival. The lack of reward is its reward; a way to disconnect from society and its expectations, baffle friends, and potentially ditch anyone who's following you if that's something you need.
In his books, Kalder always ventures to places that appear in bizarre dictionaries next to the entry for "far flung" (if you have such a dictionary, let me know.) Places that perhaps were places once but whose population rightly decided that they are shit places to live. That sounds wild and interesting in a fascinatingly boring way and there are loads of places like that in this country. I remember going on a church youth trip to some crossroads north of Bangor. We were there as part of Habitat for Humanity and apparently the most humane thing we could do there was transfer a cubic ton of wood from one side of the street to the other. Also cram into a trailer and sing at an octogenarian short on marbles.
But it occurs to me that some places are not so far flung. The remoteness and desolation of that North Woods crossroads were compelling to me, but I've lived in northern New England most of my life; I knew it was out there and I knew there was a lot of it. When I first moved to Boston and started living an urban existence, as modern an American as I am, there was still a bit of culture shock. When that initial wave receded, however, I found that what was left on the tidal shore were these pockets of remoteness, these oddly inaccessible little groves in the seventh largest city in the country. What was even more striking about their inaccessibility was their sheer proximity to the eminently accessible.
Chelsea, Charlestown, Allston, even the South End neighborhood have spotty or bus-only access, isolating them from the city proper and the points in the city made accessible by the MBTA. Then there were the real anomalies. East Boston, Revere, Brighton, Brookline, virtually anywhere Dorchester and south should be accessible, but are made less so by the vagaries of the MBTA or historical undesirability.
So what, really, does "far flung" mean? For the resident of greater Boston with no car access, Wollaston can be as far flung Wyoming, Allston as prohibitive as Panama, Eastie as isolated as Estonia. And none of these places are even at the end of the line. Call it snobbery, but what the hell could there possibly even be in Braintree?
But that's the real point of exoticism, isn't it? The snobbish idea that in order to expand our ideas of what it is to live in this incomprehensibly large planet we need to experience those places most different from our way of thinking. My point with these sections of entries that shun the touristy destinations inherent in any large city (I will not be writing about Harvard or the Freedom Trail or fucking Faneuil Hall) and become instead a tourist of my own city, going to the ends of lines and the sometimes unsavory sometimes just boring places the lie as droplets from the splash of the city center.
The way I see it, New England is one of the most varied places in the country. We have sweeping, deep mountains and inaccessible woods practically adjacent to bustling cities and their frustrations and contradictions next to remote beaches that stand on the edge of the world. Boston has an incredible distillation of all of this and it's all accessible by the T, albeit with one of the most liberal definitions of "accessible" imaginable. But that provides the perfect foundation for the anti-tourist: it's close, it's boring, it's a bitch to get there and there's nothing to see once you do.
So let's go!
When asked -- and I have been asked, repeatedly, in one case multiple times from the same person -- I offer up this definition: travel is meant to explore the wondrous, the frontiers, but we live in an age where frontiers have all but evaporated. Space is mundane and anyway unobtainable for the regular Joe and I don't know of anyone who wants to vacation at the bottom of the ocean. What, really, is so special about the Taj Mahal? A house built for a second wife and I bet she was a nag. When it comes to brass tacks, is a cruise or an all-expenses paid trip to Milan all that enjoyable? Sure, they can be relaxing or fun in a conventional, amusement park sort of way, and there's the food and the culture, but why spend $5500 on a trip you can get for a Netflix account, some library late fees, and a cooking class? For the experience, is generally the response. For the privilege of being yourself, just somewhere else. Shouldn't there be some meaning?
I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's essay, "Shipping Out" (later to appear as the eponymous final essay in the brilliant "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") and his inverse, the people who would write glowingly and lavishly over such an experience, who coo like grandmothers over a baby, pieing about the same things that people have been talking about in travel writing since Marco Polo pretended he went any further east than the Volga. What boobs. Like Zach Anner has indicated (and I hope we soon will find out how insightful he can be), real travel is not about the perfect vacation, the perfect restaurant, and, o, hey it's Bono!
That's not travel, that's Hollywood. Throughout my childhood, I would visit my far-flung family in such places as London, Edinburgh, Nashville, Genoa, take trips to the Virgin Islands, and to the (later) point, prowl around Boston and its smells. What I found least interesting, least engaging, least worthy of my attention was the very things "everyone does:" be a tourist. I hated it! I thought it was completely phoney to be all agog over places the vast majority of people around you found utterly mundane or forgettable. That is, until I realized that the majority of people around me were other tourists. That made it even worse. The last enjoyable, truly touristy thing I got real interest out of was an automated edu-ride in Oxford and that's because it had spooky ghosts in it and I was ten. The extreme confirmation is this: nobody gives a shit about Gatlinberg. It's kind of a hole and there are two things interesting about it: it's proximity to Dollywood, and how outrageously crappy and bland American culture can get. The natural beauty around it isn't Gatlinberg; Gatlinberg is a strip of road that averages 4 "Olde Tyme Foto" storefronts per half-mile. Hilarious as that may be, is that really embodying the true purpose of travel or is it just demented schadenfreude?
My most beloved travel memory involves hiking up a steep, unforgiving mountain in Wales in a driving, bitter late-December rainstorm, my sister left behind in the clown car we'd rented for the excursion as she had a case of flu so severe I practically feel it infecting me through relativistic time, to see a castle that had been a ruin for longer than America has been a thing. We slipped and fell in the mud, my dad getting the worst of it in nearly splitting his head open on his fall, were soaked through, all but my dad came down with the exact contagion that was then wracking my poor sister, and we all, all were uniformly miserable and cursed the ruin, the rain, and the mountain as we futilely dabbed at the mud caked on our clothes in the understocked parks bathroom. I remember the resident who operated the gate looking at us with incredulity as he opened it to let us attempt to capture what centuries of sieges had not, but I don't remember what look he gave us as we departed: I was elated, I had had too good of a time and all memories after leaving the grounds' parking lot were effaced by my joy.
*****
In the preface to his book of essays, Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, Daniel Kalder cited an enigmatic, obscure and likely apocryphal text, "The Shymkent Declarations." Kalder may be one of the first active, recognized practitioners of anti-tourism -- though he and I diverge on how we go about our esoteric journeying -- and several of these declarations ring profoundly true. "The duty of the traveller therefore is to open up new zones of experience. In our over explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid."
That's the heart of it, but I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. It can be broken down to a desire if not need to go to bad or boring places that are difficult to get to and offer little to no, or only superficial, reward upon arrival. The lack of reward is its reward; a way to disconnect from society and its expectations, baffle friends, and potentially ditch anyone who's following you if that's something you need.
In his books, Kalder always ventures to places that appear in bizarre dictionaries next to the entry for "far flung" (if you have such a dictionary, let me know.) Places that perhaps were places once but whose population rightly decided that they are shit places to live. That sounds wild and interesting in a fascinatingly boring way and there are loads of places like that in this country. I remember going on a church youth trip to some crossroads north of Bangor. We were there as part of Habitat for Humanity and apparently the most humane thing we could do there was transfer a cubic ton of wood from one side of the street to the other. Also cram into a trailer and sing at an octogenarian short on marbles.
But it occurs to me that some places are not so far flung. The remoteness and desolation of that North Woods crossroads were compelling to me, but I've lived in northern New England most of my life; I knew it was out there and I knew there was a lot of it. When I first moved to Boston and started living an urban existence, as modern an American as I am, there was still a bit of culture shock. When that initial wave receded, however, I found that what was left on the tidal shore were these pockets of remoteness, these oddly inaccessible little groves in the seventh largest city in the country. What was even more striking about their inaccessibility was their sheer proximity to the eminently accessible.
Chelsea, Charlestown, Allston, even the South End neighborhood have spotty or bus-only access, isolating them from the city proper and the points in the city made accessible by the MBTA. Then there were the real anomalies. East Boston, Revere, Brighton, Brookline, virtually anywhere Dorchester and south should be accessible, but are made less so by the vagaries of the MBTA or historical undesirability.
So what, really, does "far flung" mean? For the resident of greater Boston with no car access, Wollaston can be as far flung Wyoming, Allston as prohibitive as Panama, Eastie as isolated as Estonia. And none of these places are even at the end of the line. Call it snobbery, but what the hell could there possibly even be in Braintree?
But that's the real point of exoticism, isn't it? The snobbish idea that in order to expand our ideas of what it is to live in this incomprehensibly large planet we need to experience those places most different from our way of thinking. My point with these sections of entries that shun the touristy destinations inherent in any large city (I will not be writing about Harvard or the Freedom Trail or fucking Faneuil Hall) and become instead a tourist of my own city, going to the ends of lines and the sometimes unsavory sometimes just boring places the lie as droplets from the splash of the city center.
The way I see it, New England is one of the most varied places in the country. We have sweeping, deep mountains and inaccessible woods practically adjacent to bustling cities and their frustrations and contradictions next to remote beaches that stand on the edge of the world. Boston has an incredible distillation of all of this and it's all accessible by the T, albeit with one of the most liberal definitions of "accessible" imaginable. But that provides the perfect foundation for the anti-tourist: it's close, it's boring, it's a bitch to get there and there's nothing to see once you do.
So let's go!
Friday, September 16, 2011
Brief Introduction
Hello no one.
This is a brief (hopefully) introductory post about what I want to accomplish with this blog. I don't pretend that it'll be anymore serious, recondite, any less self-serving or -promoting than any other blog, though I'm going to try to always write content that is well-written, engaging, and all that rest. I'm a writer, so I'd better put my best face forward in this context.
In short, there will be a couple different types of entries; not all entries will be written from uniform perspective or with identical goals.
Primarily, there will be anti-tourist posts (to be explained in mere moments.) I'll attempt to do one or two of these a week.
Next, Boston is a peculiarly monument-ridden city, each edifice as idiosyncratic as the last. So I'm going to visit and write about all of them. What I write about each statue will vary based on how I feel that day and about that statue. The entries could be anything from historical essay to poem to fiction. If it's interesting in just a boring enough way, I'll lump them into an anti-tourist post.
Next, a little more far ranging and long-term and infrequent will be a series of Last Bus pieces. Combining my anti-tourist scope with my statuary breadth, I'll be riding the entire MBTA on the last service of whichever line of the night and writing about that. These will likely mostly be nonfiction but I may do other formats.
Finally, from time to time, I'll just write whatever it is I want to write about. The trick to this blog is to get me to constantly practice many different types of writing in order to keep them sharp and honed for my other projects, the ones I had heretofore cared more about. I think the best way to keep that consistently going is to introduce this sort of practice as another big project. I anticipate some growing pains as I integrate a third ambition to my personal artistic goals, so please be as negative as possible to encourage me along the way and keep me writing.
These sections will have headings in them for ease of sorting and, if you don't like one section's format, for skipping. They are: Stay Away from Harvard (anti-tourism), Boston's Pygmalia (statuary), Last Ride (should be obvious) and general posts will just be out there. If you think I'm a little heavy-handed with the Greek mythological references, I don't care.
This is a brief (hopefully) introductory post about what I want to accomplish with this blog. I don't pretend that it'll be anymore serious, recondite, any less self-serving or -promoting than any other blog, though I'm going to try to always write content that is well-written, engaging, and all that rest. I'm a writer, so I'd better put my best face forward in this context.
In short, there will be a couple different types of entries; not all entries will be written from uniform perspective or with identical goals.
Primarily, there will be anti-tourist posts (to be explained in mere moments.) I'll attempt to do one or two of these a week.
Next, Boston is a peculiarly monument-ridden city, each edifice as idiosyncratic as the last. So I'm going to visit and write about all of them. What I write about each statue will vary based on how I feel that day and about that statue. The entries could be anything from historical essay to poem to fiction. If it's interesting in just a boring enough way, I'll lump them into an anti-tourist post.
Next, a little more far ranging and long-term and infrequent will be a series of Last Bus pieces. Combining my anti-tourist scope with my statuary breadth, I'll be riding the entire MBTA on the last service of whichever line of the night and writing about that. These will likely mostly be nonfiction but I may do other formats.
Finally, from time to time, I'll just write whatever it is I want to write about. The trick to this blog is to get me to constantly practice many different types of writing in order to keep them sharp and honed for my other projects, the ones I had heretofore cared more about. I think the best way to keep that consistently going is to introduce this sort of practice as another big project. I anticipate some growing pains as I integrate a third ambition to my personal artistic goals, so please be as negative as possible to encourage me along the way and keep me writing.
These sections will have headings in them for ease of sorting and, if you don't like one section's format, for skipping. They are: Stay Away from Harvard (anti-tourism), Boston's Pygmalia (statuary), Last Ride (should be obvious) and general posts will just be out there. If you think I'm a little heavy-handed with the Greek mythological references, I don't care.
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