ABBQ: Great Success!

I'm snowed in here in Somerville and just posted ALL of the good photos from ABBQ. I'll be blogging many here over the next few ...years. Photos look better on black anyway.

I'm also going to try embedding a slideshow here, which you can mess around with:

ABBQ1

There is much to be thankful for this year, and I am really excited about being home in New York City for the holiday. We'll have the Third Annual CPCCPC and two Infrastructure rehearsals. Plus, I'm doing a Dexter Season 3 marathon with my little bro.

Just two weeks after Thanksgiving is ABBQ1, my group's first Austin BBQ road trip. Rob L. recently sent along a link to Texas Monthly's "quintessential, quinquennial review of the 50 best barbecue joints in Texas."

They've plotted all 50 places, plus honorable mentions, on a Google map. Last night, I printed off the area around Austin, cracked open a Smuttynose Old Brown Dog, and started planning.

Three days of cue. Plus Dale Watson at the Broken Spoke. I don't think you can fit much more Austin in a weekend.

The plan so far:

Carolina Bar-B-Q, Statesville, N.C.

When I first passed through Statesville on the interstate, late on Tuesday night, I could tell that it had enough exits to be a decently sized town. That meant there would be good barbecue.

Sure enough, the NC Barbecue Society website had an entry for Carolina Bar-B-Q there. I stopped in on the 3-hour drive back to Charlotte the next night.

Here's what happened:





My waitress was great. She was from Buffalo and had moved to NC to escape a bad relationship. That's the nice thing about America, I said. You can just keep moving on until you use it all up.

After I'd eaten, I overheard one of a group of working men order a buffalo wing dinner. This was the first time I'd been in a NC joint that combined barbecue and buffalo. I'm still curious about that buffalo. I wonder if the waitress brought it with her.

I hadn't made the connection at the time, and so I didn't ask. Before bringing the check, she sold me on taking dessert to go. I brought a styrofoam cup of fresh cobbler--half cherry and half blackberry--to my hotel room in Charlotte.

There really is nothing better than watching three horsemen ride past an abandoned, partially collapsed gas station during a driving thunderstorm.

Well, you could always take pictures of the scene developing.




Yes, folks, it's NCBBQII Part X.

Rob L. and I were drifting about the rural byways of coastal Carolina on a sweltering Sunday afternoon when we happened upon this gem: Latinos Gas Station in Chinquapin, NC. Where is Chinquapin?


Does it matter?

Probably not. What did matter, though, was the the station seemed to be retreating into the earth. The canopy over the pumps had collapsed, tearing the pumps from their moorings and, in fact, tearing one of them apart We ditched the car in the thick grass on the side of the road, and I began shooting from many different angles.



Almost instantly, the sky turned dark and opened up. Gigantic raindrops began pummeling the hot asphalt. Rob pulled the car closer to me, but I just kept shooting. My hair, shoulders, and camera got soaked, and I tried to keep the water off the business end of my lens. But the darkness provided an eerie feeling and I wanted to capture it.



I had just wiped off my lens and gotten back down low to the ground when a cry came from up the road: "Hey! Take a picture of us!" Three soaking wet horsemen emerged almost silently from the woods via a side street, and rode on past the abandoned gas station without ever once looking at the lens.



Yes, it was slightly surreal, but surreal is what these trips are all about.

Rob and I reached the ocean a few hours later, then spent the night in Wilmington as the rain poured down. When we awoke, it was Monday and we had to get home. Our northward route, which we planned to take us back to the Skylight Inn, also took us back through Chinquapin. There, Latinos Gas Station was basking in the sun once again.

Still More NCBBQII! Part 9: Knightdale, a North Carolina Town

Knightdale is one of many rural American towns caught in an identity crisis, and a perfect setting for serious American fiction. Formerly very rural, it's being subsumed into the suburbs of Durham. New money, sprawl, and housing subdivisions are encroaching on working farms. And the farms themselves are no longer staffed by American citizens. Mexican tiendas ("stores" in Spanish) serve as tiny bus terminals for the daily, 2,000-mile bus journeys that migrant workers take back to Mexico. They often pop up in former gas stations or general stores, sometimes right downtown.

So how does BBQ survive in this changing environment? It keeps up with the times. Knightdale Seafood and BBQ, first of all, has more than barbecue on its menu. And, it has moved from its downtown, small-town digs to a brick building out in the sprawlscape on a street called Money Court, next to a gas station and between two strip malls:



It's also open on Sunday, which is how we wound up there after waking up at noon in Chapel Hill and finding it to be damn near 100 degrees outside. We hadn't drank much at the concert the night before, but after eating nothing but smoked pork and vinegar for two days, we felt rather hung over anyway. Nonetheless, we started calling BBQ joints from our hotel to find out who was working on the sabbath. Most restaurants are family-run and closed on Sunday, so one has to be careful.

Knightdale was open, and serious hunger pangs set in on the 20-minute ride over. We found the place easily and were surprised by its Cracker-Barrel-like decor. After observing the huge, church-going family chowing down in their Sunday best, I took a look at the tattered menu...


...and against my better judgment ordered the chicken and pork combo with some type of potatoes and corn. We were back east: vinegar-pepper sauce appeared on the table along with the hushpuppies. The chicken and pork were good, but I could barely eat them. BBQ fatigue had set in after meals at B's (Greenville), Skylight Inn (Ayden), Roland's (Beaufort), Dillard's (Durham), A&M Grill (Mebane) and Lexington Barbecue No. 1 (Lexington).

I just sat there, dipping my hushpuppies in the vinegar sauce, chewing on cornmeal and ignoring my meat.


This would be the final new BBQ joint of the trip. From here, we set out on a sweltering Sunday afternoon land cruise of very rural eastern NC. I will remember some of the images we saw and created for a very long time.

Part X is next!

TRANSPORTES JUVENTINO ROSAS -- Main Street, Knightdale, N.C.

SALIDAS DIRECTADAS TODOS LOS DIAS A MEXICO

SAN LUIS POTOSI, JALISCO, GUANAJUATO, MICHOACAN, QUERETARO, HIDALGO

More blogging on this town and others like it coming soon.

NCBBQII Pt 7: Lexington Barbecue No. 1

Our hearts race as we pull into the packed parking lot that we have finally found for the second time. The white woodframe restaurant is still open and bustling--no chance of them closing on us this year! I slam my camera against the car door with nervous excitement as I exit the vehicle and stumble to my feet. I'm here; we're there!


Going Home Happy, 2008

Arriving at Lexington Barbecue No. 1 this past May was like meeting a famous artist whose reputation I'd long admired. The highwayside eatery is perhaps the most famous barbecue establisment in North Carolina, the most preeminent purveyor of what is known as Lexington or "Western" style barbecue. While barbecue aficionados will point out that no simple distinction exists between Eastern and Western styles, western cue often uses ketchup or tomatoes in both barbecue and cole slaw. Western cue also tends to use pork shoulders instead of the whole hog. To me the following characteristic is a requirement for all true barbecue: the meat must be smoked over hickory coals.

As the menu states:


This is the True Lexington Style Barbecue, 2008

We use pork shoulders only. They are cooked about nine hours over hickory and oak coals. We salt the meat before cooking but we do not baste. This is the true Lexington Style Barbecue.

People take this stuff seriously. After walking through the very green, 1950s-era counter and checkout area, we're seated at the first table in the wood-paneled dining room. Just across the aisle, a family says grace as they are served their Saturday dinner. Of the two granddaughters present, one receives an order of chicken tenders and the other, the one closest to her grandmother, receives a barbecue platter (chopped pork, fries, red coleslaw). Both children become immediately engrossed by their meals.

The grandmother leans over to the closer granddaughter, and says softly, "I'm really glad that you like barbecue."

Barbecue Family, 2008

And this is what's all about:

Lexington No. 1's Product, 2008

I hope you can find a thousand words within that picture, because there really is no way to describe the food other than to say that the individual elements represent perfection and the whole a delicate synergy achieved over many years of cookery. Can you imagine the subtle smoke flavor and tenderness of pork smoked for nine hours? Does the red hue in the slaw communicate the tang of vinegar and ketchup found there? Does the golden tincture of the crinkle-cut fries convey their crispiness and how they pair perfectly with the slaw, ketchup, or barbecue sauce? And what about the hushpuppies? They're not in the shot, but it doesn't matter: refills are free.

And those hushpuppies soak up the bitter-tasting house sauce perfectly:

Smokehouse Barbeque Sauce, 2008

Rob and I both agreed that our meal here totally delivered. It was everything we had heard it would be, and a sharp contrast from our first experience here. Back in 2006, we were heading east from Greenville, where B's was closed for July 4th. We got a speeding ticket along the way, and had the usual hard time finding Lexington No. 1, which is located near a junction of two rural highways where everything looks exactly the same. When we finally arrived, the parking lot was deserted and our hearts plunged through the car floor when we realized that it too was closed.

But our planning paid off this time. As we exited, we saw all types of local folk getting take-out orders at the lunch counter...


Lunch Counter at Lexington No. 1, 2008

...and the parking lot was still packed. Above the adjoining smokehouse, the half dozen shiny, rusty exhaust pipes, their brick bases covered with seeping wood tar, belched heat into the dwindling daylight as we loaded ourselves into the Taurus and shipped off with only one destination in mind: the night.



Smoker Stacks, Take Three

A&M Grill, Mebane, N.C. (From NCBBQII Pt VI: The Westward Quest to Lexington)

Nestled away in a tiny mill-town that's slowly being taken over by migrant Hispanic workers, A&M grill is a strange place. On a Saturday afternoon, its dining room was largely devoid of humans but teeming with flies. The barbecue here has a strong smoky flavor that seems strangely unaccentuated by the thick, peppery red sauce slathered on top.

This place was closed during NCBBQI in 2006, so we had to stop back in this past June. As always, click on the thumbnails for larger images.

Paradise and Lunch

Every American citizen should have to own a copy of Ry Cooder's Paradise and Lunch. I listen to it about three times per day when I'm home. It's just that good. It makes me wonder how anyone could have been talented enough to create it.

From NCBBQII Pt 5: Dillard's Bar-B-Q, Durham, NC

Full set on Flickr.

From NCBBQII Pt 5: Dillard's Sign, North Side

From NCBBQII Pt 5: Twin Meals at Dillard's

From NCBBQII Pt 5: Dillard's Barbecue

Full set on Flickr

That's supposedly South Carolina-style barbecue--it's yellow because of a heavy dosage of either mustard or mustard flour. Dillard's definitely provides service with a smile and a full array of sides. Their unusually spherical hushpuppies taste almost like donut holes.

Philly, Continued: DiNic's Italian BBQ

I was in for quite a surprise today when I walked into Downtown Philly's Reading Market for lunch. When I saw a stall advertising brisket and pulled pork, I figured it was some type of northern, gas-cooked, imitation barbecue. That was going to be good enough for a quick lunch. What I found was something very different: a new-to-me style of barbecue true to both American and Italian American traditions.

Fifteen minutes on line were worth it. Though the meat at DiNic's is definitely gas cooked, it's tender as hell. Stacks of cooked shoulders and brisket line the counter, waiting for the knife. Here, it's not so much the flavor of hickory coals that give the meat its flavor, but the Italian accoutrements. Both beef and pork sandwiches get a splash of a thin "gravy," which had more than a hint of apple cider vinegar. I also had them throw on some of the options. Upon request, the sandwich maker lined my sub roll with slices of sharp provolone. I also got roasted green peppers and "greens" (choice of broccoli rabe or spinach--I always get the rabe). The buttery garlic flavor of the rabe soaked right into the chopped pork shoulder.

I have to wonder if there are other places that serve this kind of BBQ in Philly or if DiNic's is one-of-a-kind.

Speaking of Mid-Atlantic BBQ, the Amtrak magazine clued me in on the Baltimore Pit Beef. If you want to read about that, open Arrive Magazine here and use the TOC to open up to page 66.

Two cameraphone shots of DiNic's Italian pulled pork sub:



I may have to go back tomorrow with my real equipment.

NCBBQII Part The Fourth: From Ayden to Beaufort and Back

It was still the first day of our trip, a Friday. We'd had unbelievable experiences driving from DC to B's and then down to Ayden. For the rest of the day, we explored the rural east, discovered a large industrial port complex in Morehead City, got some alright cue at Roland's in nearby Beaufort, then took a dip at Atlantic Beach. The sun was setting fast, so we rolled up the unlit backroads back to Greenville and discovered an unexpectedly vibrant bar scene there. The gin and beer were basically free, so I took full advantage.

Here are the best photos from this leg of the trip. Click a photo and you can see it larger on Flickr.


Guns, Knives & Tits


Barn Trio


Barn


Topless Barn



Christian Cream Donuts, New Bern, NC


Worship Him (Store) Near New Bern, NC


Beaufort, NC Fire Dept Ford C-Series Reserve Pumper


Beaufort, NC Fire Dept GMC Brigadier Pumper


Roland's BBQ, Beaufort, NC


Hushpuppies at Roland's BBQ
This is what hushpuppies are supposed to look like--not that crap you get at Redbones.



Roland's House BBQ Sauce, Beaufort, NC


Birds, Atlantic Beach, NC


JESUS IS LORD


HOLY HOUSE OF GOD


Handshake


Rob L at Quality Inn, Greenville

The next morning it was on to the Research Triangle for some South Carolina style 'cue, then on to Lexington for some of Lexington No. 1's famous product.

Stay tuned...

Two Evenings on the Mississippi

Because I'm extremely stressed and am experiencing typical life conflicts, I'm uploading twenty pictures of Mississippi River traffic that I took in New Orleans this March. That was a good trip with what I'd call creatively used downtime. Between convention and dinner, I'd walk down to the riverwalk, buy an Abita draft in a plastic cup, and sit down with my camera. Just like my adolescent days in McNeill Park in Queens, though I wasn't a beer drinker then.

Go to the photoset for more detail.

Looters WILL be shot, Take Two

Take One here.

Flag of the Bywater, New Orleans

This old flag survived Katrina and who knows what else...

Engine 9, New Orleans

From this past March.

NCBBQII Part The Third: Return to The Barbecue Capital of The World, The Skylight Inn, Ayden, NC

Pit Boss Working the Cleaver, July 2006

North Carolina barbecue is a complex tradition. For that reason, it's a good thing that nothing ever changes at the Skylight Inn. Hidden on a side road in the farm town of Ayden, the Skylight serves up whole hog barbecue in a way that no other commercial establishment I know of does. The place has been there for decades, but in our two visits, nearly two years apart, the only thing that changed was the uniforms on the employees.


Pit Boss Working the Cleaver, May 2008

Anyone can read up on the Skylight: it was crowned the "barbecue capital of the world" by National Geographic in either 1979 or 1988, depending on your source, and since then, it's been featured in GQ and People. But the crowd is totally rural: decent, Christian-shirt-and-cap-wearing people of two varieties, white and black. That said, race and class happen to be irrelevant in barbecue. And while the Skylight Inn's presence in the national consciousness is clearly the result of and evidence of the intelligentsia's visits to Ayden, I've never seen another out-of-towner there.


Waiting for Barbecue, 2008

The Skylight Inn produces four things: whole hog barbecue, truly unique cornbread, a simple and sweet coleslaw, and requisite sweet tea. You can't buy anything else and the recipes never change. So what's so different about their food?


The Product, 2006

Obviously, the barbecue is the centerpiece, and to an outsider, it conveys a sense of strangeness that can't be forotten. The Skylight Inn's pit boss, who has apparently worked there many years, cooks whole hogs over hickory coals for several hours, then hand-chops every usable piece of pig on a giant wooden cutting board adjacent to a similarly sized wooden trough. The cutting board is in the kitchen, and the trough is in the dining room.

He picks meat off the bones--including the skull--then pours both white and cider vinegar, salt, and hot sauce over the steaming meat...

...and blends and chops it all together with the rhythmic pulse of his cleaver. Chop chop chop chop chop. When the mix is consistent and perfect, the blade of the cook's cleaver pushes it from the cutting board to the trough, where front end employees load up paper trays of barbecue.


On our second visit, we observed the cook scoring sheets of brittle pigskin, then chopping it into tiny bits, then blending them into the more succulent meat. This is what it looks like in the end:


The Product, 2008

It is indeed the pigskin that gives the Skylight's barbecue its most oddly appealing attribute: the crunch factor. The first time I ate there (on NCBBQI, July 2006), I feared that I'd break a tooth on a bone fragment or piece of cartilage. But I soon learned that nothing unchewable goes into the Skylight's barbecue. Smoked pigskin pushes back a bit on your teeth with a faint crunch, but it's nothing you can't handle. And the unique blend of meat and skin serves as an ideal sponge for the pickled pepper-laden cider vinegar found on every table in the dining room, not to mention the individual condiments that are mixed into the barbecue by the pit boss's blade.


Cider Vinegar with Peppers, 2008

That leaves us to the sides. The Skylight's cornbread is strange and flat. I dare say it's almost flavorless, but the North Carolina Barbecue Society Website (and the book it quotes) claims that the very flat cornbread actually has "drippings" from smoked hogs mixed into the dough. I'll believe it when I see it: I like to have an everyman experience wherever I go, so I've never asked to tour the pits or the kitchen.

The slaw is simple, green, and sweet. It's very finely chopped, and neither watery nor thick. It's a perfect accompaniment to the meat.

Outside, relics like this sign...

"If It's Not Cooked With Wood...," 2006

...bear silent witness to the traditions that are upheld at the Skylight Inn. Will the traditions continue? It seems that the pit boss, that frequent subject of my photographs, is truly the man whose craft and dedication keep the place going. Who will take over when he is gone? Who will get the coals going at 4am and babysit the smoking pigs for hours, then chop them up for hours more, then dispose of the burnt coals and select the firewood for tomorrow?


Pit Boss Selecting Firewood, 2008

A guest reviewer on a popular barbecue website suggests that they "train some Latinos" to carry on this tradition of extremely difficult work. (I'll be writing about Hispanics in the south in another post.)

I'm glad to report that the Skylight, at least right now, is what it has been, and reminds in our minds the king of Eastern Style barbecue.


Barbecue Capital of the World, 2006


BAR-B-Q KING, 2008

Additional photos are available on Flickr, from visits in July 2006 and May 2008.

NCBBQII Part The Second: The Race to B's Barbecue, Greenville, NC

It has no phone line, but it has a state road named after it. It only opens for lunch, and it closes as soon as the last scraps of smoked meat are sold. The anomalies and challenges surrounding B's Barbecue make it the grail of any barbecue quest, so we made it the first stop on our second North Carolina trip.

Now, about those challenges. First, you have to work around B's summer vacation schedule. Impossible! They have no phone or website. In 2006, we showed up late on a Saturday morning to find the place closed for a week. (Okay, it was close to July 4th.) Second, you have to get there before they run out of food. Greenville looks reachable on a map, but it's actually four and a half boring hours from D.C., where our NCBBQ tours begin.

This time, we did the requisite planning. We had to wake up hung over on a vacation Friday at 6:30 a.m., grab bagels, and book it southward from the District. I-95 is heavily policed in all of Virginia, so one must drive the speed limit. As the stereo in Rob L's Taurus blared blared Dale Watson and John Hiatt, the NC border grew closer and closer. Traffic jams in DC and road work in VA slowed us down, and a nervous silence pervaded the cabin of the auto even as country and blues emanated from its speakers. Would we make it to Greenville in time?

The gas needle moved leftward as our route took us over a very rural road. With eighteen miles to go, we were down to less than an eighth of a tank. Noon approached. Would we ever find a gas station between highways? If we ran out of fuel, could we hitchhike to the barbecue? I neurotically rolled up my window to reduce drag. Rob left his down. We drove on.

A rural outpost of three independent gas stations appeared; this was Belvoir, NC. One of the gas stations sold beauty supplies, and another was out of business. We gassed up at the third, where lunching farmers inside stared uncomfortably at our bright shirts. Quite the opposite of Texas, everyone wore baseball caps instead of Stetsons. Onward.

Around Belvoir, NC:



Like many small southern cities, Greenville is ringed by rural suburbs and thick summer verdure. We knew we were close to B's, right around noontime, when the restaurant almost literally exploded into sight. At a T-shaped intersection stood the white brick structure and its smokehouse, the latter bellowing even whiter smoke into the clearing. Cars and trucks and every type of human covered every available inch of ground. There were many nurses and paramedics from the nearby hospital, schoolteachers, delivery drivers, a road crew, and us. We ditched the car and got on (in) one of the two lines.

Eat-In:


Take Out:


Friendly natives, visiting their former home from Dallas, welcomed us into the line. They told us that they'd come at 1:30 the day before and found the place deserted--the barbecue had run out. As we moved slowly into the building, we discovered that there was a quite large and dimly lit dining room inside.

As the line made its way to the counter, we debated--again, neurotically--whether to get pork sandwiches or the chicken and pork combo. We were glad we chose the latter, for B's is the only place I've been to that gives its chicken and pork equal treatment. This means that instead of using a thick, tangy, tomato-based sauce on the chicken (like Stamey's in Greensboro does, for instance), B's douses its chicken with the same vinegar-based sauce or "dip" that the pork gets. Every joint in NC makes its own sauce, so it's hard to describe the faint variations, but B's is accentuated by bright flecks of a red pepper.

But enough about the chicken. The pork, of course, was perfect. B's barbecue was tender and almost smooth, with nary a bit of skin or bone to interrupt its texture.
Meals also come with two sides and corn sticks, a strange, fried cornmeal concoction. Like the more common hushpuppy, they seem designed to soak up vinegar-based sauces. For my sides, I got a boiled potato salad and coleslaw.

The pork and chicken combo:

B's sauce, served in old Crown Royal bottles:

Outdoor close-up:


We ate and ate and only got halfway through our meals. By one p.m., the crowd showed no signs of dissipating. Smoke still bellowed from the smoker. Cars and delivery trucks hunted for parking spots, and some ended up parking in front of neighboring houses.

The Smoker and Its Keeper (This is a Dignity Hunt photograph):


Yes, B's really has a state road named after it, though the road uses a different spelling of barbecue.


Though sated, Rob and I had more work to do: we had to eat lunch again. So we hopped in the car and drove down Route 43 to the Barbecue Capital of the World, the tiny town of Ayden, NC.

Notes on Alcoholic Munising Fish Operation

Transcribed from journal. Info on Munising here. Some details added in[].

-toothless, long-haired guy in [rubber] apron loading smoker with newspaper
-"go in. they're just in the back room cutting fish"
-2/3 of storefront abandoned
-32 gallon trash can of empty beer cans
-in back room, 2 guys in aprons chopping heads off fish. blood, guts everywhere.
-fillets on metal racks, bound for smoker
-guy #2 says they're just getting the smoker going. nothing ready.
-ok. how about the sausage?
-we're gonna make some. ready about 8pm.
-end up getting dry sausage oversmoked by guy #1's brother off the floor of a fridge. price goes from half to free, as long as we promise to buy some proper sausage the next time we pass through
-dry whitefish sausage makes excellent dip, [guy #1 says]
-as we leave, guy #4 arrives with a young girl and large dog. i feed a chunk of sausage to the dog.
-guy #4 enters the fish hut carrying 2 brown 30 racks of an unheard-of beer, something like Schwarz...

MATTRESS GALLERIE

This is from an industrial patch close to central Wichita that I have visited twice, once during the rb-DM KC SIEGE 2007 and once for work. The area continues to haunt my mind...stark functionalism amid the dense ruins of an expired landscape. Some of the ruins still work--like dirt-covered rails peering out from the surface of the earth--and some are not really ruins, like the steam-spewing factories and slick mainline tracks.

This is where I "Heartbreakingly miss[ed] a shot of a stray dog lapping blue water from between two rails amidst a backdrop of gray skies and gray hopper cars containing some kind of mineral or cement." I will never forget the image. I need to go back to this completely American place once again, not rushed, and walk around, and be stared at by the refinery workers in their yellow jumpsuits and threatened scowls, and be questioned by the police as usual, and steal better images than I've been stealing there.

Cargill Salad and Vegetable Oils Refinery, Wichita, Kan., Take 1

Cargill Salad and Vegetable Oils Refinery, Wichita, Kan., Take 2

Thank You Bellinger

KCMO.

Stamford

A conversation between rb and rb on one of the worst places in the world.

from Bellinger, Robert
to Rob Bellinger
date Jan 15, 2008 11:13 AM
subject exurban boom town

from Rob Bellinger
to "Bellinger, Robert"
date Jan 18, 2008 1:52 PM
subject Re: exurban boom town

work line between road and rail
new ubs
acela
suits in january

from Bellinger, Robert
to Rob Bellinger
date Jan 18, 2008 2:04 PM
subject RE: exurban boom town

garages everywhere

from Rob Bellinger
to "Bellinger, Robert"
date Jan 18, 2008 2:08 PM
subject Re: exurban boom town

the ground floor of every office building, present and future

from Bellinger, Robert
to Rob Bellinger
date Jan 18, 2008 2:19 PM
subject RE: exurban boom town

dozens of freezing central americans huddling together on an exit ramp between i-95 and the northeast corridor tracks,
provding tax-evading employers with easy on-off access to illegal labor

from Rob Bellinger
to "Bellinger, Robert"
date Jan 18, 2008 2:21 PM
subject Re: exurban boom town

no housing, just offices

every car three times the size it needs to be

from Bellinger, Robert
to Rob Bellinger
date Jan 18, 2008 2:32 PM
subject RE: exurban boom town

only the infrastructure remains at night

Traveling this holiday season?

Mass news media would like you to be nervous. Airport security doesn't work and Al Qaeda is going to blow up the mall.

Number of minutes watching TV news in LA hotel bar:

Less than fifteen.

Number of stories about fatal auto wrecks: 5
Number of stories about sexual predators: 2
Number of stories about O. J. Simpson: 1

PITTSBURGH

"Pittsburgh (PGH) a strange city--a downtown surrounded by nothing, laden with gothic & art deco, bearing the bite of salt and snow, a fabulously bleak place on a ninety degree day, as cinematic today as Smith proved it photogenic then.

"Worthy of further exploration; a great setting."

Summer Projects gaining momentum

Looks like we'll be back in the good ol' USA this summer. KC is gaining momentum fast, and promises to be big. DM and I are not sure of the route yet.

We're also working on the Buffalo Wing Festival and the CPCCPC07.