the vermizzle

Trish Feld 1943 -2007

2007-04-13T12:13:00.001-04:00

A personal note: My mother, Trish Feld, died yesterday. A few people who read this blog know that she's been seriously ill. The rest of you may have been wondering why I've spent the last couple of years going back and forth between Vermont, where I'm from, and my home in Lancashire. She is why.

In August 2005 she was diagnosed with an aggressive and inoperable brain tumor. Mom weathered a grueling succession of radiation and chemotherapy treatments but gradually declined, and died quietly here at home yesterday evening, with her family around her. She never lost her sense of humor, and faced her ordeal with tremendous courage and grace.

Here's a little piece a local newspaper columnist wrote about her life. A children's librarian, she cared passionately about reading and learning, and she touched the lives of so many people, both personally and professionally, that we aren't sure the church is going to be able to hold everyone.

Nobody knows why people develop brain tumors. If, through the wonders of Google, anyone happens on this post in who is in the same situation, I will pass on the tremendously valuable Brain Hospice site, and this book that straightforwardly describes what happens after diagnosis from a first-person perspective.

If I have learned anything from this experience, it is just the same things people always learn, over and over, when someone dear to them dies. But they still bear repeating: your family are always more important than anything else. Tell them how much you love them, early and often. And appreciate them while you have them; you never know what life is going to throw at you.

More friggin snow

2007-04-05T20:33:00.000-04:00

When you grow up in Vermont, you think it's totally normal to spend seven months of the year hibernating like a grizzly, belly up to the radiator. The snow falls, is pretty, goes and comes and piles up and turns gray and melts and comes back and turns into slush, and you don't bat an eyelash. You've spent more hours scraping the windscreen in your lifetime than, maybe, you've spent drinking margaritas, or playing UNO. You're a champion scraper. An expert shoveler. You can take a car from snowbound to drive-ready in ten minutes flat at dawn, when it's so cold your nose hairs freeze.

But then, one day, you leave the state and move to a place very far away, where it rarely snows. At first, you miss the snow. It seems weird; where's winter? No snowshoeing. Sayonara sugar on snow. Mittens seem pointless.

You get used to it.

Then, years later, you come back to Vermont. For a very long time. In the winter.

You are so not prepared. For chrissakes, you've started buying suede boots again. You can't remember how to drive in mixed precipitation. And you've totally lost the ability to tell the difference between sleet and freezing rain. It feels like the part in Narnia where they thaw out the white witch, but in reverse.

Please, you whimper. Let it end. I can't take any more.

Winter doesn't give a shit. Valentine's Day blizzard, St. Patty's Day storm, Easter Nor'easter. Mayday ice storm, Memorial Day whiteout. Why not? Bring it on.

Dammit.

The river spirit is not amused

2007-03-15T11:27:00.000-04:00

As I write this, I'm sitting in a window seat at Capitol Grounds in Montpelier. Next to me is the Winooski River, which is rising by the hour. The city is on official "flood watch." There are sandbags stacked along the sidewalk in front of the storefronts, and some streets are closed so that the big trucks hauling more sandbags can get around. The newspaper says the next 18 hours are critical.

As I sit here drinking my cafe au lait and tapping away, people keep coming up to peer nervously over my shoulder at the river. "It's risen a couple of inches since I've been here," one man says. "Look, I could see the dirt at the bottom of that bank, but now it's covered up. Now there's only six feet clear under the bridge." The young baristas are all rooting for a flood so they can go home and get out of work. They keep popping out from the kitchen door like prairie dogs and making disgusted comments about how slowly the waters are rising. Out the window, I watch as people walking over the bridge each stop and look speculatively down at the brown, swollen river. Everyone stops and looks.

Yesterday they held a ritual ceremony on the riverbank to direct energies toward promoting "a gentle thaw." People made offerings to the river spirit. I heard about this, and was intrigued. I asked one of the organizers, a healer who has office space right next door to my yoga studio, what kind of offerings they would be making. She considered this question for a moment. "It could be anything that's really special to you, anything you think would please the river spirit," she said serenely. "A bead you made, maybe... or a cookie." A cookie. Of course. You've got to love Montpelier. There really is no place like it.

Their cookies and beads may not have been enough; The river spirit still seems uneasy. The water level has risen a couple of inches since I've been here. Now it's covering the bottom of a funny-shaped paint mark on the riverbed wall that I've been keeping my eye on. The cafe has emptied out, and I wonder what I'm still doing here, braving it out. Maybe it's time to go.

Gun crazy

2006-10-04T12:02:00.000-04:00

With three school shootings in a week, It's becoming increasingly bizarre to me how nobody is talking about guns. The media storm swirls around these unhappy communities, showing endless footage of memorial services and prayer meetings. But the bigger "repurcussion" story to emerge is parents demanding to know how safe their own kids' schools are, whether the doors are locked or not and how easy it is for people to gain access.

I don't understand why the easy availability of guns has not been seized upon as a key theme in these crimes. Maybe this seems more striking to me because I have been living in England for a few years now, where guns are strictly regulated and where gun crime remains rare. Why is it still so easy to get a gun here?

This piece in the Progressive raises just this issue, also linking the shootings with the other big story of the week, the disclosure of Congressman Foley's inappropriate emails to young boys. Violence begets violence. This editorial in the St. Pete Times (which, by the way, had the initial set of Foley emails before ABC did but thought they were too ambiguous to run with) calls for stricter gun control, but notes that the Republican controlled Congress seems intent on weakening existing gun control legislation as it is. This week alone we've seen evidence of corruption, deceit, moral rot, selfishness and cowardice from the Republican party. When is this nightmare going to end?

Yesterday I was in a store in town and noticed they were selling a little digital counter on a keychain, a perpetual countdown to the President's last moment in office. All of us waiting in line to pay shared a rueful laugh about it. I thought about buying one, but it was twelve bucks, which seemed a little steep. Still, the owner told me they had already sold four that day.

At least Hastert's probably on the way out. Back to the Boar's Nest for him!

The Cadillac of apples

2006-10-02T15:46:00.000-04:00

What a great weekend. It started off Friday night at a hot-tub get-together with some old friends in Waterbury. The talk turned to financial planners, granite countertops and daycare, and I was a little freaked out by how adult everyone sounded, but it was lots of fun.

Saturday morning I went to the farmer's market in Montpelier and ran into a ton of people I knew. Didn't see any of these performance artists that I've heard about there, but a guy dressed like a pirate was running around at one point. Ate an incredible sticky bun from the fabulous Red Hen Baking Co. Bought a matching set of t-shirts for my whole family from Bo at Eat More Kale (a great stencil design which features George W. Bush's face topped by Mickey Mouse ears.)

I also tried a Honeycrisp apple for the first time. At the Ellie's farm stand they had a crate of these apples with a big sign: "Honeycrisp - The Cadillac of Apples!" And they were more expensive than all the other apples Ellies had. I was standing there wondering if this was an example of clever marketing, when some women ran up, shouting, "Hey, they got Honeycrisps!" and proceeded to load up a couple of bags like they were scared someone else might get to them first. After all that, of course we had to get one. And it was a pretty nice apple - a little too sweet for me, I prefer the tart ones - but it has a very unusual flavor. Last night we had a friend over to dinner and she was also talking about the Honeycrisps, so I guess this qualifies as a hot trend in produce.

After the farmer's market my dad, my brother and I hiked up Stowe Pinnacle. This wasn't as crowded as I'd feared it might be during the beginning of leaf peeper season. One thing I noticed, though, was a lot of the people hiking with dogs had their dogs outfitted with special strap-on dog bags. Some were carrying dog-size camelpak water carriers, complete with plastic straws. Others dogs were wearing pannier-style saddlebags. Only in Vermont!

Bubba slams Fox, Fox threatens YouTube

2006-09-26T12:45:00.001-04:00

So I'm back in Vermont, arriving in the middle of the Clinton-Fox kerfuffle. Everyone everyone is talking about Bill Clinton's appearance yesterday on a Fox News talk show, where he responded to questions about why he didn't do more to catch Bin Laden after the U.S. Cole bombing with an angry tirade against the Murdoch-owned Fox and the American right.

An English viewer, raised on a diet of the Today programme and Parliamentary catfights, might not understand what all the fuss was about; Though he criticized the Bush administration, Clinton didn't say anything really outrageous. But if you understand the despondent state of the Democratic party in this country, you'll know it's a big deal. Confonted with a feckless Republican administration that has raped the environment, endangered the American citizenry and raided the country's coffers for their own benefit, the left has been almost bizarrely incapable of elucidating a response. Clinton's tirade "gave the Democratic party a backbone transplant" as Paul Begala said on one of the morning shows - in short, Clinton's outburst channelled the zeitgeist: people are getting angry, and realizing that we don't have to put up with this shit.

An interesting side story here is what's happening over on YouTube. Naturally, the folks who didn't see it on TV went there first to watch a video clip, and several people had posted it. But YouTube is taking the Clinton clips down as fast as they're put up, after Fox news threatened them with legal action. People seem to be reposting, but are worried about the site's culpability all the same: " er... how do we protect YouTube from copyright violations?" one YouTuber fretted. "Fox will sue them to kingdom come and get them shut down if we keep on posting, but if we don't, then Fox, big media, and the unjust law wins. Can we post under "Fair Use" or creative commons, or anti-copyright?
Is there any chance for us? Or do we just get battered by the law again and again, until we shut up like good little sheep?"

It's a good question. I think you can watch the video over at Fox News' website, but who wants to give them traffic? I have to wonder if anyone's been cheeky enough to try and post it on MySpace, which Murdoch also owns. While it's unpleasant to imagine as-yet tiny and independent YouTube getting menaced by Fox's legal heavies, how much scarier would it be if, say, Murdoch already owned YouTube, and could simply prevent people from posting the clip directly, or suspend the membership of people who tried to? This is exactly why journalists and anyone else who cares about freedom of speech need to pay attention to web ownership. While the low cost of online publishing makes it easy to set up new media outlets, the web is playing host to new and troubling varieties of media conglomeration, influence-buying and state censorship.

Blog Neglect

2006-08-24T12:17:00.000-04:00

Did I hear someone say I didn't update this blog often enough? Horsefeathers!

I'm still here. Its just that this is my blog for when I'm back home in VT. And I'm not now, so I'm blogging over at The Manchizzle. But I'll be home for a nice long visit in late Sept.- Early Oct. And I live in hope that the foliage fairy won't crap out like she did last year, when the leaves unceremoniously turned brown and fell off the trees.

Go Team!

2006-06-14T09:03:00.000-04:00

Soccer is actually getting big in America. The World Cup made the front page of some newspapers, and USA games are being broadcast on network tv. Before I came over, I worried about where I'd be able to see the games in Vermont. I thought I'd have to drive miles to some smoky den of anglophiles for two a.m. broadcasts. Turns out least two bars in the next big town are showing the games, and that includes the old school "sports bar" which only, I thought, showed baseball and gridiron.

But the weird thing is, when I got here I suddenly had zero desire to watch the World Cup. I really like soccer - I used to play it and I like watching it. Back in the UK, where people are gaily festooning their cars, homes and dogs with England flags and tattooing players' names on their unmentionables for luck, I was getting totally swept up in the frenzy of anticipation. I've seen the pictures on the net of what's going on over there... the drunken brawling in Manchester's Exchange Square, the outbreak of those embarassingly gauche England fan hats... and I know that there's no getting away from it over there, whether you like it or not.

Maybe that's why it's nice to be here, where Team USA has turned out to be kind of sucky, and - perhaps by coincidence - national interest in soccer is dwindling. We don't like to lose to other countries, and there are so many other sports we're the best at. Like baseball. We hold the "World Series" every year, and don't even have to ask any other countries to play. We're that good. (The Brits think the World Series is a perfect example of American arrogance. I think they're just mad they don't play baseball real good like us.)

So the only sport I've been watching is ice hockey, the sport I was raised playing and watching, and the only sport my entire family cares about. It's the Stanley Cup right now, and I've actually seen most of the games on Canadian TV. Sure, there are some silly hats on display, but, compared to soccer, hockey seems so fast moving and exciting. And Don Cherry makes me laugh. In the World Cup, the US team got hammered by the Czechs and we're about to be embarassed by the Italians. England looked shaky in their first match. Wayne Rooney's foot hangs in the balance. But it's nothing to me.

Movie night

2006-06-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

It happens every time I come home to the states, without fail. I go into a restaurant with my folks, try to order a drink, and get negged because I've forgotten to bring my ID with me. The fact that I'm 32 and (I think) look it, and am actually in the joint with my parents, who were there at my birth, doesn't make any difference. Yeah, and I know the whole thing about how they could lose their license if they didn't ask anyone who appears to be under the age of 73 to produce a driver's license, but it doesn't make it any less of a drag. I've got to remember to carry the damn thing.

It happened again at Julio's in Montpelier last night. Julio's has changed under new ownership, and not for the better. The food was even more mediocre than it used to be. They played cheesy music, screwed up most of our orders, and our waiter had this oddly ponderous affect. He kept calling everyone "friend." "Could I have a side of guacamole with that?" "Yes, you can, friend."

Before dinner, we saw the Prairie Home Companion movie at the Savoy. (The show started at 6:30 and it was sold out, of course, by ten after six. It's hard to imagine a place more perfectly representative of the film's target demographic than the Savoy's customer base.) I thought the movie was pretty good, but not amazing, and it was obvious a lot of the intervening dialogue had been improvised. There were some interesting characters there but a lot of them never seemed to fulfil their promise, apart from Meryl Streep as a blowsy radio singer and the cowboy duo of Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly, who were great. And I have to admit I was totally distracted by how weird looking Garrison Keillor is. Man, what a mug. He looks like one of those freaky fish that lives on the bottom of a really deep ocean trench.

First dip

2006-06-09T08:52:00.000-04:00

Back in Vermont, after months of rain-soaked England, and no sooner do I arrive than it turns unseasonably cold, gray and drizzly. Of course, back in Blighty they're having the first spell of really hot sunny weather all year. I would wonder if I was a rain god if it weren’t for Monday and Tuesday, when I got so excited about the hot, southern sun beating down that I actually drove over to Bolton potholes for a dip.

I rolled up and parked behind a guy in brown waders unloading tackle from a truck. He eyed my beach bag and lack of fishing gear. "You’re not going in are you?" he asked incredulously. "Yep," I told him, remembering suddenly how close to May it was. I hiked through the woods and dropped my stuff on a gravely patch next to the water. The air was cooler here, and it was a little buggy. The waterfalls rushed over the stones, looking more like a cateract of snowmelt than anything else. I thought about how this stream ran right off the mountain, and wondered just when it was that the last patches of snow up there had actually gone. Hmm. Maybe I needed to get a little bit hotter.

Twenty minutes later I stood up, shed my cutoffs, and picked my tender spring feet over to the water’s edge. I took a deep breath, and strode boldly in. YEAOWCH!

I just found this great site run by the Vermont River Conservancy, which uses Google Earth to map the best swimming holes in the state, and has directions and descriptions and pictures, like the one above.

Young Vermonters: come back and breed

2006-03-06T09:04:00.000-05:00

I got sent a link to this New York Times story by my friend who lives in Brooklyn. I looked at the list of friends he sent it to: Boston, New Jersey, New York, Chicago... nope. Not one of us lives in Vermont, though we all grew up there. It kinda depressed me. And tomorrow is Town Meeting Day, too. Jeezum Crow.

There are a lot of us out here. That story was the NYT's most emailed story the day it came out, and I can imagine it winging its way to resettled Vermonters all over the world. Why did we all leave Vermont? I have left and returned and left again on and off since going away to college in 1991. I lived and worked there for five years in my mid-twenties, but moved to NYC for grad school, knowing I probably wouldn't be coming back to live there anytime soon. Working in newspapers in Vermont was great - I learned a lot and it was wonderful living near my family. But after a certain point, I felt like my career would stall unless I moved to a city. And, especially when I was living in White River Junction, admittedly not the most happenin' part of the state, I found it almost impossible to meet other young people I had anything in common with. And I was heartily sick of jam bands.

While in New York I met my husband and have now moved even further away - to England. From the beginning we planned to return home to Vermont when we have kids, maybe in 3-5 years. I've always wanted to raise a family there, and he loves it there too. But we worry about where we're going to work, and how we'll make it on our lower salaries. Here, we're on the outskirts of a an exciting, thriving city but live in a part of the countryside that could give VT a run for its money on the pristineness front. We make decent enough money; and my writing work is steady. On the downside, we don't know our neighbors, and are almost completely disassociated from community and political life. I desperately miss my friends and family. But we like it here, and sometimes I wonder if we ever will move back. The longer we stay, the less likely it seems.

What would make all of us refugees return? It's kind of a chicken-and-egg question, but I think the Governor's right: good, well-paying jobs are the main thing. Many of my friends from other states have considered moving to VT after falling in love with the state on a visit, but I know at least three or four young couples who scrapped plans to move to Vermont after they took a look at the job market and realized there was little there for them. The one couple I know who did move there are self-employed internet biz folks who could live anywhere.

Strangely enough, maybe 10 years ago I remember reading a big Sunday Magazine piece in the Rutland Herald about how Gen-Xers were moving to Vermont in droves. I don't know what's happened since then to change things, but I guess the downturn in the economy a few years back might have something to do with it.

(graphic from The New York Times)

Gone for a while

2006-01-30T07:16:00.000-05:00

I'm back in England for a few months, so I won't be posting much to the Vermizzle, unless some Vermont issue gets me all fired up from afar. But I'll check in every month or so. If you miss me, you can always visit me over at The Manchizzle, my blog across the pond. I'll leave you with a few pictures from my stay in Vermont this fall/winter, taken with my Lomo Holga camera:

Fire Station, South Hero

Pumpkins at Bragg Farm, East Montpelier

Trippy waterfall, Plainfield

Wok n' Roll, Hyde Park

A Tale of Two Pubs

2006-01-13T11:10:00.000-05:00

Waterbury has changed a lot since the last time I lived here. Gone upscale. We’re getting a Shaw’s on Route 100, and I heard it’s going to have a sushi bar. And we have the Alchemist, a brew pub that sells stuff like Belgian-style beers infused with sour cherry right on Main Street, where the sporting goods store was. It also boasts a fine selection of single-malts. The menu features bleu cheese burgers and hand-cut french fries served in fancy metal stands with garlic mayonnaise. The place is done up in metal sculptures and warm earth tones, wood and exposed brick. It looks like the kind of bar where models from a J. Crew catalogue shoot would go for beers after a rosy-cheeked day spent cross-country skiing, chopping wood and baking organic cakes from scratch.

Across Main Street is the The Pub. The Pub is, well, … it’s The Pub. It’s been there, like, forever. I guess it’s the kind of place you go to get drunk if you don’t want anyone to see you doing it. The doorway is on the steep part of Bank Hill, giving it a crooked appearance. Inside it’s dark and grimy, with a couple of pool tables.

The thing I used to love about The Pub was the jukebox, a veritable goldmine of eighties metal. For a handful of linty change you could revisit those after school sessions watching hair bands prance in their spandex on MTV. You could go in there and play “Nobody’s Fool” or the entire White Lion discography and no one would bat an eyelash. Now it’s been replaced by one of those computerized jukeboxes where you can pay extra money for the machine to download any song in existence. Of course, it was all wasted on the customers, who were still listening to the same old shit.

They have two kinds of beer on tap: Bud and Bud Light. They serve other brands by the can. The cans are lined up on a shelf behind the bar. The ladies room is decorated with a framed poster of an oiled, tanned stud emerging from a swimming pool, muscles gleaming. I can only imagine what hangs in the men’s room.

The bartender, Otis, told us that when he first started working there six years ago, it was crazy. Guys would come in and start fights all the time. Over time he barred the troublemakers and bad drunks, one by one, until they were all locked out. They all drink at the American Legion now, around the corner on Stowe Street. And the Pub is often almost empty, just a few weathered folks quietly sipping their beers at the counter. The shouts and broken bottles, the ghosts of old fights, linger in the air like stale tobacco smoke.

Things are good at the Alchemist. It’s been packed ever since it opened its doors a couple of years ago, and since they don’t take reservations, you almost always have to wait for a table if you want to eat. An artists’ studio and gallery has opened upstairs. At some point they’re going to open for lunch and expand into the space next door.

But things aren’t so good at The Pub. It’s not as busy as it used to be. A developer bought the building on the corner of Bank and Stowe streets that the bar is located in. They’re renovating it, the scaffolding is already up. Retail units. Rumors have been flying around town that The Pub is closing any day now, booted out of the building like a troublesome drunk. You can hear the relief in people’s voices when they tell you about it. But Otis told me that the lease doesn’t expire until summer of 2007. It’s not going anywhere, for a while at least.

The Burlington Free Press: Still sucking in 2006

2006-01-06T15:11:00.000-05:00

I’ve been prodded out of my blogging lethargy at last by the Burlington Free Press. I know finding things to gripe about in the Freep is like shooting fish in a barrel, but the past couple of weeks, the paper has really outdone itself (and that’s saying a lot.)

This all started last month, when I noticed that the BFP had been running a series called “Lives Well Lived” described as “stories celebrating Vermonters who died in 2005.”

These were stories of regular folks who died, plucked from the obituaries and given the sort of restrospective celebration usually only given to famous or otherwise "notable" people at death. It’s a great idea, and represents a return to local journalism – the opposite of the sensational, breaking news-driven stuff that usually dominates front pages. But it wasn’t the Freep’s idea.

For the past four or five years, The Valley News has been running essentially the same series, called A Life. These beautifully written stories appear in the paper every Monday. (Full disclosure: I used to be a reporter there, and worked on the series myself back in 2001 and 2002.) Here are some recent examples, in case you're curious. I know, it's not like nobody else could have come up with this idea. But it's annoying that smaller papers like the VN don't get much credit for excellent work like this.

http://www.vnews.com/12262005/2797027.htm
http://www.vnews.com/12122005/2760400.htm
http://www.vnews.com/11212005/2735479.htm

Leaving that series aside, the anti-union bias in the Free Press’ coverage of the various teacher strikes in the area has been deplorable. In many cases, no attempt whatever has been made to present both sides of the story. It’s a good time to remember that Gannett is one of the most notorious union busters in the media.

And the Free Press’ op-ed columns – or “heartburn row,” as I affectionately refer to them - have always showcased reactionary troglodytes like Cal Thomas and William Raspberry. But the most consistently infuriating, at least lately, has been Kathleen Parker. She took time out from defending Dubya’s wiretapping recently to dash off a hate-filled, poisonous rant about how bloggers only write hate-filled, poisonous rants. She places bloggers a notch below al Qaida and Osama, describing them as “insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility.” Oh my!

Bloggers are also uncivilized children "who shriek Gotcha! when they catch some weary eage earner in a mistake or oversight… when a mainstream journalist stumbles, they pile on like so many savages.” Sounds like someone’s been caught out a few times, eh Kath? Imagine, people having the gall to correct journalists’ errors.

The blog backlash labors on (I think we’re in the second or third wave of it now) and taking cheap shots at bloggers continues to be a blood sport for the more backwards among the traditional journalists – or reliable column fodder when they run out of ideas. They might as well have “I am threatened by blogging” tattooed on their foreheads.

Bah Humblog

2005-12-23T12:05:00.000-05:00

Yeah, so I haven't been blogging so much lately. I know how lame it is when people don't update their blogs much. And then come back on with some paltry excuse about how busy they've been. But whadaya want? Sometimes people pay me to write things, and that leaves me with less time for the blogging. And I have been neglecting the Vermizzle a teensy bit in favor of its sister blog back in blighty, The Manchizzle. There's just been more going on over there lately.

And now it's Christmas Eve Eve, and what with all of the frantic egg nog guzzling, present wrapping, christmas cookie scarfing, and friends-back-in-town visiting, I just don't know when I'll be able to squeeze in some Yuletide blogging. And thanks to web zen and False 45th, I've just wasted more time I could have been blogging downloading new music while playing a flash game involving kittens clad in christmas outfits. It's a damn shame.

Whither Skateland?

2005-11-25T14:02:00.000-05:00

On my last few visits to the love-it-or-hate-it shopping mecca of Williston, I’ve either been so high on an adrenaline rush of naked materialism (Mom, look, they have a Best Buy and a Circuit City), or so busy sucking down my venti almond triple soy latte, that I haven’t noticed one small but crucial change to the strip: Skateland is no more. The place where it used to be is now a scrubby lot fronted by a cheerless bank building.

This is sad, sad news. Yeah, okay, so I’ve figured out that this happened way back in like, 2000 or something – what can I say, I’ve been out of the motherland. But where are the 12-year-olds of northern Vermont going to go to get their skate on now?

Skateland. Those carpeted, round benches. The thrum of wheels against wood competing with Loverboy, Naked Eyes and Styx. The weirdly-lit snack bar, where kids chowed down on pink and blue cotton candy, rocket ice creams and too-syrupy fountain sodas. Pre-teens in tight jeans nervously eyeing each other up, both dreading and hoping for the next time the announcer boomed “couples skate …’ and holding hands, they rolled shakily out to the strains of Total Eclipse of the Heart. There was a place in the middle, under the big mirrorball, where kids gathered, clowning around and showing off. Around them, serious skaters confidently cris-crossed and weaved. On the edges, learners clung to the carpeted walls, praying for balance. The rental skates all looked exactly like the ones in the picture above: crap-brown leather with curling edges and uncomfortably hard insides.

Later, when music videos came on the scene, they would project them against the far wall of the rink while people skated. I was there the day that the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller – the long version – arrived, and everyone was so excited they sat down on the floor to watch it. I had my birthday party at the rink two years in a row, and took to wearing a pink-and-blue satin jacket with the legend “Roller Disco” emblazoned on the back. The window for Skateland was between the ages of about nine and thirteen. After that, more grown up pursuits beckon the teenagers of Vermont. Chiefly getting high in the woods and standing in cold fields around cars blasting out Led Zeppelin IV, pretending to enjoy the taste of warm Budweiser.

I went back to Skateland, for some reason or other, in the summer of 1995. It seemed smaller and a lot shabbier than I remembered. I talked to some kids in the parking lot, teenagers who were hanging out, bored, looking for some trouble to get into. It was both sad and strangely consoling to still find it there. But now it’s gone, and I wonder – where are they going to skate now?

New Hampshire Wants YOU

2005-11-10T11:27:00.000-05:00

Those of us avidly following the Vermont secession story in the press should check out a few newspaper stories filed in the last week or so.

This one from the Christian Science Monitor puts SVR in the broader context of secession movements around the country, and includes some interesting stuff about the historical case for and against secession's legality.

And this Boston Globe story is an update on a related secession story - Killington's bid to leave Vermont for a life of giddy tax-free abandon in the Granite State. I say we let 'em go ... Live free or die!

The interesting thing is that New Hampshire seems suspiciously eager for this to actually go ahead:

"CONCORD, N.H. --A New Hampshire commission established to help Killington secede from Vermont and join New Hampshire didn't have much to discuss at its first meeting Wednesday. That's because Vermont hasn't established a similar commission to work out the secession details.

Regardless, commission Chairman John Hunt insists the New Hampshire panel's existence sends a clear message to Vermont -- or any other state -- that citizens have a right to seek other alliances if their complaints aren't addressed.

"They (Vermont officials) might see this as a joke. I don't," said Hunt."

Hmmm.... what's going on over there?

That Way

2005-11-08T19:38:00.000-05:00

This little video has nothing whatsoever to do with Vermont, but it's both funny and deeply frightening. And do watch it to the end - it only gets crazier. Don't play it at work, or any other place where being clocked listening to a '90s boyband might damage your reputation. An appreciative shout-out to my homie back in the Manchizzle, Conscious & Verbal.

I Want It That Way

Verbloggers in the Flesh

2005-11-07T18:33:00.000-05:00

A late report on the weekend’s Vermont blogger meetup at Langdon Street Café in Montpelier. It was pretty cool – twenty people there or so and I think everyone had a good time. This was only my second blogger meet-up, and it was a lot more pleasant than the first.

I started blogging back in 2003, in New York City, and went to a blogger meetup organized by the folks behind the excellent NYC Bloggers site, which has spawned ripoffs in nearly every city where they have a subway map and some where they don’t. The main things I remember about that event, held at some anonymous bar in Hell’s Kitchen, was that everyone wrote their url instead of their name on the ‘Hello, My Name Is …’ stickers they gave us to wear, and nobody drank much. Most of the people there were a little tense and distracted because they were trying desparately to ingratiate themselves with Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke (the Posh n’ Becks of the blogosphere.) It was kind of uncomfortable, and more than a little boring.

But the blogger meetup in Vermont was just as I’d expected: a laid-back gathering of people who were friendly and a little quirky, but who definitely had a sense of humor about their own geekiness. Some nice chats were had. The Vermont blogging community seems to really be getting off the ground, and for this big props must go to Cathy Resmer and Seven Days for spreading the good word. It’s especially impressive for a newspaper to be leading the charge, since most newspapers either see blogs as unwelcome competition or don’t really understand what a blog is.

Love it or leave it? No problem.

2005-10-18T14:38:00.000-04:00

Way back when The Vermizzle was in high school, there was a tongue-in-cheek Vermont secession movement, chiefly a series of mock debates held in town halls around the state. I went to the one at the Statehouse, which as I recall ended in an overwhelming yes vote (ah, the Reagan years.) And I remember being bitterly disappointed when things didn't pan out. I was ready to man the barricades.

So when I heard about the secession movement led by a group calling itself the Second Vermont Republic, I assumed it was a joke. When a friend insisted these people were serious, I figured it was nothing more than a few people flying the freak flag for the demographic of grizzled Goddardites and wild-eyed libertarians who introduce resolutions opposing the fluoridation of water at town meeting.

But a phone call to one of the Second Republic’s founding fathers, Thomas H. Naylor, confirmed that this movement is no joke. Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who moved up here to retire, says they’re “dead serious.” The union has lost its moral authority, and they want out. He says the secession movement gathered steam right after George W.’s reerlectation. “He’s our membership chair,” Taylor quipped. “Every time he opens his mouth, our membership goes up.”

He described the process by which Vermont would actually secede, which begins with a 2/3 vote at a representational statewide convention and ends with the words “then we’d come back to Montpelier and stop paying taxes, stop following the rules, and pray a lot.” The ball starts rolling Oct. 28 at the first statewide convention on secession in this country since 1861. It's going to be held at the Statehouse, and will feature some genuinely interesting speakers.

For some reason, the Governor, Lt. Governor and Vermont’s congressional trio all declined invitations to speak at the convention. Further requests for an account of where they stand on secession have been met, Naylor says, with stony silence. “That’s really a gutless move. The people of Vermont are entitled to know what their postion is,” Naylor said. He intends to “turn up the heat” on the pols by issuing press releases calling for them to explain their position. Disappointingly, he reports that no one in Vermont politics has come out of the closet as a secessionist … yet. “We have been in contact with legislators who are clearly sympathetic to our cause, and have given us advice, but will not go on the record as secessionists.” Write your congressman!

These people are to be taken seriously. Whether they’re in earnest or not, they’ve cooked up the mother of all media stunts. The Vermont secession story has so many elements that have proven attractive to the press. They’re providing a flashpoint of public opposition to Bush, which, at a time when his approval rating has never been lower, makes things easy for the news folks who have to write about it anyway. The quaint progressive antics of little Vermont always make for good copy. And hey, the reporters can come up here to cover the convention and catch the tail end of foliage too! Mark my words, the NYT is going to be all over it like white on rice.

“It’s a real David and Goliath story,” Naylor said. “Tiny Vermont taking on the greatest empire that ever lived? Our power lies in the absurdity of it.”

Hatemongering
Oct. 30

So I decided to go check out the statewide convention on secession on Friday. The crowd was biggish, and intense: lots of older men with prodigious beards and women with gray ponytails and serious expressions, knitting. The rest were reporters, a handful of dredded-out twentysomethings, and a few teenagers who were clearly there on some kind of assignment.

I rolled up just in time to hear the keynote address by James Howard Kunstler, the author of a book called The Long Emergency. The subject of his talk was “The Cheap Oil Endgame.” I guess I should have been warned by the remoteness of this topic from Vermont secession (….but petroleum has EVERYTHING to do with Vermont secession, I can hear them crying now.)

Kunstler was like Chicken Little with a New York accent and a serious crush on himself. He spent the first minute or so explaining his thesis, which goes like this: The collapse of cheap petroleum will bring about the decline of civilization as we know it, alternative energies will fail, and within five to ten years we’ll all be up in the hills living off what we can grow and sleeping with one hand on the shotgun. Rather than presenting evidence to support this farfetched premise, Kuntstler spent the rest of his time at the podium taking potshots at the Bush administration and crowing about how he had reduced this or that group of people to dumbfounded silence with the excellence of his logic.

The crowd was loving Kunstler – they applauded like crazy as he howled about the evils of the suburban lifestyle and the supreme dumbness of the American people. And they continued to applaud as his vitriol picked out a more specific target: “The Nascar fans of the South are a pretty rude group of people. They crawled out of the mud and into the middle class 20 years ago, and have limited experience with society. And they worship firearms … I think we can expect a fairly violent future ahead.”

This observation drew enthusiastic claps and incredulous laughter. But it was approving laughter, the laughter of people shocked by his audacity for saying out loud what they all secretly believed. And then I remembered something about Vermont that I had forgotten.

For me, it's always been easier to focus on the positive side of Vermont’s liberal bias – the wonderful sense of community, two Independents in Congress, many good health food stores, and socially-responsible businesses. But it’s dark side is pretty ugly: a whole population that’s smug, self-congratulatory, and elitist. And doesn’t mind a bit of classist hatemongering on a Friday morning, just as long as it’s directed at the right kind of underclass.

After the talk ended I didn’t feel like staying for the afternoon panel about secession. I went to Capitol Grounds and scowled at the graying, Patagonia-clad, latte-drinking liberals. And then I decided that maybe the secessionists’ strategy was to make everyone else in America so sick of Vermont’s self-righteous indignation that they would be happy to part with us. If that’s their aim, I think they may actually have a shot.

Excited about Halloween? They are.

2005-10-10T17:30:00.000-04:00

Having grown up in Waterbury, I know that there are a few things you can count on. The air will smell of roasting coffee, the town and the village will never agree on anything, and that car slowing down to ask you directions is looking for Ben and Jerry's. And no matter what time of year it is, there is a holiday on the horizon and the house next to the car wash on Route 2 is celebrating it early and with a somewhat alarming enthusiasm.

They go so far beyond the acceptable level of holiday-related house adornment that I have to wonder if Hallmark has them on payroll. You expect Christmas decorations (and theirs are awe-inspiring) but all out, deck-the-halls-with-bats-and-skeletons Halloween decorations are rarer. And when the yard is paved with festive plastic on Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving, Independence Day and St. Pat's, you start to wonder about the people living in that house. If they made decorations for today's quasi-holiday, Columbus Day, I'm sure they'd string 'em up gladly.

It's pretty amazing to think about the amount of time, money and energy that go into this. Why do they do it? Their house must be bursting with plug-in plastic santas, crepe paper turkeys and leering leprechauns - although some of them do double duty. Notice how, this year, the Christmas sleigh has been cleverly adapted into a haunted hayride for a gang of ghosts? Sadly, most of the people in the neighborhood don't share their holiday spirit, and shake their heads about the eyesore at the end of Butler Street. I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact that these festive folks never seem to be quite as eager to take the decorations down as they are to put them up.

I just worry that they'll put those Christmas reindeer up too close to hunting season, and something like this will happen. It would be tragic.

Pointless, incessant barking

2005-10-03T09:59:00.000-04:00

Now for some more pointless, incessant barking. I was driving to Waitsfield Farmer's Market on Saturday, a beautiful indian summer morning. But my daydreams about fresh corn and late season tomatoes were shattered by the bizarro driving of the guy in the Ford Focus in front of me. He crawled along at about 40, swerving all over the road. One hand on the wheel, the other - yep - holding a cell phone to his empty head. Mass plates. I pondered the word 'Masshole' for a while, and continued to ponder it while he got off the phone, sped up and started tailgating the truck in front of him.

This is the time of year Vermont gets invaded by tour buses full of bluehairs and flotillions of rental cars bearing pairs of overpaid urbanites jonesing for their country fix. The turning leaves are wonderful to behold, but the leaf peepers clog the roads, drive like idiots and, for some reason, really piss a lot of Vermonters off. We shouldn't resent them. They bring in a lot of cash - some $337 million last year, according to this story, which is nothing to sneeze at. A lot of that money goes right to the small B&Bs, restaurants and shops that depend on tourists to stay afloat. It's environmentally positive revenue, too, since this kind of tourism makes it economically attractive to keep the state clean and lands open and undeveloped.

But I think a lot of the October rage has to do with entitlement. We live here year round. We know the existential despair of stick season, when the sun disappears for a long, long time. We're here in January, shivering out into a dark morning to shovel three feet of snow off the car before driving to work. And we're still shoveling in February, March and April. We're here negotiating roads transformed to impassable rivers of potholed mud every spring, and getting devoured by mosquitos and black flies all summer long. We're living in a state where the growing season is short and the life span of a muffler is shorter. Where, as the bumperstickers succinctly tell it, you have to "moonlight in Vermont - or starve."

So when the state erupts with glorious color for a few weeks every year, we feel like we're entitled to enjoy it. And they aren't.

Smoke gets in your eyes

2005-09-28T17:17:00.000-04:00

Last night I walked into my favorite bar in the world, the inimitable Charlie O's in Montpelier, after many months out of Vermont. I had heard some people bitching about it at a hippie bonfire party in Maple Corner, and I wanted to see for myself. Out front a lone man with a scraggly ponytail sucked on a Marlboro Red, next to a couple of new benches and ashcans. The screen door slammed behind me, and I saw that the ashtrays had been removed from the slab of pitted, ancient bar. So it was true. There was no smoking in Charlie O's.

It's hard to explain the great sorrow I feel about this, especially as someone who no longer smokes. Charlie O's was always very, very smoky. Fuck-you-and-your-fancy ventilation-systems smoky. On entering the dive you were enveloped in a miasma of tobacco smoke so thick and powerful that it could block out the sun. After a night there, your eyes burned, and your clothes and hair reeked of it. This smoke kept many of my friends away, friends I always felt a little sorry for. And during the legislative session it often proved to be the one place in town where you were safe from suits in various stages of drunkenness. A bar for whiskey drinkers, tough broads and unpredictable men. That's how I like to think of it.

Actually, it's more like a bar for tipsy rednecks, leering weirdos, trustafarians and people you went to high school with that you hoped you'd never see again. The kind of place you might go for an aperitif before dining on Oxycontin and pork rinds. In its defense, though, it is the kind of bar where people actually talk to each other, and once in a while you will have a great conversation with a stranger over a couple of beers. The live music is a real pleasure, especially if it's the Starline Rhythm Boys and the old-timers are dancing. And if they see you in there a few times the bartenders, always women, will be marginally less unfriendly to you.

But a Charlie O's without smoking is just all wrong - it's like eating a creemee with a spoon.

They still haven't taken down the sign that says "Charlie O's Cafe Tabac - Now Smokier Than Ever!," or the boxes of Swisher Sweets lined up behind the bar (The owner, self-described anarchist Jeff Jacobs, started billing the joint as a "cigar bar" when the legislature first looked at banning smoking in bars back in 2003.) It still smells like smoke in there, but it's just the ghost of cigarettes past. And with the smokescreen gone some worrying new smells are emerging, chiefly a sour, slightly rotten smell that might be years of accumulated swill and spillage. Maybe the smell will be enough to keep the squares away.

Welcome to The Vermizzle

2005-09-25T12:05:00.000-04:00

Hello. I've started this blog as an experiment in independent journalism. Most of the blogs I've done before have focused on cultural commentary and goings-on in my personal life (you can link to my last one, written while living in Manchester, UK, here.) This blog will aim to provide a tasty sampling of life in Central Vermont, with everything from quick-hit tips and reviews to original, self-generated features about cool stuff and interesting people in Vermont. With pictures and everything. I'd call it a blogazine if I didn't think that sounded hopelessly obnoxious.

And I promise to post a minimum of once a week, but ideally three times that ... we'll see. Maybe if I write it down it'll actually come to pass.