Word: pavements
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...hawker. "You have to pay the lineman." Simultaneously, other collectors are making their way through Dhaka's bazaars. In a wholesale vegetable market inside Kawran Bazaar, thugs belonging to a local Mafia collect daily payments from shopkeepers, which are calculated with impressive precision. A shopkeeper squatting on the pavement has his shop space divided into plots of 3 ft. by 3 ft., and is levied $3.50 daily for each plot. Those whose shops are beside the road, and closer to the trucks that download and pick up wholesale produce, have to pay two-and-a-half times more...
Noise can be controlled to an extent, depending on the source. Some of the biggest sources of ambient noise are highways and roads, but the cause is less honking horns or gunning engines--though those play a role--than tires hitting pavement. Pliable rubber making contact with asphalt doesn't seem as if it would produce a lot of noise but in fact it does, and in a lot of ways. As any spot on the tire strikes the highway, it hits with the thunk of a little rubber hammer. Also, the patch of tire that's in contact with...
...real pleasure. There’s something primal about it: the extension of the long muscles of your thighs, the swing of your knee’s hinge, the kick at the apex of your stride, the roll of your foot’s fine, differentiated bones against the pavement. Walking allows you to think: Charles Dickens, I read once, often walked 20 miles a day and would come back brimming with new characters, dialogue and melodrama. And Dickens did it in the days before really comfortable footwear. Too, walking provides a friendly view of the world. When you walk...
...years ago, ex-Pavement guitarist Spiral Stairs released All This Sounds Gas, a wonderfully post-indie record that was equal parts Neil Young and early U2. Comprised of shaky-yet-deeply-felt lyrics and guitar lines that lazily pointed at the sky without ever gathering the momentum to soar, the music lodged in the brain despite its modest ambitions...
...best things about Gas was that it definitively wasn’t a Pavement album. The same cannot be said of Monsoon. Though Stairs rarely achieves Malkmus’ free association lyricism, his decidedly indie delivery is couched in undistinguished material that sounds like Pavement B-sides. There are some more upbeat moments: “Caught In The Rain” features one of Stairs’ bummed-yet-cheery choruses while “Line It Up” musters a strut that the rest of Monsoon only gestures towards...