It’s true, I’ve seen them do it.
(Another perk of working close to MIT is being close enough to Emma’s to get a Chicken Pagnotelle panini (with fresh instead of smoked mozzarella) for lunch).
Speaking of i-cafe in Teele Square, I just saw this little tidbit on Chowhound:
got to talking to the owner, ali, who, it turns out to be the original owner of soundbites. he sold out to the breakfast nazi 9 or 10 years ago. made me a banana crepe on the house — nice touch.
I haven’t been to Soundbites since the time the breakfast nazi threw our check at us and told us to leave, the very second that our friend John picked up his last forkful of omelette. And yet, John keeps going back every time he’s in town. It must be the crack in the hash browns.
Stuff like this is why I love working in the MIT neighborhood. On my walk to the T from work, I saw this sign on Vassar Street in front of the Stata Center. It was cycling between a message that the Mass Ave bridge will be closed from 6 am - 3 pm on Sunday, and that the sign had been hacked. Granted, it could have been more clever, especially considering that it’s going to be closed because a new Kevin Spacey movie is shooting there. Still, plain old technical chops and the chutzpah to pull it off go a long way sometimes.
I also shot a little movie, which is up on YouTube.
For as much as I griped about the demise of the Someday a few months back, I feel like a heel for not going to the i-cafe in Teele Square before now. It’s so great, and it’s right around the corner from The Curtisian.
It’s crazy— I keep hearing pretty good things about it, but haven’t gotten past the fact that it looks like it’s just a doorway to a basement. And, basically, it is, but stepping into the basement is like being teleported from Teele Square to Morocco (the owners are an unbelieveably nice Moroccan couple). It’s actually a surprisingly roomy space, all decked out in carpets and Moroccan lamps and cushions, with a space up front for live music and apparently movies. It’s very uncrowded, which would be a good thing, but I’m advertising it here, because I fear its disappearance more than I fear its becoming overcrowded at this point.
Terri and I talked with the woman who is co-owner on the way out. Apparently, they are going to have a hearing coming up where they can extend their hours until 2am and have live music; a petition is going to be in The Somerville News soon. She mentioned that the location used to house a bar called The Jumbo (sounds Tuftian), which I don’t know anything about.
Until the Someday kids get things going at Sacco’s in Davis Square (which is very much in the works), it’s worth checking out. Actually, for those of us who live nearer Teele Square, it’s probably more interesting than Someday @ Sacco’s.
This is why the Sox keep you coming back. Even when it’s a 7-1 blowout, Remy and Donny O. keep it entertaining.
Happy Friday the 13th.
That is all.
You know, the virtues of David Mitchell’s most recent novel are almost unreviewable, and it’s because of the reviews that I put off reading it for almost a year. The Globe reviewin particular put me off (”Jason Taylor, 13, is a Holden Caulfield for the Margaret Thatcher era.” GAG). I just didn’t see why I had to spend more of the finite minutes of my life reading another coming of age story about a sensitive, artistic small-town youth, despite how utterly taken I was with both Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten. (Have yet to read Number Nine Dream).
It’s too bad, because it really does avoid almost all of the perils of cliché that the premise holds. But again, it’s almost impossible to talk about it without it sounding like it’s the most awful, clichéd crap. I think the best I can do is to say that it really reads like Mitchell wrote it without ever having absorbed anything else in the genre. Yet it feels somewhat wrong to assume that it’s all autobiographical drawn-from-life stuff, either.
All I can surmise is that much of the material has been sitting in Mitchell’s files for years, and with a few heavily praised and unquestionably non-autobiographical novels with plenty of pomo pyrotechnics under his belt, he felt safe enough to publish this without fear of being pigeonholed as an autobiographical writer of coming of age stories.
And if you’ve been put off by Mitchell’s pomo pyrotechnics in the past (I’m talking to you, Terri Wise), I’ll vouch that there is almost none of that here. Though, for those of you who enjoy that kind of thing, the rather stunning appearance of one of the characters from Cloud Atlas alone is worth the price of admission.
Cameron: [Whispering to himself after hanging up from a phone call with Ferris] I’m dying.
[Phone rings, and Cameron answers]
Ferris: (over the phone) You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.
[source]
I forgot to mention, I finally, after about a year of procrastination and meat-mongering, defeated the Naughty Sorceress and Ascended in Kingdom of Loathing.
An ascender is me.
One of the things that made University Wine Shop a nice local wine shop in the area around Harvard Law School, near Terri’s old neighborhood, was the store cat. She’d walk around the store or sleep in her cat bed on the windowsill, mostly indifferent to the commercial proceedings or passers by on Mass Ave. Even though Terri hasn’t lived there for almost 10 years now, when we’re in the neighborhood, e.g. to go to Cambridge Common, we walk by the shop, we’d pop in to see her. Well, we saw this sad sign while we were walking by yesterday afternoon. R.I.P., Dixie.
However, we continued down the street and stopped into History, a new vintage shop a little bit down Mass Ave. Aside from having clever little price tags (each had a typed story fragment with period details to indicate the decade of the article of clothing), a store dog was sunning himself in the front window.
Sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks has been this tidbit about a very slight controversy in Colorado around a resolution to make John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” the state song.
‘A high is medically the releasing of endorphins in the brain — yes, drugs cause it, but so do lots of other things,” said State Senator Bob Hagedorn, a Democrat from the suburbs of Denver who successfully led the drive on Monday to make Mr. Denver’s anthem ”Rocky Mountain High” Colorado’s second state song. The tune will have joint status with ”Where the Columbines Grow,” which pretty much everyone agrees is about flowers.
”We could be talking about guys who’ve been fishing all day, or kids pigging out on s’mores, with the chocolate,” Senator Hagedorn said, referring to other endorphin-producing activities.
Indeed.
But here’s what makes this noteworthy to me:
Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in Roswell, N.M., the singer originally considered calling himself John Sommerville, according to his official Web site, Johndenver.com, before settling on Colorado’s capital city for his stage name and Aspen in the central Rockies as his home.
I know, it’s spelled slightly differently than Somerville, MA, but what if John Denver had chosen Somerville, MA, as his namesake, and made it his home. Would it have meant that the 70’s would have been filled with the mellow sounds of John Sommerville singing about the joys of bowling at Sacco’s, throwing back a pint at Sligo’s, the peaceful natural beauty of the Mystic River?