Category: Places

Vivian Darkbloom at PA’s Lounge

Last night bookdwarf was out at a bachelorette party so I went over to PA’s Lounge to see a couple bands. I don’t get over there much but when I do, I kick myself for not going more often. It’s got an atmosphere that’s been ably described as “VFW Hall” — complete with sassy bartender who insists on showing “The Notebook” on one TV to balance out the baseball on the other, and a crusty old guy who’s been there drinking away his pension check since midafternoon, repeating himself and clumsily trying to chat with the opening band members. No attitude at all. I like that kind of vibe.

And I definitely like $3 generic beer.

The event was billed as a CD release party for The Sunsets Quick, and they were pretty good. The first band, Forsythe, have a lead singer who sounds like Cat Power, and a great drummer. Plus, they actually use a marimba for a few songs, instead of just setting the synth to marimba mode. That’s pretty nifty.

The highlight, though, was the middle of the three performers, Vivian Darkbloom. Their track “Cold War,” if there were any justice in the music biz, would be on heavy rotation. Lines like “I loved our cold war, we never had to mean what we said, we spoke like our governments” and “you list me as a friend, but it’s complicated, I guess the whole world knows now” are just brilliantly clever. And then there’s the fact that the lead has attached a Wii remote to his guitar, and wired it in some way so as to have the motion sensor affect the tones coming out of the instrument.

Buncha Savages In This Town, I Tellya

Apparently more than one car in the neighborhood got this treatment. I guess I should be glad that this year’s crop of undergrads is supporting a local business like Tedeschi, but it’s still irritating to find a wang drawn on my car’s windshield.
Stupid vandals

I mean, since they’ve gone with Circus Peanuts as their medium, they could at least have picked Jumbo The Elephant as their subject.

Let’s All Go To The Plastics Museum

I didn’t know such a thing existed, but while headed elsewhere this past weekend I passed a sign advertising the Plastics Museum. As you might imagine, it is full of important history about bakelite and tupperwear and celluloid and space-age materials. It sounds like the perfect place to unleash a couple hundred bored fifth graders.

Yeah, I’m totally going.

Too Little, Too Late

Boston’s Real Estate Cafe is having a coffee meetup to talk about projected ten percent decline in the price of single-family homes in the next year. I don’t know what to say except “woohoo?” Loss of population, price declines, and the MBTA aside, housing in these parts is still too scarce, too expensive, and too far from public transit. For as long as I’ve been paying attention, the problems have been obvious and the solutions have been simple, if unpopular (Dense mixed-income housing! In your colonial town!)

Meanwhile, The Times tells me that Bernanke is “clamping down on exotic and subprime mortgages,” something that’s been obviously necessary for at least four years. Keep this up, boys, and you just might get the barn door closed by the time the horse gets bored of romping around the farmyard and decides to come back out of the rain.

Wandering The Old City

I am thinking about a movie about killers hanging out in a medieval city, and it reminded me of the last time I went to a medieval city.

Nürnberg. I was there for work back in the spring of 2005. I had meetings Tuesday-Friday, but arrived early on Monday, and had the day off to get used to the jetlag and wander the city. I went and saw Albrecht Dürer’s house. It was closed, of course, because it was Monday. Museums are often MONTAGS GESCHLOSSEN. Beautiful from the outside, though, like the rest of the old city.

It was spring there, while it was still grey in Boston, and I was happy just wandering around the city’s medieval center, grabbing a sandwich midday, flipping through the guidebook to say “eine lager, bitte?”

All the bathrooms had vending machines with cute ten-packs of Lucky Strike Light cigarettes, which I remembered from Chile, and which you just can’t find in the US. The tourist info maps had ads for restaurants, family amusement attractions, museums, and porno palaces. The famous court where the war criminals were tried is still a working courthouse, and wasn’t open during the days I was there. All the other museums were Montags Geschlossen, too. I went to the porno palaces.

Tuesday we had meetings. The other two people from my US department had arrived Monday night and Tuesday morning, and were jetlagged and irritable. I was fresh, but I was junior staff. I was there to learn about how to conduct international meetings, and to impress upon the German counterparts that this series of meetings was important enough to bring three people to Europe for a week. Sometimes the point of a meeting is not only in the topics discussed, but the priority of those topics. My presence indicated that this was a topic of three-people-in-Europe importance. But not three executives. Just three people. I don’t recall if anything really came out of the meetings.

Mostly I sat around and nodded and took notes and read a book about how to be a product manager. After work we went to the biergarten and I wandered around the city some more, browsing stores where I couldn’t read the labels on things and guessing at what signs meant, walking until my feet hurt.

I didn’t kill anybody, though. So I didn’t have a lot to run from. I was just there.

Movoto And Reality Hitting The Boston Real Estate Market

The Boston Real Estate Blog says that Movoto has come to town. It’s another disintermediation play like Redfin and ZipRealty, although I haven’t bothered to figure out what their specific angle is, because I don’t really want to buy a house right now.

See, I spend a lot of time drooling over loft condos, because that’s the kind of shallow yuppie I am. So I looked up a few in my neighborhood and found 7 Park Ave, which is asking a million bucks and has been on the market for over a year. I used to live across the alley from that building. It’s nothing special, and it’s shadowed on one side by the tall, unattractive apartment building I used to live in. Yeah, the library garden on one side makes up for that a little, but not much. And sure, the condo residents get offstreet parking, but it’s just not a million-dollar condo. Spacious, yes – 3BR, 3500 square feet. And well-appointed, too, with granite countertops (the harvest gold appliances and shag rugs of the ’00s). Whoever owns this place must be a real admirer of Manny Ramirez, who has had his condo on the market for two years now without a nibble or a price reduction.

There are a lot of fancy loft condos in this neighborhood for a lot less money, and they’re not moving either.

If they all started cutting their prices by, say, forty or fifty percent, then I’d consider trying to get a loan. (Yes, I know, I’m going to rent forever because I am too cheap to pay all the various fees, which strike me as deliberate insults. Shut up.)

Book Review: The Polemic Tradition In Nonfiction: Roberto Saviano’s “Gomorrah”

Roberto Saviano has a book out called “Gomorrah,” about the Camorra, the Neapolitan mob. I got an advance copy from Bookdwarf awhile ago. She knew when she saw it that it was exactly the sort of thing I love. It’s got crime, scandal, ecological disaster, and a heartfelt, personal touch. There’s an excerpt in the latest Granta, although it’s not online, just in print. You can also read about the author – now in hiding – in the Times from earlier this month.

He says his distaste for the criminal class in Naples is personal. That’s definitely true. In the US, getting worked up about a political issue is considered poor form these days. Critics who have point out that our president is a corrupt, criminal nincompoop are derided not for being incorrect but for being “shrill.”

Not so in Italy. In Italy, when you get furious, when you write poetry about the crimes of your fellow-citizens, they kill you. Saviano’s rage is intense. He’s got a polemic here, and I can only hope that US audiences don’t ignore it because of that. His choking rage at the destruction that criminal enterprise wreaks on his hometown should draw you in. It says: This man is serious. He’s got something important to say. Listen carefully.

You should read this book. You should buy it from the Harvard Book Store.

How To Get Your Own Square In Cambridge

Frank Kramer Square Just about every intersection in the greater Boston area is a “square” of some kind, and many of them are named after one or another hero of the town. There’s a relatively simple process for getting a named square: Be from somewhere near the intersection, fight in World War II, die, and have relatives fill out the paperwork with the city.

But there are a few exceptions. Mark Sandman, the frontman for the band Morphine, has Mark Sandman Square – the intersection of Mass Ave and Brookline Street, right near the Middle East, where he often played. Of course, he still had to be born in Cambridge, contribute mightily to the development of music in Cambridge, and then die to get that honor.

Not a lot of people get squares named after them while they’re alive. Just about nobody. Frank Kramer, owner of the Harvard Bookstore and a founding member of Cambridge Local First, is the only exception I can think of, and he’s there with Mark and Pauline Kramer, who founded the bookstore 75 years ago. So, if you want to get a square while you’re alive, start by becoming a pillar of the community and tirelessly dedicating yourself to promotion and preservation of local businesses. Then, after 75 or so years, if you’re still alive, get a friend to submit a request to city hall. You just might get to attend the dedication ceremony for your very own memorial square, a pleasure I imagine is something like being able to attend your own funeral to see who your real friends are.