expanding locally

My media micronation expanded today with the launch of pronounced WOO-BIN, a blog created to bring the majesty of the Boston accent to the starving masses.

So if you're morbidly curious or just want to put a voice behind my words, check it out.

Or don't. I'm not pushy.

In any case, I'm commemorating the event with this track, in which Boston's neurotic new wave legends do their take on a 1966 Detroit soul classic by The Capitols...

Human Sexual Response - Cool Jerk (from Fig. 15, 1980) - Not bad. Not bad at all.

Schrödinger's landscape

Cambridge Road, Burlington MA, circa 1949
My maternal grandmother grew up in Woburn's west side, three steps from the Burlington line. Her father and grandfather worked at Cummings Farm, long since bulldozed and obliterated to make room for the shopping centers, condo complexes, and office parks that occupy the crowded stretch of Cambridge Road (and it will always be "road," not "street" for me) from Bedford Road to Route 128.

Traces of the Cummings estate still remain, as the bulk of Mrs. Cummings's substantial land holdings were bequeathed to the "children of the City of Boston" in a restrictive trust which eminent domain takings have only taken a small bite out of. Every so often there has been talk by Boston politicians to find a loophole to break the trust and sell the prime real estate, thus securing a huge windfall to fund projects like the Rose Kennedy Greenway or a 1:1 scale replica of the Sphinx -- bearing Tom Menino's face -- to be built on the South Boston waterfront that is Mayor Mushmouth's personal Valley of the Kings.

For now, though, the patches of forest and scrub between the office buildings and used car lots remain overgrown and beyond the reach of deep-pocketed developers. Every time I drive up that way with my grandmother, which is more times than I can count, she delivers the same series of nostalgic rambles about what the area used to be like when she was young.

"We used to race paper boats in that drainage ditch. My uncle drowned in that stream when he was trying out his new galoshes. He was six. I used to babysit for people up this hill. It seemed so steep back then. You could wander wherever, and no one would tell you to get off their land..."

The litany never varied, and became etched in my brother's head and mine through years of repetition. Even when I drive the stretch alone the routine of places and events queues up unbidden, a subconscious mantra and stuff of which family in-jokes are made.

On the way back from our weekly trips to Target, I'll occasionally take a detour through my old North Woburn stomping grounds, though it has become harder and harder to reconcile the visual input with the expectations of decades-old memories. The phantoms retain more substance than the present reality, and I still see the Tomato Hill sandpit or the seasonal marsh/skating pond in the woods in place of the subdivisions that now occupy those spaces.

From my late childhood through my mid-twenties, the pace of development in the area was glacial -- a single-family home here and office building there, but apart from the last lurching encroachments from the local industrial park, there was little in the way of rapid, drastic transformations of the landscape. What did occur was gradual enough to be easily internalized and placed in context. This not only applied to Woburn and its surrounding communities, but to the places in town where I used to spend my time -- Brighton Ave to Kenmore Square, Mass Ave from the MIT Bridge to Porter Square, Cambridgeport to Central Square, Porter Square to Davis.

Then came the real estate boom and tsunami of gentrification that came in wake of rent control being repealed in Cambridge. I also got a car and started driving again, which shifted my axis of operations away from the city and back to the suburbs. I work in Boston, but what I actually see of the city is mostly limited to a stretch of Morrissey Boulevard and the view from I-93. It's no great loss, to tell the truth. In this era of retail chains and global branding, the only difference between city and suburb is that the suburbs have better parking and slightly smaller chance of stepping in a puddle of human urine.

When I do make the rare trip into town, I find a landscape transformed beyond recognition, to the point (as in the time I met up with a friend in Davis Square) where I lose my bearings in places I've walked through dozens of times before. I can deal with the new well enough, but I've yet to encounter an instance of the "new" being an improvement rather than a bland upscale repurposing.

The nature of the changes filters back to me from my wife or from urbanocentric friends. Kenmore Square has been effectively eradicated. Allston has slowly been absorbed into the fiefdoms of Boston University and Harvard. Harvard Square has turned into a strip mall with pretensions of atmosphere and Central Square has gone from the home of radical bookstores and Cheapo Records to hosting The Gap.

There's no real reason to go back anymore, and I prefer to preserve my mental image of the landscape (including the stop sign in Kendall Square my pal Leech walked straight into in a golden moment of unintended slapstick) as it was back in 1994 in a dead/not dead state immune to the quantum flucutations of empirical evidence.

It does make me an unreliable source of driving directions, however.

Duran Duran - Careless Memories (from Duran Duran, 1981) - Infinitely preferable to "Careless Whispers."

Saint Etienne - It's All Gone Horribly Wrong (from The Misadventures of Saint Etienne, 1999) - A Japanese soundtrack album to an English film released only in Spain and which starred an American actress (Parker Posey, as per the Mandatory Posey Appearance Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994).

Svensk - Getting Old (from a 1967 single) - Psychedelic freakbeat is immune to the ravages of time.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality (from Architecture & Morality, 1981) - Brutalism is maladaptive.

want to move like this and that

It's clear that this gentleman never visited North Woburn in the early 1980's.

One memory that will always haunt my dreams is of the time my friends and I decided to walk to the Woburn Mall by cutting behind the industrial park and following the Boston & Maine railroad tracks beside the chemical plant. The tracks ran roughly parallel to the Aberjona River, which at that stretch of the not-even-close-to-mighty waterway devolved into a series of interconnected ponds and reed marshes.

It was the middle of winter, so we figured we could shave some time of the trip by walking across the frozen surface of one of the larger ponds. The water wasn't more than a couple feet deep at the center, and considerable less so at the edges, and the ice was exceptionally translucent. Beneath it was a Lovecraftean swirl of colors and vegetative shapes utterly alien to New England environs -- day-glo magenta and mustard fronds and kelp-like water foliage, which in hindsight were probably chemical accretions rather than actual living plants, but were still incredibly unsettling to behold.

Right, the purpose of this post was not to explain why my corpse will most likely need to be interred in a lead-lined concrete casque, but to indulge in another round of linkposting, the lazy blogger's ever-reliable friend.

Say it ain't so, Kylie! Parte deux! Both Blanka and Donna Summer were unavailable to comment.

In case you want to know where all the cool kids will be tomorrow night.

Always an excellent course of action. (Also, the weft and warp of the Apocalypse revealed!)

My wife's family came right off the boat, and they can't stand the damned song.

Feeling uptight on a Saturday night? Nine o'clock, the radio's the only light? Lacking caffeine and feeling blue? Dr. K visited a place that's ideal for you.

There is nothing I can add to the discussion that hasn't been said already.

Sparks & Jane Wiedlin - Cool Places (from In Outer Space, 1983) - Enthrallingly irritating yet catchy in the magnificent Sparks manner.

it felt like we'd been here

Being the only licensed driver in house, I'm the one who provides transportation to and from Boston Derby Dames bouts on those occasions when Maura decides to go stag. The matches are held at the Shriners' Auditorum in Wilmington (a.k.a. "The Land of Nod"), not far at all from my old North Woburn stomping grounds.

In the summer, making the long ride down Fordham Road to the venue with Super Lumina's windows rolled down, it hard not to notice a certain aroma -- a melange of evergreen, scrub foliage, and diesel scents -- wafting in the late afternoon breeze. It's the smell of my childhood.

I lived in North Woburn until the fall of 1984, when my family left our first floor apartment on the corner of Merrimac and Dartmouth Street and moved into the other side of my maternal grandparents' duplex in Woburn Center. I think about the old neighborhood surprisingly often, though my visits (or rather "pass-throughs," as there's no reason to stop and get out of the car these days) have gotten more and more infrequent. The landscape has changed too much since the early 1980's, and the dissonance between "what was" and "what is" is the stuff of fever dreams -- ghosts of eradicated landmarks superimpose themselves over the upstart subdivisions and McMansions that now occupy their previous spaces.

But then Woburn, especially the part of the city north of I-95 and west of I-93, has been a developmental palimpsest as far back as I can remember. That was what made it such a fascinating place in which to spend one's childhood. Despite the push towards modern office parks as upscale replacements for the tanneries and chemical plants, the the scars and mouldering remains of the old industries remained -- crumbling foundations and discarded machinery half concealed under nature's attempts to reclaim the open spaces.

"Down Back," the tract of land stretching from NELCO (New England Leadburning Company, founded by my great-great-grandfather) to the edge of the city dump was a playground beyond compare, criss-crossed with the BMX-friendly remains of pulled up train tracks and chock-full of piles of illegally discarded junk. A ten-year old with more curiosity than sense (and, hopefully, an up-to-date tetanus vaccination) could unearth all kinds of treasures from the refuse, from animal skulls to a collection of turn-of-the-century postcards to creased and weatherbeaten porn mags to all sorts of things construct a hastily made go-kart with before sending it careening down Chester Avenue. One of the more disturbing finds my crew made was several sacks of arsenic, dumped by the side of the path so as to return that ultra-toxic goodness back to the soil, I suppose. Or because some lazy cheap fuck couldn't be bothered to dispose of it properly.

Coexisting with this graveyard of industry past were many rustic elements. A couple of the residents (including my paternal grandparents, and later, my aunt) at the far end of the neighborhood had horse stables, chicken coops, and even the occasional goat on their land. Though only a short ten miles from downtown Boston, North Woburn was on the far edge of the suburban fringe (which has since spilled northward over the I-95 boundary, brushing up against and even crossing the New Hampshire border. Check the tags on southbound vehicles on any given morning commute, and you'll see what I mean). While not as honky-tonk as, say, Billerica or Tewksbury was at the time, there was a certain blue-collar ethnic hillbilly character to the neighborhood, though fading fast even back then under the influence of newer arrivals but still manifested though the occasional buckshot-perforated stop sign or raccoon pelt nailed to a tree for drying.

As a kid, I wasn't really aware of the neighborhood's unique atmosphere. In fact, I was thrilled when my family moved as it put me within closer range of the places that sold comics, music, and other items of adolescent importance. Now that I'm older, and last traces of its identity have given way to a sedate aura of suburbanity, I find myself reflecting about how lucky I was to have had such a place to spend my formative years in, full of wide open spaces with maximum potential for childhood hijinx and where nine-year old kids could frolic free of adult supervision through industrial ruins.

Yeah, I know. Everyone feels nostalgic about their childhood haunts and thinks that they were something special and rare.

Mine really was, though.

Skeletal Family - Promised Land (from a 1985 single; collected on The Best of the Skeletal Family, 2001) - Not really a chant, and I'm clear on their ever-circling credentials, but it's a lovely bit of gothic rock from a time before the the genre devolved into mall-rats with black hoodies and Trent Reznor fixations.

I want a clean me

I logged on to the City of Woburn’s website yesterday to pay the excise tax on Super Lumina, and was greeted with this cheery bit of news:

Boil Water Notice Issued for Woburn:

The public is advised to boil all water for drinking, food preparation, ice, brushing teeth, etc.

It seems that one of the city’s water storage tanks was showing high levels of E.coli bacteria. Typical. Just when the comments about Woburn’s water had started to taper off (after 25 years), the supply gets contaminated by a germ associated with human feces. I wish I had read the message before I brushed my teeth yesterday morning.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a case of someone taking “Water and Sewer” too literally, but that some animal remains had ended up in the water inside the tank. While I was relieved that I had only rinsed my mouth out with carcass broth and not fecal stew, it does raise nagging questions about what an animal was doing inside the storage tank in the first place. My first thought was that the city had set up a secret catfish farm in the public water supply as a means of offsetting budget overruns, but the real reason turned out to be that “portions of the tank’s roof and fencing were compromised by wear and tear.”

It’s nice to know I live in a city where preventative maintenance concerning a basic essential service is given such a high priority.

The Standells – Dirty Water (from Dirty Water, 1966) – Just swap out “Charles” for “Aberjona,” “Boston” for “Woburn,” and “muggers” for “Juggalos,” and you’re good to go. I still think The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" is the definitive song for this region, though.

Throwing Muses – Soap and Water (from The Fat Skier EP, 1987) – On the way home from work last night, my wife and I stopped at a supermarket the next town over to pick up some bottled water for the pets and ourselves to use until this idiocy blows over. The shelves were nearly bare, and there were a bunch of folks loading up shopping carts with jugs and bottles of Dasani and Poland Springs. My wife asked “Let me guess, you’re from Woburn, right?” and got several weary nods in response.

Human League – Being Boiled (Fast Version) (from the remastered edition of Reproduction, 1979) – The biggest problem about this whole experience has been making sure our rather large extended family of pets doesn’t get exposed to contaminated water. My wife spent yesterday afternoon boiling their various water dishes and bottles to kill any potential bacteria. It’s a time consuming process, and no amount of gorgeously bleak synth music (such as this lovely track) can make it less arduous.

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I was checking the site’s logs today, and I noticed a couple of referrals from a place that provides a searchable database of hotlinked music files from various mp3 blogs while trying to sell an overpriced “membership” to store said files for people. I certainly didn’t give this place permission to profit from leeching my bandwidth, which is paid for out of my own pocket. Armagideon Time is about love, not money.

Music blogs have an uneasy enough relationship with the powers that be. They are grudgingly tolerated because of their relatively limited reach and their willingness to act as unpaid publicists for labels and artists. Sites like the one I mentioned above are trying to make a quick a buck off by exploiting mp3 bloggers, and are going to be what ends up killing the scene.

The immediate problem, though, was easy enough to resolve with a little .htaccess magic courteously provided by the very wise, very helpful Dave Lartigue.