city of fitful dreams

Decades before Carol Danvers and Billy Batson graced the City on the Hill with their sequentially artsy presences, the cast of Winsor McCay's pioneering comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, made a brief stopover in the magical land of Bahstin.

Here's the highlight reel from that 1911 visit:

First up, an aerial flyby to assess the terrain, complete with the requisite comments about the confusing layout of the roads. Certainly a wise course of action, though perhaps best done without addition of a racist caricature.

(Unlike certain other lesser cities, Boston's street plan is the result of organic growth over the space of nearly four hundred years of continuous habitation. This might lack the centrally planned clarity of a regular grid of prefab developments laid over the bulldozed remains of an orange grove, but it's the price one pays for an authentic sense of regional history.)

The oddly-shaped spit of land above the gentleman on the right's chapeau is old Columbia Point, back in the days when it housed a sewage plant and a city dump, and before the peninsula was jacketed into a seawall and became the location of my scrappy (and only slightly dumpy) alma mater.

The next stop on the itinerary is the Old South Meeting House on Washington Street, which is neither the Old South Church nor the location where the "one if by land, two if by sea" lanterns associated with Revere's ride were hung. (That happened at the Old North Church. I have no idea why you outsiders get so confused when you ask for directions.)

The Massachusetts State House, curiously denuded of all surrounding landmarks, marks the final leg of the tour. Contrary to what McCay would have the reader believe, the crowd below have not gathered to watch the arrival of the intrepid explorers, but to witness the latest scandal in which the Speaker of the House has been embroiled -- an occurrence so reliable and predictable, in fact, that it has replaced the atomic clock as the standard for timekeeping in the Commonwealth.

Charlie Flaherty, then Tom Finneran, now Sal DiMasi -- what is it about the job that causes the suspension of professional ethics and integrity? The entrenched remnants of the local political machine culture emboldened by the fact that Massachusetts is essentially a one-party state? Or that the Speaker's gavel is some eldritch Lovecraftean artifact that channels corrupting impulses into those who wield it? (I suspect it involves a bit of both theories.)

Having moored their Art Nouveau airship to Boston Common's famous Pee Tree (so named, as a crazy street person once informed me, because "some dude just peed on it"), the crew sets out to gather provisions for their journey to Montreal (which has better strip clubs and a lower drinking age than Beantown does, as well as Lay's Smoky Bacon potato chips).

There are few things as lovely as a toasted slice of Boston brown bread (a.k.a. "the bread that comes in a can") smothered in butter, but Flip demonstrates a painful lack of awareness in the the gastro-intestinal symbiosis between brown bread and baked beans. The high fiber content of the beans is required to offset the sweet sludginess of the brown bread. Five thousand loaves eaten on their own will only lead to a colon impacted with neutron star densities of molasses-heavy waste material.

At least it will make for an interesting voyage to Quebec. I just hope the airship has more than one lavatory onboard.

The Byrds - Boston (from The Preflyte Sessions, 2001) - Recorded before the band hit their folk rock stride, this track demonstrates a strong early Beatles influence -- and by "early Beatles," I mean "Chuck Berry."

Friend and Lover - Boston Is a Lovely Town (from Reach Out of the Darkness, 1968) - Non-specific praise is groovy!