So this was our big brand-name rock show of the year. Terri instigated it (I kind of peaked with Devo sometime in high school), but I figured what the hey.

Tom Tom Club opened. I wasn’t really a fan of their music back in the day and I’m still not. But I really enjoyed their set; they were really pretty solid, and they had a ton of energy and they were just a great dance band. And now that I have gotten a little more of a taste for the NYC post-punk scene, I kind of get their context a little more– they easily could have showed up in Downtown 81 alongside James White and The Blacks or Kid Creole and the Cocoanuts. It was also much harder back when the Talking Heads were still in operation to see them as their own thing, but that is a little more obvious to me now. And the very afro-beat / world music sound of the last Talking Heads record seems less of a David Byrne tangent.

Devo was pretty faithful to their schtick– no big deviations in their stage show from the DVD we have of their 1980 stage show. Pretty similar set list, too. Their yellow hazmat suits are a little wider. But the spirit was still intact, and they had people up and dancing from the start. Some of the little films that they projected were clearly vintage Devo, but seemed like they might have been re-dubbed. And for the last song, Boojie Boy came out wearing some kind of frock and a pink baseball cap with a rhinestone skull-and-crossbones on it; during his nonsensical diatrabe I could sense the mood in the place was patient, but there was just a touch of “um, maybe you could take that stupid mask off and play Whip It again?”, but I think it was probably my favorite part of the set. And you know, it really is something to see the little film of them from 1981 in their Duty Now for the Future outfits with the wind in their hair, projected 30 feet high, with the Devo Corporate Anthem playing, with a few thousand other people in a place called the “Bank of America Pavillion” drinking a fluorescent green “margarita” from a slushee machine on a summer night. Mmmmm. Devolution.

There were teams, and I was on one of them. Nobody in the scavenger hunt were originally from the planet we were on. We weren’t scavenging for stuff, it was for clues to some puzzle. But the puzzle wasn’t just some made up game, we were really supposed to figure something out that would help people everywhere.

This clue was in a ruined mansion near a lake. It was night. Everything was dirty and grubby inside and it smelled woody and earthen. The wooden fixtures were getting eaten by termites and decomposing into dirt. The lighting was bad, maybe there were candles, and we had flashlights. On the second floor there was a Vandercook cylinder press under a dusty tarp in one room. Other teams were racing past. We lifted up the tarp– other people had been there before us– and I started to read the clue spelled out in the type. There was one interpretation of the clue that the words seemed to suggest. but I could tell there was a trick there: I could see that there was some arrangement of other letters, mostly “C”s near the bottom that, along with the words, made some kind of design, but it was hard to see. I realized I should just go to my printing studio and get some ink and actually run the press and we would see something the other teams hadn’t seen.

I ran outside to get on my bike to go to my studio (which was still in Somerville, which apparently was on this planet). It was dawn outside, and hilly, and it smelled like Pennsylvania, and I think it was.

Speaking of Facebook, I just roundaboutly got found by a really good friend who I knew when I was in high school, who I sort of thought I’d never hear from again. I guess maybe that’s not quite true, we always seemed to run into each other at unlikely times and places. So I sort of thought we would just run into each other walking down the street in Boston or in an airport in DC or something. Back in the day, we lived maybe an hour and a half away from each other and went to different high schools, but we always seemed to run into each other in the city in the least likely places at the least likely times. Like the time that my friend Greg and I went into Pittsburgh to see a play; we saw her walking down the street on the way there, and she came with us. Meeting up was often that haphazard, but we were pretty close, we had long phone conversations and I think we went to her homecoming dance together as a pretext to go the the Rocky Horror Picture Show afterward.

Anyway, the last time I saw her was just after college in the weeks before I moved to Boston and she moved to DC, when we drank Mickey’s Big Mouths on her parents’ porch late into the night, and talked about Big Life Transitions and such. After that, we maybe emailed a couple of times. And then even the occasional “I’m still alive” messages stopped maybe five years ago. While I said earlier that I always thought we’d run into each other again, in truth, I’ve been a little concerned about the silence.

I am definitely a little surprised at some of the facts I’ve been able to pick up. But it’s good; she looks happy. Anyway, I’m very curious to see if she’ll actually get in touch with me again; I really hope so, but I’m also just glad to know she’s still out there.

I guess this kind of thing is not that noteworthy; I find people and people find me all the time. I just am really happy about this one.

Decent Slate piece on space imagery in African American pop, from Sun Ra to Lil Wayne. Could be expanded to be a whole thesis!

I started reading her blog for the stuff about letterpress, but stay for stuff like this.

Thanks to Terri’s photo class, I managed to (barely) miss the fun on the Red Line this morning. We left the house at 7:40 or so (normally I leave at 8:10 or so), so although the train was abnormally crowded, we actually made it all the way to Park Street. Though, we did notice that it smelled weirdly like fire when we stopped abruptly just after Porter Square.

After work, I met up with Terri and we walked around and she took pictures, and we ended up at Rosebud. We never go to Rosebud. It’s a well preserved little train car diner with nifty neon. But it pretty consistently has bad food, so we never end up going there, what with the infinitely better options in Davis Square. But we went, because Terri needed to take pictures inside for her class, and all the tastier joints were too dark. There was a sign on the wall behind the bar that said “try our world famous bloody mary!”. I recommend that you not bother with the world famous bloody mary, which was watery tomato juice, vodka, with a wilty celery stick. Just get a Harpoon IPA. The one thing that we ordered that was fantastic was the buffalo mushrooms. Some time in the last 5 years I’ve become sort of a buffalo fiend, and pretty much, you put buffalo sauce on it, I’ll eat it. (Shut up). But we left thinking that we should go back more often. It’s a place definitely where old-school Somerville character gets along pretty much fine with the gentrificators like yours truly. The waitress saw Terri taking all kinds of pictures and brought her over a postcard and said, “this one’s probably going to be better than the one you shot outside”. We explained that she was taking a photo class, so we hoped they didn’t mind us taking pictures. The bartender heard that (it is a train car after all) and said “OK, just make sure you only shoot my good side” and turned his face to the left and pointed to his right side. When we were wrapping up, a couple came who appeared to be regulars. The waitress asked them where they were last night (for the Celtics game). The woman said that they were down on the cape. There was a picture of Larry Bird taped to the side of the TV over the bar.

Anyway, we left thinking we should go back there more, if only for drinks.

I caught this nugget in a Reuters article today:

The 2007 World Series-winning Red Sox baseball club last month became the first professional sports team to go solar, installing solar hot water panels that will replace a third of the gas used to heat water at Boston’s historic Fenway Park.

Note, I noticed the article caught it because someone from my company was quoted in it:

“The solar industry will look very different just two years from now,” said Ted Sullivan, a senior analyst at Lux Research, a New York market consultancy.

He said he expects “a shake-out among companies that aren’t prepared to thrive in this new environment — particularly crystalline silicon players that haven’t invested in new thin-film technologies.”

Turns out a couple of friends have been quietly blogging.

First, Doug, who is the mutual friend who introduced me & Terri, and in whose wedding party I wore a kilt, has a blog. Encourage him to post. It’s good for him.

Second, Cheri, whom Terri met a couple of jobs ago, and whom we see all too seldom since she moved to the West coast, has a great, great blog going at Parlancer.

Third, Jenn, a college friend, is blogging here, and I’ve gotta say, reading her blog pretty much approximates having a conversation with her, which is a Good Thing.

And actually there are some other people, but I don’t know if I should out them or not.

And, for what it’s worth, I’ve found most of them on Facebook. It seems like sometime in the last 6 months, absolutely everybody I have ever known (or am related to) in my whole life suddenly appeared on Facebook. I don’t love it, I don’t have any special objection to it (I am not a privacy nut, I crossed that bridge a long time ago), but it doesn’t make my eyes bleed like MySpace, and now that everybody I have ever known (or am related to) in my whole life is on it, it’s kind of interesting to keep superficial tabs on everybody. It’s kind of like using finger on the VAX back in the day to see what everybody is up to. Don’t take offense, though, if I don’t accept your invitation to the green patch where your zombie vampire hatchling plays scrabble with my good karma, it’s not personal, I just need to draw the line somewhere.

Woke up at 8ish, Saturday-style. Terri was still asleep so I read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in bed for a couple of hours. I’m really loving it. It’s got all the smarts and ambition of a the other Michael Chabon novels but with much less sphincter and much less of the “look at how smart I am”.

The morning was growing long in the tooth and my hair has been driving me crazy, so I made to get up and go to Custom Barber Shop in Harvard Square. Weezie woke up and I talked her into coming along. There were an insane number of kids waiting in line to get into some kind of new sneaker store on Brattle Street; I couldn’t figure out what the deal was, like if there was some kind of rock or hip hop star signing something inside, but Terri seemed to think it was just the sneakers.

We had some fun in two of the remaining bookshops in Harvard Square. Had some late lunch at Cambridge Common and blabbed. We dropped a bunch of coats, clothes, and books off at Goodwill. I dropped some Letterpress Guild Print Fair posters off with Melissa, a fellow printer, to put up around Davis Square.

We headed home and continued to work on our massive life-cleanup project. We’re currently going through every single thing in every closet and just throwing crap out. It’s liberating. I whittled my casette tape collection down to 10 or so tapes. And those I kept not so much for the content as mementos with talismanic value. Remaining:

• Diane… The Twin Peaks Taps of Agent Cooper
• The Wendy Carlos Switched-On Bach Album (note, this is the 1983 version, hence “Wendy”, not “Walter”)
• a tape I made of a record from the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh that was an hour-long interview with Glenn Gould originally made for the CBC
• A Cab Calloway compilation tape I bought and listened to incessently during my junior semester in Ireland
• The Repo Man soundtrack, ordered through BMG Music Club in college
• various tapes of the short-lived bunch of people I played music with in college, which I hesitate to call a band
• A bunch of microcasettes; I have no idea what’s on them, but it’s probably interesting. I’m guessing old answering machine tapes or various stuff I recorded for articles I wrote during my internship at In Pittsburgh Newsleekly or perhaps for my college paper. I wonder if I have anything to play them on.

We never managed to eat dinner, so I had some brie with a hunk of day-old baguette.

Now we’re waching the Penguins game, and I think I have to go because it’s a 5-on-3 situation in favor of the Penguins…

And they’re doing it in dialect!

oor heids have just been blown clean off

I don’t usually whine about my commute, and there are many many MBTA riders, indeed, entire blogs, devoted to this pursuit. But today’s was amusing enough to whine about.

Preamble: apparently a Red Line train caught on fire and the MBTA bussed people between Broadway and Harvard (basically, the entire stretch of the Red Line that most riders use).

When I found this out at South Station, rather than fight the hordes, I decided to walk to Park St, take the green line to Hynes, and get a #1 bus to Harvard. But when I got to Park St, there was one of the shuttles right there, and when I heard the driver lean out the door, and — I think — say that they were going express to Harvard, I decided to jump on. It was full, but not as crowded as it could have been, presumably because it was going express.

Except, when the closed the doors closed, the driver turns around and says, “OK, does anybody know how to get from here to Harvard Square?”

Now the chances of someone knowing the way are pretty good (but not 100% because a lot of Red Line riders are suburbanites who just take it to Porter Square to catch the commuter rail). But the chances of a Red Line rider knowing the best way to go, especially the best way at 6:30pm during rush hour, are low. People generally take the Red Line specifically so they don’t have to know. The chances that someone who knew the best way would be in earshot of the driver on a full bus are just about zero. And indeed, we ended up not going express to Harvard, because we got lost in Beacon Hill and ended up at Charles MGH, and just took the normal Red Line route and made all the stops from there (which meant that it quickly went from full to overcrowded).

But honest to goodness, where did the MBTA dig this driver up? It wasn’t just like he had no idea of how to get out of Boston, he seemed to have no idea of where the Red Line actually goes and where it stops. After a while, it gets easy: you just follow Mass Ave and stop at every big “T” sign you see; and because there is no subway, there will be huge crowds of people standing outside and waving to you. But this proved too difficult for this guy. People actually had to tell him to stop at Central.

I sound indignant, but mostly I felt bad for him. He was clearly asked to do something he had no idea how to do, and everybody’s been there at one point or another. Luckily most of us don’t have to do it when we’re driving a huge piece of machinery, crammed to the gills with sweaty, tired people.

That said, my fellow commuters were taking it in stride: there was the same kind of jovial whatcha-gonna-do solidarity that is usually reserved for the first big snowstorm of the season.

I made it home by 8:15, which made the trip about double my usual commute time.

Terri and I have been talking recently about where “home” is. When we go to Pennsylvania to visit my parents, I say “I’m going to visit my parents” or “I’m going to The Farm” but to me, home has not really been there since I was 18.

That said, I have lived in Somerville or Cambridge for almost 12 years now, and I still have no idea what the local TV network affiliates are. I know there is a channel 7, and I think it might be Fox. I know there is a WBZ and I think it is CBS, but I don’t know what its number is. I know there are 3 variants of WGBH and that is PBS. All I really know for sure is that on RCN in Somerville, the Red Sox are on NESN which is channel 30, and Turner Classic Movies is channel 62.

But I can still name the ones I grew up with in Pittsburgh: 2 is KDKA, a CBS affiliate (one of the few if not the only “K” stations east of the Mississippi). 4 is WTAE, an ABC affiliate. 11 is WPXI, NBC (and it used to be WIIC which I was reminded of when we were at Nora and Jim’s the other week: they had a Pittsburgh Steelers WIIC mug!). And 13 is WQED, the oldest public TV station in the US.

That said, Somerville definitely feels more like home to me than Pittsburgh, but it’s weird to have lived here so long without being able to name a single network affiliate.

We have two winners: John had the idea first, but Helmecki the Elder actually used appropriate LOLcat syntax.

Runner up: Marco’s simple “My space”.

Helmecki: email me your address at ezraball at gmail to claim your peanuts.

And here’s one more NYT story worth noting, about Berlin’s Templehof airport.

The article notes the airport’s “magical” qualities; it definitely has an aura about it, but I’d say more eerie or uncanny. Definitely an unusual sense to have in an airport, which you expect to be more sterile, modern, and bland than a hospital.

Back in January we passed through Templehof on our way from Berlin to Nice, via Brussels on some weird Belgian airline. It was one of the only airlines running from that airport. We arrived for our 5pm flight at around 3pm, and it really seemed that the only other people in the airport were also there for that one flight. It was so eerily empty, it seemed photo-worthy:

The airport bar was called “The Airlift” commemorating that this was the West Berlin airport used for the Berlin Airlift.

Much of Templehof’s infrastructure was built up by the Americans for the airlift. The NYT article posits that this historic association links the city’s feelings toward the airport to the city’s feelings toward America. Which are on an individual level more complicated than what you’d guess from just reading the papers. I remember our cab driver on the way to the airport was very chatty and wanted to practice his English (which I don’t think anybody has ever explicity said to me before). Turned out, his sister married an American soldier and moved to Erie, PA (which is just about an hour or so away from where my sister Abby lives). He was also a big fan of country music, and played in a band that played James Taylor and Garth Brooks covers in bars.

This is possibly the most fun I’ve ever had reading an obituary. This guy sounds like possibly the most glorious fuckup who ever lived, and the NYT obituarist seems barely able to contain his tone of gleeful derision.

Huntington Hartford, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur, arts patron and man of leisure, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. He was 97.

There were some major failures:

…he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.

There were many lesser ventures that either bombed or fizzled, among them an automated parking garage in Manhattan, a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and his own disastrous stage adaptation of “Jane Eyre.” He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost an estimated $80 million of it.

But no task seems too varied or small for this guy to fail:

In 1940, Mr. Hartford tried being a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, after putting up $100,000 to help get the paper started. If nothing else, the experience produced one of the all-time great excuses for missing deadline: he once sailed his yacht to cover an assignment on Long Island, and upon returning to the city could find no place to tie up and come ashore with the story.

With the start of World War II, he donated the yacht to the Coast Guard. In return he was given the command of a modest supply ship in the Pacific. He ran it aground twice — once, he said later, because his navigational charts were out of date, the other time because “I mistook feet for fathoms.”

And he also did not fare quite so well in love. Here’s how things ended with wife #4:

In 1974 Mr. Hartford married Elaine Kay, a former hairdresser more than 40 years his junior. They, too, were divorced, in 1981, but continued to live together in Mr. Hartford’s 20-room duplex apartment at 1 Beekman Place in Manhattan. In 1984, Ms. Kay and a friend were arrested and charged with tying up a teenage secretary to Mr. Hartford and shaving her head. The directors of the building voted for eviction.