Antique ritual all lost to the ceremony of progress
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spatch met me after my appointment; we refueled on bagels and ramen at the Boston Public Market and then we walked around in the dark, which is what there is after four o'clock these days.Originally we had the idea of visiting the installation of local landmark neon on the Greenway, since not all of the planned signs had been installed in May when we discovered them; we were most impressed by the sign for the Flying Yankee Restaurant with its space-age callback to a beloved streamliner train, although I don't remember Bay State Auto Spring and its suspension-flexing mechanic, either. Some of the tubes have gone dark since the spring, which encourages the impression of authentic working signage, but I still hope the city repairs them. I cannot feel as fondly about the next piece of public art in the chain: if it was inspired by the Big Dig and the tunnel lights of I-93, neither of us was sure why it turned out a hooped cage of steel frames from which white bars of LEDs buzz on and off in a pattern that suggests convenience store fluorescence on the fritz more than it does the streetlights and work lights of that quarter-century; it gave me flashbacks to the half-forest, half-cornerstore dreamscape of The Ritual (2017), but I can't imagine that was the goal.
By that point we were far enough down the curve of Atlantic Avenue that it seemed natural to visit the Northern Avenue Bridge, so we stood for a while on the flat concrete bridge that parallels it into the Seaport and watched the rusted trusses and the channel lights and the fading wake of the water taxi through the permanent gap of its swung-open spans. We kept seeing a curious rainbow static at the far end of the center span as if there were TV screens on a test pattern glowing back there, among the weathered planks and brittling steel: we had no idea what it was and it felt like the start of a weird tale to go looking. I couldn't remember if we were at the right end of November for the yahrzeit of the Summer Street Bridge disaster and I didn't want to cross back over the Fort Point Channel not knowing; it seemed rude. I'm still not sure we should have spent any time in the Seaport. It doesn't feel like a real place. Especially at night, full of screen-light and black glass reflections, it looks like a downtown designed on the combined principles of Ballard, Kubrick, and Lawrence G. Paull. All the buildings are labeled things like "Vertex," "Envoy," and "Icon." At the point where we realized we had been followed across at least three blocks by the same perky pop tune bouncing out of different storefronts (the lyrics were unintelligible to me, but Rob is disturbingly sure he heard something wrong going on in my head—"It may have been projection, I don't know!"), we literally fled down the first side street we could find where the buildings were brick and the streetlights sodium. "This is how people get nostalgic for gaslight," I heard myself saying, gesturing to our sallow orange shadows. "It's seedy and it's the color of dead bugs and baby aspirin and I love it." We ended up on Congress Street, then on A Street where gentrification has not yet erased all the ghost signs from the lofts and offices that were warehouses not so long ago, and I looked up just in time to catch a wing of seagulls lifting over the roofs like a fountain of blown white paper; they kept blowing out into the darkness and I kept watching them wheel and drift and slowly disappear over the roof behind me; they made a snowglobe of the ice-black strip of sky and no one who passed us on the street looked up with us, which feels like a total wipeout for the crowd crystal experiment. We crossed back over the Summer Street Bridge, where the forty-six passengers of Car 393 drowned a hundred and two years ago at the start of this month. The tomb of the seagull kings ("There was Kaw I, Kaw II, and then the Kree dynasty and the regency of Skree-a-a-a-a") still floats in the darkened water, dirty white as feathers and concrete. My fingers were freezing inside their gloves and we got on the Red Line at South Station. Then we hit several locations in Harvard Square on the way home, no doubt contributing to my general sense of having been on my feet all day, but I got a ginger-lemon-honey and two snickerdoodles out of it. Also we ran into a friend of mine who is not on Dreamwidth. The buses and trains were surprisingly not terrible throughout.
I feel I should have heard of Jean Améry, but I didn't recognize his name, although as soon as I saw his description of the Nazis as a government of sadism I recognized his philosophy. I looked him up, however, because the book kiosk at South Station had the recent NYRB translation of Charles Bovary, Country Doctor (1978) and I had no idea that anyone, much less a celebrated Holocaust survivor and essayist, had written a book-length throwdown with Flaubert over the rights of even unsympathetic secondary characters. It is not the season when I can buy books for myself (Rob purred warningly) and I had to leave it, but I am delighted at its existence. Genocide is not the only thing that people who have survived one are obliged to write about. Fandom was not invented with the internet. I'll probably conflate Améry's Charles with Van Heflin's, anyway.
None of this evening has stopped me from feeling melancholic about everything and especially my prospects, but it was objectively a nice set of things to do after the sun went down.
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It sounds like it! I am sorry about the melancholy, however. :-/
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Thank you. Like everyone else, I want more time to do the things I want to do, not the things I have to do just to keep from drowning.
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I did enjoy that, because I enjoy people dancing in public (cf. the small girls on train home all but literally swinging off the stanchions to "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain"), but I can see how it might have left you feeling like La La Land.
and when we noticed the movie theater had no marquee and absolutely no exterior or interior advertising, I remember thinking "Oh, it's a beautiful dystopia." I think I stand by that.
You said it out loud. "Oh, it is a beautiful dystopia." With much the same inflection as "Thank you, little cat," who then needs a firm application of the Giant Paper Tongue.
I guess it works not to advertise your movies if people are only coming to you as part of a pre-planned evening. Who needs foot traffic?
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I looked up just in time to catch a wing of seagulls lifting over the roofs like a fountain of blown white paper; they kept blowing out into the darkness and I kept watching them wheel and drift and slowly disappear over the roof behind me; they made a snowglobe of the ice-black strip of sky --beautiful
Glad you escaped Seaport--it sounds very Camazotz-y.
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I didn't know about the disaster until the centenary article, either, and then I think it got wiped right out again in the 2016 election. It's haunted me on and off ever since.
--beautiful
It was like seeing shooting stars.
Glad you escaped Seaport--it sounds very Camazotz-y.
It's completely inorganic! Even the actual downtown doesn't feel so superficially constructed! The name alone is an imposition over older neighborhoods: nobody I knew used it until the last few years when it became clear that the "Seaport District" really was going to be a thing whether the city as a whole wanted it or not. And then it's got these problems. In addition to the part where it was built just in time to sink like Atlantis in the rising seas.
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Agreed. I remember going with friends to see the ART's The Duchess of Malfi in a recently converted warehouse behind A Street in 2009 and there was just none of it.
It had been a few years since I'd been to the Seaport, and there were so many new buildings that I didn't recognize anything it was a little disorienting.
There was new construction even since the spring! We didn't recognize parts of the skyline at all.
At least the ICA remains excellent.
Yes. The ICA is a real place and I am glad of it. I just feel bad for it stranded among all the high-rise.
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It does sound like a book after your heart. I hope you can find and enjoy it posthaste.