In the last moments of my life
I hope the only sound echoing
through my head
is your voice laughing.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Odyssey Americana (Part DC)
In which our hero rides a fucking scary escalator, and descends into the utterly absurd center of the American universe, and marvels at what he finds there. He also makes a couple of stupid jokes.
The train ride--
Entering and exiting trains is a wonderful experience. As travel goes, train entrances and exits are like the day spa of travel bureaucracy. They check your ticket every once in a while, but other than that, no big hassle. Unless you count travel time. In that case, it's the part of the day spa where some new employee locks you in the sauna for a day and a half, forgetting you were there, and when they finally remember you, you emerge looking like Emperor Palpatine. The trip just drones on and on. My travel companions, comparatively, were priceless.
First-- Incredibly White Fratboy with his iBook, blasting Lil' Wayne from Boston to Stamford, Connecticut with no regard for others. It was especially endearing when he started mouthing the words with that half-smirk I've come to expect from guys like him, which simultaneously intimates, "I Think Can Nail Any Bitch Who Walks By Me" but "I Don't Know How To Read."
Second-- Yakking Ivy League Girl, who spent from Stamford to New York City squawking on the phone with someone, discussing whether or not she wants to go to Yale or Harvard for Grad School... in English. It was almost frightening having to listen to her almost moan over Victorian poetry while name-dropping (apparently) famous literary critics and talking about her new shoes, or forgetting that "she was, like, not even 22 yet, [she's] still only 21. Oh my goooood."
Last-- NYC Hipster Asian who nested EVERYWHERE. She got on in New York City wearing leggings, and plugged into her iPhone. From New York to DC, she plowed through about eight In-Touch Magazines and steadily spread out all of her belongings into our little section. First the seat adjacent to her, then the seat adjacent to me. Not that I was using it, but that she was so presumptuous was rather annoying.
DC--
It's hard, at first, to write about Washington DC. In the last eight years, my own relationship to this place, as with many of countrymen, has become, to put it delicately, strained. To a certain extent, I still liken entering this city to entering the belly of a beast. I tire of the thought of writing something beautiful and moving about my frustration and fury with the United States since the 2000 election. So I won't say anything, more than that I'm apprehensive. Though we've seen a change in administration, I'm hesitant to put myself full force behind anyone who would actively pursue the leadership of the country. (As John Adams once remarked "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it," and years later, Douglas Adams nodded in agreement when he wrote "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.") To a certain extent, I come to view Washington DC less in terms of Jimmy Stewart and more as a place of inimitable corruption and inhumanity. This paragraph has quickly lost its flare.
This Washington DC has the scariest escalators I have ever been on. Descending (or rising) from (or into) the bowels of the city. These escalators bearing people to (and from) the subway are about 200 feet long, they drop down about 100-150 feet and they are incredibly steep. Every time I've gotten on them, I've been completely mortified.
The subway they descend to is easily the nicest I've ever seen. Composed of tube-shaped concrete wall/ceilings, the place smells like a human factory, but is awfully well-kept. The trade-off for this nice subway is that the prices are astronomical. My week-long Public Transit pass in Boston was $15. In DC, a single day pass was $7.80. And they don't allow you to buy them in bulk at a cheaper price, or to buy week-long passes. It was infuriating. More infuriating, though, is that due to discrepancies in prices listed in each station, some places require you to pay an exit-fee, if you paid less money than you were supposed to, (not that you had any control over it, a machine did all the math) they gouged you a bit more. If I were more inclined to hate taxes, I assume this would get my ire up enough to protest, but I don't think that's necessary.
By and large, this expensive nature extends to the rest of the city. A friend and I met up and went to a hookah bar. In Oregon, a round of shisha costs about $5-$7. A nice price for an hour-long activity which can be shared by several people. At this place, we paid $22.99. Plus tax. To be fair, my companion said that even for DC this was pricey, her old hookah bar cost about $9 a round. On top of that, the lounge itself was blasting house music, draped in dark red curtains with plushy chairs, carrying an array of awful beers, with trashily dressed waitresses. In short, it felt like we shouldn't have been smoking hookah. We should have had our noses on the coffee table snorting lines of coke. At least then the $22.99 tab would have been a steal, not a shanking.
The next morning, laden with all of my bags, I hoofed it from Massachusetts Avenue over to the campus of American University, where I was staying with a family friend. The walk from Massachusetts Avenue to the Dupont Circle Subway station in the daylight gave me a nice glimpse of the city. It's lowlying, filled with ornate block-like buildings, most of which (at least on Massachusetts Avenue) are filled with fascinating enterprises. In a two block radius, I walked passed the Chilean Embassy (a flamboyant little building), the Congressional Black Caucus, which was almost directly next to the inauspiciously named Tobacco Lobby, which was near to the appropriately Spartan, (or appropriately oppressive) Uzbeki Embassy, followed by the massive SEIU building, and finally, the Australian Embassy, which dwarfed both of the previous embassies but lacked the free-range kangaroos of my dreams
The rampancy with which Embassies clog this city is almost scary. In my time, I passed by those embassies, as well the Russian, Japanese and Swedish Embassies. Later on in my trip, with my family-friend/tour guide, I would learn more about the idiosyncrasies and jokes surrounding these places. That on Halloween, the French Embassy supposedly passes out glasses of champagne to those of age in America. Conversely, that the Russian Ambassador had to squelch rumors of free vodka shots for the same evening. We joke that Serbia hands out homemade bombs and AK-47s. This lead to a discussion, more serious in nature, about the way these embassies act during moments of national crises-- Earlier this year, for example, when the war with Georgia ramped up and the United States wasn't terribly friendly toward the Russians and their place in the conflict, the Russian Embassy took on a bunker-like mentality and status. Passing the Swedish embassy, we worried that raising tariffs on whitefish or restrictions on viking ships would result in a horde of helmed vikings walking through Georgetown wielding battle-axes and growling at every passerby.
I managed to wander over to the AU campus, meeting up with my companions. From there we traveled back over to the city, to see the Mall. It's going to be slightly difficult for me to put everything I felt seeing the central hub of the nation into perspective, so bear with me.
We exited the subway into the middle of the mall, between the Washington Monument (again, the forefathers? Not fond of foreskin) and the Capitol Building. The mall is massive. I've always understood the mall in abstract, but to see it, the long sloping grass knolls, corridors created by drooping, leafless elms, the late winter grasping at strands of near-warmth hidden in the wind, is almost overpowering. It was conceived by Pierre Charles l'Enfant in his original plans for the city from the late 18th century, but wasn't fully conceived until the early 20th century, with the McMillan Commission, and inspired by the City Beautiful Movement.
We decided to go first to the National Museum of American History. It's another block-like building, about 3 stories tall. Outside, the sound of Billie Holliday drifts down from somewhere, almost ethereal. We passed by just as the words "he can be happy/with just a sip of gin" fell from her lips. Or it did, when she recorded "Can't help lovin' that Man" all those years ago. It made me smile so that I just paused and let her fill my ears for a few moments.
Inside, the Museum is filled with the miscellanea of more than 250 years, starting with Washington's uniform from the French and Indian War. I use the word 'miscellanea' intentionally. The scope of what we've amassed culturally versus the detritus we've jettisoned, the artifacts, art, music and ideas which have become, over the years, uniquely American (or in some cases, things we've co-opted).
Dorothy Gale's glass slippers, Oscar The Grouch, MC Lyte's Journal, Kermit The Frog, Fab Five Freddy's boombox, Carol Channing's Dresses, Grandmaster Flashes' turntable, C-3PO, Elvis' guitars, a board game based on the Kennedy's (inappropriately we joked: "Will you get shot, get brain cancer, drive your plane down into the sea?") A portrait of Stephen Colbert, a whole room filled with co-opted Stradivari instruments, Grover Cleveland's top-hat and overcoat from his inauguration, a silver toy ship gifted to Teddy Roosevelt, Ike's uniform, a failed attempt at creating empire-invoking uniforms by Tricky Dick, an unsettling death mask of Abraham Lincoln, articles of his clothes, the whole of what makes us who we are, not the wars, the destruction, hate, but the creative acts are the ones we keep, the bizarre, the inane, the tacky, the beautiful, anything and everything that has proven significant, all here, all part of what makes us American. Billie Holliday's voice singing somewhere for each of us. Outside, the homeless man with the saxophone, blowing for his existence, blowing "Pure Imagination" and in every line I can hear pain, sorrow, joy, humor, anger, hanging in every howling note and every empty space between them. Everything we've taken from people and everything they've given us. Jazz. If ever there is a quintessential artform which relays the chaotic, numbingly beautiful underpinning of the universe, it is the pulsating, confused melodies and the carefully random rhythms of Jazz, and the music most likely to exist long after this nation, deeper than any words on paper, it is the very soil of this country. It is surely the most pure form of music we as a nation have ever created, and its influence, like vines, crawls up and sparks even the most austere of constructions, and I am glad that here we acknowledge its roots in our cultural life. But I digress. It is in this rambling I attempt to reach a point: that in this place, though we know our country to be a quilt composed of bitterness and thievery, the whole that it creates is marvelous, possessed of the ability to be objective and welcoming of every artform to which the country owes something.
And after this we walk the mile, lie down beneath the Washington Monument, the breeze slowly picking up, surrounded by people of every color and creed I can imagine. The reflecting pool empty for some reason ravaged now by sons and daughters, lovers and friends digging in the dirt for pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters ("has the recession gotten than bad?") the sunset fading over the Lincoln Memorial, where silent I mouth the 246 words, especially the last, "and that government : of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
From there, the words still echoing on my tongue, we wander out along a path which takes us past a reservoir, an outcropping of the Potomac where, resting for a moment on a bench, the reflection of the Jefferson Monument and pinpricks of light dance like fireflies in the night water. We continued on to the Roosevelt Memorial (of which I have only two things to say: Not enough wheelchair. And it was like a concrete hedgemaze. So maybe they were trying to make it a visual metaphor for Social Security) and then on to the Jefferson Memorial itself, another neoclassic shitshow (As proof of the brazen and silly obsession the forefathers had with Grecian ideals, it is said that somewhere, in a Smithsonian basement, apparently rests a gigantic statue of George Washington in a toga. I both thank and rue the man with the wisdom to keep that under a tight lock and key.) The building had more of the clever quips and phrasings of both the Roosevelt and Lincoln memorials, which were lovely and heart-throbbing, yet I cannot deny that I secretly hoped to find, etched in a tiny crevasse in the wall, a quote from Jefferson canonizing Sally Hemings' booty. Or at least something along the lines of "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to tap that big black ass, aww yeahhhh!"
Which only makes the next joke about how Obama's memorial, if he ever gets one, may not be neoclassical, but it ought to be made of obsidian, all the more atrocious. Be thankful I got rid of that paragraph.
Thought I certainly mock, the truth is that I recognized, as the designers of this place recognized, the power it must hold, both internal and external. But at these moments, because of that place, I was learning to love my country again. Perhaps this was the real reason for this trip. After eight years of frustration, war, hatred, sadness, screaming furor, everything that began not on September 11, 2001, but on October 7th, the night we began bombing Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, the night my father, brother and I howled in righteous furor at fire and death, death of innocent people, the destruction of hopes for people I'd never even met, while my mother sat unspeaking and how it haunted me, and my own regret and anger at my actions ever since have made my life a struggle make up for the failure of our humanity and compassion that night.
It led up to this. I still have issues with my country. I still disagree with it, still wish it embraced peace more, welcomed death less. But in hearing, for example, that on election night, most of Georgetown, thousands of students, ran to the gates of the White House and impromtu sang "(Na Na Na Hey Hey Hey) Goodbye" to its occupants, I can do nothing but smile. Even as I edit this, some 3 months after, I read in the news that a man named James Hill is running for congress as an honest-to-god pirate. Bless him. I read that a few days ago, the legislature in Missouri, in a move to confound Neo-Nazis who adopted a road, approved the name-changing of the road to memorialize a rabbi who fled Nazi Germany. Each day I read more and more concerning reports of the travesty of the Iranian election. In all of this, I am re-learning the beauty of what freedom of speech means, the beautiful, Jazz-like nature of Democracy and existence, where we have the opportunity to embrace everything from the silly to the sacrosanct, the pretty to the putrid, the strange fits and starts of humanity's tiny cul-de-sacs of thought, we see that in embracing the beautiful, we must also embrace the bizarre and the completely ridiculous. Where we learn that the meaning of free speech is not only the right to one's opinion, but the imperative to educate one's self and defend it. It's about learning what makes this country beautiful, and utilizing it, not sitting in reverent fear. That this great experiment must be pushed, prodded, poked and even stabbed. And that it will only be stronger for it.
And I thank the universe, and Jazz, for it.
The train ride--
Entering and exiting trains is a wonderful experience. As travel goes, train entrances and exits are like the day spa of travel bureaucracy. They check your ticket every once in a while, but other than that, no big hassle. Unless you count travel time. In that case, it's the part of the day spa where some new employee locks you in the sauna for a day and a half, forgetting you were there, and when they finally remember you, you emerge looking like Emperor Palpatine. The trip just drones on and on. My travel companions, comparatively, were priceless.
First-- Incredibly White Fratboy with his iBook, blasting Lil' Wayne from Boston to Stamford, Connecticut with no regard for others. It was especially endearing when he started mouthing the words with that half-smirk I've come to expect from guys like him, which simultaneously intimates, "I Think Can Nail Any Bitch Who Walks By Me" but "I Don't Know How To Read."
Second-- Yakking Ivy League Girl, who spent from Stamford to New York City squawking on the phone with someone, discussing whether or not she wants to go to Yale or Harvard for Grad School... in English. It was almost frightening having to listen to her almost moan over Victorian poetry while name-dropping (apparently) famous literary critics and talking about her new shoes, or forgetting that "she was, like, not even 22 yet, [she's] still only 21. Oh my goooood."
Last-- NYC Hipster Asian who nested EVERYWHERE. She got on in New York City wearing leggings, and plugged into her iPhone. From New York to DC, she plowed through about eight In-Touch Magazines and steadily spread out all of her belongings into our little section. First the seat adjacent to her, then the seat adjacent to me. Not that I was using it, but that she was so presumptuous was rather annoying.
DC--
It's hard, at first, to write about Washington DC. In the last eight years, my own relationship to this place, as with many of countrymen, has become, to put it delicately, strained. To a certain extent, I still liken entering this city to entering the belly of a beast. I tire of the thought of writing something beautiful and moving about my frustration and fury with the United States since the 2000 election. So I won't say anything, more than that I'm apprehensive. Though we've seen a change in administration, I'm hesitant to put myself full force behind anyone who would actively pursue the leadership of the country. (As John Adams once remarked "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it," and years later, Douglas Adams nodded in agreement when he wrote "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.") To a certain extent, I come to view Washington DC less in terms of Jimmy Stewart and more as a place of inimitable corruption and inhumanity. This paragraph has quickly lost its flare.
This Washington DC has the scariest escalators I have ever been on. Descending (or rising) from (or into) the bowels of the city. These escalators bearing people to (and from) the subway are about 200 feet long, they drop down about 100-150 feet and they are incredibly steep. Every time I've gotten on them, I've been completely mortified.
The subway they descend to is easily the nicest I've ever seen. Composed of tube-shaped concrete wall/ceilings, the place smells like a human factory, but is awfully well-kept. The trade-off for this nice subway is that the prices are astronomical. My week-long Public Transit pass in Boston was $15. In DC, a single day pass was $7.80. And they don't allow you to buy them in bulk at a cheaper price, or to buy week-long passes. It was infuriating. More infuriating, though, is that due to discrepancies in prices listed in each station, some places require you to pay an exit-fee, if you paid less money than you were supposed to, (not that you had any control over it, a machine did all the math) they gouged you a bit more. If I were more inclined to hate taxes, I assume this would get my ire up enough to protest, but I don't think that's necessary.
By and large, this expensive nature extends to the rest of the city. A friend and I met up and went to a hookah bar. In Oregon, a round of shisha costs about $5-$7. A nice price for an hour-long activity which can be shared by several people. At this place, we paid $22.99. Plus tax. To be fair, my companion said that even for DC this was pricey, her old hookah bar cost about $9 a round. On top of that, the lounge itself was blasting house music, draped in dark red curtains with plushy chairs, carrying an array of awful beers, with trashily dressed waitresses. In short, it felt like we shouldn't have been smoking hookah. We should have had our noses on the coffee table snorting lines of coke. At least then the $22.99 tab would have been a steal, not a shanking.
The next morning, laden with all of my bags, I hoofed it from Massachusetts Avenue over to the campus of American University, where I was staying with a family friend. The walk from Massachusetts Avenue to the Dupont Circle Subway station in the daylight gave me a nice glimpse of the city. It's lowlying, filled with ornate block-like buildings, most of which (at least on Massachusetts Avenue) are filled with fascinating enterprises. In a two block radius, I walked passed the Chilean Embassy (a flamboyant little building), the Congressional Black Caucus, which was almost directly next to the inauspiciously named Tobacco Lobby, which was near to the appropriately Spartan, (or appropriately oppressive) Uzbeki Embassy, followed by the massive SEIU building, and finally, the Australian Embassy, which dwarfed both of the previous embassies but lacked the free-range kangaroos of my dreams
The rampancy with which Embassies clog this city is almost scary. In my time, I passed by those embassies, as well the Russian, Japanese and Swedish Embassies. Later on in my trip, with my family-friend/tour guide, I would learn more about the idiosyncrasies and jokes surrounding these places. That on Halloween, the French Embassy supposedly passes out glasses of champagne to those of age in America. Conversely, that the Russian Ambassador had to squelch rumors of free vodka shots for the same evening. We joke that Serbia hands out homemade bombs and AK-47s. This lead to a discussion, more serious in nature, about the way these embassies act during moments of national crises-- Earlier this year, for example, when the war with Georgia ramped up and the United States wasn't terribly friendly toward the Russians and their place in the conflict, the Russian Embassy took on a bunker-like mentality and status. Passing the Swedish embassy, we worried that raising tariffs on whitefish or restrictions on viking ships would result in a horde of helmed vikings walking through Georgetown wielding battle-axes and growling at every passerby.
I managed to wander over to the AU campus, meeting up with my companions. From there we traveled back over to the city, to see the Mall. It's going to be slightly difficult for me to put everything I felt seeing the central hub of the nation into perspective, so bear with me.
We exited the subway into the middle of the mall, between the Washington Monument (again, the forefathers? Not fond of foreskin) and the Capitol Building. The mall is massive. I've always understood the mall in abstract, but to see it, the long sloping grass knolls, corridors created by drooping, leafless elms, the late winter grasping at strands of near-warmth hidden in the wind, is almost overpowering. It was conceived by Pierre Charles l'Enfant in his original plans for the city from the late 18th century, but wasn't fully conceived until the early 20th century, with the McMillan Commission, and inspired by the City Beautiful Movement.
We decided to go first to the National Museum of American History. It's another block-like building, about 3 stories tall. Outside, the sound of Billie Holliday drifts down from somewhere, almost ethereal. We passed by just as the words "he can be happy/with just a sip of gin" fell from her lips. Or it did, when she recorded "Can't help lovin' that Man" all those years ago. It made me smile so that I just paused and let her fill my ears for a few moments.
Inside, the Museum is filled with the miscellanea of more than 250 years, starting with Washington's uniform from the French and Indian War. I use the word 'miscellanea' intentionally. The scope of what we've amassed culturally versus the detritus we've jettisoned, the artifacts, art, music and ideas which have become, over the years, uniquely American (or in some cases, things we've co-opted).
Dorothy Gale's glass slippers, Oscar The Grouch, MC Lyte's Journal, Kermit The Frog, Fab Five Freddy's boombox, Carol Channing's Dresses, Grandmaster Flashes' turntable, C-3PO, Elvis' guitars, a board game based on the Kennedy's (inappropriately we joked: "Will you get shot, get brain cancer, drive your plane down into the sea?") A portrait of Stephen Colbert, a whole room filled with co-opted Stradivari instruments, Grover Cleveland's top-hat and overcoat from his inauguration, a silver toy ship gifted to Teddy Roosevelt, Ike's uniform, a failed attempt at creating empire-invoking uniforms by Tricky Dick, an unsettling death mask of Abraham Lincoln, articles of his clothes, the whole of what makes us who we are, not the wars, the destruction, hate, but the creative acts are the ones we keep, the bizarre, the inane, the tacky, the beautiful, anything and everything that has proven significant, all here, all part of what makes us American. Billie Holliday's voice singing somewhere for each of us. Outside, the homeless man with the saxophone, blowing for his existence, blowing "Pure Imagination" and in every line I can hear pain, sorrow, joy, humor, anger, hanging in every howling note and every empty space between them. Everything we've taken from people and everything they've given us. Jazz. If ever there is a quintessential artform which relays the chaotic, numbingly beautiful underpinning of the universe, it is the pulsating, confused melodies and the carefully random rhythms of Jazz, and the music most likely to exist long after this nation, deeper than any words on paper, it is the very soil of this country. It is surely the most pure form of music we as a nation have ever created, and its influence, like vines, crawls up and sparks even the most austere of constructions, and I am glad that here we acknowledge its roots in our cultural life. But I digress. It is in this rambling I attempt to reach a point: that in this place, though we know our country to be a quilt composed of bitterness and thievery, the whole that it creates is marvelous, possessed of the ability to be objective and welcoming of every artform to which the country owes something.
And after this we walk the mile, lie down beneath the Washington Monument, the breeze slowly picking up, surrounded by people of every color and creed I can imagine. The reflecting pool empty for some reason ravaged now by sons and daughters, lovers and friends digging in the dirt for pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters ("has the recession gotten than bad?") the sunset fading over the Lincoln Memorial, where silent I mouth the 246 words, especially the last, "and that government : of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
From there, the words still echoing on my tongue, we wander out along a path which takes us past a reservoir, an outcropping of the Potomac where, resting for a moment on a bench, the reflection of the Jefferson Monument and pinpricks of light dance like fireflies in the night water. We continued on to the Roosevelt Memorial (of which I have only two things to say: Not enough wheelchair. And it was like a concrete hedgemaze. So maybe they were trying to make it a visual metaphor for Social Security) and then on to the Jefferson Memorial itself, another neoclassic shitshow (As proof of the brazen and silly obsession the forefathers had with Grecian ideals, it is said that somewhere, in a Smithsonian basement, apparently rests a gigantic statue of George Washington in a toga. I both thank and rue the man with the wisdom to keep that under a tight lock and key.) The building had more of the clever quips and phrasings of both the Roosevelt and Lincoln memorials, which were lovely and heart-throbbing, yet I cannot deny that I secretly hoped to find, etched in a tiny crevasse in the wall, a quote from Jefferson canonizing Sally Hemings' booty. Or at least something along the lines of "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to tap that big black ass, aww yeahhhh!"
Which only makes the next joke about how Obama's memorial, if he ever gets one, may not be neoclassical, but it ought to be made of obsidian, all the more atrocious. Be thankful I got rid of that paragraph.
Thought I certainly mock, the truth is that I recognized, as the designers of this place recognized, the power it must hold, both internal and external. But at these moments, because of that place, I was learning to love my country again. Perhaps this was the real reason for this trip. After eight years of frustration, war, hatred, sadness, screaming furor, everything that began not on September 11, 2001, but on October 7th, the night we began bombing Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, the night my father, brother and I howled in righteous furor at fire and death, death of innocent people, the destruction of hopes for people I'd never even met, while my mother sat unspeaking and how it haunted me, and my own regret and anger at my actions ever since have made my life a struggle make up for the failure of our humanity and compassion that night.
It led up to this. I still have issues with my country. I still disagree with it, still wish it embraced peace more, welcomed death less. But in hearing, for example, that on election night, most of Georgetown, thousands of students, ran to the gates of the White House and impromtu sang "(Na Na Na Hey Hey Hey) Goodbye" to its occupants, I can do nothing but smile. Even as I edit this, some 3 months after, I read in the news that a man named James Hill is running for congress as an honest-to-god pirate. Bless him. I read that a few days ago, the legislature in Missouri, in a move to confound Neo-Nazis who adopted a road, approved the name-changing of the road to memorialize a rabbi who fled Nazi Germany. Each day I read more and more concerning reports of the travesty of the Iranian election. In all of this, I am re-learning the beauty of what freedom of speech means, the beautiful, Jazz-like nature of Democracy and existence, where we have the opportunity to embrace everything from the silly to the sacrosanct, the pretty to the putrid, the strange fits and starts of humanity's tiny cul-de-sacs of thought, we see that in embracing the beautiful, we must also embrace the bizarre and the completely ridiculous. Where we learn that the meaning of free speech is not only the right to one's opinion, but the imperative to educate one's self and defend it. It's about learning what makes this country beautiful, and utilizing it, not sitting in reverent fear. That this great experiment must be pushed, prodded, poked and even stabbed. And that it will only be stronger for it.
And I thank the universe, and Jazz, for it.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Odyssey Americana (Part Boston)
In which our hero braves the wild airports and discovers things most mundane, before landing in Boston, marvelling at some stuff, and going to sleep, over the next few days exploring both the outer-rim and the most historic inner-rim of Boston, seeing old things once revered now hyper-commercialized.
Morning-- Too goddamn early. I wake to go to the airport. My flight leaves at 7:20 AM, which means, according to my family, that the only appropriate time to arrive for a flight, if it leaves at 7:20 AM, March 1, 2009, is to arrive sometime a few winters previous, maybe late January, 20o7, at about 2:53 AM. That is, barring any inclement weather, in which case, your arrival should be no earlier than autumn, 1986.
A few bits of hygiene care later, we are off, racing down the highway in the damp, blurry pre-dawn, the first few fingers of light clutching the western mountains as it hunted us.
Check-In has changed since the last time I flew. In the days of yore (about a year ago, anyway) check-in consisted of staring down an unnervingly cheery attendant, who smile and bat their eyes at you, even as they tell you that, yes, in fact, shaving cream is a weapon and you cannot bring it on the plane. However, the ripostes with Air Travel bureaucracy are nullified by the replacement of those eerily chipper attendants by LCD screens. Why bother with pesky employment, with its 'salaries,' and 'benefits,' and 'genuine human interaction,' When you can have mass mechanization? Brilliance, I tell you! This change, in effect, has created a sort of check-in bottleneck, where passengers do all the work themselves, and where once these desks were manned by at least five attendants, they now are manned by one to two employees who flit from computer to computer, checking everybody's IDs. That's all.
After this disheartening experience, I was hoping for painless air travel, with a nice movie and some reliably atrocious airline food. My hopes, to my utter dismay, were half-dashed. The trip was uneventful, enjoyable even. It flew by quickly with the help of a book and a catnap. But instead of the cumbersome, blocky (but blissfully gratis) headsets from the air-travel of my childhood, the quaint, semi-unconstitutional-but-mostly-just-ethically-iffy edited in-flight movies have been replaced by tiny 'digeplayers,' on which passengers can watch almost anything, for only $10, credit card only. And the meals, my god, the meals! Using the sort of advertising language that makes me want to wretch, the front pocket included a pamphlet which described different 'picnic baskets' which could be purchased for $5. So, great! A picnic basket!... On a plane. Right.
The only other harrowing portion of the journey pertained to the skittish woman seated next to me, who scooted over to the window seat the second the plane door was closed and we were free to do with our row as we pleased. It wasn't so much that she did it, had I been in her situation, I would have done the same thing, but she was so quick about it, it was rather strange. The other portion pertained to the man sitting behind me, who, in what I've come to expect from American Exceptionalism, felt it was his prerogative to talk on the phone as long as he wished, regardless of FAA regulations which state phones must be turned off.
Boston--
Upon arriving in Boston, I found a very simple, streamlined process to retrieving my luggage, and I was greeted by Laurel, one of the friends I was staying with here. We then took the bus to the train station (colloquially, 'the T.') This took us a little longer than expected, as we took the wrong bus, thusly receiving an extra tour of Logan International, which is a lovely concrete block, definitely worth that second, superfluous trip.
The T is just as it sounds. It has multiple lines running through the city. My first glimpse of which, as we exited the tunnel (the train is like the bastard child of a subway and a trolley, some parts are on ground, others, beneath it) was of a gigantic Barnes and Noble, which serves as both bookstore and school bookstore for Boston University. Near to that was a brick building, sitting like an old man among teenagers in the city, with a tower, and old-archictecture (none of the few archictectural terms of which I know to describe this building are springing to mind, of course.) This intermingling of old and new which is rampant throughout the city is clearly visible on the bus ride back to Laurel's apartment. But in the day since arriving, at the time I'm writing this, I've been able to see much more of the city, and indeed, the whole place is littered with these brick neo-classical relics seated next to glass and concrete behemoths of modernity.
No where is this marvelous reuse of the cities old buildings more evident than the place Jake and Laurel live. Chopped up from an old house into apartments, it was probably built in the early 19th century, what with its vaulted ceilings, closed up fireplaces, gorgeous moulding, perennially squeaky wood-flooring and like just about every old building ever, staircases seemingly made by dwarfs suffering from vertigo.
On Tuesday, I took the commuter train from Boston out to Newburyport. It took me a bit of running about, asking for directions from almost everyone, and made it onto the train with only a minute to spare. As a rule, on public transit I try always to sit next to little old ladies, for they are generally composed of sweet natures. So, I wandered up the aisle, looking for an open seat, finally finding one near the front of the car. Politely, I asked to sit. Expecting a voice crackling from years of over-perfuming and Better Homes recipes, instead, the woman growled at me like a bear and snapped "Kid, do whateva you want." At that point, I was so embarrassed I couldn't even move on, I just sat down and cowered.
Luckily, crazy old bear lady got off after two stops, and I was able to look out the window at the passing towns. The land is dotted with groves of leafless oaks rising above frozen marshes, cut through every so often by half-frozen rivers. Which is a nice way of saying 'swampy.' The outlying suburbs, filled not with the cookie-cutter homes with sprawling driveways and massive chainstores, are instead beautiful entities unto themselves, made up of brick-and-ivy storefronts and dutch colonials stacked neatly against each other. This subtle bit of city planning is significant in that it shows that even in America, there are places where our outlying cities have not splayed themselves out entirely for the benefit of cars. Where western suburbs are made with automobiles in mind, (the age old question: which came first? the suburb or station wagon?) every place, be it a home or a business, feels it has a prerogative to provide more-than-adequate parking space. Part of what makes the central city such an artfully compact wonder is that it disregards this equation.
Newburyport exists in this vein. It is comprised of beautiful colonial homes, its high school is an old georgian ogre, just fun to look at. My hosts (one of whom was engaged in the town governance) while driving me through town, were giddy to point out a home built in the late 17th century, and, to my delight, positively rueful when we passed through the newer chain-store consumerist hellholes.
Antithetical to the graceful aging of the city and the suburbs is that this place is filthy. It's hard to determine what these people hate more: taxation without representation or brooms. I mean, I know these people live in a swamp, but c'mon.
Also slightly antithetical, but mostly just aggravating is the way that people treat one another. I've never considered the west coast a particularly courteous area, yet compared to Bostonians, Oregonians (or, by extension, most Westerners) are like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. On the T coming home from Newburyport, there were a group of rich kids discussing where to get off, in relation to where they parked. During this conversation, a man dressed in punk attire entered the train. He stumbled slightly over my feet, and apologized. I motioned that it was fine. He was only on for a stop, but heard enough of the rich kids' discussion to say, before exiting "yeah, you should get off at Park and you'll be fine." He then exited the train.
There was a momentary pause before the rich kids, as well as another local, began mocking the man.
"What the fuck wazzat?"
"Who the fuck he think he is?"
"Di' we ask him? Di' we ask 'wheh should we go?' Fuckin' tourist."
"Whyn'cha fuckin' get awf at Wonderland, then see wheh you're at, fuckin' mook."
Of course, then they got off at Park.
A few minutes after that, a tall, stuttering man came rushing into the car, asking if he could borrow someone's cellphone. No one offered, and I felt bad. I pulled mine out, checking the reception bars. We were underground, so, naturally, barely any reception. I'm about to apologize to the man for my lack of reception, when the local from the first interaction blurts out,
Morning-- Too goddamn early. I wake to go to the airport. My flight leaves at 7:20 AM, which means, according to my family, that the only appropriate time to arrive for a flight, if it leaves at 7:20 AM, March 1, 2009, is to arrive sometime a few winters previous, maybe late January, 20o7, at about 2:53 AM. That is, barring any inclement weather, in which case, your arrival should be no earlier than autumn, 1986.
A few bits of hygiene care later, we are off, racing down the highway in the damp, blurry pre-dawn, the first few fingers of light clutching the western mountains as it hunted us.
Check-In has changed since the last time I flew. In the days of yore (about a year ago, anyway) check-in consisted of staring down an unnervingly cheery attendant, who smile and bat their eyes at you, even as they tell you that, yes, in fact, shaving cream is a weapon and you cannot bring it on the plane. However, the ripostes with Air Travel bureaucracy are nullified by the replacement of those eerily chipper attendants by LCD screens. Why bother with pesky employment, with its 'salaries,' and 'benefits,' and 'genuine human interaction,' When you can have mass mechanization? Brilliance, I tell you! This change, in effect, has created a sort of check-in bottleneck, where passengers do all the work themselves, and where once these desks were manned by at least five attendants, they now are manned by one to two employees who flit from computer to computer, checking everybody's IDs. That's all.
After this disheartening experience, I was hoping for painless air travel, with a nice movie and some reliably atrocious airline food. My hopes, to my utter dismay, were half-dashed. The trip was uneventful, enjoyable even. It flew by quickly with the help of a book and a catnap. But instead of the cumbersome, blocky (but blissfully gratis) headsets from the air-travel of my childhood, the quaint, semi-unconstitutional-but-mostly-just-ethically-iffy edited in-flight movies have been replaced by tiny 'digeplayers,' on which passengers can watch almost anything, for only $10, credit card only. And the meals, my god, the meals! Using the sort of advertising language that makes me want to wretch, the front pocket included a pamphlet which described different 'picnic baskets' which could be purchased for $5. So, great! A picnic basket!... On a plane. Right.
The only other harrowing portion of the journey pertained to the skittish woman seated next to me, who scooted over to the window seat the second the plane door was closed and we were free to do with our row as we pleased. It wasn't so much that she did it, had I been in her situation, I would have done the same thing, but she was so quick about it, it was rather strange. The other portion pertained to the man sitting behind me, who, in what I've come to expect from American Exceptionalism, felt it was his prerogative to talk on the phone as long as he wished, regardless of FAA regulations which state phones must be turned off.
Boston--
Upon arriving in Boston, I found a very simple, streamlined process to retrieving my luggage, and I was greeted by Laurel, one of the friends I was staying with here. We then took the bus to the train station (colloquially, 'the T.') This took us a little longer than expected, as we took the wrong bus, thusly receiving an extra tour of Logan International, which is a lovely concrete block, definitely worth that second, superfluous trip.
The T is just as it sounds. It has multiple lines running through the city. My first glimpse of which, as we exited the tunnel (the train is like the bastard child of a subway and a trolley, some parts are on ground, others, beneath it) was of a gigantic Barnes and Noble, which serves as both bookstore and school bookstore for Boston University. Near to that was a brick building, sitting like an old man among teenagers in the city, with a tower, and old-archictecture (none of the few archictectural terms of which I know to describe this building are springing to mind, of course.) This intermingling of old and new which is rampant throughout the city is clearly visible on the bus ride back to Laurel's apartment. But in the day since arriving, at the time I'm writing this, I've been able to see much more of the city, and indeed, the whole place is littered with these brick neo-classical relics seated next to glass and concrete behemoths of modernity.
No where is this marvelous reuse of the cities old buildings more evident than the place Jake and Laurel live. Chopped up from an old house into apartments, it was probably built in the early 19th century, what with its vaulted ceilings, closed up fireplaces, gorgeous moulding, perennially squeaky wood-flooring and like just about every old building ever, staircases seemingly made by dwarfs suffering from vertigo.
On Tuesday, I took the commuter train from Boston out to Newburyport. It took me a bit of running about, asking for directions from almost everyone, and made it onto the train with only a minute to spare. As a rule, on public transit I try always to sit next to little old ladies, for they are generally composed of sweet natures. So, I wandered up the aisle, looking for an open seat, finally finding one near the front of the car. Politely, I asked to sit. Expecting a voice crackling from years of over-perfuming and Better Homes recipes, instead, the woman growled at me like a bear and snapped "Kid, do whateva you want." At that point, I was so embarrassed I couldn't even move on, I just sat down and cowered.
Luckily, crazy old bear lady got off after two stops, and I was able to look out the window at the passing towns. The land is dotted with groves of leafless oaks rising above frozen marshes, cut through every so often by half-frozen rivers. Which is a nice way of saying 'swampy.' The outlying suburbs, filled not with the cookie-cutter homes with sprawling driveways and massive chainstores, are instead beautiful entities unto themselves, made up of brick-and-ivy storefronts and dutch colonials stacked neatly against each other. This subtle bit of city planning is significant in that it shows that even in America, there are places where our outlying cities have not splayed themselves out entirely for the benefit of cars. Where western suburbs are made with automobiles in mind, (the age old question: which came first? the suburb or station wagon?) every place, be it a home or a business, feels it has a prerogative to provide more-than-adequate parking space. Part of what makes the central city such an artfully compact wonder is that it disregards this equation.
Newburyport exists in this vein. It is comprised of beautiful colonial homes, its high school is an old georgian ogre, just fun to look at. My hosts (one of whom was engaged in the town governance) while driving me through town, were giddy to point out a home built in the late 17th century, and, to my delight, positively rueful when we passed through the newer chain-store consumerist hellholes.
Antithetical to the graceful aging of the city and the suburbs is that this place is filthy. It's hard to determine what these people hate more: taxation without representation or brooms. I mean, I know these people live in a swamp, but c'mon.
Also slightly antithetical, but mostly just aggravating is the way that people treat one another. I've never considered the west coast a particularly courteous area, yet compared to Bostonians, Oregonians (or, by extension, most Westerners) are like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. On the T coming home from Newburyport, there were a group of rich kids discussing where to get off, in relation to where they parked. During this conversation, a man dressed in punk attire entered the train. He stumbled slightly over my feet, and apologized. I motioned that it was fine. He was only on for a stop, but heard enough of the rich kids' discussion to say, before exiting "yeah, you should get off at Park and you'll be fine." He then exited the train.
There was a momentary pause before the rich kids, as well as another local, began mocking the man.
"What the fuck wazzat?"
"Who the fuck he think he is?"
"Di' we ask him? Di' we ask 'wheh should we go?' Fuckin' tourist."
"Whyn'cha fuckin' get awf at Wonderland, then see wheh you're at, fuckin' mook."
Of course, then they got off at Park.
A few minutes after that, a tall, stuttering man came rushing into the car, asking if he could borrow someone's cellphone. No one offered, and I felt bad. I pulled mine out, checking the reception bars. We were underground, so, naturally, barely any reception. I'm about to apologize to the man for my lack of reception, when the local from the first interaction blurts out,
"You won' get no reception down heeah."
At this point, I handed the phone to the stuttering man, just as a fuck-you to the local. The man needed help dialing, so I helped him. Sadly, the phone, being spurned by reception bars, didn't even dial out. The man thanked me, and I apologized that I couldn't be more helpful.
The local then looked down at me, smirked, and spat "Nice try."
I just looked back at him hard and shrugged.
Thursday, Jake and I decided to wander to the older portions of Boston and walk "The Freedom" trail, which is, as it sounds, a delightful trail of bricks lain down going around to different historic sites in Boston, including the Common, the old State House, Faneuil Hall and the Granary Graveyard.
The Granary Graveyard was its own block of the city, filled with both little weathered near-anonymous gravestones, and massive, hulking phallic memorial columns symbols of our nation's forefather's virility. (John Hancock's was circumcised, thank God.) Walking around, though, it was hard to see why the city couldn't just assign someone to come in and at least shovel out decent pathways, much less get the snow away from these stones, already badly beaten by the elements.
Meandering up the path, we passed both the gravestone of John Adams, and his very much non-jewish friend, Hancock. (I am doing my best to refrain from the easiest of jokes.) In the far end of the yard lay the gravesite of Paul Revere, (the town loves him) which was easily the tourist highlight. In front of Jake and me, two middle-aged hipsters were taking pictures of practically every gravestone whose engraved words were still visible, and when they happened upon Revere's grave, they guffawed over "never hearing about him before." And one of them, determined to get a good photo, knelt down next to the memorial stone (not the actual grave), his friend with the camera lining up the shot, and he set his starbucks cup on Revere's grave, so that it wouldn't be in the shot, of course.
Now, I'm not a hugely proud American. Pride is such a weird concept. I have a hard time with people who exhibit pride in being things they didn't choose to be (White, American, even Gay, Presbyterian, a radiator, the number 4) and neither do I subscribe to any thoughtless hero-worship of the founding fathers. I'm certainly not above mocking them if the situation permits and the joke arrives. But to see a starbucks cup carelessly strewn over a man's grave like its his personal coffee table is pretty pathetic. But I guess I'm glad his twitter-account will have this killer pic of some old guys' tombstone.
This sort of aggravation only grew worse with the continuation of the trail. At one of the next stops, we found The Old Corner Bookstore Building, a place which once published the writings of "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott." Of course, this location is no longer a publisher. It's naturally become a jewelry store known as Ultra Diamonds, advertising 'ridiculous' 80% off sales prices. I'm glad that a place which once celebrated the birth of a country which celebrates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is now inhabited by a company of hacks peddling pieces of carbon mined by wage slaves in Africa.
Further on, a tavern calling itself "the first tavern in America," established in 1795, (though that seems dubious. Did nobody drink from 1620-1795? Puritans, oh Puritans! Still, being sourrounded by swamp-land certainly makes me want to drink. So, someone in 175 years MUST have had a drink.) was now filled with buzzing television sets buzzing with sports, and their taps were filled with Sam beer, and only Sam Adams (These people love freedom AND shitty beer.)
At this point, I handed the phone to the stuttering man, just as a fuck-you to the local. The man needed help dialing, so I helped him. Sadly, the phone, being spurned by reception bars, didn't even dial out. The man thanked me, and I apologized that I couldn't be more helpful.
The local then looked down at me, smirked, and spat "Nice try."
I just looked back at him hard and shrugged.
Thursday, Jake and I decided to wander to the older portions of Boston and walk "The Freedom" trail, which is, as it sounds, a delightful trail of bricks lain down going around to different historic sites in Boston, including the Common, the old State House, Faneuil Hall and the Granary Graveyard.
The Granary Graveyard was its own block of the city, filled with both little weathered near-anonymous gravestones, and massive, hulking phallic memorial columns symbols of our nation's forefather's virility. (John Hancock's was circumcised, thank God.) Walking around, though, it was hard to see why the city couldn't just assign someone to come in and at least shovel out decent pathways, much less get the snow away from these stones, already badly beaten by the elements.
Meandering up the path, we passed both the gravestone of John Adams, and his very much non-jewish friend, Hancock. (I am doing my best to refrain from the easiest of jokes.) In the far end of the yard lay the gravesite of Paul Revere, (the town loves him) which was easily the tourist highlight. In front of Jake and me, two middle-aged hipsters were taking pictures of practically every gravestone whose engraved words were still visible, and when they happened upon Revere's grave, they guffawed over "never hearing about him before." And one of them, determined to get a good photo, knelt down next to the memorial stone (not the actual grave), his friend with the camera lining up the shot, and he set his starbucks cup on Revere's grave, so that it wouldn't be in the shot, of course.
Now, I'm not a hugely proud American. Pride is such a weird concept. I have a hard time with people who exhibit pride in being things they didn't choose to be (White, American, even Gay, Presbyterian, a radiator, the number 4) and neither do I subscribe to any thoughtless hero-worship of the founding fathers. I'm certainly not above mocking them if the situation permits and the joke arrives. But to see a starbucks cup carelessly strewn over a man's grave like its his personal coffee table is pretty pathetic. But I guess I'm glad his twitter-account will have this killer pic of some old guys' tombstone.
This sort of aggravation only grew worse with the continuation of the trail. At one of the next stops, we found The Old Corner Bookstore Building, a place which once published the writings of "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott." Of course, this location is no longer a publisher. It's naturally become a jewelry store known as Ultra Diamonds, advertising 'ridiculous' 80% off sales prices. I'm glad that a place which once celebrated the birth of a country which celebrates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is now inhabited by a company of hacks peddling pieces of carbon mined by wage slaves in Africa.
Further on, a tavern calling itself "the first tavern in America," established in 1795, (though that seems dubious. Did nobody drink from 1620-1795? Puritans, oh Puritans! Still, being sourrounded by swamp-land certainly makes me want to drink. So, someone in 175 years MUST have had a drink.) was now filled with buzzing television sets buzzing with sports, and their taps were filled with Sam beer, and only Sam Adams (These people love freedom AND shitty beer.)
The rest of the freedom trail, including Paul Revere's house (!) was great, with the exception that in most cases passersby are inundated with streams of advertisements, gigantic multinational companies (Starbucks in particular) who made it their goal to link the American Revolution, every spot of hallowed history to their mission statements, 'proud to be part of the birth of America,' etched onto pieces of useless plastic. I was waiting for a sign saying "Boston Common! Brought to you by Verizon! (Are you in?)"
On further reflection, my frustration with this modern state of our historic sites, a corporate commercialization of practically everything we've tried to deserve is perhaps misplaced. Perhaps it's too idealistic of me to expect we'd keep a purified, reverent attitude toward our history, (for even I lack that) protecting it from such bastardization. But as I looked around, to every nearby Border's, Starbucks, WellsFargo, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse (In the basement of the Old City Hall! And How!) I realize that maybe corporatism is our legacy. It is the disease we've wrought upon the world, and that the Freedom Trail is a testament to that, it was destined to fall prey to corporatism, in fact. That just as we were founded upon the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the meaning of which, actually is intended to be 'money',) those principles were only important insofar as they saved the rich founding fathers some money, that perhaps this is the true nature of America. Giving free reign to these enterprises, it is our destiny to consume, consume, consume until we swallow ourselves whole. Perhaps this is the only natural course the country would take. Even one hundred years ago, it's conceivable to imagine a local con-man selling trinkets commemorating these places, cheaply made and cheaply broken, in order to make a quick buck. And now that man is a faceless hedge-fund monolith. The pursuit of happiness. Maybe this is just who we are.
That sounds hopelessly dour.
Final Thoughts on Boston: I love Portland.
On further reflection, my frustration with this modern state of our historic sites, a corporate commercialization of practically everything we've tried to deserve is perhaps misplaced. Perhaps it's too idealistic of me to expect we'd keep a purified, reverent attitude toward our history, (for even I lack that) protecting it from such bastardization. But as I looked around, to every nearby Border's, Starbucks, WellsFargo, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse (In the basement of the Old City Hall! And How!) I realize that maybe corporatism is our legacy. It is the disease we've wrought upon the world, and that the Freedom Trail is a testament to that, it was destined to fall prey to corporatism, in fact. That just as we were founded upon the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the meaning of which, actually is intended to be 'money',) those principles were only important insofar as they saved the rich founding fathers some money, that perhaps this is the true nature of America. Giving free reign to these enterprises, it is our destiny to consume, consume, consume until we swallow ourselves whole. Perhaps this is the only natural course the country would take. Even one hundred years ago, it's conceivable to imagine a local con-man selling trinkets commemorating these places, cheaply made and cheaply broken, in order to make a quick buck. And now that man is a faceless hedge-fund monolith. The pursuit of happiness. Maybe this is just who we are.
That sounds hopelessly dour.
Final Thoughts on Boston: I love Portland.
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