Sunrise, Solstice

Melissa tells me that the sun is already up at 5:30! Indeed, weather.boston.com confirms that the sun will rise at 5:31 tomorrow! This is one of my favorite differences between Boston and New York: the summer days are 30-50 minutes longer. (And October through April is gray).

Shit! I didn't think this started happening until mid- to late- June. One of my pipe dreams during a particularly miserable summer was to wake up and do a bike ride every day at sunrise. I never got up once, and I haven't had an operable bike since August.

I need to get up early tomorrow, and then I need to get a new bike.

Overheard in Davis Sq Station

In aggravated tone: "..so then the caups tell me I beat my grandmother with a plant..."

Wally's on Tuesdays

Wally's on Tuesdays is the place to be for serious music. They don't carry name-brand stuff; instead, the heavy r&b-funk-jazz that is played seems to come from far deeper in the well that commercially sanctioned music is skimmed from. If you are a musician or aspire to be one, the effortless actions taken by the players, who change week-to-week, can often damage your ego (in a way that can only be repaired through practice, practice, practice). At Wally's, talent and legend well up in the brownstone walls nightly...and there's never a cover.

Wally's at Closing Time on Flickr (rb).
Wally's official site (redesigned).

Last or Second to Last Red Line

Three out of four consecutive nights.

saturday night

that's that.

it's over.

SCARY AND DEPRESSING WINTER BOSTON!

Fantasized about June 8th.

It came this morning....7° on the way to Logan, with the massive, opaque plumes of steam moving glacially slowly through the blank, promiseless sky. Awesome power.

I love snow.

Not powdery, silent, country snow. Nor skiing snow. Urban snow. We've had three storms in the last week in Boston, and there are three- and four-foot heaps of ice and snow everywhere. White is the cure for gray. When the dull skies don't keep their promises for weeks, that's when I worry. Thank you, snow. Fuck you, S.A.D.

Overheard in Logan

Pastiche of quotes from young Korean-Amerian male in white hoodie with shaved head, screaming into cellphone about two feet from my head.

HOW OLD AM I? I'M A GROWN-ASS MAN, BRO. I BEG THEM, SEND ME TO IRAQ, SEND ME TO IRAQ. I GOT CLOSE QUARTERS COMBAT TRAINING. I'M GETTING TRAINED BY TWO NAVY SEALS, BRO. I'M KOREAN, BUT I LOVE MY FUCKING COUNTRY. I WANNA DIE FOR MY COUNTRY. I'M SICK OF READING NAMES IN THE NEWSPAPER OF THESE PEOPLE DYING OVER THERE. WE'RE COMING INTO A GENERATION WHERE THE ONLY WAY TO BE ANYTHING IS TO DIE AND HAVE YOUR NAME ON A WALL OR A FUCKIN GRAVESTONE. THAT'S THE ONLY WAY I'M GONNA MAKE MY PARENTS PROUD. SEND ME TO IRAQ. I'LL DIE, BUT I'LL KILL A COUPLE NIGGAS BEFORE THEY KILL ME.

Big Dig adds new layer of coddling for suburban commuters.

As if the $15b price tag, increased carbon emissions, and huge encouragement of driving to work alone were not enough, the Big Dig will now pander to drivers who use cell phones--by allowing all cell phone customers to pay $7.6m to add reception-providing cables to the tunnel walls. The Globe reports that many drivers who "multitask" may now "be able to chat on their cell phones uninterrupted." Massachusetts Turnpike officials, who stand to gain a lot of rent from this development, claim that cell phones in the winding tunnels won't create threats to safety. But the Globe reported on an activist's investigation into the tunnels' high crash rate on July 24 and published a reader's letter supporting the activist's work on July 25.

We need to get people out of their cars. We need to cut down emissions in Urban Boston. We need to encourage safer driving through a statewide headset-only law. This development makes accomplishing any of those goals seem a little less possible.

Body Splattered on Congress Street in Soulless Southie

I really didn't want to be in a cab this morning, and when the Terminal A ATM turned out to be out of cash, I just took the Silver Line. In the glass and glitter part of Southie were many flashing lights, belonging to Boston, Massport, and State Police vehicles. In front of the building that Silver Line buses pass through, a lump under a white sheet with a spurt of escaped blood slowly drying on the dewdamp asphalt. What happened?

Large Northeastern City Takes Valuable Harborfront Property and Uses it to Expand Port

And it's Boston. This is awesome!

In the Northeast, we never get new industrial stuff to photograph. But as usual, the private development on public land is being run by at least one ex-state official, just like the MBTA commuter rail. And the Globe illogically uses the words "cement" and "concrete" interchangeably in its article.

I know that's why you come to my blog. To read about the difference between cement and concrete.

Now I got worry.

It's been pretty much dark out all day. The cars have their headlights on. I have all the lights in my living room on so I can see my work. Six more months of this will be bad. I can either hope for good weather (HA), or try not to work by myself in my house every day.

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."

Blessed with another autumn day.

It's June 14--59° and cloudy. Just like the day before. Whenever I REALLY start to like it here in Boston, the weather strikes.

On another note, we are one week from the summer solstice. My plans to wake up and see the amazingly early sunrises--around or before 5am, which we never had in New York--have been repeatedly thwarted by my inability to get out of bed.

Capturing Scary and Depressing Winter Boston

You have to land on a redeye from at least as west as Denver, completely exhausted, to see it. It has to be about 7:29 a.m., with the useless February sun just having risen. It has to be at least ten degrees below freezing, with the air so thin that any exposed part of your body feels ready to explode into the icy vacuum. The smokestacks of the Mystic River power plant in Everett and the US Gypsum plant in Charlestown have to be blasting aternating columns of steam and haze directly upward, at opposite ends of the faded Tobin Bridge. This is just setting the stage for the ride out of the airport. As your cab navigates the snaking ramps to the Sumner Tunnel, you catch a glimpse of all the hundreds of pointed woodframe rooftops in East Boston, then see the sun's weak rays reflecting off the anonymous and and unidentifiable skyscrapers downtown.

How to pack it all into one shot or series of shots?

This is what I think about as summer begins to arrive.

I need a tripod, an arctic suit, and an elevated vantage point in East Boston to nail this.

No Maps of Urban Boston?

It's amazing that there are no maps on the web showing the ring of smaller (but very urban) cities that ring Boston--like Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Quincy, Chelsea, Revere, Brookline, etc.--in their proper context.

I'm not looking for a map of "Greater Boston," which includes all the suburbs clear to New Hampshire and Worcester, or a map of "Boston Proper," which includes only neighborhoods in the smallish municipality of Boston.

The municipality of Boston has about 600,000 people, but when you add up the populations of the ringing cities, you find that the urban agglomeration has about 1.2 million people.

However, with no centralized government, planning suffers. And there are no maps on the web that I can use to show my brother neighborhoods he might want to live in.

F. Star Market

No one seems to realize how overpriced Star Market in Porter Square is. I guess it has something to do with the clientele: yuppies who will pay whatever things cost. I stopped in to buy orange juice last night. A carafe of OJ usually costs $2.50. Not here. $4.69.

That's an additional 88% for nothing (except, maybe, "convenience"). I call it the Cute Yuppie or People Watching Surcharge. But we all know that Market Basket has better peoplewatching, and we all know orange juice should not cost $4.69.

Overheard on 88 bus, Friday evening.

"I mix Heineken with vodka. BAD mix, nigga! That shit FUCKED up my stomach! BAD mix, nigga! Not gonna mix that again."

Doing business in Boston is as easy as ripping your own heart out with your bare hands.

Cost of Aqua Teen Hunger Farce in Boston, versus unexpected costs incurred by Turner Broadcasting in major American cities:

Austin $0
Atlanta $0
Boston $2m
Chicago $0
Los Angeles $0
New York $0
Philadelphia $0
Portland $0
San Francisco $0
Seattle $0