COMMON BOSTON

the midsummer light at the edge of the time zone at seven in the morning comes in through the east facing windows of the eleventh floor of the boston ritz-carlton with a vengeance. and "with a vengeance" is a stock phrase that they're allowed at seven on a monday morning as they decide that they might as well get up with the city for work as well, because they're tired from working the weekend and because fierceness is terribly, datedly overused as a descriptor, even if that is quite what it was when the [what was i going to call her?] tolerated her hipster clown entourage of two through three airports twenty-four hours earlier. they could, of course, have drawn the curtains (although there was nothing to be done the morning before when project venezuelan hand job was double blindside fucking foiled by the marine sitting across the aisle in business class on the way from philadelphia and then by the incompetence of the airline, which ultimately took the mark -- or the john, or whatever his name was in venezuelan -- off the plane).

it wasn't, however, as if their night out in the south end had been anything to keep them from keeping their plans with the morning. dinner at that popular charcuterie place had been fine -- very good even -- and neither the popularity of charcuterie places nor the popularity of the place itself could have done anything to undermine the quality of the food. the problem was that boston is a city without style; although, they admitted, it was possible that the all polo shirts had nothing at all to do with sublime following 311 on the stereo. that might have been an ugly oversight -- or intention -- of the service, which apologized a few minutes after the arrival of the coffee for having been just about to spoon the [how was i going to refer to her?]. insult to injury, it seemed, for hipster clown number one (i was going to call him jim), but they'd been at it all day already (a big day for little piggy), and not so late as it might have been, it was time to call it a hard day done, driven, like all driven people, by the desire to succeed. come to boston, early retirement at the ritz-carlton.

to be fair, the sun hadn't actually beaten the alarm; but the volume of the chime wasn't anything compared to the vengeance of the sunlight coming through the windows of the east facing corner room on the eleventh floor to which the clowns had been put to sleep. (tolerance only goes so far.) and as long as he was up, thought number two, he might as well go the distance, which the night before had only been planned so far as the pool at the sports club, but, since with the sun and all and return flights in the afternoon, became a walk across the river through cambridge. maybe they would have been more so in the fall (the leaves! they're told), but neither the institute of technology nor harvard (and there, neither the square nor the yard) were enough to justify what they wanted for postcards. better, maybe, he thought, to have saved the sweat and stayed in beacon hill where he'd bought the stamps. there didn't, he thought, remain much question that the liberty hotel would have easily outstyled that charcuterie place -- although he admitted again, to himself this time, that the food had been unquestionably good. "take ivy" had, he thought, taken the rest of the country at least three years back, but sandals and starbucks had taken harvard square.

the bar at the ritz, however, had held its own. and the night before, before early retirement and after a long afternoon session, the band had posed for the cameras under the drowsy lights in front of the mirrors that reflected all of the worst artwork: bad, yes, but well displayed amid all of the best walnut in denmark. old unprofessional indiscreet fatty femme seeks same for celibate pen pal and games wasn't the shortest name that the trio had come up with, but it was the finest, at home both with the walnut at the bar and the unquestionably good food at that charcuterie place; and that magazines, anyway, have taken to calling them oui. and that's funny, because whatever i was going to call her, she's always saying no.

it's possible too that day number two (for clown number two) had been tarnished even before it had had its chance to shine as a result of so much having happened so early -- and of so much having been spent on the band's sunday afternoon session. wieners to the left had said the sign at the clam beard bar near the charcuterie place, and, earlier, pictures of erotically photographed gourmet burgers flying between smart phones past the memory of another sign, spotted well before the band's pending early retirement but which was nonetheless a summary of their esprit de corps throughout the evening and the preceding afternoon: old money wanted. and it's possible that the rest of boston had just been so easily paled after the band had seen that picture of advanced style downtown not long after leaving the cab from the airport. that woman, seated, smoking, with her white hair and her crimson lipstick in her white half trench printed like a printed newspaper might just have been a phantom orderly on that morning's escape from the emergency psychiatric ward, but she was also, the members of the band concurred, why paul revere had ridden so hard to tell the british that the americans were coming to blow it up at the 2012 olympic games. the rest of the city may not have been using it to its full advantage, but that was why they had invented freedom. and in boston, she could have married any of them. oui. wieners and old money wanted. i do. i so motherfucking do.

ANY PORT IN A STORM; or, KNOWLEDGE OF HELL, part 2

seen from the north, the main street bridge looks like it might have been designed after the barqueta, but it was the broad street bridge that, like the single arch suspension bridge in seville, was built to commemorate the quincentennial of the first voyage of christopher columbus. it's also on that broad street "discovery" bridge (in this second tier city in the north american middle west) that you'll find the bronze placards commemorating columbus' discovery of a new world for castile and león. but those placards aren't nearly as confounding as the spires that the city has recently erected on the four plinths of the bridge to celebrate the bicentennial of the municipality. in the design race of their founding year, the barqueta is the easy winner. at any rate, however, the single suspension arch design of the barqueta is more similar to the design of the main street bridge, although the arch of the latter is at a slant. from the north, you might not detect the slant of the arch, and the bridge could look almost like a replica of the barqueta. but from either approach -- taking the bridge head on as it were -- you notice the street lamps, which rise form the southern edge of the bridge at a slant parallel to the arch...a total image that is surprisingly untacky by the prior design and planning standards of the city.

it seems like i've crossed it already dozens of times -- and always in the direction of fabulous franklinton, in the direction of the fabulous franklinton sign on the house behind the barbed wire fence on town street as it enters franklinton -- and so i don't take much note of the admirable design when i cross it the morning of the storm. a parking meter on town street (before the fabulous franklinton sign), and a series of very pleasant phone calls that will begin the escalation of the dizzy game of catatonic psychological terror. everyone's playing emergency escape from the psychiatric ward, and the cute guy at the cvs pharmacy can turn the screen and give you your entire history with the company, recall for you all of your forgotten adventures with the ambien walrus.

at the bus stop, the man selling newports announces that they're fifty cents each or, the deal, that he'll give you two for a dollar. he's wearing a fashion rosary. on trend. and i think of the bracelets made popular by iker's girlfriend. in the qualifying round of olympic men's soccer, spain has been beaten by japan. and i wake up to hear the news just before the rain picks up, the lightning sounds, and the grid goes dark.

HOW TO...TRY? OH MY GOD, JUST TRY

...so then, moving on. but then right there up ahead is that mural of american gothic (half inverted) that the new york times used in the profile of the city (or, rather, this neighborhood) that it ran in the (sunday?) travel section a year (or two?) ago. and then i have to remember that that existed, almost a year after that pile of clippings got sent to the recycling. then, however, now it's started there's no not remembering the panther in her fake fur putting questions to the patrons or idlers in the parking lot of the convenience store that's coming up on the walk north. directions to the gay disco. streets of ghosts. frankie hejduk pulls out his phone as he's walking into a bar, resigned, like the rest, to the welcome distraction of his grindr. stalking ivri lider, like the rest, three (four? five?) years behind. and it's about time, i think, as i think about the opening of that dance club further up the street where it turned out that i was not, in fact, able to break dance that one new year's eve after the "poak chops" dance party at the witch's house, it's about time that i made good on steadying all of those soap boxes on gentrification in portland and actually watched "flag wars" for myself. olde towne east is, however, a different story. and that story wasn't the one in the new york times, but it might be the more interesting one to tell, if only for all of the opportunities for typing those two special terminal vowels. plus, e.e.'s a.w.o.l. gets points over the memory of that disco, if for no other reason than it at least acts like it belongs here (which means there's nothing to criticize when you realize at the end of the night -- or ten steps in -- that, yeah, no one was ever fooling anyone, there's no denying that it does). and that's where team super awesome adventure princess (to sing a so long and farewell to the all but forgotten unicorn pony) will be for karaoke on thursdays. give it a try. if we're not inspired, it's only because we're refusing to be. if it weren't for the curse that we won at the tarzan machine, that trip to the casino would have been an unmitigatedly successful pilot adventure. so, then, moving on.    

HOW TO LOOK REALLY, EXCEPTIONALLY, IMPOSSIBLY BAD IN PANTS

the turk, the angolan and the american, and nothing to have brought them together at the dinner table than the glory of globalization. it's been happening, of course, well all know, and to the point that talking about it more than just in passing has become almost altogether passé. and we'd thought that madrid had just been only a little behind in the line of transmission when we saw the bicycle hung above the espresso machine and the register at toma, that the bike bar was still a theme for great cities. but now (and even if there's still resistance in its andalusian sister city), what do you know? we find one -- and a microroaster at that -- in columbus. downtown. and everyone in hamilton county is a beer snob. in oversize chinos. it's a relief, though, in a way, that it's all over. no need to try to go home again. just go downtown (in your hometown) and smell the smell of the rose sweet shit wafting out of the roaster, direct (via the cultural export lines extending out) from the pacific northwest. delicious until you get to the dregs, after which even the old, abandoned hearse factory can't make you think it's cool. hearses and industrial ambulances. but maybe that's just the jitters, and those, surely, must also be the same in istanbul and luanda. so then, moving on.

LO TRADICIONAL

it does its job sometimes, tried and true, and it does still have its place, although that place might not be where you'd traditionally expect to find it. and where you find it one night at dusk as the breeze rises and the temperature finally starts to fall is far away from the manicured traditions of the center, on the edge of one (or it could be another) of the neighborhoods where people have been left alone to live everyday life. you find it in a parking lot, which apparently pertains to calle alberche, outside, among the cars and the parking spaces, because inside of la tradicional there's nowhere to sit. and you sit, outside, in tawdry plastic chairs from the diet coke brand, which match the equally tasteless plastic tables that cover that patio surrounded by the parking lot, and the atmosphere of the restaurant is capriciously both at odds with and made by them. you came, however, for the food, because the food speaks for itself, which you know because it has such a widely spoken reputation. but what's basque about cantabrian anchovies on top of salmorejo? then again, why should the brazilian expat ex-toledana have known all the traditions of spain in the first place? but that, in keeping with the essential incongruity of the tables and chairs (not to mention the impeccably dapper server who announces plates but doesn't take orders) is in perfect keeping with all the best traditions of seville. away from the manicured traditionality of the center. eleven o'clock. breeze still rising. you joke more than necessary about the pluma al oporto -- and the jokes are soured by regret, but the dish is fine. you can't, however, do much to stem the bad puns, because the beers at la tradicional are served large. bullied silence. the way home, with the detour taken not to find ice cream, doesn't manage, in the dark, to avoid the virgen del sol. days or hours later, on the way to the white footed bars around america town in madrid, you finally see one of the black footed pigs off to one side of the highway through extremadura, and he or she is happily trotting out acorns there in the place of tradition. he or she (if it was actually him or her that you saw) will later mark the end of the line, because even if you were a third of your way to cantabria, the salmorejo was, so to speak, behind you, and the anchovy sandwich at that not so traditional roadhouse was nothing but salty brass tacks. not a trace of breeze. lucky that the beers there are served large too, even if the capital could only offer a shade of the pluma al oporto and was more than a far cry from la tradicional.

PUT THAT IN YOUR PRIDE AND SMOKE IT, AGAIN (AND AGAIN AND AGAIN)

what happens in chueca happens again and again in chueca. and it wasn’t any surprise that i’d found myself again (but again) in that subterranean disco where i’d lost the key to my spanish boyfriend’s heart, which maybe hadn’t been not so long before but was definitely very early on. still, we (you or i, anyway) wouldn’t have expected to see so many people at the bars that evening after, or, well, we wouldn’t have expected to see so many people at the bars to watch the tournament final between spain and italy. and after the rout (after the rest of the country joined chueca in singing that one queen song), we remarked again that we wouldn’t have expected to see the streets so clean that evening after -- after having seen them so almost unimaginably dirty at eight o’clock that morning. it had been a party the night before, in the streets, city sanctioned and only halfassedly supervised by the municipal police. and as had been noted at the party, the new mayor of madrid would just have to eat her humble ham, and that meant pride cleanup…and own up: that pride is money, and that the argument she’d made about the pears and the apples in opposition to the same sex marriage law hadn’t made any fucking sense. not that we had been at the party the night before to be proud of money or marriage, but, well, we all have to try to meet somewhere in between, and the night before people were meeting at the party (although, probably, the new mayor wasn’t there). still, she had the ghetto cleaned up in time for the people to go back to watch the game and to restart the party -- or, as it were, to go back to the party to watch the game. and then the party continued after the game. and then, as if as a reward for having roused ourselves on that second day to support the country and the party and the country of the party, answers. and consequence. of course, with the streets full of flags it was only a matter of encounters before we found out that the columns were the columns of hercules, but none of us could have expected (and none of us at all this time) that the man who would make that explanation, the man from murcia, would end up dancing the sevillanas with us when they put them on at the bar into which we followed him and his…well, whatever you’d call them  but what did it matter? and this -- our impromptu homo feria the day after the party happened in chueca (where the party will always happen again, and where we hadn’t been surprised that we’d found ourselves, again, in that other subterranean bar dancing with the guy who wasn’t from brooklyn and the one who wasn’t piqué) -- if we couldn’t argue that we hadn’t already had our pride the night before with the rest of them, well, then we were uniquely proud of this. and we danced with light and heavy hearts. and when the bar closed, the streets were still clean -- at least, that is, in chueca, because the party that night was further to the south and to the east, although we didn’t realize the extent of it until we went in search of a taxi on gran via and were met with the phalange of national police that was sweeping the crowds away from the cibeles (as the crowds threw their empty bottles at the advancing line, those bottles that the municipal police had, for another night in a row, allowed the crowd to empty in the streets). and so the next day we skirted gran via and the cibeles carefully, not for the memory of the police (who were nothing but helpful in directing us to where we could find a cab as they removed one of the barriers that the crowd had raised in the road) but for our knowledge of the crowd. and the victorious national selection arrived at the cibeles to greet its still frenzied (reintoxicated) supporters. we could hear them, and we could see the tide flowing out down the paseo del prado to meet the sea of red and yellow around the fountain. but we skirted them. the bear trying to get drunk at the madroño tree was the municipal symbol more representative of our weekend, anyway. still, somehow, and maybe it was the sloth of the finally waning hangover -- but really, who are we kidding, it was early regret and nostalgia -- the red and the yellow, the kingdoms and the crowns surrounded by the pillars of hercules: that giant flag of aznar’s billowing languidly over the plaza de colón with the setting sun shining occasionally in between the billows was comforting…or inspiring…or maybe seemed somehow deserved. fucking immigrants. but that’s why we love freedom.