The Blog Formerly Known As Boston T Parties

This blog is a result of vacationing, sans internet, during the time my domain name, bostontparties.com, was up for renewal. From September 2008-July 2009, bostontparties.com covered Boston’s goings-on and blog scene. I am in the process of moving the content here, but please don’t go looking for me at bostontparties.com now- it is not my site, cross my heart! If you have any questions, though, feel free to email me at cdw250@nyu.edu or drop by nymagnanimous, my resume and clips site. Thank you for your patience!

A presto,

Claire

An ed sullivan show moment, and other sloppy seconds

[photo credit: Jonathan Mandell]

I’m somewhat of a fizzler, sometimes. you can see that, I’m sure. Back in France, when K proposed a btp refire, I was quick to agree. Nights, after dinner’d been cleared and the other wwoofers had left the dining caravan, we laid out plans- the new btp would be a dual-dairy of the city, alternate stories embedded with events and destinations.

and then… so quickly it fell to pieces. I know all of you juggle full-time jobs with blogging, and you do it so well, when all I can do is read your blogs, and mewl piteously at my listlessness.

somehow i’ve let this blog, which i tied up so neatly and happily last December, become a ragged, sagging, shabby thing, all gapes and whispers and crickets. so now, to stave off further withering, i’m wrapping it up again. but.

There’s something else I’ve been working on all summer, something I know you all, if you have a few minutes, can maybe help me with. Because my senior colloqium is all about blogs and regional identity- namely, I’m trying to see if where you’re from comes out in how and what you blog. In the interest of a) getting it done, and b) accuracy, I’m keeping a stateside, mid-30s and under perspective.

The International And National Gauntlet

I love running through cities. Brighton isn’t exactly a city, but its sidewalks are usually filled with enough people to make a decent moving obstacle course. It rarely gets better than decent though, as the obstacles are usually weighed down with age and its accoutrements- walkers, small wire grocery carts containing 15 cans of catfood and a package of ground beef, crumpled partners, arthritis. Today, at the junction of Beacon and Summit Ave, a man with matchstick legs and bulbous knees tipped a royal blue newscap at me while his wife scowled through straggly garnet whisps and fiddled with the fastners of her kelly green suspenders. Outside Bazaar, three generations of Russian men unloaded cartons of beets and great loaves of potato bread from a Honda minvan. The portly Lubavitch scuttling down Harvard Ave looked ahead at no one until a tiny man in a Yarmulke called out a greeting as he swept the entry to the Butcherie.

I stopped running once i got to Comm Ave, and walked the mile and a half back to where the Reservoir begins. At the closet-sized International and National foods co (157 Sutherland Rd), I bought a container of what appeared to be beets and peas and cabbage.

Silvertone vs Chat'n'Chew: A Tale of Two Smacs

[Photo Credits: Cave Cibum and HJW3001]

In Manhattan, there’s a restaurant on 16th street right off Union Square called the Chat ‘n’ Chew. It is filled with a mix of 50s and cowboy memorabilia, and its menu cheerfully offers up diner fare done right – “not your mama’s meatloaf,” “holey cow” burgers, “uncle red’s addiction” fried chicken, tv dinners, greaseless sweet potato fries, dense and towery slabs of coco-cola chocolate cake, and what until last night I figured was the world’s best mac and cheese- chewy rigatoni tossed with cheddar for flavor and velveeta for fun, and topped with crushed potato chips. The mac and cheese at Silvertone is structurally quite similar to CnC’s, but it subs out the chips for bread crumbs and parmesan. A smart choice, for it clings to the noodles and absorbs the grease instead of adding to it.
Plus, Silvertone has drinks. Not that CnC doesn’t, but they’re not exactly a headlining event.

Of Bizarro Branding, Toffee, and Teva Toes

His ankles are barely twigs, gaping in scraggy white sneakers-”Noth Fase,” spells the tongue, in sky blue.

Near invisible lips pucker and release around a piece of toffee whose wrapper he lets drift to the subway floor. His face is a prune, his eyes the shallowest of grooves. It’s a face that belongs in National Geographic- if not the cover, than at least a decent spread, a visit to ye-olde China, gongs and rice and scarlet dragons.

He has a daughter, nearly as scrawny as he, but unwithered. The alligator on her polo is backwards, and the toenails peeping out form her Tevas are ballerina pink. She too sucks a toffee, though her wrapper is neatly folded, tucked into her grey Jansport.

Sometimes, she shoots her father a backwards glance, and her mouth smiles around the candy. The rest of the time she stares ahead, while her fingers and pink toes drum a steady waltz.

At Packards Corner, she springs to her feet, grabs her father’s elbow, and ushers him off. He is probably still working on that toffee.

'Eepstair Et Zaftig

Eepstair

“You know, your ipod is misleading.”

We were sitting, the boy and I, in a little booth in Zaftigs watching plates piled high with omelettes and french toast and brisket zoom by on the arms of sturdy, and eagled-eyed servers. I mentioned something about restaurant soundtracks- how they were predictable, prefab, and sucky, and I had said this feeling rather smug about my own musical library, and then the boy’s sentence clattered into my blueberry pancakes with a hackle-raising thud.

“You have all these terrific artists, but then I click on them and there’s only one or two songs.”

Because I listen to music by playlist, not by album, I explained. For the most part, I’ve assembled my library song by song, and most songs are chosen because they fit into a specific playlist.

The boy finds this odd. He grew up listening to albums, though, and I grew up listening to not very much, until I saw Garden State my junior year of high school and rushed out to buy the soundtrack and listened to it over and over and over and emerged with a love of lofi, quirky indie pop. And the Garden State soundtrack is a playlist, really, so perhaps it is responsible for my love of them.

Dirty Martini Blues

He twiddled the olive spear vigorously. It was his third of the evening, and he sat alone. His eyes fixed upon the Sox game, but in a glazed way- no grimace or grin at hits and strikeouts, certainly no fists banged upon the zinc counter. THe wrinkles in his perwinkle shirt grew with each martini, and when he got up to leave I saw that his khakis were just as wrinkled, and his left boat shoe had a hole in the toe. He didn’t see the smile I gave him, or he pretended not to. A good thing, maybe, as I couldn’t keep the pity out of it.

Linen, Loafers, and Louis

The loafers were chestnut and faintly scuffed, but the nickel horsebits shone. The pants and jacket were sage green and linen, high-roller tempered with nursing home. I guess the high roller won out though, with the LV-spattered belt and the Cartier tank. But the face surprised me, because it was deeply wrinkled, and the wire-rimmed spectacles couldn’t hide the fact that one eye was higher and wider than the other. The smaller eye was trained upon The Economist, which shook slightly until Boyslton, when he slid it back into a camel leather briefcase, sprung to his feet, and disappeared behind a large Asian family sporting brand-new Sox Hats in green, pink, baby blue, and yellow.

Is This It?

[Photo Credit: Stefanie Klavens]

Emphasis on the “is,” and summer being “it.” A hopeful question. These days are kind of Strokesian though, aren’t they? Vague and grey and faintly buzzing with spikes sweet enough to keep your finger off the skip button. And today was mostly a spike, at least in Brighton, and I took advantage of it on a bench in a teeny park. I don’t know if all the parks in Brighton have free wifi, but the one on comm ave just before the reservoir does. Also it has a lot of passersby, especially in the early evening -stooped and craggy babushkas wheeling metal carts filled with cat food and a carton of half and half, dewy runners and heaving would-be runners, and families, many of them multiracial. Sometimes the families stay, because there’s a playground, and the grass, neat and springy with clovers, is perfect for picnics and little knees.

Midnight In The Korova Milkbar

The boy who asked me to move my bag was dreadlocked, combat-booted, spikey, and wasted. Keeping my eyes on my book, I did so, but he was too large to fit in one seat so he stood in front of me while his two friends passed a bottle of what looked like mouth wash back and forth. Across the aisle, an Asian boy in a skateboarding cap was reading 1984, which delighted my dreadlocked buddy.

“I love that book, man. Do you like it.” The Asian boy liked it very much.

“You read A Clockwork Orange?” He had not.

“Oh man, you gotta read it.” Dreadlocks’ friend, appropriately sporting a bowler hat (in addition to a black mesh shirt and “punk rocker” tattoo on a shriveled bicep), concurred.

“Yeah, you gotta. You’ll get ultraviolent. You’ll just want to hit everyone.” He turned to Dreadlocks.

“Man, we should go ultraviolent NOW.” The little Indian man sitting next to me stiffened.

“No, man. When we get off, we can. We will. We’ll go so ultraviolent.” The Indian man relaxed a little.