Being Young is Easy (By Yourself)

I just had the greatest date, with myself. It involved about 14 miles of biking, the Edward Hopper exhibit at the MFA, the Ingrid Michaelson/Jenny Owen Youngs "anti-folk" double-bill at the Paradise Lounge, and a scallion pancake in Brookline.

First, I decided to finally see whether the Hopper hype was worth it. Left at 7:03 for the 8pm showing and made it there in only 30 minutes flat. Shame on the MFA for not having a single bike rack. World-class my ass.

I give you my notes from the exhibit, unaltered and uncensored:

"b. 1882
sold 1 painting 1st 41 yrs

[The Lonely House, '23]

illus/printmaker until '41

ALL OF THESE
PAINTINGS ARE
REALLY PHOTOGRAPHS

shards of past--surrounded by extremely rich-looking people--their offspring give them away

wall words continually use "vernacular" and "middleclass" interchangeably...could you do that once?

'John Sloan's lusty nudes were the working-class counterparts to Hopper's more withdrawn middle-class women'???

Screen in NY Movie="gray, not silver, gray," from something I wrote

FACES VIEWING NIGHTHAWKS

TEXTURE OF
THE SURFACE
OF THE
IMAGE
"

I started thinking about grind and how Hopper ground and I wanted to write new grind. In the guestbook, at the end of the exhibit, I wrote:

[Name:] RB 7/25/7
[Comments:] GRIND.

They didn't have any little magnets of "Sun in an Empty Room," because it was a suicidal painting, so I didn't buy any magnets. I retrieved my bike from a parking meter post.

Close enough to the Paradise Lounge, I figured I would at least check out the show DB had let me know about: Jenny Own Youngs with Ingrid Michaelson opening. The girl:boy ratio was about 15:1, no joke, so I just hung out with a Maker's. Jenny was an excellent musician, but her performance seemed unfortunatley anticlimactic after the POP! of Ingrid Michaelson and Allie Moss. At the show neared its end, I left and got a scallion pancake across the street in Brookline, after reading a very decent Weekly Dig article on scallion pancakes between sets.

When I returned to the Boston side of Comm Ave, all was dead and the musicians were loading up their autos. I wanted to talk to Allie Moss but she was on her cellphone. She looked at me as I unlocked my bike and then I biked BU Bridge/Memorial Drive/Harvard Sq/Porter Sq/North Cambridge/Teele/home with no lights and didn't get killed and now I'm typing this shit because, as everyone says at work, "I feel compelled to."