Wax Banks

Fall feeling.

Autumn is generally my favourite season of the year. A brisk fall day under a bright grey sky in sweater and hat is one of the best things. The first time you see your breath on evening air, balled fists jammed in coat pockets, you're not yet hunched into the New Englander's wintering posture of tucked chin and tense rounded shoulders...or the cutting cold wind off the Charles River just to piss you off a bit, hone your edge, ready you for the bitter hell of Boston winter. I love even those things. The right music helps; love too. If you can tell the difference you're not listening closely enough. I awoke from a two-hour trance to chiming guitars and the sky deepening from carolina to columbia to cornflower blue on its way to (I hope) the extravagant red of martian cities. I used to find myself in this situation all the time. The important thing, whether the sun's rising or setting and whether or not the music has yet found its way back from animated suspension to resolution and diminuendo and hush, is - the only thing is - will you listen to that -

Inspired by Mr SEK.

OEDIFICATION: to put out one's eyes in a fit of misplaced rage.

(I'd wanted to call it KENTISTRY but it turns out I'd misremembered Lear.)

Louie.

Louie from Brian Moore on Vimeo. (h/t Danielle!)

Do not call it Phenway for god's sake.

From our seats in the right field grandstand: Trey Anastasio destroys Boston.

Seated at counter.

She's perched on a stool at the chest-high counter overlooking the main body of the store, straight brown ponytail rubberbanded between her shoulderblades, blue jeans slung low and white knit blouse pulled up by her clerical posture to reveal the tiniest layer of baby fat on her lower back, skin suntouched and fine peachfuzz hair. Never looking up from her work. Denim legs dangle unconsidered or once in a while feet tap. She leans close over the counter writing in pen, looks up. Some faces broadcast a posture or mood or judgment, others reflect an inner state as if accidentally, like someone left an open mic to pick up conversation among the panelists before the seminar starts. She gathers her possessions, sits up, stands easily - an athlete's steps maybe - and walks round the rail to the stairs leading up, the bathroom her destination presumably. Eyes wide, almost melancholy, her face pale, the barest hint of a wattle behind her chin. What do you know without knowing? Only yourself: you rush in as shadow to fill the space where a life's light should be. Or you are the light that obscures others' angles and crenellations, makes everything daytime, softens all being's edges...oversteps day's borders and so vanquishes its meaning. And then while you wonder about eliding her identity she's - just - gone.

Eldritch MIT.

[Wrote this the other day. First, shaky, incomplete, rough, and altogether gleeful draft.]

Eldritch MIT

The Institvte has a long history of involvement in government programs, of course, and the government is still a major source of its funding. The noisy inrush of corporate money in the 1980's (centered on the Media Lab, at least - ha - in the media) earned the school negative publicity, but this was very much in MIT's interest - after all, the public would be a good deal less understanding about the school's spectrum of government-sponsored research initiatives. Indeed, military involvement in the school is the most run-of-the-mill form of government investment in MIT; less money has been spent in the Eldritch Science and Engineering program, but the impact of the program has been more far-reaching than that of even the splashiest military systems.

FOR INSTANCE: thought exists in the brain as electricity and passes through suspensions of complex, largely unknown media to affect physical matter. Human thoughts can of course be amplified and transmitted by normal electrical means, but it is well-known by eldritch scientists (and understood practically to the dismay of their counterparts in engineering) that eldritch media respond to qualities of thought understood discernible by few humans. Indeed it is speculated that the sense/translation capacity of eldritch media could enable a kind of eldritch computation, likely not directly adaptable to mundane human display/interface but able to characterize and untangle metaphysical (supernatural) systems and relations. Optimists in the field of eldritch studies project that a prototype eldritch computer could be functional inside of a decade. MIT scientists do know that other groups are dong similar experiments, though it's not known whether such progress has been made.

The difference between amplified and unamplified thought-signals, from the perspective of a medium of eldritch transmission, is analogous to the difference between a piercingly loud upper-register musical note and the burnished sound of a lower-register tone; if you can imagine remapping amplitude to frequency, think of eldritch matter and media as responding to chordal tuning rather than the content of a single neural signal. 'Second sight' has long been understood as a matter of 'seeing differently,' which noninitiates take to mean 'seeing more.' Again, this is to mistake volume for purity.

Devices to amplify and reconfigure eldritch stimuli are essentially mood organs, which alter the nature of thought, its contours, its musicality. Ritalin is a stimulant that speeds up the brain, syncs the rate of mental processing to the information throughput rate, and so enables deliberate thought - it slows down thought by speeding up the brain, and so focuses the user. Eldritch tuning is analogous to this cognitive reconfiguration; eldritch computation, when it arrives, will systematize the application of tuning methods to the human (and superhuman) brain.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: One of the more controversial initiatives to come out of MIT's eldritch sciences program in the last decade recharacterizes lycanthropy not as a blood disease of a single organism but as heightened receptivity to an atmospheric transformation, which induces something like a bit flip in the organism - actually removing the human self from this plane and replacing it with another creature via a metaphysical conservation law. In this framework, vampirism can also be rethought as serving not the human host but an extraplanar entity for which the human 'vampire' is himself nothing more than a vessel - with blood serving not as food but as a kind of interdimensional lubricant. In these terms vampirism isn't a disease but an unwanted responsibility to an unwelcome third party. This links up the 'demonic soul' and 'bloodthirsty lost human' theories of vampirism - the vampire's loss of moral compass is a form of eldritch Stockholm Syndrome, eliding the barrier between the host (the human 'vampire') and the rapacious vampiric entity and giving rise to a hybrid creature. In line with normal principles of eldritch embodiment, this elision manifests physically (and simultaneously!) as unnaturally extended youth and physical decrepitude within the most convenient physical framework, i.e. the vampire's (former) physical appearance, bone structure, etc. Study of the 'mysteries of the universe' - supernatural laws in other words - makes certain modes of physical transformation available to the supplicant, whether she's a psychically-sensitive human or a vampiric host, of course. But vampires are known to have easier access to these methods of transmutation, and can indeed suffer induced lycanthropy under controlled, amplified conditions (one of the key findings of the MIT lycanthropy initiative, though the lycan/vampire relationship fell outside the project's original ambit).

ELDRITCH GEOGRAPHY OF MIT: The Institvte's location across the Charles River places it within Boston's paranormal penumbra, but certain physical features of the campus do increase its suitability for eldritch research. The steam tunnels that crisscross the campus are laid out such that certain weather patterns, particularly certain confluences of coastal climate and lunar phase, yield much greater than normal amounts of eldritch gusting and pooling; the concrete superstructure of the tunnels masks a substructure of rare ferromagnetic substances not fully characterized by mundane chemistry.

(Yet another case of 'no such thing as bad publicity': media attention to BU's supercollider plan for south Boston handily drew media focus from an MIT plan to expand its subterranean extent by 150% over ten years, largely at the behest of the only-unofficially-titled Dean for Eldritch Studies. The Mayor of Boston is a powerful man with a good deal of influence over local comings and goings; the Mayor of Cambridge has long served at the pleasure of MIT and its larger neighbour to the northwest Harvard University, de facto co-regents of Boston's younger, smaller sister city. Eldritch Harvard is a subject for another day; suffice it to say that Harvard's focus has always been on more traditional arcane studies - alchemy, astrology, invocation, necrography, necrohistory, diabolism, etc. - and its more traditional scholarly scholarly has much in common with that of the great Oxford/Cambridge magical societies, whose members tend to dislike the rationalist approach of MIT's eldritch research programs.)

The tallest buildings in Boston (the new Hancock Tower) and Cambridge (MIT's Green Building, geographic center of campus) were designed by world-famous MIT graduate (and secret eldritch adept) I.M. Pei, who customarily produced two separate sets of plans for each building. The public documents are available from the respective municipal planning offices, while the secret and of course more accurate plans are open only to MIT adepts. The proper plans for the Harvard Bridge are open only to Harvard's arcanists, though MIT engineers determined in the 1920's that the Bridge serves as a walkway for the dead among other things.

HACKING: MIT's hacking community has always straddled fields of mundane and eldritch inquiry, and the best-known MIT hacker signs (Jack Florey, Irving Q Mojo, J Arthur Random) unwittingly honour arcane adepts of the late 19th century. Jack Florey in particular is well-known to lovers of fairy tales, though in mundane tales he goes by a different surname. Abstract 'hacker signs' spotted throughout MIT have historically been attributed to old-time tunnel hackers; their true purpose is magical and their provenance dates back, in the strangest cases, to before the founding of MIT itself in Boston in the 1860's. Of course MIT's present-day main campus in Cambridge wasn't built and opened until 1916.

And yet there are the signs, clear as night.

('Nevertheless, it moves.' --Galileo)

Like all brainy college students, MIT undergrads hold on to fanciful numerological traditions - Random Hall's 17, Tep's 22, the Discordian fives at East Campus, various fraternity signs, etc. But the hidden numerology of the campus is a good deal more interesting, and largely unknown among students, except to the research apprentices who generally end up bound to the campus all their lives in some semi-official capacity. What do you think drove Stallman mad, for instance? Or drove Lebling and Blank to reimagine the Colossal Cave as the Great Underground Empire? Or prompted Marvin Minsky - a madman and former prodigy who could allegedly play complex piano pieces backward after a single listen - to imagine his emotion machine, his Artificial (emotional) Intelligence, which is nothing if not a cosmic mood organ, an Overmind embodied only in hypothetical computational devices beyond the capacity of silicon and electricity?

Do you imagine that the symmetry of MIT's campus is accidental, or worse - ornamental? And do you suppose that the school's tradition of numbering its buildings is really just a navigational aid, when studies have long shown that humans typically retain lexical schemata more readily than numeric? Do you suppose the main lobby of MIT is numbered twice-five for...convenience?

No, of course not. You would never be so naive. Nor would MIT's hackers, crafty engineers that they are. Even among mundane MIT students there's long been a suspicion, an imaginative motive, that part of the campus remains hidden. 'Zork' is of course an encoding of this fancy, as is the 1980's fiction of 'Miskatonic Institvte of Technology.' The truth - that part of the campus exists outside the visible realm - can compel student hackers but is unlikely to be revealed by them, though the astonishing incidence of mental illness and suicide among MIT students might reflect unwelcome, unfathomable knowledge as well as preexisting emotional instability or normal college jitters and self-selecting social maladaptation. The central artery for MIT foot traffic is, after all, a hallway called the Infinite Corridor; since the key fact about that hallway is its impressive but decidedly finite length, we can label its name a juvenile fancy, or credit it with identifying something true and yet unseen. 'Infinite,' for most (mundane) users of the word, may as well mean nothing more than 'Beyond the visible,' and we can suspect that MIT's famous Corridor - the aorta of a hallway-network larger than any but the Pentagon's - might indeed stretch beyond normal sight.

The twice-yearly phenomenon of MIThenge sheds light (ahem) on the Corridor's true nature - two days on which the sun shines directly down the Corridor, blinding and bright and utterly breathtaking. The same phenomenon occurs in New York City, which naturally has its own arcane tradition. Like the odd structure and layout of MIT's tunnel network, the idiosyncratic lineation of MIT's aboveground Corridor refers to something other than itself. Built during the twentieth century's first great mechanical horrorshow, the 1914 outbreak of 'world war' which would give us chemical and trench warfare, MIT's campus layout reflects a common urge to rationalize and reorder the world, to stave off dark fancy that feeds on itself and the minds that give in to it. But the school's layout exists in dimensions beyond the merely spatial. Its physical array has metaphysical uses - serving a salad with a tuning fork misses the device's use but no one's stopping you doing it, and whatever the Corridor's purpose, it's not upended or subverted by women and men merely walking through it.

It is speculated that a system of complex formulae relates MIT's layout nomenclature (even-numbered buildings east of the campus center, rough increases as buildings radiate outward, mirrored pairs across the N-S axis of campus, etc.) to the absolute locations of buildings and certain eldritch-geographic characteristics. Inquiry into these matters would be aided by consideration of the design and construction history of MIT's campus, particularly in the years just prior to 1916. (Was the campus designed during WWI? What effect would that cataclysm have had on an American architect?) Special attention should be paid, in the course of such study, to the list of scientists' names which ring the inner green court of campus, and the layout of text on the walls of Lobbies 10 and 7 (and 10+7=?). The line connecting transmitters/receivers atop the Green Building and the Hancock Building should also be considered, as - (un)naturally - should the experiments that utilize the complex scientific apparatus atop Building 54, which location has long carried a ten-times greater fine for trespassing than the standard $50 for MIT's other rooftops. The sensitivity of the rooftop equipment explains the hefty fine, but 'sensitivity' refers in this case not to atmospheric phenomena but to something far less well understood...

Tea.

I'd like to note that unlike the thousands protesting some abstract liberal malfeasance (and, improbably, 'OBAMA'S WAR' - whichever war that is), when I went to the 'Tea Party' on the Commons this week I was actually drinking tea.

Keeping it so damn real it makes my soul itch,
wb.

Higher taxes? Come on!

I asked a couple of people at yesterday's Boston 'Tea Party' protest whether they were in the $250K+ tax bracket, and why so many middle-class people were complaining about higher taxes on the rich. Didn't get answers (though I did get called a filthy hippie!). Kind of awesome. Deeply, deeply stupid.

12/30/97 MSG.

One of the two or three best shows of the best touring year of a halfway decent rock band is on sale now in glorious soundboard format. What it is: canonical versions of 'Taste' and 'AC/DC Bag,' the bustout of 'Sneakin' Sally' after eight long years, a goofy '500 Miles' cover in the middle of 'Harpua,' an unfinished 20-minute 'Hood' so good you won't mind that it turns into 'My Soul,' and a half-hour improvisatory encore including a wild 'Frankenstein' and a triumphant 'Sally' reprise. An ideal introduction to the band as well - your digital stocking-stuffer for the young music fan in your family, right there.

I got my first copy of this show on XL-II from Dave Rainie and company at a local tape-trading party up in Porter Square in January '98, something like two weeks after the show - we daisy-chained a stack of tape decks and spun five or six simultaneous copies. It sounded perfect to me. I first heard electric Miles Davis (Live Evil, not exactly the easy stuff!) a few weeks later, and my destiny was written. Some of my fondest memories of college, those. Heh: I didn't even know where Porter Square was back then. Some days I think I still don't.

Ambiance.

I heard this [mp3] on WERS sometime in 2003 or so while driving through Kenmore Square, and nearly crashed my (ex-girlfriend's) car. It was the linear sum of several of my musical fetishes; it was like glimpsing the very top of a tall mountain through clouds and realizing the landmass you've been living on is in fact just a foothill (molehill?) Whenever I hear any a capella singers I ache for this tune. Far as I'm concerned it's the gold standard of...something.

The tune is 'Excerpts from "Rhapsody in Blue",' performed by Ambiance, a Sweet Adelines group that split up before I ever heard of 'em. You might die when you hear it. Or maybe not; but your wellbeing is your responsibility, not theirs.

Off to learn about just intonation, ciao.

Remember, remember!

There was a fellow standing behind us in line at the polling place, complaining incessantly about having to 'stand in this line after I've already stood in that one!' Like us, he'd been dropped from the voter rolls for some reason, and only got to fill out a partial ballot. Something to do with the census, I suppose. He bitched at a cop, at two poll workers, at the people behind him. I laughed aloud at him, which made my wife uncomfortable (don't laugh at crazy people, folks). Feet tapping, stepping out of line to look 'significantly' at the poll worker, repeating the same words over and over again. 'Sir, this is the process you have to follow,' said the cop. 'NO,' he responded. Well it worked when he was six, I guess, why shouldn't it work now? We guessed he was an autism-spectrum type; it'd be ungenerous but reasonable to guess that he's just an asshole. Well there are worse things in the world.

But the wait in line was pretty irritating. Still, the poll workers were friendly and enthusiastic, and we got our ballots maybe fifteen minutes after arriving at the polling place.

Two booths opened up side by side, and my wife and I entered at once.

Because of the presumed census snafu, we didn't get to vote in the local elections; we found out afterward that all five races on the state ballot are unopposed. Blah. So it was Questions One (drop the state income tax?), Two (decriminalize marijuana?), and Three (ban dog racing in the state?), the senatorial election (Kerry will win, so I threw my vote to the Libertarian as a multiparty advocate), and the presidential choice.

Nader's name was on there, as were some Green-Rainbow types, a Libertarian. Presumably the McCain-Palin ticket was listed, but I didn't see it. I hardly saw anything, frankly. I've never been so excited about participation in government - however rudimentary or superficial - in my life. There: Barack Obama and Joseph Biden.

I've filled out a lot of Scantron forms in my time, on various school and state exams, but have never felt in doing so that I was honoring the past or building a future. I voted for Kerry in 2004 and was glad to do so, but I was a little cynical about it - my vote didn't matter much after all (this is Cambridge). My vote doesn't matter any more this year than four years ago; Obama has Massachusetts locked up, of course. And yet.

I can never make up my mind about human nature. Some days it seems we're basically lazy venal selfish beasts, ready to swerve toward evil at the slightest provocation as long as our self-interest isn't obviously threatened; other days I recognize that people will rise to the level of the opportunities they're offered, will respond to honesty with honesty, will unite for a common purpose good or evil if it means they can draw closer to their brothers and sisters. I like the neatness of aphorisms like 'A Republican is a Democrat who's been mugged,' yet I didn't start voting Democrat until after I was mugged in Boston. I want to think that conservatives and liberals break down along some essential moral line that can be known - and gamed, if one is so inclined (oh well).

Half the time I think racism is a negative expression of the inborn desire for simple principles of association - understandable but sad, and to be overcome if possible by a process of acclimatization, education, fellowship. The other half I think growing up is a process of learning to fear for others and ceasing to be afraid for ourselves, and that the colour of one's skin only scares those whose development has been arrested somehow. (And then I'm reminded that children don't know hate, only wonder.) I have no illusions about the end of racism and fear, but I have absolute faith in people's ability to learn new things about one another, to discover new powers within themselves. Funny thing about us. You and I can learn together; we do so. What a thing that'll be.

Tonight I'll head over to Lindsey and Rugs's house with a group of friends, sit down with a bottle of wine, and watch the great wheel turn for a while. I'll try to remember, for once, to mark the time - to fix my memory, to make a treasure of the moment. I'm proud of Americans. I think Barack Obama's gonna be president, and I think he'll work hard and stay honest on the job. I feel like the sun's rising. I'm so proud of us, and I want this feeling all the time. Some feelings you have to go out and make. We can if we want. Yes, we - well, you know.

Excerpt from something in progress.

[Inspired by an astonishing piece from the very first issue of Outside magazine.]

I come to everything on a slant, straight lines seeming to curve into one another like arched backs. Massachusetts Avenue runs arrow straight through Central Square before curving down toward MIT, but riding fast along the eastbound curb I imagine the road as a bundle of fibers or cords converging to a point somewhere up ahead. I feel that I'm being watched; the road takes on a concave shape, dark asphalt like a mirrored lens. Pulling up at Albany Street I stop behind another rider, young, an MIT student I'm guessing - her hair unfashionably long and untended under a new red bike helmet, like a security blanket. A bent pylon falls over on the sidewalk and she glances up; I lean over, desperate suddenly to catch sight of her face. Is she -- But I'm not sure what I'm asking. She turns back toward the street, then looks to the far sidewalk, and I see her face finally: Untended. Hidden. My curiosity fades instantly; I kick the bike forward when the light changes and a block later she turns off, or I do. I feel nothing at all.

I had an opinion about Sarah Vaughan before I ever heard her sing. I thought that was important, then. I think it's important now to tell you that my opinion happened to be spot on. 'I'd rather be lucky than smart,' because lucky men look smart sometimes - but even a smart man can't change his luck.

At night sometimes I ride up and down Mass Ave hoping to catch sight of things without knowing in advance what they are. I learned the word flâneur in college; I was supposed to want to be that thing, but I've come to a state of being without the benefit of terminology. Now I just ride, and hope. But I generally don't catch things. Voyeuristically I'm top predator - the definition of 'voyeuristically' you might say - but a component of whatever fantasies animate me is that I'm also being watched. I wish to be watched but not seen. More than anything I wish to make my wishes known; not to validate the content of any fantasy, but to be allowed to allow myself fantasy's comfort. The thrill of orgasm all the time without the mess, is what I guess I'm saying.

Other nights I ride slowly through Harvard Square, between academic buildings and among professors' houses (and the back rooms where lecturers and adjuncts rent month-to-month). Stage lighting in every colour on every side. When the street is rainslick I focus on not falling over and the world seems to straighten up, spinelike. I worry too much about falling to let myself feel like sliding. When something is at stake. My fantasies are not that durable - they are their own place, not an overlay or layer of imagistic data atop the hand-and-foot world, and I am an isolationist when it comes to this imagined country of mine. I'm thirty pounds lighter there, and I've remembered to remember certain things that my oldening body has forgotten, starting with: I am a hunter. My fantasies aren't the jungle nor the sea. They're a goddamn nature preserve.

BBFITW.

Chivalry isn't dead, it's retarded. Not to say I'm finished practicing of course. But a good man gets to grouse, right? Point: if you haul your ass to Porter Square via bicycle for a nice brunch with the bride-to-be, check the goddamn weather first. Perhaps Boston is expecting wrath-of-god downpours today.

Perhaps you should be too, Galahad.

The rain goes one way, the hail goes another!

This weather is ridiculous! We're to have intermittent showers, thunderstorms, and hailstorms today - and through the window of this workspace I see the hail flying right-to-left, then bright sunshine, then the rain blasting left-to-right, practically horizontal. Great day for a bike ride if you're a goddamn iron golem (forgive me nerd gods). The real shame is that I left my reading glasses at home, so I can't stare at the laptop for too long without getting a headache.

When I do manage to look at it, I see in the upper-right corner of this stripped-down word processing program the following page number...

34.

...and below it the first of two key scenes featuring The Guy, The Friend, and The Girl, whose meeting will establish The Deep Problem, which will manifest as The First Problem. Which, as you'd expect, involves cheap video cameras and wannabe artists taking out frustrations on the innocent.

In the second scene she'll kiss the wrong guy, but there would never have been a right guy.

[Update: Make it 36, and the scene is too long, as expected. All the extra words are nothing but me, and (re)moving them will restore the scene's integrity - by getting me out of the way.]

Crowded House: Somerville Theater.

Crowded House play at the Somerville Theater tonight (Tuesday)! If you're in town, c'mon down to the show - against all laws of God and man, tickets are still available. Drop a line if you go, perhaps whiskeys could be tipped at the Burren or something?

I can't sleep so I'll tell you about Baby.

I can't tell whether I'm sunburned. Normally you'd say something snappy back, like 'Then you're probably not!' or quasi-medical, like 'Yes that's because the nerve endings are...' or 'Then you probably are!' (Amazing how content becomes intent.) But don't bother saying those things. There isn't a mirror down here that's usable at night, one of the oddities of our apartment. There's only the entryway mirror, and the overhead light near it is deeply-set in this ridiculous painted-black emplacement, which maybe focuses the light, and maybe someone at some point thought that was a whiz-bang idea (like the long stretch of living room outer wall with no window), but it very definitely is not/was not a whiz-bang idea. Point being the mirror shows you fuck all unless you've got the door open to let in daylight from the hallway, but - surprise - the door opens across the mirror. There's no answer so you learn to deal with whatever you look like.

Here's what I've been thinking about just now, then I'll tell you what I've been reading that's made me write this way all of a sudden. You can skip this paragraph if you're literary-minded, you asshole. I've been thinking that the little battery icon in the upper-right corner of my laptop screen, which never seems to stay full for long anymore, isn't about time as such. It indicates very roughly the percentage of battery power you've got left. But that percentage is only relevant if you have a sense of how long the thing normally lasts, and (or maybe or) how long you've been using the thing. So I've got "1:47 remaining" according to my computer, but I had to dig for that information. What it wants to give me, up front, is a number that's meaningful to it, to the machine, but as far as I'm concerned signifies only that I'm not the smart one here and I wouldn't know what to do with these percentages if one of them grew fangs, leapt up onto my pant leg, and bit me in the knowledge ass.

I've been reading The Wasp Factory. Go back and read the previous paragraph, it's about my laptop and it's got a twist ending, you won't see it coming!

I got to this maybe-sunburned state by playing outside all day in our gorgeous mid-spring weather, where by 'playing' I mean:

1) first literally playing starting around noon a/k/a Sunburn O'Clock, kicking a soccer ball and throwing a frisbee like it's 1986 again, though I don't think I really played with frisbees back then, preferring de-furred tennis balls and a miniature plastic football that maybe said 'Rice University' on it;

2) drinking a good (bad) amount of (bad) bourbon at a picnic-party, while being hustled by a little three-year-old kid who said we were playing War but was in reality making the game up as he went along, and he knew it, and I knew it, we knew we knew, if you know what I mean;

3) riding up to Porter Square to what I initially called a 'massage parlor' before I got the lingo down;

4) riding back to the picnic party where everyone had migrated indoors and while intoxicants were dispensed and stories swapped I leafed through some urbane fortunate's copy of the Real Book and goggled yet again at the economy of construction of 'Giant Steps,' you know what I'm talking about;

5) riding home but it was dark then so scrap it.

At home the GF and I conked out on the downstairs bed/couch after proto-conking out on the pile of brightly-coloured beanbag chairs, which were comfortable enough to lull into sleep but not so comfortable that you could really give in to it, hence 'proto-.' Did we have dinner at Christopher's while it was still light outside? Yes we did. Was the chicken burger fantastic? Yes it was (that artichoke aioli!). Was the Godiva chocolate liqueur drink perhaps a little...? Yes it was, a little. But she drank all but a sip of it and you'd be surprised, or maybe not, how much pleasure I take in watching her eat and drink, so I didn't mind mostly staying out of things where the chocolate was concerned.

I think I must have eaten a bunch of milk chocolate today because I'm just not tired. Or...is it the sunburn? Am I sunburned? I never stopped to find out. Well it kind of hurts the skin on my neck when I roll my head around, and I didn't put on a collared shirt until I came home to gussy myself up a little for the party. So the working hypothesis is: minor sunburn. What really (hahahaha) burns me is that I made a manful effort to put on sunblock before going out, even called the GF's attention to it like it was Baby's First Poo-Poo or something. Which, no, I don't suppose I would have been rubbing that on my bald spot now that I think about it. But in the heat of the moment, rushing out the door to go play in a field, how can you be sure? I don't even know what colour my skin is, how could I possibly know how I'd react to Baby's First Poo-Poo?

The proper way to begin the day, it turns out...

...is by waking in the middle of the night with awful heartburn, playing a mind-numbing video game for 45 minutes, watching some tango videos, returning to bed, lying there unable to sleep for more than an hour, then going for a weirdly uplifting 6am bike ride along the Charles with the Beatles doing their thing on the headphones. I saw one of the biggest goddamn centipedes I've ever seen on the way out of the apartment - it (the sight of it, not the actual centipede) nearly killed me; on the way in I looked for it but it was gone, and Chris Isaak's 'Wicked Game' kept things easygoing. Now, of course, I have that sleepless nausea feeling I associate with bothering to go to a 9am class (aah 6.034, I only attended you twice, and both times I regretted it), but since I've burned my excess calories for the day the world looks like it might spin my way for a damn change.

Actually now that I think about it the proper way to begin the day would be to do the above after a full night's sleep and a morning cup of fruity gelatin snack. You want it to be one way. But it's the other way.

Gone Baby Gone.

[No major spoilers in here; I recommend seeing this film, particularly if you've got a Boston-onscreen jones. Knowing too much about the structure of the film will rob you of one of its signal pleasures, so if you're at all interested in this flick, just go see it, and come back sometime.]

What a surprising film! Not just in terms of plot, though through the first half I didn't even guess at the final outcome. I mean in the craftsmanship: the casual intensity of the actors, particularly Casey Affleck's subdued observer-protagonist; the shocking, horrific simplicity of the violence; the fantastically detailed dialogue and monologues of the Bostonian characters, starting with Amy Ryan's complicated Oscar-nominated turn as a grieving mother - her final speech, 'It's like 9/11,' is as precise an imitation of working-class American interview-speak (Oprah-speak, Springer-speak) as I've ever heard; the unexpected comedy, intertwined (not just alternating) with unexpected moments of brutality or (yes) speechifying; the newfangled old-fashioned boy-n-girl detective pairing at the center of things, which plays off Affleck and Michelle Monaghan's youth to make a few tough points about Boston's infamous parochial bigotry toward the young, the 'inauthentic,' the soft.

All the supporting actors are good or excellent: Ed Harris does his intense thing, Morgan Freeman uses his saintly affect to ungentle effect, Titus Welliver and John Ashton and Jill Quigg nail down their characters with a few gestures. The accents aren't consistent among the stars (is it just me or did Welliver knock his out of the park though?) but Affleck has directed his actors with a rough-n-ready feel very different, as I recall, from that of the far more mannered Mystic River, which may be a better movie but gets a lot less close to the bottom of the Hub spiritually. (And never mind The Departed, best film of the three, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Boston - it's a Hong Kong story painted white, set in Boston for reasons of allegorical familiarity, not socioeconomic specificity.) Apparently Affleck cast many of his actors from Southie; it shows. And Monaghan and Affleck have a fascinating energy in their scenes together: I'm given to understand that Monaghan's gal-Friday/business partner, Angie, is a lot tougher and more substantial in the book, but she functions onscreen as both moral compass and ironic counterweight for Affleck's street-talking detective. Their pairing is the best thing about the movie; when it was over I found myself wishing I knew more about how they'd gotten together, what it was like for her living in their neighborhood, how she'd taken her role in what seems to be primarily his work (that's how his contacts and clients treat it anyhow...). The detectives/lovers might not have a Nick'n'Nora spark, but I recognize their relationship; for me it was the most accessible thing in a movie that eagerly pursues verisimilitude. Lovely work by all involved.

The whole thing isn't perfect, of course. The middle third of Gone Baby Gone gathers and pools, but the movie doesn't exactly take off running in Act Three either; the falling-domino plot-resolution climaxes windily, and by then the main thread of the story has lost some of its immediacy (we don't see Amy Ryan between midpoint and finish). As dark and ambivalent as the film's final scenes are, as beautiful as that silent shot of cop cars arriving is, the briskness and concision of the story come to feel a little like cheats by the end. And even with the neat plot structure and strong thematic line through the middle of the story, the second half doesn't have the unexpected crackle of the first part. And the plot, when you've learned all the details, is as implausible as any Detective Novel Backstory, less baroque than a Philip Marlowe tale but less believable than the pact-among-friends tale that animates Mystic River. The emotional lines in the film are clear and stark, but the plot is shaggier, and if the grand conversation between Harris and Affleck at the end of the second act is the emotional centerpiece of the film, its main plot function is to provide - offhandedly, smartly - a piece of trivia that kicks off the final act's hairpin turns and detective-story business. You won't mind, since this also brings a jump in the story's velocity, and structurally the second-act longueur is a clever feint, but since the midmovie false-climax is deliberately so unsatisfying, you'll have spent the thirty minutes before the Affleck/Harris conversation wondering when the shoe was gonna drop anyhow.

[Plus, as Ty Burr put it in the Glob:

Affleck's not certain what to do about race, though - he is from these parts, isn't he? - and white characters in the book have been cast with black actors (Gathegi, Morgan Freeman as a police captain) in ways that don't feel entirely organic to the tale.

I felt the same way, unable to place Edi Gathegi's Haitian gangster in the Boston ecosystem. And Freeman's world-weariness is strangely placeless in films like this; he's in the movie but not really of it.]

Still, the last scene, particularly Adams's casual mention of 'my Meredith Vieira,' that any-more-stark-and-it-would-feel-arch final dolly move, and the knife-twist final couplet, makes something complex and smart out of the story's seemingly blunt-instrument treatment of missing and threatened kids, and elevates the entire film. The questions raised by the climax and coda are tough, and the hero of the story doesn't get off scot-free, not even close - this is a detective story in which you get to see the detective learning to live with choice and change, for better or worse. Affleck the director handles the Dorchester scenes with such despondent brio that the quiet of the coda hits you hard; he's left his little brother nowhere to run.

This was in every way a good film. Give it a go.

Dad said to marry well.

I may yet.

Toscanini's and the Someday Cafe - what now?

Of course if you're around Boston you've probably heard about Tosci's closing; apparently the owner owes more than $160,000 in back taxes. I didn't realize until today that the owner of Tosci's was also the last owner of Davis Square's late lamented Someday Cafe - and that he's the one who 'forgot' to renew his lease for three months before the landlord decided it was game over. Somerville residents implored the new tenants to share space with the Someday, but the owner of the crepe place that now occupies that (excellent) location was dubious about getting Rancatore involved with his new venture:

Creyf, a 41-year-old Belgian immigrant who plans to start serving crepes there come September, seems quite sure that he does not want to do business with anyone who may not have the business skills and credibility he requires, and said the move to sign a lease was a purely business move on his part.

I imagine he's feeling good about his decision now.

How is it possible to run a business like Tosci's - with its several Greater Boston locations - and simply 'forget' to sign a lease? Or fail to pay down such an enormous debt over the course of years? I mean, personal taxes are one thing, and admittedly he'd lost his Harvard location last year (meaning a steep decline in revenue), but Rancatore can't possibly be as bad at his job as this makes him look, can he?

Can anyone clarify the situation, here? What's the real story on the unpaid taxes? Mistake, malfeasance, and how would you know which one to assume? And as Jeff says, if there's legitimate suspicion that homeboy has been simply evading his taxes and claiming poverty, why would anyone help him? Is 'confusion' a good reason for a 25-year-old business to run up such a debt over five years? Again, not paying taxes for a year I understand, if you're in dire straits; you can make it up easily enough. Getting into trouble because you've taken a risk expanding, that makes sense. But the Rancatores are giving really unsatisfying, even unbelievable reasons for being in this situation. What's the deal? (I'm trying to evaluate the morality of helping them out with a donation. Personally I can't afford to donate, nor would I be particularly inclined to, but I'd like to see the angle if possible.)

I should say, as well, that I'm glad the Rancatores have left the comments section open on their Save Tosci's blog - it's a rancorous and therefore depressingly enjoyable read. In any case, when Someday closed I assumed the owner was a fool. Now there's more evidence to support that supposition - yet I can't help thinking darker thoughts. More's the pity; I liked the rainbow-coloured adopted hometown full of grownups that existed in my mind, thanks.

* * *

From a commenter at the savetosci.com blog:

Toscanini's supports many community charities and schools. They sell great products, and always treat customers with the utmost courtesy. They spare no expense in making the best ice cream. Gus and Mimi live very modestly and plow all earnings back into the business. They have not stashed away the tax money, as the now State realizes. In years past their bookkeepers were incompetent and taxes didn't get paid. Nobody knows how much, so the State made up their own figure--does anybody doubt they chose a highball number? (Gus is too polite to say this publicly.) In fact, they have stayed current with tax payments for several years, despite losing 2 of their 3 stores. They have already caught up with money owed the IRS, and now are dealing with the State. The total owed to the State is mostly for penalties and interest, NOT sales tax collected or payroll tax withheld. Gus did not choose bankruptcy, which would have allowed him to wash his hands of all taxes owed. If the store reopens, employees keep their jobs, the State gets both back and current taxes, and we get great ice cream.

Toscanini's has cleaned up their act. Let's help them over this last hurdle. If you can, pay them back for what they have given the Community over 27 years.

Davis Square 10 Jan 2008.

The air is jacket-cold but not bitter, and every tree in sight is January-naked; someone smokes a cigarette leaning against a lamppost, someone throws an arm laughing around his wife, someone walks bundled up and ancient with two grocery bags. Occasional breezes laze through the plaza in Davis Square, unseasonable and easy. A left-handed guitarist in a knit cap taps his feet on his too-low mic stand, bending over into a question mark to sing: 'Your attempts are pathetic / to undermine me / No you just don't get it / Is it so hard to see? / Going to have to do better than that.' The mic picks up as much of his nimble fingerpicking as of his voice, friction of skin on string. Waiting at the crosswalk is a mother all in fashionable black, right down to the baby carriage. The guitarist brought something to give away, at least. It's January, on the downslope of a shocking warm spell, practically t-shirt weather earlier this week, and the only colour was put here by people: advertisements for Cracker Jacks, Coca-Cola machines, the Italian flags painted on the overhang of Mike's Food & Spirits. 'Give me something / I'm lost in the wood.'. The sun is close to perfect. No one moves too fast, people in sweatshirts and stocking caps are smiling at one another. Fresh air in the closed room of this small city in winter. When a young guy walks by and drops change into the musician's bucket, it rattles the mic stand, which rattles the mic, which broadcasts a percussive advertisement for the man's generosity (repaying generosity). I didn't see, only heard. Of course if he'd dropped in a whole dollar no one would've known but the man with the guitar. He gets out a glass slide to play some dirty blues and a two-year-old smiles at him. But not at me: I brought nothing to give away today. Growing richer off of all of them. Six strings rattle on the glass and the girl's mother gives her some money to pass on to the man. I don't hear any plinking sound, only the man's profuse thankyou. Must've been a dollar.

Tonight at the Common Ground!

Come dance! 10:30pm we'll probably turn up - be there.

Royale with cheese.

I'm at Espresso Royale near Northeastern! Come visit if you're on the East Coast! I'll be here a few more hours.

--wa.

Glue.

If you are nervous about switching between partners at, say, your local beginners' tango class - abandoning your fiancée to dance with God knows what unsavory heathen types - do not be nervous. It is such a wonderful thing and it will improve your dancing quite rapidly.

We will talk about social glue soon, and I will no doubt cite Bowling Alone, and this will turn into one of those blogs, at least for a time. And I'll gush about how exciting it is to put on actual dancing shoes and stare into someone's eyes (or over her shoulder) with an accordion playing. Man oh man.

How the grownups kick it when baby is around.

This is what parties are like at our place: My Poor Green Babychild, in Glorious Quicktime.

If you're entranced by the video adventures of Green Babychild - and I know I am - then take heart: there's more to come.

[If the video won't display in your browser, then download it to your desktop; it should play fine in the Quicktime Player.]

BPL Punk!

The Boston Public Library has free wireless for cardholders, enormous reading tables, plenty of sunlight, and strict rules (actually enforced!) about cell phone usage in the reading room. The chairs are a bit low compared to the tables - bad for laptop typists - and there's no food allowed at the tables, which is a mixed blessing. But overall it's one of the best places in Boston for a quiet day's work on your this-or-that. I do love working at the big table at the BU Espresso Royale, surrounded by law school and med school types yapping about torts and knee joints, while the irritating hipster employees deal out their magnificent assortment of sweets and pastries; but it's hard to beat the BPL. Particularly given the music policy at Espresso Royale, apparently no more complex than 'louder is fucking better.' Well, nothing in this world is perfect except the end.

Dedication, devotion.

Joss Whedon, Jaime Paglia (of Eureka), and a bunch of the Daily Show writers will be speaking and marching in Harvard Square between 12pm and 3pm today, along with whatever fans and local writers can turn up, as a show of support for the WGA. At some point in there they're gonna head over to Pandemonium in Central Square to hang out and sign things. Not since elementary school (Jack Prelutsky it was) have I stood in line for any such thing. And I've certainly never marched and chanted slogans. But I'd do this.

[Actually that last bit isn't true: one day in college a 'Pro-Life' march happened by on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and a bunch of friends and I hastily made signs in our basement that read 'Amateur Life' - which yes we thought that was quite funny - and joined in the march. ('When professionalism is on the attack, what do we do?' 'Strike back!' Or more pithily: 'Pay? No way!') A bunch of tough pro-life kids threatened to beat us up and told us we were spoiling their fun, so after a while we went home.]

The only problem here is that I'm waiting on a rather important package to be delivered. And since I don't have a tracking number (ahem) I can't know when it will arrive more precisely than 'today.' So I may end up missing the WGA/fans get-together.

Still, if it sounds like the sort of thing you'd do, you should go do this sort of thing! And hopefully I'll join you later.

Spider on the speaker by the window in the sun / Come on come on come on everyone!

Here is a picture of a beautiful green plastic baby on our stovetop in Cambridge. My people and I found the baby on the side of a road in New Hampshire. Now it will never be without a home.

Gifts.

Monday: Good work, productive merciless editing of an old story, big steps forward on a new story, some time on the bike, a strong feeling of accomplishment.

Tuesday: A good hour throwing weights around with my boy Jezebel (a/k/a Penguin), errands undertaken and completed, feeling of accomplishment persists.

Wednesday: Trek out to BU to work for five hours at Espresso Royale (superb work environment, particularly at that huge central table), startling amount of writing done, including a full outline and 'beat sheet' for the new story. On the walk home, a realization that Dad's anniversary is coming up; Arcade Fire blasting in my headphones and feeling a weight and wind and I charge across the Harvard Bridge to the computer cluster at W20 (aka MIT's student center, you humanities types) and hurriedly write a poem. There is the sense of moving quickly toward something new.

Thursday: More errands, a trip out to Coolidge Corner to work at Peet's (no space for work), side trip to [REDACTED] for Christmas-shopping inspiration, excellent work done, and I at long last begin reading the Divine Comedy (Ciardi's rhyming-verse translation). After seven cantos of the Inferno my impression is threefold: (1) this is fantastic; (2) I like the melodrama of Dante's Hell and its Cleopatra-and-the-other-damned-lovers vibe, but feel maybe a stronger affinity for the austerity of Milton's bleak Hell, with Satan and his coterie of demonic assholes waking up on the floor from the worst spiritual hangover in the history of the universe to start piecing together the Infernal Bureaucracy; (3) ohgod I'm definitely going back to Paradise Lost after this.

And rock climbing! Man, it'd been a long time. The wall itself was great but the real impact was felt on...

Friday: ...when I woke to bands of pain across my shoulders and down into my arms, fingertips and joints brutally burned, and the village newspaper in my hometown says they're gonna print the poem today for Dad, and I dreamed last night I was a murderer, there's much work to be done, the Boss says I have a several-day stay, and I have a lunch date with what-can-be and who-for-me and yes-we-can. Dante is sitting here on the desk calling me back, Squeeze is on the stereo, everything seems like it comes next in a run and rush. I hope you're having a good day, Reader(s); I feel brushed by luck and love for some reason. Gross? OK gross, I admit it.

obama@boston.com

Barack Obama spoke yesterday at Boston Common. I expected to have a lot to say about him, but it was immediately clear that he was tired and worn out from campaigning, and that big outdoor rallies offer next to nothing by way of substance. Is he a good speaker? God yes - once he'd warmed up a bit and found his rhythm (in spite of the constant heckling from Ron Paul's chorus of idiots) he delivered a rousing speech. But it was very, very short on specifics, and if Obama dwelled on his differences from Hillary Clinton (archetypal 'Washington insider') in broad terms, he didn't drive home that the major differences between them, e.g. her eager support for the Iraq War back when it was politically safe, would be deal breakers outside of their respective cults of personality.

I liked Obama's first movement: he quickly and carefully made the point that though any Democratic candidate functions in part as a referendum on the failings of the Bush administration, and specifically of our Middle East misadventures, his candidacy had a positive progressive upside. What killed me was that he outlined that upside very broadly; it felt like a half-gesture. 'Well, it's early.' Yes but in three months he could be out of the race. Speaking of which: He spoke only elliptically about race but that's obviously a big part of his appeal: I suspect that with all her personal baggage and dynastic implications Clinton will muddy the abstract issue of women-in-power (along with husbands-in-waiting, ahem Bill) far more than she'll 'solve' it, but Obama's presidency would be an enormous immediate blow for civil rights in the U.S., in a way that would transcend politics. He doesn't make this a big part of his presentation, but it's a key narrative underlying his campaign in the eye of the public...

...as illustrated by the awkward parallels drawn last night between Obama and his warmup act, Governor Deval Patrick. I'd never heard him speak before, and he was superb. From the subway tabloids I hear about allegations of cronyism and such, but all I know is that his speech was a lot more detailed and lot more well-shaped than Obama's, even if he too needed five minutes to limber up. Just hearing the name of a local neighborhood in a politician's speech makes a world of difference, and unlike Obama, Patrick used the word 'taxes,' a notion Obama's gonna have to speak to directly if he wins the nomination. The previous speakers - several organizers and the super-deluxe awkward head of Obama's New England steering committee - laboured to draw links between Obama and Patrick, but danced awkwardly around the most obvious parallel between them, namely that their candidacies have only become imaginable in the last decade because of their (different) racial and cultural backgrounds. They have a good deal in common politically, but it was disingenuous for Steering Committee Guy to point out over and over that they're two peas in a pod without being willing to spell out exactly what he meant. Policy he wasn't talking about, sorry.

Well look, it was a rally, not a policy speech, and I'm glad I went; it was nice to get the full force of Obama's charisma and personal presence, and very nice to hear directly from Patrick. I see why people respond so strongly to them. My likely vote was not affected by this rally, not that I'm aware of. It was a good time, and lifted me up momentarily.

I kind of hope Gore enters the race. That could be interesting. I doubt he will, but...that could be interesting.

Shorter reaction to the Star Simpson story.

Look, motherfuckers, just because you can't tell the difference between a circuit board and a waterboard doesn't mean the bomb squad is allowed to be equally ignorant. If you seriously think nearly gunning this girl down constitutes security then you're a big, big part of the reason this country is so fucked up right now.

Also:

Star, you're an engineer who builds real-world devices to empower people. Did it seriously not occur to you to consider the environment you'd be wearing this sweatshirt in? Christ. Please, please use your whole brain next time.

Lucky Star? Falling Star? The stupid headlines just write themselves.

Boston's police are in the news again, as is MIT; as it happens, some friends of mine are close to the 'hoax bomb at Logan' situation, and I find that some facts need to be set straight.

First of all: Building an LED-equipped sweatshirt to grab the attention of prospective employers on Career Day is a really good idea. Juvenile? A little, sure. But markedly less juvenile than comparing Star Simpson to the 2004 post-World Series Boston rioters (nor the presumably trained policemen who fired 'nonlethal' projectiles into a crowd of students, killing one). Less juvenile than persisting in referring to a light-up sweatshirt as a 'fake bomb,' clear evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Less juvenile than writing...

How much do you want to bet Star's got a trust fund, and that her parents are aging hippie types?

...in a major Boston newspaper. (Admittedly not one with any kind of reputation for journalistic seriousness - but check out those circulation numbers.)

Second: Yes it's a bit weird that Star was at Logan to meet her '42-year old boyfriend.' It's also none of any journalist's business, nor is it relevant to this ridiculous story how old Tim is.

Third: The real story is of course the fact that you can walk into Logan with (an object shaped like) a boombox and not even get noticed - indeed, that you're expected to walk around carrying unmarked pieces of luggage - effortlessly avoiding security, but a circuit board attached to a single 9-volt battery is enough to bring out the automatic weapons. Star embarrassed some cops, and the state is going to attempt to misapply this hoax-bomb law to punish her for it. The shirt obviously isn't meant to even look like a bomb; hell, I failed my Circuits class at MIT and even I can tell that it's nothing of the sort. Can I imagine a paranoid cop making a mistake? Absolutely.

But the paranoia is the problem, not the shirt.

When the Bad Guys want to blow up a major transportation hub, I guarantee you, they sure as hell won't send a 19-year-old Hawaiian girl to do so in broad daylight with a battery strapped to her chest.

Personally I think Star made a dumb mistake. But under no circumstances should that mistake ruin her future; the ignorant reactionaries braying for blood (c'mon, three fucking editorials in the Boston Herald?) are making things worse. The city looked foolish during last year's Mooninite 'crisis'; it looks foolish now. Let's not compound things by turning this into a threat-to-America issue. Only the dignity of Boston's security forces is being threatened this week, and the threat is entirely to itself.

Guest.

Went to a fascinating talk the other day at Harvard. An esteemed guest blogger will be around to relate the tale next week, God willing and the creek don't rise. I want you to know that I'm thinking of you, Reader(s), and taking a beat to act for you. In the sense of 'do,' and in the sense of 'make-believe.' What else do you even want.

Slightly-more-rapid transit.

Just so's you Boston bicyclist types know, you can quite comfortably ride in the large shoulder on Route 9 out to Newton; it's probably safest at higher-traffic times to take some of the offramps (so as to avoid swerving into traffic on overpasses), but you can cruise Boylston St. at a goodly clip for several miles. Great exercise too - those inclines give your legs and lungs a bit of a how's-your-father, particularly eastbound.

In other news: wow I could use a nap.

Subconscious connection.

As the Pats game drew to a close last night, we flipped over to the Sox-NYY game to see a bad situation: 4-2 Yanks in the bottom of the ninth. But unlike the football game (the outcome of which was never in any doubt), the Sox game was a dramatic thing, with Schilling and Clemens(!) dueling to 1-1 after seven innings, a cloudbreak for the Yankees, then two intense go-rounds for the Sox. The last at-bat: David Ortiz, bases loaded, two outs, against Mariano Rivera. Who may look put-upon but is the fucking Prince of Darkness as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't at his best, but he got what mattered.

I bring it up only to mention that I'm bringing it up: I was riveted by the final series of Sox at-bats, particularly that impressive two-out walk to load the bases for Ortiz, who flied out to shallow center. All it took was the scoreboard, the words 'New York Yankees,' and the sound of all of Fenway Park screaming its collective head off, and I was twelve years old again. 'Longtime Reader(s)' of unusual patience may recall that I have mixed feelings about such things; I don't like the posturing and pieties of diehard sports fans, who are like Buffy fans without the assumed depth of shared meaning. (This isn't to say I don't understand and share some of the pieties and posturing; I'm just saying, the game is not the myth of the game, and that disconnect is central to the nature of fandom. You don't have to like everything about yourself.) But I was totally, uncritically sucked in. And maybe that's an analogue of 'reading for pleasure' but maybe it's something else - like turning on E! True Hollywood Stories and not being able to turn away - and I'd like to know better. Meanwhile I embarrassed myself jumping out of my seat every time that skinny fella pitched to Ortiz. Not even working out my mixed feelings here. Airing them out, like socks.

Locus classicus of the hugeness/fitness paradox: bicycling.

See, I think I could start every day with a ~15-20-mile bike ride. Get the blood going, clear the mind, burn some fat. (The term is 'Low Intensity Steady State (LISS) Fasted Cardio Workout.' Though I object to the term 'low intensity' because I get really angry at the world, even when I'm going slow as ass! That's pretty intense.) But will that encourage hugeness, or fitness? Unclear. I've gone on record supporting hugeness (see the previous post), but then sometimes - when you're all alone and not totally flexing for the ladies - sometimes a little fitness can be acceptable. At the expense of hugeness? Unclear. Like so much. Like this entry.

Of course Mim and Adrian are probably going 'F that, I ride 17 miles on my junker bike just to get to the garage where I keep my rock and roll bike for the 250-mile ride to the airport for my commute to the Moon!' But there's a reason you're right this instant reading my blog and not theirs, Reader(s), is all I'm saying. I show you my heart and soul and you click away, you embrace some other online diary? I don't think so!

[Today's loop - Science Museum to that Boathouse a good distance past Harvard, at the footbridge - took an hour on the nose. Getting dressed, 5-10 minutes; post-ride ablutions and relaxation, 20 minutes. An hour and a half on non-weightlifting days seems totally reasonable.]

What?

I've been too much in my own head lately to notice that the Sox have the best damn record in baseball! And the Yanks are two games out from the AL wild card spot, eight behind the Sox, with 30 games left in the regular season. Gnarly. (Sidebar: there's a high school in California that produced two Major League perfect game pitchers: David Wells and Don Larsen (the latter a name burned years ago into my brain as one of the great American heroes. Consider the odds.)

We saw Happy Feet at the Hatch Shell.

First off: not a bad place to see a movie, but bring a pillow and a way of propping yourself up for two hours.

We'll skip the trivia and the jazz chorus performance and skip straight to the meat of the thing: the animated film Happy Feet.

Have you heard of this thing? It's a CGI film about a dancing penguin. I know that sounds stupid. It stars Hugh Jackman (unrecognizable), Hugo Weaving (unrecognizable), Nicole Kidman (unrecognizable), Robin Williams (all too recognizable, twice over), and Elijah Woods (clear as a bell and nicely underplayed).

It was directed by George Miller - who made the Mad Max films.

Its lead player doesn't sing, he tap dances: to tracks laid down by Savion Glover.

It's a nearly all-white production that manages to present something like a panracial wonderland, which is at times really uncomfortable - check out Williams's misbegotten Barry-White-crossed-with-Mr-T schtick - and at times hilarious and escapist and joyful. And when 'aliens' appear, the cultural mishmash of the film is suddenly affecting and chilling. Indeed, there's a section of the film that's tonally closer to The Truman Show than any other film, into which odd racial stereotypes suddenly burst forth and are complicated and queeeeeasy. (Remember that guy behind the dancing penguin also played Mantan in Spike Lee's Bamboozled.) Let's point out, though: Miller is very definitely not an American filmmaker, and his vision shouldn't track along American racial-sensitivity lines; the choice of Glover for the role is apt (though who else does what he does?), and lends the film an air of racial complexity.

And speaking of the Truman Show bit, when those 'aliens' are revealed, they're shot in a way that may not even register with children, but should chill adult viewers. It's a creepy sequence and its technique only deepens viewer discomfort.

The music of Happy Feet seems to be modeled on the (overwrought, unbearable) Moulin Rouge: positively adulterous in terms of genre and style, with single lines from songs bleeding into one another. The opening and closing lines are from the Abbey Road suite (again, probably lost on kids, but a good sign to adults that what's coming is fucked up somehow), and inbetween you get such a ridiculous assemblage of styles - with onscreen music nearly constant for the first half of the film, by the way - that the profligacy starts to take on a meaning and joyousness of its own. It's hard not to like these penguins, not least because they're addicted to song. And there's a moment, at the film's climax, when Gregorian chant finds counterpoint in African choral vocals with Glover's delirious tap sketching out a syncopated martial beat underneath: it's the third or fourth time the film has risen to musical ecstasy, all the more affecting because the scene is a herald of religious/industrial apocalypse.

It's a disjointed and crazy film and it's way better than it has any right to be. I think you should see Happy Feet, ideally with lots of other people. It's several films in one, and each is better than you'd expect.

[Happy Feet was reviewed very capably and sensitively here by Manohla Dargis. In particular she states succinctly what's uncomfortable about the film's racial matrix.]

40+ miles on the bike; ping pong majesty; squash.

To Alewife, up the Minuteman Trail, around Monument St to Concord (with a stop at the Old North Bridge, oddly stirring), stop for lunch. Then foolishly head down 2A, caught in a brief fall of rain, roll past Hanscomb airfield, double back at I-95 to Lexington over that damn hill, lemonade from an adorable little girl and her mom on the street. Back down the Trail, stop briefly at home for athletic shorts, then down to MIT for ping pong and squash, where one of the opponents is a tennis pro in his late 20's.

Have you ever noticed how well tennis skill translates to ping pong and squash skill? I'm dead, folks.

See you tomorrow.

There will be snacks, there will.

As a motivational tool and gut-check, at the GF's suggestion I have made a table.

This being a 'personal weblog' and you and me apparently having time on our hands, I will tell you about the table, and about a couple of other things.

And baby makes three!

Neighbourhood of fifteen pounds, about seventeen inches, slim, able to be carried around in one hand, surprisingly maneuverable - God in His infinite wisdom has seen fit to make a new addition to our household! Our little terror is a rich black colour, which (I readily admit) cut against certain of my expectations but in the end is only one more little quirk for us to love.

We also bought a U-lock and helmet, and I took some magical photographs in the bathroom, but those can wait. Our visit from the stork to Ace Wheelworks in Somerville was scary and fun and has already wrought many changes in our lifestyle; we look to the future with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Plus in a couple of years I can sell our new little darling over Craigslist if I need cash in a pinch.

Here's how things went down.

The GF went to Judy Jetson's in Porter Square today to get a long-awaited shortest ever haircut - which will probably get a whole separate post because frankly she's gone from sexy to Schedule I - and I wandered down to Ace on the recommendation of the GF* and my boy Farhad (of the Cambridge Night Rally and other area projects). I haven't owned a bike since something like second year of college; in grad school I was an enthusiastically middling rollerblader, a quick study but not possessing any great talent. (I could've done with a bike when I lived in Brookline, but failed to plan ahead.) The only time I ever had a road bike as a kid was this prostate-threatening ancient blue plastic piece of secondhand ass that made constant scary noises and had accumulated so much schmutz over the years that - though it was theoretically a ten-speed - you couldn't actually shift gears at all. Good times! I loved that stupid bike. In college I foolishly rode a crappy mountain bike around town. No wonder I went off bike-riding midway.

So I'm off to Ace Wheelworks. The place was swamped with customers, apparently a normal weekend crowd. The staff at Ace is really easygoing, not as chilly in my mind as (say) the staff of Cambridge Bicycle in Central Square (which comes highly recommended itself, as you can see, though I've not heard any personal stories of the sort). After a while a stoned-acting, slightly distant fellow in understated hipster glasses lazed over from doing his sales thing in the next aisle, and I got a crash course in different bike categories and geometries. The guy seemed to know his business but we weren't making that Special Connection, you know? I rode a mountain bike and a couple of hybrids, and it was...paradise. I've borrowed the GF's bike a couple of times in the last few years to run errands, but I'm too heavy to ride it without guilt and too tall to do so without damaging various bits of cartilage and self-esteem. You take for granted that your bike is fitted to your body, maybe, but it was a liberating thing for me, damn.

Still: distant. Genial but a tiny bit distant. Not unpleasantly so but I could tell we wouldn't be going out for a celebratory beer-and-vandalism outing when he got off from work.

Then the GF showed up.

Did I mention the whole Goddamn! aspect that was going on, the new may-as-well-eh? hair, the everything else? The sales situation altered instantly: sir became chatty and easygoing, mocking me for my hangover (perhaps I should mention: hangover), cracking the 100% jokables. Not in a sleazy way: I think he just needed to be reassured that my ticking-time-bomb virility and seriousness weren't in any way a threat to him, a direct challenge, purposeful effrontery...We busted out a bike with a shock absorber, I basically plotzed, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing. Plotzed? Oh Christ you must be getting tired of this, Reader(s). I know I am. I mean to say: riding on that single cheap-ass shock made for a hugely unpleasant experience. Like Aragorn known as Strider the Ranger of the North, I like to stay close to the earth.

The apparent owner of the place, a level 16 cleric/level 10 ranger dual-class with receding hair, came out while we were on the street and laid down a hundred cubic of pure uncut knowledge on us all: brand names, numbers, vibes, essences, diminuendos and crescendos, the perils of false consciousness, different kinds of gearshifting mechanisms...the nearness of wisdom is comforting in a way that 20somethings can take for granted.

There wasn't even much talk of money. 'I'm not gonna try to convince you to spend money you don't want to spend.' I believed him, and in trust I went on to spend money I didn't want to spend. Nice deal on free tune-ups for ninety days (parts and labour), lifetime warranty on the frame, tires and tubes not covered, etc., and a discount on accessories. The time came to purchase a helmet, a freighted moment: I nearly went with the unconscionable and perfect hot pink skateboarder helmet, which would surely have marked Your Humble Blogger for death, my droogie(s). In a pinch we made the right choice and backed off (i.e. they didn't have hot pink in a large helmet size).

One U-lock purchase later and we were paying and paying, there were tiny rat-dogs running around menacing the baby children. A nice familial carnival atmosphere. The girl running the machine had all the tattoos and none of the rage, I felt like I was coming home from the war against the self to a warm apple pie made of Jesus. Even got to ride it home, nearly killing myself and several pedestrians, all of whom had it coming.

And that's how our baby was conceived and born, huzzah!

Long and short: Ace Wheelworks pretty much rocked. Friendly and knowledgeable and laid-back and solid, no one tried to sell me into semi-voluntary sex slavery, no fashion staredowns took place. Two thumbs way, way up. ('And take back one thumb to honor the Hebrew God whose Ark this is.') Can you believe this bullshit? Seriously, I was gonna write this meditative piece about transmedia storytelling and academic discourse-policing, and instead I went and relived the magical baby-making adventures for you, without whom I would be blogging for an audience altogether less stylish, altogether less productively complex. Are you happy now? I have a bike, it's been ages it seems, I'll come visit. You can burn like a gajillion calories in a matter of moments if you maintain seriousness and rage.

Also I took pictures in the bathroom wearing basically nothing but a hipster-looking bike helmet and my reading glasses, so you have that to look forward to. The second S in 'RSS' is for 'totally serious.'

* * *

* ...who apparently doesn't know shit and was just parroting what the Barnyard Weasel told her. Do you know the man? If you know, you know. Y'know?

Informed shopper.

You know what's a nice feeling? Walking into a store knowing exactly what you want, grabbing it, striding boldly out - without giving in to the temptation of impulse shopping. Capitalism at its least wearying (though by no means its nicest, let's not be silly).

Harvard Book Store, Million Year Picnic, Good Vibrations, and of course the holy grail...IKEA. Though what kind of soulless bastard do you have to be to talk into IKEA and not take a taste of what's around? Horrifying.

Debutante balls.

Over the last week the following things have occurred, among others.

• IKEA
• Stabbing of self in left palm with Philips screwdriver while assembing IKEA furniture
• Some amount of swearing, flailing, gallows humour
• A tetanus shot in the right deltoid, which is huge because of...
• ...working out almost daily, which has led to...
• ...the loss of several pounds of fat, mitigated only by the likely catabolism of a little muscle on a couple deep calorie-deficit days, though I'm below 209 for the first time in months and just relieved in a way you maybe don't understand
• I have a hole in my palm in the shape of a cross, gnarly
• The reservation of a rental car for Saturday
• (But don't think I've forgotten how we made the wrong turn onto the Mass Pike in the U-Haul van, at $0.59/mile plus gas, and ended up passing goddamn Natick before I realized what'd happened and we turned around, oh you have no idea how embarrassing that kind of thing is for someone who loves driving as much as I do, talks about it, boasts even about his proficiency behind the wheel and attentiveness and unquantifiable style, for shame...
• Ahem.
• Several episodes of Buffy and Angel viewed and re-viewed
• And the latest Lost, which miraculously wasn't the low point of the week, was quite good in fact
• The brother called me from some trivia nite in Chicago, apparently drunk, asking questions about the history of the PGA Tour and then just hanging up on me, but in the heat of the moment can you blame him? Can you blame a guy for that shit, honestly?
• Friendly, thoughtful exchanges with smart people in the comments sections of various weblogs
• Some spur-of-the-moment freelance magic that pulled in a couple days' wages in a short evening
• Joining the writing staff of a new web magazine and committing to writing a regular column for which I must this weekend pitch an armful of ideas (about which more soon, I promise)
• No seriously do you realize how important that is to a little wannabe like me?
• The eventual completed assembly of all the IKEA goodies, including a genuine dining room set that makes the apartment look all, like, lived in and stuff
• Plus we have a goddamn kitchen cart!
• Do you have a kitchen cart? Then quit snickering you pig

And to top it all off, I just lay in our ridiculous king-sized bed for an hour reading comic books (Powers, volumes 4 and 5) while the GF - who features prominently in all of the above items that don't involve sitting in front of a computer, though she didn't so much administer the tetanus shot as sit around while I suffered, quietly, in a nearby hospital room - read Powers while my extraordinary GF took a red pen to a printed copy of the nearly-complete first draft of her doctoral dissertation, inducing such pride you have can't imagine, can't even begin to imagine. And I was totally just sitting there in a Star Wars shirt and briefs reading a comic book like some kind of dire hopeless geek, begging to be put out of my misery, and frankly I don't know whether I've ever been so happy. The briefs are black, not white, for God's sake. I wear 'em to the gym. For health.

You're welcome, Reader(s). Stay strong.

Surprisingly the Catholic Church did not respond to my request for a ride home from the hospital.

You'd think, with puncture wounds mysteriously* appearing in my palms**, they'd have leapt at the chance to help out. Special thanks to F.2thaA.R.H.A.D. for the timely ride home from the Cambridge Hospital.

Luckily I know how to type one-handed!***

* * *

* 'mysteriously' == 'my hand has a Philips screwdriver-shaped hole in it because I'm stupid'

** The cab driver, genial and wacky in a typically Cantabridgian way though he's an NYC transplant, suggested that a 'traveling Bodhisattva' would give me a cross if I continued manifesting stigmata. I wish I'd had a pithy response.

*** Let's not delve. Hope you're well. Typing will be intermittent this week - gotta keep my shit together for a nice paying gig that arrives toward weekend. The hand hurts like hell. Carry my self-inflicted wounds on the left, carry my tetanus shots on the right.

Special Day festival, briefly.

So my birthday was on Tuesday the 13th, as you well know, but my Special Day - i.e. the party - came last night in Davis Square. If you happened to be downstairs at Redbones around 9pm, or at the Diesel Cafe a couple hours before closing, you might have seen us; I was the balding fellow in the tie and sweater demolishing motherfuckers on the pool table (and then getting psyched out and losing to Edgar, surely the weakest opponent of the night from a purely skills-based standpoint, aaaaargh).

It was the third straight birthday party in Davis Square for me and the chums (of chance?!); Diesel is an ideal winding-down location if you don't mind the somewhat hit-or-miss musical selections by the baristas. About food we need say only this: I ate at Brezhnev's and Redbones in a day and never once felt full - despite eating, at rough count, fourteen pounds of pulled pork and a thousand scallion pies. A measure of personal discipline achieved. In the valley, everywhere you go is up.

Afterward, pictures were taken in our portrait studio bathroom. Pretty much 100% adorkable.

I share because, though the GF tends to be maddeningly cute the majority of the time, I am a distinctly unphotogenic individual, yesterday's toilet adventures notwithstanding - yet this one seems to have turned out alright. Pity you can't see the necktie though. Apparently I decided to display both chins in this photo. See you at the gym.

And so happy Special Day to me - and you, Reader(s), whom I need.

The Departed: a riveting, schematic film. In other words, Scorsese goes Hong Kong all over.

We finally saw The Departed last night. The one-line review is straightforward: two and a half hours, and not a moment of it is wasted or boring - a dazzling bit of filmmaking. See it if you haven't, of course, but you already know that.

But about one hundred minutes into the flick I had the following thought, which sums up the rest of this post: Why haven't they done the scene where DiCaprio and Damon point their guns at one another and stand silently for a couple of minutes with maybe a silly early-20th-century American pop song on the soundtrack while some innocent bystander (ideally the girl) talks to them? This is that kind of film, right? Yet how can they get away with something that ridiculous...

Well it is that kind of film. Don't let the accents fool you: The Departed has nothing to do with Boston. Indeed it could take place anywhere in the world with no script changes after the first act. That says something about the movie, I think; I'm not sure what.

More below the fold. Spoilers follow of course.

Well done!

Related to this afternoon's post on the ATHF prank-turned-police-freakout-turned-9/11-part-two, we bring you the sweet revenge of the stoner artistes. My god, these reporters were being such humourless cunts!

Well I feel I hell of a lot safer now.

So there's an Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie coming out. Nothing to be excited about, right? ATHF is dumb.

But some ad cats employed by Turner Broadcasting thought: let's market this thing by putting little electronic doohickeys all around ten major cities in the US.

And here's how it went. And here's what the deep thinkers at the Boston Globe editorial board think we oughtta do about it.

And here's what the thing looked like.

Ladies and Gentlemen: two Boston-area douchebags were arrested for strategic placement of circuit boards and LED's. As one commenter at this occasionally-funny but largely embarrassing and lazy Reason comment thread puts it:

Let me get this straight. The city of Boston is paralyzed in fear of Lite Brite?

This is why I moved to VA.

The newsmen have taken pains to mention that the police purportedly 'detonated' (i.e. blew up using their own bomb) at least one of the devices - presumably to discover that it was not, in fact, an explosive of any kind, as should presumably have been apparent to trained professionals from a couple of key facts:

• These stupid sculptures have been up all over the country for weeks now
• Bombs generally require explosive materials, I think
• Embarrassment, though contagious, is not explosive

The furor in the press is about wasted gov't resources, 'panic,' and the fear (among those in positions of authority) of embarrassment. The Globe editorial is a risible piece of moralizing hackwork:

Perpetrators of terror hoaxes can anticipate prison sentences of up to five years if apprehended. But potential criminal prosecution is only one consideration. The tricksters at Turner, a unit of Time Warner, Inc., should pay the bill for the consequences of its lame marketing gimmick.

Terrorism hoaxes are common. Two years ago, a drug addict and smuggler gave a fake tip about a terrorist incursion in Boston that led to another massive mobilization of law enforcement. In 2005, an angry deportee used a fake threat that forced officials to close a tunnel under Baltimore's harbor. Turner officials say their devices were never meant to be seen as threats. Yet they find themselves in bad company.

This was not, of course, a 'terror hoax,' at least not according to the several news reports that have already come out; prosecuting the two 'artists' for deliberately inciting public terror is disgusting, and would set a bad precedent for dealing with public electronic displays. (Do you realize there are complicated digital billboards and 'televisions' arrayed all...over...the...city?!!???!?.2/2d) These boards looked like IED's? Seriously?

Even when they lit up pretty colours?

The city reacted properly in this case, for the first few minutes, it looks like. We should be glad our first-response team is deadly serious; someone has to be. But Menino's government is now embarrassing itself and needlessly causing problems for its citizenry.

But restitution should be made by someone: that's the American way. How's this. If Turner foots the bill for deploying the Bomb Squad, I'll pay for Menino and the Globe editorial board to go into therapy. It can only help.

Best and worst things about the North End 'round Friday midnight.

Best: Tiramisu and port over pen and notebook at a corner table dimly lit.

Worst: The grotesque spectacle of middle-aged Italian-American men fixating on undesirable foreigners ('tambourine cocksucker' was the colourful phrase of the night) and the aroma of teenage vaginas.*

Whatever mechanism perpetuates the myth that certain men's leering and catcalls are shows of 'appreciation' and 'respect'** is more dangerous to the psychic wellbeing of this country than any presidential malfeasance or bird flu. Someone should tell the big bald fucker at Caffé {ahem} that The Sopranos is going off the air, so he can stop perpetually auditioning for the role of 'Tony's even less charming misogynist cousin.'

* * *

* For a moment I found myself wondering if, as a concerned member of the wider community, I was allowed to make a citizen's arrest for violation of Workplace Sexual Harrassment laws. Then I wondered how long a knife would have to be to reach a lung through that many inches of pendulous man-boob. Then I felt really, really bad.

** ...which demonstrate nothing more, of course, than dull-witted insecurity, but who's counting?

Evening, Allston.

Hit the dance drinking floor at Great Scott for some successor-to-Honeypump hangout night. Good times, good people. My boy Farhad held court at the foot of the bar, wavily. Next stop: sobriety, then more freelance work, then a tremendous amount of house cleaning, then more hangouts, then sobriety again, then...etc. etc. etc.

Hope you're well, Reader(s)! I'm pulling for you and hoping the happiness lasts years.

ps. Honeypump is gone. The link is there for sheer 'nostalgia' value. Does that make me lame? That makes me lame.

pps. Love is not a skin you can shed nor would you even dream of it. It's a vital organ beats for you and all the slumbering/wondering universe.