HERE.

I discovered a couple days ago that while there are comments that get posted to my site immediately without moderation, there are some that go into a queue that I have to approve before they appear on the site. I don’t know why some go into the queue and others don’t, frankly, but most of the “comments” that end up in the queue are spams. To be honest, I figured they were all spams and instead of going through them, I periodically deleted the whole bunch without having a closer look.

Well, the other day I had a closer look. The ratio of legitimate comments to spams was something like 1:100, but there were legitimate, thoughtful, even insightful comments in there that would have been deleted had I not taken that closer look. (I still delete the ones that call me names, by the way.)

I wanted to mention this oversight on my part, and to apologize to anyone who may have attempted to post a comment in the past, whose comment never appeared. If you didn’t call me names, it was because I threw it out with the junk mail. I will be more careful from now on. I wouldn’t want to miss any stray compliments, would I?

Ok. That’s it. Carry on.

These two shots were taken from Kingston St., between Bedford and Summer (scroll down for detailed directions–the red “x” marks the spot). The first is looking due west, the second looking southeast. I was right across the street from The Good Life, which is The Place for martinis, apparently, in case you didn’t know. I’m not gonna get into the whole “what is a martini?” debate right now, though. It’s too early in the morning, and I’ve only had three martinis so far. (I need at least five-and-a-half to get philosophical.)

The building in which The Good Life finds itself is utterly charming, by the way:

The closest T station is Downtown Crossing (Red Line), which is .17 miles away. To get here from there, walk approximately 1 block SE on Summer St., turn right on Kingston St., walk a short distance SW on Kingston St., and look up.

Just so you’re clear on this, I consider a “found vista” in the city that open space framed by the structures. One thing I like about Boston–that you can really see in the second shot above, is how unexpectedly, and from just one certain angle on the ground, lines converge.

In that picture–looking SE–what is pleasing, mysterious, titillating even, is the vanishing point between the buildings. Their parallel lines seem to converge in that sliver of open space. There is freedom there, beyond—but it opens up only for a moment. Take two steps in any direction, and it’s gone. Like the shadow of a thought, or the hint of a possibility.

If you’ve discovered a secret vista, send it to me HERE.

HERE.

If you have some horror stories about T etiquette to share, and I know you do, drop me a line HERE. I’ll make you famous.

Yikes. HERE.

So, three of us (Leslie from Little House, David DiRocco, who owns a triple decker on Chase St., and myself) met with two reps from DCR (Margie Lynch, director of partnerships and Karl Pastore, director of the Harbor region) on Friday.

The DCR was able to get two grand from Ben Affleck in return for rights to film at the park. They are able to get matching funds for any contributions to the park, so there’s actually four grand for benches, a new coat of paint for the playground equipment, and a late-autumn bulb-planting. Karl also mentioned he would like to
check into new rubbish receptacles–not barrels, but those kind of mesh ones that are pretty common in parks these days. There was no commitment on this, however.

Karl said he would get some inmates on work-detail to scrape paint and prime the playground equipment. Margie suggested a gathering in late September, to paint it. Margie said it would not take many people to do it. Leslie said some of the youths at Little House might be interested.

As for broken fencing, they suggested if anyone knows any union construction workers, we might do some networking with them. If not, I’m sure we can work with DCR on it.

I asked about shrubs, and Margie said the DCR had nothing against the idea of some being planted, but that someone from the neighborhood would have to make sure they were maintained.

Margie encouraged the idea of a “friends of Atheneum Park” group to form a “friends of” partnership with DCR, but that is a matter of interest, organization, and commitment. I think a good first step is to set up a September work-day, and see who is interested in helping out and to what extent and in what capacity.

With just a little TLC I think the park/playground could be improved immeasurably. If anyone is interested you know where to reach me.

HERE.

Of course they do not work for the T. But the T thought of it first. So there.

I had a daunting weekend, and it’s splattered all over my week so far. The weather has been more or less wonderful, of course, and I was able to spend a bit of time in the garden Saturday, but for some reason–maybe the planets are in an evil alignment– my relations at the moment are almost universally prickly. The ones that aren’t prickly are like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

There are times when you’re in the flow, when all those seemingly disparate elements beautifully converge, and then there are times when nothing comes together, and all those perfectly merged elements scatter to the four winds again. Sometimes life is like looking through a kaleidoscope, isn’t it?

And sometimes you just find you’re in the dark. Usually when you bang into something head-first you didn’t see was right in front of you. So many disparate emotions, your thoughts crowding each other out. It’s all a lot of static. Nothing resonates.

It seems to augur change.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater with a friend, watching the thoroughly delightful Little Miss Sunshine, and at the end, when the little girl performs at the pageant—a wonderful scene, even if you saw it coming—I find myself bawling my eyes out. Hmm. Funny.

The movie was a “small, good thing,” to borrow Raymond Carver’s famous phrase. I liked the theme of impotently defying society’s rigid structures. And the peculiarly American take on that modern struggle between artifice and authenticity. I was impressed once again by Steve Carrell, whom I think is the next generation of a venerable comic tradition whose current best practitioner is Bill Murray.

This may have been a hybrid genre piece (dysfunctional family goes on a road trip), but it was a good one. As for whether genre pieces are worth seeing, there was an interesting article in the Sunday Globe by their film critic Ty Burr, about Snakes on a Plane, where the always astute critic asserted: “We go to movies–even honest schlock–not to see what we expect to see but to be surprised by what we hadn’t expected.”

But do we?

This assumption on the part of critics is really a presumption in disguise. It’s like saying that when we go out to eat we always want Chinese. We don’t. Sometimes we want Japanese, Italian, or Mexican. If we ordered a humonga-chonga, we will indeed be surprised if the waiter brings us mugu gai pan, but that’s not what we wanted. Novelty is sometimes not on the menu.

The critic might, out of ennui, choose to distill what is valuable in a picture to “surprise” or “originality,” but this contradicts everything we see in the actual history of art, where a genre is invented, replicated endlessly, mastered by degrees, finally perfected, and then parodied, mocked, and morphed in its decline, cannibalized and hybridized beyond recognition, until a new genre emerges.

The important thing to understand here is that “we” don’t necessary want to be “surprised”–movie critics, because they are bored, because they watch too many movies that seem to be too much alike, want to be “surprised.”

Why do people buy albums and listen to them over and over and over again until they know every lyric, every guitar lick, every little lilt in the lead singer’s voice? The Cult of the New is particularly modern. And has actually already been superseded. Postmodern architecture is not about out-and-out originality, but appropriation and recombination. The ascendant forms of entertainment, like video games, are not about originality or surprise, but about repetition and mastery.

But the point here is that there is no one reason to go to the movies. Sometimes we want the salve of ritual, the stations of the cross; sometimes we want surprise. For me narrative cohesion, pacing, good–that is to say authetic, appropriate–dialogue, and a dose of je ne sais quoi are the ingredients of greatness, regardless of genre.

As for prickly relations. I mean, aside from those that are just generally prickly, regardless. (And you know who you are!)…

I got a good dressing down from a relatively new FWP about my treatment of the Newbury Street shopper a couple weeks ago in my blog. To be fair, he admitted that if he had been people-watching on Newbury Street and she had passed by loaded up like a pack mule as she was, shaking her thang, he might’ve cracked wise, but he would not have gone home and written about it.

It is an interesting distinction. And there is definitely something to it. The diarist sometimes seems petty for recording for posterity off-the-cuff observations that come off seeming unseemly when the moment is past. This is the chief source of danger in keeping a diary, in fact, as anyone who has for any length of time and has the courage to read it over occasionally can tell you. Come to find, we are all petty.

What do we do when we see someone so utterly self-absorbed they don’t even realize they’re being stalked by bloggerazzi? We mock them at a safe distance. My new FB acknolwedged this. What is unseemly is admitting it after the fact. But there is a remedy even for this. Mock the blogger. Pierce made his point–”mock not lest ye be mocked”–by mocking me! Stalked by the online mockerazzi? Mock them back! We will all go down together! In a stinking plume of self-pity and scorn!

I think to many people I heard from on the issue it seemed “unfair,” but also a bit cowardly, particularly to photograph our mystery shopper, especially from behind. It’s like shooting someone in the back. I’ll own it. But come on, people. If you step outside your door these days you run the risk of being shot. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to be watching your back for you.

Then at work yesterday one of my esteemed colleagues sort of pulls me aside, sweetly says she wants to ask me about something I recently wrote.

Now, I should preface this by saying, about a month ago another of my esteemed colleagues, an Italian gentleman, pulled me aside in the corridor (literally grabbing me by the collar) and growled: You MUSTa Write about a de WARRRRRAH! I was like, which one? I mean, Christ. Well, the Big One, of course. It’s Armageddon, you know.

But I didn’t write about that war, because no matter how judicious you try to be about it, you will get it from both sides, and, frankly, I don’t see where the big emergency is. This has been going on for millennia, and it will go on for many milennia more. It’s the freakin Hatfelds and McKahlils. What’s the rush to write something? And so what if it is the end of the world (which it isn’t)—then what?

But finally I did write something—not really about that war, but about the War on Terror, and not from the Jewish perspective, but from that of the humble Goy.

Oy.

After reading what I had written (which, for the record, made no mention of Israel, the Jews, Hamas, or Hezbollah), my colleague this morning (who is Jewish) totally JEWED-OUT on me.

To my Jewish friends out there (even ones who claim to be Reform Jews and to be all nonchalant about their Judaism): please calm the fuck down. Your homeland is under siege, I understand. It’s painful for you. I understand that, too. You don’t need to go around picking fights and casting aspersions for me to see it. We all see it.

By the way, my Jewdentials are impeccable. I’m not even talking about the part of me–eight and a half inches (give or take a few)–that’s German Jew. I won’t mention that one of the major romantic entanglements of my adult life was with an absolutely Jewlicious Hungarian Jew. (All I will say about it–TMI ALERT– is that in one of the great ironies of History and destiny, I was the circumcised one and he, like many assimilated East European Jews born post-WWII, got to keep his foreskin–where is the justice?)

Is the modern state of Israel problematic? Yes. Is the Arab world a mess? Mm-hmm. But Yahweh is a fighting God and Jews are fighters. Didn’t you see Yossi and Jagger? You want me to drop everything and rend my garments every time a missile is hurled at you? It sucks, but I only have so many garments to rend.

I have to say going out in Boston on the weekend is problematic without a car. Most of my friends have one, so it’s rare that I’m out and about late at night without a viable way home. Friday night was one of those rare occasions. And I have to say I could not fully enjoy the evening anticipating the hassle of getting home on the T.

The outing started off badly. I haven’t been using the T at all, and had only used the automated machines at JFK once since their installation. I had to recharge my Charlie ticket, and have to admit that the first time I used the system I didn’t have any trouble at all. (To be fair I still have not used it during rush hour.)

This time the first machine I tried could not read my debit card. It gives you three swipes and then you’re out. I tried it on four different machines. It’s a brand new card, I have activated it, and I’ve got funds in my account. I had a ten dollar bill–so after trying the card I figured I’d just go ahead and use cash. Unfortunately, one small part of one corner of the bill was torn off, and the machine would not accept the cash, either.

I walked over to the hermetically-sealed T Ambassador Pod (TAP), and to my surprise the woman in the booth actually opened her little window without making me beg and plead. She was very friendly, which made me immediately suspicious, but I soon realized she had this chipper attitude because she could do absolutely nothing to help me. She had no change. There are no tokens. And if the machines don’t want your cash or your card, you’re shit out of luck.

She took me through the process, and counseled me in the correct swiping technique. Apparently the machines are a little fussy when it comes to how swiftly you swipe. At any rate, I was able to recharge my Charlie ticket (but actually, it spits out a whole new ticket, not the same one you inserted.)

I was lucky to make the train. They have new bells and buzzers at JFK, that are like air-raid sirens. Good for the hearing impaired, that’s for sure. Props on the amped-up PA system, too.

On my way home, I had to take the green-line to the red. Of course, the green-line doesn’t honor the Charlie ticket. One young woman I was in line with started arguing with the lady in the token booth. “This is absurd,” the young woman said. I just laughed. It’s a little known fact that the current system is actually based on plans for a “Metro of the Absurd” drawn up by none other than Samuel Beckett. No lie.

So when it was my turn I handed over a five dollar bill. I wanted two tokens. She pushed my five dollar bill back under the window, and barked “I need quarters!” I was like, “and?” I mean, is this my problem? I pushed my bill back under the window. She pushed it back out. “Quarters!” she roared. I was with a friend, who luckily had some change (though no quarters). Thank goodness she was willing to accept other forms of legal tender.

You know The Dog Whisperer? They need a T-employee Whisperer. At least until they get fully automated. At which point I am sure the T-employees who are now so badly behaved will become pleasantly domesticated, with the pressure to do anything useful off of them. Maybe petting booths would be a good idea, once the system is fully implemented?