Ah, Route 8. There are few routes so rich, yet so humble. You could live your whole life on route 8. Start out at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Ward at Beth Israel; get an education on the way at UMass, Northeastern, or Simmons College; check out an exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum; go to a game at the Fenway; plant a garden or have anonymous sex in the Fens; have a rapid HIV test at Project Trust at the Boston Medical Center, and then celebrate your negative results by buying smack in Franklin Square Park; and after loads of cool adventures, finally end up six feet under in Columbia Square Cemetery in Dot. All this and more, without ever leaving our featured route of the day!
Here’s my suggestion for a fun-filled and action-packed day trip. Hop on at UMass Boston after a trip to the JFK Museum on the harbor and hop off at Kenmore Square (yes, this route boasts perhaps the two greatest and best-known symbols of 20th Century Boston: JFK and the Citgo sign!) and enjoy life’s rich pageant along the way. WOO-WOOOO! All aboard!
Our first stop (though not THE first stop) is South Bay Shopping Center! Are you a subcontractor or just a do-it-yourselfer? Well, there’s a Homo Depot right here at South Bay Center, and Bus #8 will drop you right at its door. Need some cheap immigrant labor for that little gentrification job you got going on? Look no further. We’ve got Mexicans, Brazilians, Cape Verdians, a virtual 31 flavors hanging out in front of the Home Depot and Target just waiting to assist you for a fraction of the cost of legal day-labor! ¡Venga, venga, venga, muchacho! ¡Dese prisa! ¡El autobús se está yendo! ¡ariba ariba, andele andele!
Next, let’s hop off at the Boston Medical Center, a medical research hospital associated with BU! It has a slightly complicated history of mergers, but its various individual institutes were founded in the mid-nineteenth century. The former Boston City Hospital (BCH) was the first municipal hospital established in the United States. Nowadays BMC is THE place to BE if you’re afflicted by a STD!
Bus #8 runs through the South End, too. Of particular interest: the aforementioned historic Blackstone/Franklin Square neighborhood. There are two big parks there with big-ass birdbaths as their centerpieces. The parks seem to serve as spill-over for the Pine Street Inn, which is, surprisingly and unfortunately, not on our tour today. Those of you interested in visiting the Inn will have to tune in for featured routes #9 and #49, coming soon! Until then, feel free to get to know some of the Inn’s eccentric denizens in Franklin Square!
But I would be remiss if I failed to mention this area is now home to the trendiest, priciest, loftiest new neighborhoods in Boston: SOHA and SOWA, both very much in walking distance from the Blackstone/Franklin Square Neighborhood. But you are probably not taking the bus or reading this if you are living there. So I think it’s safe to say there is something slightly sad and wannabe-pathetic in these cutesy-chic, Manhattanistic loftihoods, which were not invented by down and out but devil-may-care artistes but by sleazy developers and snooty realtors who have by now priced all the squatters out (many now reside in the Pine Street Inn and Franklin Square Park). Yes, there were and are plenty of artist studios in the hood, but it’s been utterly defunkified in the process of luxury loftification. Not knocking it, just telling you. Because there are gonna be people out there who will say things like, “Oh, SOWA! That’s kinda funky!” But it’s Queer Eye funky, at most. Which means occasionally you’ll see someone using a vintage necktie for a belt.
One place on our route that is off the scale on the funkometer is the Dudley area of Roxbury/North Dorchester, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. And this is why (as The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) informs us):
“This diverse community of African American (37%), Latino (29%), Cape Verdean (25%) and White (7%) residents has a per capita income of $7,600 compared to nearly $16,000 for the City of Boston as a whole. The median family income for the area is $20,848. The unemployment rate is around 16%. Approximately 32% of the area’s population falls below the poverty level.”
Now, no offense to anyone, but that 7% figure above is crucial to the funk factor of any neighborhood. Sorry. When white people think of something funky, it’s usually something like the “funky chicken,” a dance whose invention is attributed to Rufus Thomson, a rhythm and blues and soul singer from Memphis, which involves acting like a chicken; flapping your “wings” and flailing your legs around. All well and good, but is it really funky? While Thomson’s credentials are impeccable, he was never able to adequately explain how or why or under what specific circumstances impersonating a chicken is funky. Personally, I think it was an ingenious way of selling the idea of funky to white folks who haven’t got a clue.
The truth is white people have been searching for the meaning of funk ever since the word entered the slang lexicon. And it’s a word with a particularly rich etymology. The Oxford Unabridged gives some tantilizing hints as to the connection between funky and chicken. One possible origin is the Flemish fonck: “cowering fear, a state of panic or shrinking terror.” In 19th century English, as a verb, it was slang for “to flinch” or “to try to back out of” something. Horatio Walpole was quoted in 1886: “The last time I saw him here [Eton], was standing up funking against a coduit to be catechised.” As a noun it could mean “a kick,” as quoted in J. Halley’s Life (1842) here: “He placed his hand…unluckily just on the spot where Mr. Pony is rather touchy. Sundry vehement funks…were the immediate consequence.” Flinching and kicking, hmm? Maybe old Rufus was an etymologist after all.
But when it comes to the adjective “funky,” things get even clearer. It showed up in its more readily recognizable form in 1954, 170 years after its first sighting in English (”sweet or funky cheese”). But here’s the clincher, from the December 31st, 1960 issue of Melody Maker:
“Horace [Silver] recalls that the use of the word funk in the modern sense goes back to his composition, ‘Opus de Funk’. ‘When you put a lot of little blues inflections in the solos, people would say you were really funky, by which they just mean bluesy.’”
Which introduces another intangible into the discussion. But never mind. Even Cecil, of The Straight Dope has entered the fray. One of his faithful readers claims the following origins for “funky”:
“[It] seems to derive from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, `bad body odor.’ … Both jazzmen and Bakongo use funky and lu-fuki to praise persons for the integrity of their art, for having `worked out’ to achieve their aims…. This Kongo sign of exertion is identified with the positive energy of a person. Hence `funk’ in American jazz parlance can mean earthiness, a return to fundamentals.”
To which Cecil replies: “YOU SAY IT’S FUNKY, I SAY IT STINKS.”
As far as funk’s concerned, the only thing that’s for sure is this: if you have to ask you’ll never know.
The long and short of it is: any way you slice it, Dudley Square is funkier than SOWA.
Hmm, well we’re about halfway through our tour, and I don’t know about you, but I am BEAT, my babes. So We’ll have to finish this action-packed route another day. And if you have any suggestions for sights I may have missed so far in our journey from UMass to Dudley Square, feel free to toss in your two cents!