Lizkdc Dislocation

A People's History of the Fourth of July in Boston

Pops Concert By Garrett A. Wollman. (From The Archives @ BostonRadio.org) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Whilst scrubbing my grill, ordering three types of meat and other patriotic tasks, I find myself diving back into childhood memory of this national holiday. 

There are a few small-town Fourth memories, the times we were at the beach somewhere for the weekend. The parents would drive a car into a field of scratchy, dry sun-bleached grass, and settle us kids for the fireworks to come.  You could have convertibles and kids back then: not only did we not have car seats, we drove around with our precious little noggins caressed by the murderous highway breezes, HOW ABOUT THAT. 

So you could sit in that attractively unsafe car, or on an old blanket on the grass, and watch some part-time volunteer firemen--doubtless without the appropriate training--make pretty explosions in the sky.

Other times you got to have your big city Boston Fourth, heading downtown to Pops' giant bandshell to see their deathless leader, Arthur Fiedler, lead the storied band through a medley of Burt Bacharach, Broadway, and George M. Cohan hits that really heated up those World War One-era gramophones, plus a few Beatles tunes for those crazy kids.

Legend has it that when the Pilgrims first arrived upon the shores of Massachusetts, Fiedler emerged from the woodland shadows in his spotless band leader's suit with his snowy white mustache, and foretold that one day, a new nation would be born, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal, but that it would take a really, really long time for folks to get that through their heads.

Who Are the People in the Neighborhood? (JP Cut)

 

People you see in JP on a sunny Friday afternoon.

Guys with braids on bicycles. 

Guys on those tallbike things (when tatts and dork glasses are just not enough to announce your demographic niche).  Guys riding up to other guys with braids and slapping hands as if to say, yo is your band playing tonight, and did you see my girlfriend's knitted bike cozy she is selling on Etsy. No? Then check my Tumblr. That sort of handslap!

People going into the corner store for cigarettes and chips and cheap beer and money orders, and people going into coffee shops to co-work on their code for that site about crowdsourcing social change they won't finish before they head off to grad school.

Big Latin guys headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness. Little hippie non-profit women headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness.  

People headed to the co-op store for whole grain bread and hemp soap.  People headed to that Meatland store for pork sausage and the joy of shopping at a place called Meatland.

Parents taking their progressively-named children to Music Together classes (Emma Mae, please hold hands with Linus and Deliverance). People on their way to their Tribal Dance or Belly Dancing lesson (Note on schedule:  *Students must buy finger cymbals and a 3 yard silk veil from Susi to participate in this class.)

People headed to the Irish bar, the other Irish bar, the other again Irish bar with the mural and corned beef hash and eggs on Sunday, the Scottish bar, the bar in the former brewery that sometimes has a gay line dancing night now, but no more bowling.

Who you don't see:  the invisible people, who invest their lifeblood and InDesign skills in all those free newspapers stacked in the front of all Jamaica Plain businesses, toiling away in their mysterious dens somewhere, delivering their precious freemedia to the careless masses until they can no longer carry on and throw themselves from the top of the Brewery smokestack or move to New Hampshire to become Republican lumber yard owners.*  (* theory)

Yes.  It is a July afternoon in Jamaica Plain, and though I could muse upon the rivalrous charms of my own dear Roslindale, I am going to go to the Scottish bar instead.

 

Bar Mitzing

Urban Iris, June 6 2011

So, this weekend I became a man.

Well, no, virtually, I attended the bar mitzvah of the son of one of my oldest friends in the universe and saw HIM become a man, and we all joined in the experience.

 I couldn't text my way through the ceremony the way I got through most of my Season of Important Ceremonies, the First Communion and High School Graduation etc, because the nice rabbi specifically asked us to keep all devices away and not diminish the ceremonial moment. I could have cheated like the teen in front of me, but I had been specifically informed that the God of Israel is a Mighty God, so I did not. I mean, according to Ben's Torah Portion, He afflicted Moses' sister with psoriasis just for talking shit about her in-laws which, WHO AMONG US is not guilty of that?

The Return of Glee

Well, Tuesday night.

Well, if you love pop music with such a sickness that it can make you happy to have Bruno Mars and "A Chorus Line" mashed together in one hour.

If you spend expensive hours with your therapist's furrowed brow, attempting to spackle over the foundation-sapping traumas of adolescence.

 If your stupid, unkillable inner girl insists still takes a detour outside the approved playlist of Belle and Sebastian and Sufjan Stevens  to take an  inner spotlit stage and  belt an unholy synthesis of "If You Believe in Life After Love," "Don't Rain on My Parade", and "Circus" while you make your rounds of office desk and Powerpoint and lonely smart-phone twaddling  . . .

If you ever had a freak-out seeing the junk culture of your oddball, shabby, inflationary, low-budget decade of childhood turn into some sort of warm and glowy, cherished cultural touchstone . . .

If you're not sure if you're ironic, camp, or just a loser.

Then, you probably enjoyed the coming of a new season of Glee.

I would like to report that instead of such futility, I spent the evening tutoring orphans soaked in British Petroleum spillage and writing free-form poetry on soy paper. But it would not be true!

L sign.

A Start of September Thought

Top Five Reasons Why I'm Glad I'm a Grownup and Not a College Student

• It no longer seems like a big fucking deal to wash my own clothes instead of stinking.
• Knowing there are more bands in the world then R.E.M. (people under thirty, insert "Jack Johnson").
• Not bothering to make philosophical arguments about the right or wrong way to have sex.
• Enjoying or hating books without having theories about how this taste will save or destroy society.
• No more a capella music.

Top Five Reasons Why I Miss Being a College Student

• Can't go to work smelling of last night's beer.
• Katy Perry is the most played musical artist in America.
• Less sex.
• People around you are cheerfully reading Dan Brown.
• No more people to tell you when you've done A+. You have to figure it out.

Inception and Me, a Love Story (or At Least, a Bad Date)

Paris folded in half, and in half again.  Penrose stairs and other Escheresque games. Noirish hotel hallways of mystery, with elegant, mysterious-skinny Joseph Gordon-Levitt slipping through them, upside down and sideways. 

Dicaprio doing his bewildered, slightly battered man-of-honor shtick, leaving the impression of a hero who is just slightly too dim to have been tempted by the more outrageous possibilities of his situation.

Ingenious ingenue Ellen Page as a graduate student in architecture--oh menace of overdue education loans and unsatisfiable culture claims!   No wonder she sells out to the first faintly plausible employer who appears and lures her by destroying a cafe and pretending to take her seriously.

And French Oscar-winner lady Marion Cotillard playing that even more terrifying menace to chunky American manhood, a person who is both a wife and a European.  A menace more terrifying then a Death Star wrapped in a failed iPhone wrapped in a ripe chunk of sub-prime mortage, buddy.

Oh, and Christopher Nolan's insane genius for helming movies about beautiful, damaged, guilt-ridden men, his love for Hitchcock's exploitative take on Jimmy Stewart, and dudes who may or may not have killed their wives (if only they could remember) and the downtrodden underdog geniuses like Nicola Tesla and The Joker.

Inception, you are truly the most best movie of the summer. I love you with all of my damaged heart, infected by infinite comic book and Movie Loft and graduate-school-bullshit-theory ridden brain.  Call me, and we'll make beautiful, stupid love!

As They Did in the Golden World, or, Goodbye July

Something this morning reminded me of a Shakespeare wedding.

No doubt it has to do with the fact that I spent all my summers as a teen in sort of academic nerd camp where the Renaissance and the hot dry crunchy grass of later summer and the salvational power of college admission and nubile adolescence in glasses all blended together.

Actually there was only one summer like that, but evidently it left a deep impression on one.

In all events, I don't want to think about that long-ago July, and As You Like It and Twelfth Night and Rosalind and people singing in the woods and how exile and injustice and loneliness are swept away by weddings and justice restored and weddings.

Because I so absolutely bought it even at the exact moment, as a young person, when I thought I was that cynical smartypants who would certainly avoid all the sad stupid things the adults around her had gotten themselves into.

And look at my grownup life and how much sad and stupid is all over it. 

"I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs."
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.5

But that makes me more or less the parallel of the Fool in the play, and the play makes the fool's own melancholy the object of laughter, and even he gets caught up and run through the machine of love and weddings and redemption and putting things back in order in the end.  I need little hat with bells, and some coffee and July is almost over, anyway.

Phil Marshall and His Amazing Traveling Living Room Road Show

Last night was one of my favorite musical moments in a year of good music. Sitting under a June sky, on a small green field surrounded by chest-high flower banks, a whole bunch of us sank back in lawn chairs, hanging on to cold beers, while a pretty great singer did his thing on the acoustic guitar.

It was the Granby, Connecticut tour stop of a curious phenomenon.  How Phil Marshall got to this big back yard in Connecticut from Austin via Tulsa, starting out from Yorkshire, is a whole story, with which he regaled us in many anecdotes, in between songs.

Phil is originally from Yorkshire, where they make small dogs and pudding that has meat in it.  So he had the good sense to repatriate to the United States, where we have a terrific musical heritage,  and mighty mountains and spreading golden plains, and also make lawnchairs with beverage holders in them, and Ke$ha.  

Anyway.  With the radio industry bought up by Clear Channel and the like, and the CD market blown to pieces by iTunes and its fiendish encouragement of popcorn singles over chewy and substantial albums, these are harder days then ever to make it as a musician. Unless you're a robot, or Ke$ha.

A Damp and Fertile Post

This time of year,  gardeners will stare at you with glazed and unseeing eyes.  They may look like they're present, but they're not.  Their heads are filled with a drama taking place a foot underground. There is mud under their fingernails and they are fingering seed packets in their pockets and there is compost in their socks.

It's a hundred times more severe here in New England this year because of the Rain. The rain which fell and fell and fell until the folks at the Blue Hill Observatory said it was the wettest March in a hundred years and just as they were about to show you their lovely charts, their spouses called and said the basement was flooded so they had to go.

It rained for a solid month until the entire state was soggy and grey and anxious.  The roads became edged with new miniature ponds, and the ponds expanded boastfully into lakes, and the chilly little rivers staged takeovers of the surrounding fields and all around the water knocked at the doors and windows and in many cases moved straight into the house without waiting for a key or an invite.

Who's Teaching Who, Here?

From tutoring this week: a tale of two writers. Both twelve.  The creative writing open prompt was "the year 3010." 

Kieya wrote two precisely organized paragraphs hoping for world peace and less violence in cities, and predicting that cars would fly, then calmly got out some drawing paper and moved on to creating a pencil landscape of complete order and symmetry. 

Jyreese wrote four un-punctuated, un-capitalized, unstoppable pages about planets exploding and aliens fights with martial arts.