3 posts tagged “boston”

This morning I am, as usual on a Sunday, at Quacks sitting at my regular table and contemplating the graffiti on the wall next to me: “Omens will eat you alive.”  It appeared months ago, barely a week after the new paint job dried, and I’ve been wondering what it means ever since.  Or more to the point, what it meant to the person who wrote it.

The joy of graffiti often comes from its crypticness, though from my experience that’s usually more of a pleasure for the scrawler than the observer.  People love in-jokes as long as they’re in on them and there’s little in this world that’s more an in-joke than graffiti only you and maybe one or two other people will understand.  At least that was my experience back when I fearlessly wielded a Marks-A-Lot.

 Defacing any flat surface of common property seemed to come naturally in my school years – it was, as my brother later said of bumper stickers, “just another way to carry on the dialogue.”  Desks in every classroom and stall-dividers in every boys’ bathroom at Westtown were covered with graffiti and even as a day student I contributed my share – Ramones lyrics, derogatory comments about the Student Body President (the one my senior year weaseled his way into office on a promise of beer in the water fountains), even just the names of the King Crimson members on the first album.  When I first started using the Upper School bathrooms in 7^th grade I spent any number of hours pondering other messages left: who felt compelled to share with the school that “Kintner is burned out on glue”?  Why did someone draw a mangy likeness of a mutt closely modeled on Thurber’s Muggs and title it “Potto’s Dog” (Potto being the name assigned to an Assistant Boy’s Dean who reputedly patrolled the grounds at night with a flashlight, shaking bushes to flush out pot-smokers) when Potto, far as anyone knew, didn’t even have a dog?  And so on.

 Things got a lot more out of hand in college, as they will when you gather a bunch of young people who think they’re just so damn clever.  At first I was content to confine my wall-scrawlings to my own dorm; one winter night left to my own devices in Seymour after practically everyone had already gone home for winter break and feeling particularly nihilistic, I wrote “Is it true as you say that we’re on the eve of destruction?” in peanut butter in the stairwell.  It wasn’t until I fell in with Ivan junior year that I learned the folly of this; Ivan worked part-time for Buildings & Grounds and told me, “They all know it’s you, man, and they’re just waiting for you to fuck up.”  Ivan taught me how to graffiti the smart way like he did, which was every-damn-where else on campus.  Also how to make it cryptic enough so it wasn’t easily traceable to its source; Ivan hated hippies, but no one who didn’t know him well would ever guess that  “No tofu for you!”, which appeared ubiquitously in El Marko throughout senior year, was his handiwork. 

And when I graduated and moved to Boston I viewed the city at first as an extension of Bard.  I took a house in Somerville with Lori, who had grown up in Tivoli and was getting away for the first time; Lori bought a magnum marker, the biggest the art supply stores sold, and proceeded to use it everywhere she went in Somerville – even (or especially) on sidewalks.  She was freaked out by Harry Hood, at the time a pint-size animated spokesman for the area’s predominant line of dairy products, so she tried to exorcise him by prefacing nonsensical statements with “Harry sez:” or often just “Harry gives Hood head!”  I preferred my favored Bard icon, a stick figure with wedge-shaped head.  For us this was only perfectly reasonable behavior and I had no idea how annoying it probably was to the working-class folks around us.

(Actually, I kind of did.  We both hated Somerville.  If we’d stayed in that neighborhood longer than three months and kept that shit up one or both of us would have likely made the acquaintance of the local PD and not in a good way.)

 Leaving Boston though broke me of the habit, pretty much for good.  Greenpeace shipped me to Greenwich, then Philadelphia, and finally San Francisco and in the course of my travels I gradually absorbed the idea that in most of the real world – specifically, the world that I wanted to learn to be a part of - there’s just no place where graffiti doesn’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.  And because I never did it as performance art or as a revolutionary act or really for any reason but getting (and hopefully provoking) a cheap laugh, it didn’t seem worth the risk.

 Or maybe joining up with Greenpeace channeled my need to act out into a more socially acceptable (and certainly better-protected) venue.  If you want to call 80s-era GP “socially acceptable.”  I suppose I could have done much worse and gone for Earth First instead.

Whatever.  No here I am 25 years later, back in a college town where the graffiti is good, great sometimes, but mostly still cryptic.  I don't feel any particular desire to join in; cheap laughs are just as easy to come by these days from other sources.  I'll probably always feel the urge to interpret, though, as I'm proving this morning at Quacks.

I was technically in Boston a total of 72 hours this visit and if I learned anything it’s that 72 hours is nowhere near sufficient.  I only got one full day to be out and poking around in the city, the other one being allocated to a day trip to Cape Ann (see next entry), and that poking-around day saw somewhat dismal weather.  Even so, Boston in the gray is better than most cities in their best spring plumery, and there was a lot to see downtown that’s sprung up in the 24 years since I was last out on foot there.

South Station is quite impressive these days, or at least the food court is.  Impressive but not pretentious, and I felt every bit of affection for the place I remember from taking the Red Line there daily when I worked for Greenpeace on Congress St. renewed.

The building that housed the Greenpeace office hasn’t fared so well.  In fact it’s been completely gutted to make way for a 32-story behemoth.  I’m just glad I got to see it when it still looked at least a little like it once did.

Speaking of urban density, the house right next to W.’s is getting some ugly new infill in the back yard.  W.’s is pretty much the same as it was last year but that new house is seriously going to block the sun from his shop and driveway.  The original house in front is getting a rehab to the tune of the high six figures.  At least the property will look nice from the street.

Loved the fountain and stream on the fringe of Chinatown.  No telling how long it’s been there but it fits perfectly if you overlook the six-lane semi-expressway 10 feet away.

The Commons was its same engagingly grungy self and even the sporadic rain couldn’t take its charm away.  Swan boats still in full operation too, filled with hooting schoolkids and not an iPod in sight anywhere.

All the time I spent in the Back Bay when I lived here I don’t recall looking up that much then.  If I did I’d have surely remembered there are some large, ornate and wickedly classy buildings around here.  As always I'm reminded that they just don't know how to build things the way they did on the east coast.

While most people this week are thinking about getting to Austin, I’m only thinking about getting out.  Even if it won’t be for another two months!  Monday I started making arrangements to take off for Boston at the end of the semester: stay with my oldest brother W. in Cambridge, pound the pavement around Davis Square in Somerville (one of the five places I lived during my year and a half there), ride the Green Line to all the formerly low-rent places it goes.  I’m looking forward to being there in May, as IME it’s the best month for traveling to the Eastern seaboard.  Got about 10 days coming, and I’m planning to make the most of them.

Ideal would be taking a side-trip to see another brother, E. in New Hampshire.  E. hasn’t responded to my inquiry yet – he’s the last of my siblings to get sucked into the internet – so I don’t know what the possibilities are for that.  

It’s been 11 years since I was last in New England, a rushing-everywhere Christmas week between Philadelphia, Westchester County, and Boston/NH.  I plan to make it more leisurely this time.  Like: stay in Boston long enough to rent/borrow a bike and hit some of the urban trails.  I can’t tell you how totally appealing that sounds right now.

W. included with his response a picture of us at my high school graduation.  Talk about a blast from the past, here it is – this is what family is for.  The pictures is pre-MS and –wheelchair for him, pre-corpulence for me, and it’s hard to believe we were ever so young (he was early-30s then).  It’s even harder to believe my nose was ever so large.