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.

lost all track of time

A couple of Fridays back, the wife and I had to make a trip to scenic North Reading on feral cat business. As we were already in Burlington on another errand, I decided to bypass the forbidden zone that is the I-93/I-95 interchange and take the back way, which involved heading down Cambridge Road (not "Street") towards the Billerica line then turning onto Route 62's serpentine path to glory.

It had been a while since I'd been down that way, and I was astonished to find that so little had changed in the past twenty years. The development boom of the past decade or so has completely transformed huge swathes of greater Boston's landscape. Communities that were considered positively honky-tonk when I was a kid, places like Billerica, Wilmington, and Tewksbury, have since become upmarket suburbs, and there is no open space so rocky, swampy, or otherwise tagged with liabilities that some ambitious developer won't clear-cut and terraform it into McMansion-friendly subdivisions. The local "boonies," as much I knew them from childhood, have all but evaporated into a single homogeneous sprawl radiating out from Boston to the edges of I-495 loop.

But not along Route 62, apparently, where old houses are encircled by forests of old trees, and even the post-WW2 ranch homes have gradually assimilated into the backdrop of the green. The corridor hasn't been entirely immune to the sprawl's encroachment, but compared to my old neighborhood in North Woburn, it has remained largely intact...a place where you still need to use your high-beams to navigate in the dark hours.

TWO WARPS TO URANUS!
(Granted, that also applies to the very developed and upscale town of Winchester, but that's because those rich motherfuckers are too cheap to turn up the brightness on their streetlamps. They're also too cheap to pay for trash pickup, which means you see assholes in Porsches illegally dumping their garbage in the Middlesex Fells Reservation.)

We passed by truck and equipment yards with unpaved surfaces bounded by pine trees, anachronistic retail islands at long-bypassed intersections, a poultry farm, and the requisite series of non-chain, locally-owned eateries with inexplicable names. (We also stumbled across the location of the local Wal-Mart store, suggesting that the honky-tonk aura is not so easily dispelled.) It's an odd thing to wax nostalgic over, but it's comforting nonetheless to know that the topography of my childhood exists in some form or another less than twenty minutes from my house. Until the next frenzied round of development begins, that is.

The sharpest jab of nostalgia hit me while were crossing over the Boston-Lowell train tracks by the intersection of Routes 62 and 38 in Wilmington. There, to the left of the road and beside the tracks was this place of many childhood pilgrimages...

Our Mecca, Lourdes, and Graceland rolled into a single seedy piece of commercial real estate.
I couldn't see what occupies the space now, but back in 1984 it was the location of "Trains & Games," the only arcade within reasonable distance of my North Woburn stomping grounds. I don't know which one of the neighborhood crew discovered the place, but once we knew about it, we hopped onto our off-brand BMX bikes and made the long trip to Wilmington whenever time, weather, and availability of quarters permitted.

The selection of games at the place was an adequate enough mix of perennial favorites (Pac-Man, Robotron: 2084, Dig Dug) and a handful of newer titles like Gyruss, Punch Out, and Mr. Do's Wild Ride. The arcade attached to the go-kart further up Route 38 in Tewksbury had a bigger and better selection, but it also involved biking an additional four miles each way. What Trains & Games lacked in diversity, it more than made up for in convenience. Plus the lone staffer behind the booth was far more laid back than the uptight eagle-eyed crew at the Speedway who'd show you to the door the moment your last token was spent.

Mr. Do's Franchise Fatigue!
Weekday afternoons were the ideal time to make the run, as the place tended to be packed on the weekends. The fact that most of the gang had strict dinnertime curfews made it tricky to pull off without split-second timing and frenzied pedaling.

Hit the ground running when the 2:45 final bell at the Linscott-Rumford rang. Throw your book bag in the porch and holler to the parents that you were going out. Meet up with the rest of the crew and zip down the old train tracks to the Wilmington line. Pedal your ass off down Route 38 for a half hour. Burn through a pocket of quarters in twenty minutes. Pedal back to North Woburn while ignoring the stitch in your side. Collapse on the lawn with five minutes to spare.

...and even if you could barely choke down your mac 'n' cheese through the dry heaves and heat exhaustion, those brief minutes of pixelized joy were totally worth it.

"You know what this game needs? A boss with a rape conviction and a penchant for ear biting!"
In the autumn of 1984, my family moved out of North Woburn to the center of the city. The additional four miles of biking required and the discovery that the local pool hall and bowling alley had game rooms (and were in walking distance) put a stop to my trips to Trains & Games, though I occasionally tagged along with a friend whose mom used to drop him off there. The last time I visited the place, sometime during my sophomore year in college, the arcade had gone under and had been replaced by one of the many lousy comic book stores that attempted to make hay during the 1990's speculation boom. It, too, went tits up a short while later.

Seeing the place after all these years brought back a flood of vivid memories -- nothing especially dramatic or important, just very distinct impressions of a time long past. I can see the shortcut to East Dexter Avenue in bright light of a spring afternoon. I can smell the muddy tang of the shallow stream that ran alongside the path. I can hear Steve Perry's "Oh, Sherrie" and Phil Collins's "Against All Odds" -- and I wish to Christ it would just stop.

I place a lion's share of the blame on Hot Hit Videos, an attempt by the local CBS affiliate to cash in on the music video craze of the time. The show's 4:30 PM time slot made it ideal cooldown time viewing after getting back from the arcade, but the programmers' fondness for AOR cheese has left me scarred for life.

If I have to remember the spring of 1984 through pop music, at least let it be pop music I actually enjoyed at the time...like these two tracks...

The Go-Go's - Head Over Heels (from Talk Show, 1984) - Goodbye, bubbly new wave....

Ratt - Round and Round (from Out of the Cellar, 1984) - ...and hello, ugly pop metal.

like the feeling at the end of the page

My wife and her friend were browsing the stacks at the local chain bookstore when they came across this fine work of high literature...


I realize that there is a detailed science behind romance novel cover design. In a genre based on disposability and formula, marketing is everything and the ideal state exists between comfortable familiarity and enticing difference. Call it the "impulse purchase zone."

The intent behind the cover to Midnight Treats is fairly obvious -- the promise of softcore titillation. The couple posed in a way that the focus is on the man, whose focus in turn on the potential buyer...not his partner in monkey-lovin'. "I'm really thinking of you, not this hot blonde I'm spooning," his expression suggests. Or perhaps, "This hot blonde could totally be you."

Intent is not the same as execution, however, and Maura and her pal saw things through the filter of a Medford, Massachusetts upbringing...


For full effect, it really needs to be read in a Medford accent, which is a testosterone-heavy variant of the Boston accent with Vinne Barbarino tossed in for good measure, and delivered with a slight nod of the head. You can take a girl out of Meffa, but you can't take Meffa out of a girl.

(That comment could very well get me killed once the wife reads it. She insists that the whole "Meffa" thing was a joke constructed in neighboring communities, and that no one in Medford calls it "Meffa," despite ample evidence to the contrary. I can't be too hard on her, though. It's not her fault she didn't grow up in the green fields and wastepits of Woobin, as your humble author did.)

Missing Persons - Words (from Spring Session M, 1982) - An excellent slice of American new wave, featuring the talents (and distinct Medford accent) of singer Dale Bozzio.

Friday Night Fights: Rush 'N' Attack

It's friday night, cats and kittens, which means it's time for a little realpolitik action with Black Canary, Master of International Diplomacy!

(from Justice League #3, July 1987; by Giffen, DeMatteis, Maguire & Gordon)
Now that's what I call détente....

The Dents - Not Through with You (from Time for Biting, 2006) - Up for some kickass parochial punk rawk? Maura caught them performing at a Boston Derby Dames a couple years back and their album has been on heavy houshold rotation ever since.

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.

Vacation 2008: Day 3 - Give me fyah

Look what I got in the mail last Saturday!

The 25th anniversary edition of Barbecue, the G.I. Joe team's resident firefighter! Or more accurately, the G.I. Joe team's rezahdint fy-ah-fy-tah and token Bostonian.

Lady Jaye's file card states she was born in the Vineyard, but it's safe to assume that she was a high holiday baby with a permanent address in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Gabriel "Bahbahcue" Kelly, on the other hand, was the real fictional deal, a seventh generation Beantown jake presumably well versed in the local culture of fradulent disability reports and lack of independent oversight.

"I'd love tah help ya fight Cobra Cammandah, Duke, but my back's been actin' up. Union rules. Maybe when I get back from rock climbin' I can do somethin'."

While the general wisdom regarding special forces operatives stresses cross-training (so that the units can function effectively despite loss of individual members), the Joes were hyper-specialized to a fault, with full-time team members dedicated solely to covering even the most narrow of disciplines. In practice, this meant that many of the less well-rounded members of the team either spent most of their time warming the benches back at the Joes' HQ or got dragged along on missions outside their areas of expertise, leading to absurd scenarios like Snow Job, an arctic warfare expert, fighting in full cold weather gear in the tropics. Call it the "licensed merchandise theory of warfare."

For poor Barbecue -- armed with a hi-tech supersoaker and a fire axe -- the time not spent inspecting the base's smoke detectors and spinkler systems went something like this...


An important function, to be sure, but it doesn't dull the gnawing feelings of inadequacy when the other guys and gals on the team are doing some post-op boasting about how many Rattlers they shot down or how they kicked Destro in the 'nads while leaping from an exploding A.W.E. Striker.

In the overfondly remembered G.I. Joe cartoon series, Barbecue's great shining moment came in "The Viper Is Coming," a episode revolving around the title's ominous warning and culminating, as these things usually do, with an Eastern European gentleman arriving to "vipe the vindows."

Yes, for real. So fuck your rose-tinted childhood nostalgia, fanboys. All the perfumes in Araby can't mask the pungent stink of 80's toy cartoons.

The episode did treat the public, however, to another interesting popcult attempt to duplicate the Bay State's distinctive regional accent. It goes about as well as you'd expect, as demonstrated by this fan-edited trip into the poorly-synched mouth of madness...

Now while there are certain Snagglepussean overtones in the Charlestown variant of the Boston accent (which I suspect is the real reason behind the Townies' famous "Code of Silence"), I can state with a reasonable degree of authority that we do not speak like the "confirmed bachelor" character actor lovechild of Phil Silvers and Jack Haley. (Haley, along with Ray Bolger, did happen to hail from Beantown, but even so...)

(Also, I don't want to read too much into things, but the personality profile on Barbecue's file card states, and I quote, "He can...wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart Coke bottle." Fancy that.)

Dude, I know you're tired of "pahk the cah" jokes, but the white boy ebonics thing is not the answer.
For the musical portion of today's post, I decided to keep things nice and local...

The Cars - It's All I Can Do (from Candy-O, 1979) - As long as it's done well, I won't complain.

The Pixies - Dig for Fire (from Bossanova, 1990) - This is Boston, not Centralia. I still haven't warmed up to The Pixies, as the psychic scars inflicted by the various fans of the band are still tender after almost twenty years, though I can appreciate the music...in small doses...in the rare proper context.

Ode to a State of Granite

Let us move to New Hampshire
And get back to nature
In a pre-fab McMansion
built on a clear-cut postage stamp.

Let us move to New Hampshire
Where vanity plates are cheap.
HOTMILF bolted to the bumper of your Ford Galaxy
and RONPAUL1 on my Escalade EXT.

Let us move to New Hampshire,
We will claim to be "independent,"
Make fun of Democrats,
and vote Republican.

Let us move to New Hampshire
Where the finer things can be found
Like fireworks, gun shops,
And cheap crystal meth.

Let us move to New Hampshire.
I will buy a Harley, go to Laconia
and play outlaw biker
instead of graying middle manager.

Let us move to New Hampshire
and be done with Taxachusetts
except for the two hour commute
to our jobs in Boston.

Let us move to New Hampshire.
If the gas prices should beggar us
If the I-95 gridlock devours our daylight hours
We can take comfort in not paying a sales tax.

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - It's Grim Up North (Radio Edit) (from a 1991 single) - A different Manchester and an entirely different breed of grimness await those brave enough to tread across the Bay State's northeastern border.

The radio edit lacks the full radiant and terrifying glory of the the full "Part 1" version of the techno/industrial masterpiece, but it still gets the job done rather nicely. The transition into Hubert Parry's hymn "Jerusalem" (based on William Blake's preface to Milton: A Poem) never fails to knock me on my ass with its sheer power. It's one of those instances of brilliance that elevates a good piece into something trancendentally awe-inspiring.

It also doesn't hurt that Blake, loony mystic that he was, has long been a favorite poet of mine....

I shall not cease from casual spite,
Nor shall my ire sleep in my hand,
Till we have built a saner world,
In New England's mean and bitter land.

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!

and the winners stand confused

Today I'm going to take a look at a rare treasure that manages to combine two of Armagideon Time's recurring obsessions -- Bay State parochialism and the immortal gloriousness that is Captain Marvel Adventures. For a couple of years in the early-to-mid 1940's the series ran monthly stories spotlighting various American cities. The tales took the form of rather anemic edutainment travelogues featuring bits and bobs of local color and call outs to various real-life local politicos or personalities under the guise of fostering a wartime spirit of national solidarity (by having a giant tree devour Akron's shopping district or corncob smugglers bedevil the inhabitants of Sioux Falls).

After stumbling across a few of these stories, I got to wondering if my own stomping grounds were ever shown any CMA lovin' and, sure enough, issue #40 (October 1944) of the series spotlighted my beloved Beantown in a story titled, "Captain Marvel and the Mayor for a Day." I'd like to apolgize in advance for the quality of the images. They were pulled from microfiche and my Paint Shop Pro (because I'm too lazy cool to learn Photoshop) wizardry could only do so much with the raw material I was stuck with.

The story begins with Billy Batson, boy radio reporter and Captain Marvel's alter ego, disembarking at North Station to attend a ceremony where the brightest high school student in the city will be awarded the honorary title of "Mayor for a Day." As Marvel's wisdom of Solomon would be useless in figuring out to to get to the Green Line concourse from Causeway Street, a local philanthropist has a car waiting to take Billy to the pre-brutalist nightmare version of Boston City Hall. (The gorgeous French Empire city hall building on School Street has been repurposed for commercial use.)

Upon arriving, Billy is introduced to a couple of members of the local broadcasting fraternity:

WEEI is still on the air as sports talk radio format station. Sister station WNAC eventually changed its call letters to WRKO, where it presently hosts a veritable smörgåsbord of ignoramus-friendly fare from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Howie Carr, Michael Savage, and Coast to Coast AM.

Inside City Hall, the ceremony commences, overseen by Mayor (and eventually Governor and U.S. Secretary of Labor) Maurice Tobin, for whom the Mystic River bridge and popular destination for the suicidal is named. (Mayor Tobin courteously took time out of his busy schedule of avoiding an indictment over his complicity in the Cocoanut Grove tragedy to attend the event.) The honor of Mayor for a Day is to go to the perky and WASPy Bob Wright, Boston's best student (by virtue of his parents' sending him to private schools though his K-8 years then suing the district in order to get him into the prestigious Boston Latin High School, as per the normal protocols).

Before privileged Bob can be sworn in, however, the festivities are interrupted by a member of the "De Boston Better Citizens League" (branches in Charlestown, Winter Hill, and South Boston), advocating for his own candidate for the honorary title, the not-at-all ethnically stereotyped wannabe Dead End Kid, Terry Mahoney:

When a call to the school confirms Terry's valedictorian status, Captain Marvel smells a big Hibernian rat and sets out to discover the truth. He also engages in a little sightseeing...

...swinging past the Bunker Hill Monument, commemorating both the Battle of Breed's Hill and Charlestown's need to overcompensate, and Fanueil Hall, where he drops a few hundred bucks on overpriced tourist junk.

Marvel's investigation reveals a low Chandlerian conspiracy involving stolen cigarette cases, destroyed records, and dastardly frame-ups. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery, Billy dons a Scalley cap and an unexplicable faux Brooklyn accent (technical term: pidgin white ethnic-ese) to infiltrate the De Boston Better Citizens League, in a scene that reads like a Classics Illustrated version of The Departed:

Billy's ruse is detected (after he asks for a bottle of "pop" rather than "tonic") and the gangsters decide to get rid of him by tossing him inside a cement mixer, violating the local tradition of a point blank shot to the head or a severed aorta, followed by burial in a shallow unmarked grave in a brownfield by Tenean Beach. Billy escapes the slowly-rotating death trap by transforming into Captain Marvel, who makes short work of the thugs.

Marvel is able to see past the red herrings and false leads, and flies off to the Roxbury-Jamaica Plain frontier (free from attacks by escaped gorillas since 2003)...

...to confront the mastermind behind the fiendish goings-on in his cement factory lair and bring him to justice (after some hot superheroic action involving construction equipment, of course).

So what was the reason for trying to rig the Mayor for a Day results?

To nab a sweetheart no-bid contract for the mastermind's cement firm by taking advantage of a little known law which apparently grants the mayor unlimited powers. (The same law has been a cornerstone of current Boston mayor Tom Menino's nigh-eternal reign.) My own excessively elaborate plan to exploit for my own gain the archaic Boston statute forbidding bathing more than once a week also failed miserably.

Also, graft and corruption in the Bay State's public works arena? The Devil, you say!

Billy Butler - Boston Monkey (from The Right Tracks, 2007) - Jerry "Ice Man" Butler's younger brother was an exceptional Northern Soul artist in his own right, despite never getting the attention or chart success he deserved. It also didn't help that his material had been out of print or unavailable for decades. Here's a choice sample for your edification and enjoyment.

Also, how can you tell a Boston monkey from the more mudane variety? It's unable to figure out how turn signals work, it drops the r's from its grunts, and it wears a "YANKEES SUCK" t-shirt. (Just because it's facile doesn't mean it isn't true.)

Dream Syndicate - Boston (from Out of the Grey, 1986) - From the South Side of the Windy City to the West Coast haunts of the Paisley Underground, the bards sing their songs in celebration of the dubious virtues of this hard-bitten city of Bean and Cod. "The whole thing ain't gone down according to the plan..." Truer words about this place have never been sung.

ride the mild surf

I generally don't do reposts, but due to the sheer number of Google search hits and emailed requests, I've decided to make an exception. The fact that the song in question is a longstanding favorite of mine, and ranks right up with the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" in terms of my intimate familiarity with the cited geographic features also played a major factor in my decision.

So here it is:

The Gremies - No Surfing in Dorchester Bay (from a 1980 single) - The Gremies were a local supergroup of early Boston punk acts, featuring members from DMZ/The Lyres, Unnatural Axe, and the Real Kids. (The b-side of the 7" consists of a dub version of the track.)

I first became aware of this single after stumbling across an entry (with a photo of the picture sleeve) in the college library's copy of Who's New Wave in Music, and I made locating a copy of it the highest of acquistional priorities -- mainly because I have spent nearly every weekday since the autumn of 1990 toiling away on the shore of that frequently pungent body of water. The view from my cubicle window looks right out onto it, actually, and I can indeed confirm the bay's lack of surfability.

what did I do but miss my home

Though geopolitical follies led to my entering this sad world south of the Mason-Dixon line, I've always considered myself to be a Bay Stater born and bred, and I take no small pride in that fact. It's a harsh region and it generates a harsh breed of people -- impatient, irritable, and fiercely devoted to the only religion that matters. Well, that and the First Church of Aggressive Driving Habits. (I recite the liturgy during every morning's and evening's commute: OHFORFUCKSAKE-WHATTHEHELLAREYOUDOING-HOWABOUTATURNSIGNAL-FUCKWAD. Amen.)

Among the many other aspects of this willful parochialism is my longstanding fascination-slash-repulsion regarding how the region is portrayed in television, movies, and other popcultural diversions -- fascination due to the "Hey, they're talking about us!" factor, with the repulsive flipside over how frequently the entertainment business screws up the various regionalisms. The only reason I could be bothered to watch A Civil Action (set in my dysfunctionally beloved Woburn) is to see Stephen Fry putter around the bank of an Aberjona River far wider and more picturesque than the muddy creek that flows through my fair city. (Woburn itself is depicted as a stock Hollywoodized "New England town," rather than appearing as the industrialized mid-ring residential suburb it was back then.)

By far, the biggest stumbling block in popular portrayals of the Land of Bean and Cod comes when non-natives try to imitate the region's distinctive accent. Tim Robbins nailed it perfectly in Mystic River, but most actors are content to retrofit a broad Brooklynesque accent with exaggeratedly dropped R's and liberal use of "wicked" as a modifier. Or, even worse, they imitate how the Kennedys speak, even though no one but the Kennedys talks that way. Seriously.

The devil is in the details, and the Hollywood Bahston accent overlooks numerous but significant linguistic tics that characterise the real deal. Just one example is the dropping of middle double consonants. (I've had two linguistically-minded friends tell me what the correct scientific term for it is, but it seems incapable of sticking in my memory.) "Button" becomes "buh-un" and "kitten" becomes "kih-en." It's a small detail, but one that makes it easy to pick out the pretenders from the genuine article.

And so, with my grumpy, hyper-specific pedantic mindset firmly in place, I would like to direct your attention to Ms. Marvel v1 #13-14 (January & Feburary 1978), a two-part non-arc set in Boston area. The actual stories are no big deal. Carol Danvers (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel) returns home to her parents' house in the upscale North Shore suburb of Beverly (which, oddly enough, borders on the town of Danvers. "Hi, I'm Joe Brooklyn from Queens!"). She deals with some Daddy issues, gets caught in a struggle between two alien beings, and fights the rivet gun-wielding Steeplejack. Oh, she also has a two page non-encounter with Dracula, whose only purpose was to remind readers that Marvel was publishing the Tomb of Dracula comic at the time.

Instances of local color in the two issues are pretty thin on the ground. As drawn by Jim Mooney and Carmine Infantino, Boston looks like pretty much any comic book big city. Writer Chris Claremont does get his geography straight...kind of. He correctly mentions Lynn (Lynn, the city of sin/you'll never come out the way you came in) as a midpoint on the Boston-Beverly commute, but inexcusably drops the ball in this sequence....

...in which the Kittery, Maine naval base has mysteriously migrated sixty miles south to occupy the previous location of the Charlestown Navy Yard. Thank goodness Old Ironsides wasn't harmed in the massive geographic upheaval.

Claremont made no effort to capture the Boston accent in the characters' dialogue, which is surprising considering how much he reveled in such antics in the X-titles he wrote. Och, the wee bairn, tovarisch! Mein gott! Mon dieu! Ah'm invulnerable, sugah! It's probably for the best, actually. Besides, having been made aware of Ms. Danver's Bay State roots, I've found myself subconsciously applying a Boston accent when I read her dialogue...

Rather pissah, I dare say.

Speech patterns and geographical accuracy aside, there is one panel where Carol does show her Beantown bona fides in big way...

...following a high-intensity superheroic workout with a lahge coffee regulah (from Dunkin Donuts, of course). Way to represent, Ms. Danvers!

(What the hell is up with the "even in Boston" caption, anyway? A sixty story building collapsing is big news where ever it happens. Hell, this incident caused a local panic and made the national news. We may be jaded around here, but we're not completely insensate.)

Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - New England (from The Beserkley Years, 1987) - There's nothing I can add that Mr. Richman & Company haven't already got covered here.

Vacation II: Day 8 – That’s just the start

The usual drill for Saturdays, vacation or not, is that Maura goes shopping with her mother, and I stay home an complete my list of weekly chores in quiet solitude. On this Saturday, however, the alternator on Maura’s mom’s car shit the bed, and I found myself accompanying my wife to Market Basket and the Burlington Mall.

I used to visit the Mall quite a bit, as it housed the only Electronics Boutique, hobby store, and Suncoast Video in the immediate vicinity. In recent years, my trips to that one-stop temple of retail commerce dropped off to almost never, due to the shrinking level of disposable income that came with home ownership, the stores I frequented going belly up, and the ease of simply ordering what I want off the internet. My long abstention from mall-going gave today’s visit an aura of hyper-reality that I found hard to shake off.

It’s strange to see place which serves a traditionally middle class suburban demographic attempt to posit itself as “upscale.” That goes a long way toward explaining the Mall’s high turnover of rental occupants. A good third of the shops or restaurants that had been there on my previous visit were gone, either replaced by something new or obliterated by seamlessly constructed barriers sporting an Orwellian “COMING SOON: MORE CHOICES” in pastel green paint along their entire length. I suppose it’s an inevitable consequence of the fallacious “If you build it, they will come” marketing dictum, because I don’t see the chubby, balding dads wearing System of a Down t-shirts, the various soccer moms conducting fierce holding actions against the onset of middle age, or the mallrats resembling animate Bratz dolls, which together represent the majority of the mall’s clientele, rushing out to the grand opening of a store dedicated entirely to selling overpriced crystal geegaws.

...and so another dream dies in the painful throes of a defaulted small business loan, clearing space for the next contestant in the unending game of Capitalist Darwinism.

The unrealistic pretensions of class can partially be blamed on the petty tyrannies of local planning boards, who are more inclined to roll over for projects pitched as “high end.” The same folks who finger the rejection stamp during the entire duration of a proposal for a new Dunkin Donuts will fall all over themselves in offering concessions and easements for a granted-to-fail-within-a-year boutique.

Yesterday night, on the way back from dropping Maura off with a friend, I swung by a recently constructed “lifestyle shopping center” built where the Burlington Raytheon campus used to be. What, you may ask, is a “lifestyle shopping center?” It certainly isn’t a strip mall with delusions of grandeur, anchored by establishments that play off an upscale reputation while almost never frequented by the truly rich. Strip malls are crass and cater towards the proles; “lifestyle shopping centers” feature stores like Coldwater Creek and Thai restaurants.

I visited the place because there’s a Borders there, and while I’m not keen on big chain bookstores (or paying full price when I can get something cheaper on Amazon), there was a new Horus Heresy book released a couple weeks back. Amazon doesn’t discount Black Library (which publishes the series) titles, so I decided it would be just as easy to do cash and carry for the title, and should I happen to see anything else that caught my eye…

Borders is Borders, and there’s no sense at yelling at the rain for being wet, but what really threw me off about the shopping center was its design. The place is laid out like a Mediterranean villa crossed with Fort Courage, which is a bit of a mindfuck for a provincially-skewed New Englander like myself.

Malls (along with television) have long been the hammer and anvil by which American culture gets panel-beaten into a uniform flatness (which is then sprayed with a glossy Californian sheen). The only thing I came away with from my college linguistics class was that it was determined that the ubiquity of generic teenspeak was carried from the Left Coast across the country by the vector of overlapping shopping hubs. The process has usually been syncretic and gradual, though. The pastel-and-white faux Florentine arcade of the Burlington Mall is downright subtle compared to the springing up of a red-tile and stucco-bedecked monstrosity in the land of Minutemen and colonial farmhouses.

The entire time I was there I felt like a tourist in my own homeland, completely cut loose from any sense of locational context. Indeed, if I was grabbed off the street on a balmy summer evening, blindfolded, and dumped off in the parking lot, I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was in Riverside, California; Gary, Indiana; or a mile and a half from my house. It’s nothing that hasn’t been remarked upon before, but the sensation was so unsettling I felt compelled to mention it. It was as if I had stepped into the world of Richard Matheson’s “The Creeping Terror” (cited in Mike Davis’s excellent Ecology of Fear), where fungal spores turn the entire continental United States into one big Los Angeles.

In the story, Bostonians chose mass suicide over assimilation. After these past forty-eight hours, I can totally dig their reasoning.

The Freeze – This Is Boston, Not LA (from This Is Boston, Not LA, 1982) - I'm always amazed and delighted when I see this compilation get props from punk fans around the globe, even if most of the tracks are fast-rather-than-good hardcore. This brief mission statement of a title track was used (minus the final f-bomb) in TV commericals for the Newbury Comics chain of stores during the early 1980's.

Sparks – Shopping Mall of Love (from Music You Can Dance To, 1986) - Rollercoaster was on cable the other night, and that otherwise lame excuse for POV shots featured a performance by the Mael brothers. It was nice diversion from the monotony, and perhaps the filmmakers would have been better served by inverting the proportion of scenes featuring roller coasters to scenes featuring the band performing.