Drunken Owls and Other Delights

The J & A Good Time Comedy Revue and Biscuit Brunch Tour '14 was a rousing success! Our weeklong vacation to various New England points of interest was chock full of daily meetups with friends and family, not to mention stopping by favorite haunts. The first half of the vacation was spent in the Boston area, where we stayed at a lovely B & B in Cambridge a short distance from both Porter and Davis Squares. Much driving and sightseeing, including a very enjoyable leisurely drive around Boston and neighboring towns on Sunday. We headed westward to central MA on Tuesday and spent the rest of the week with family and more friends. We even managed to drive through three different states on Thursday, when we drove up to Brattleboro VT, then over to Keene NH, then back to Athol for a brief break before heading down to West Springfield to see my good buddy Bruce, who I haven't seen in quite a few years. We finished off the week with a brunch with my parents before heading back to Boston. That night we met up with two more people in Chelsea, and finished off the night with soft serve on Revere Beach--something one just has to do at least once. We flew back on Saturday morning, where we somehow managed to remain awake. This had to be the busiest vacation I've ever had, but it was a blast, and I'm incredibly happy I was able to see so many people during it.

And as an aside: I was not able to work on writing revision on a daily basis...but I did manage to more than make up for it by working on three chapters during the six-hour flight back to San Francisco! :)

Whew! So that's our spring vacation out of the way. We don't have another major vacation until August when we head to London for WorldCon, which I am of course eagerly looking forward to. In the meantime, we do have a number of fun events scheduled, including a number of SF Symphony shows Shakespeare at the Kabuki, and more. It's been a hectic 2014 so far, but in a good way!

Thoughts and prayers going out to my old college-era stomping grounds of Boston. Still one of my favorite cities in the world. The above picture was taken almost exactly one year ago, the day after the Marathon, when A. and I came back east for vacation and stayed a few days in the area. It's taken from the eastern facade of The Public Library on Dartmouth, looking east across Copley Square at Trinity Church and the Hancock Tower. The end of the Boston Marathon would be right around the corner to the left of the picture, on Boylston Street.

I lived in the town from September 1989 when I moved into the Charlesgate dorm at Emerson College (back when it the school was centered on Beacon Street), to August of 1995 when I moved out of my Allston apartment and back home to Athol. I had a lot of ups and downs there, a lot of lean times, and a hell of a lot of good times as well. I have a lot of memories of walking through Copley Square at night after going to the movies or hanging out at the Copley Place Mall, sitting at the stone benches at the library, visiting Trinity Church, having drinks at the old lounge at the Westin, hopping down the stairs to the Green Line T to and from work. There are quite a few points in the Back Bay that are considered great gathering places, but I always felt that Copley is one of the best and biggest. It's wide and clear, and on a nice day it's lovely and relaxing.

After I moved back home, I continued to visit Boston at least once a month, parking at Alewife and taking the T all over town. I even had it down to a specific plan: take the Red and Green lines out to Kenmore Square to stop at Nuggets and Comicopia (and maybe the BU Bookstore as well), walk past the old Emerson dorms on the corner of Charlesgate East and Beacon, then down Mass Ave to Tower on the corner of Newbury, then to Newbury Comics down the street (sense a theme here?). From there I'd head over to Copley Square to hang out for a bit and maybe have lunch, before heading back on the T and up to my last stops at Harvard Square. I did that at least up to 2003 or so. A lot has changed over the years--the parking lot in front of Prudential Mall now has new high rises, Emerson moved over to the Common, Buzzy's is long gone, the elevated T near Boston Garden is gone, even Kenmore looks somewhat different--but I still miss it there.

The thing I love most about Boston is the vibe. Despite what tourists and non-Bostonians might say, it's an extremely friendly city, a quirky one, a welcoming one, an intelligent one, a competitive one, a cranky one, and a laid back one. I think that's partly why San Francisco works so well for me nowadays, because it's got a very similar feeling. It's a great place.

I've been thinking a lot about Beantown and everyone in it today. They take care of their own, and I love that.

Stay strong, Boston. We love you.

As is the usual with YouTube, I was looking for something else and found this gem:



Think Tree is one of the first bands I saw at a club when I went to Emerson in Boston, these guys were AWESOME to see live. They're of course a bit laid back here because they're on Dutch TV, but they put on a wild and funny show when they were in Boston.

For those not familiar with the band...it's very similar to Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine, only instead of it being dark and dire, it's a bit...well...odd and maybe even a bit nerdy. Definitely check out their two albums (eight/thirteen and Like the Idea) if you happen upon them!

I've been around the dial so many times, but you're not there
Somebody tells me that you've been taken off the air
Well, you were my favorite DJ, since I can't remember when
You always played the best records, you never followed any trend
FM, AM, where are you?
You gotta be out there somewhere on the dial...
--The Kinks, "Around the Dial"


(Hat tip to head58 for pointing this out this morning via email...)

WBCN is losing its terrestrial station as of August 19.

Those of you in the New England area probably know 104.1 FM as one of the biggest mainstays of rock radio in Boston for YEARS. Its first broadcast was March 15, 1969, playing Cream's "I Feel Free". A fitting first song to play, come to think of it, considering their original format was progressive freeform, much like how New York City's WNEW started (actually, within a few years of each other). They changed to album-oriented rock in the mid-seventies, classic rock in the eighties, and a foray into various versions of alternative rock in the nineties up to today. It was also Boston's outlet for Howard Stern, one of the premier stations for local bands to get their start, and one of the best stations to broadcast local live shows.

It was also a station full of very well-known DJs and production teams, including Peter Wolf (of the J. Geils Band--his online moniker was Wolfa Goofa with the Green Teeth--yes, that's where it comes from), JJ Jackson (of early MTV fame), and Billy West (the Ren & Stimpy voice actor), as well as locally-familiar names Charles Laquidara, Nik Carter, Duane Bruce, Matt Siegal, Oedipus, Carter Alan, Bill Abbate, overnight guy Albert O, and Mark Parenteau...I'm sure some of you recognize those names if you listened to Boston radio as much as I did.

I always thought of 'BCN as the older frat-dude brother of Boston radio--the station that knew the rules but broke them anyway and got away with it (for the most part), the station that demanded to be cranked up, the one that always sounded like it was being broadcast in the back room of someone's house while the rest of the place was partying it up. In my years living in Boston, I spent most of them listening to WFNX, but between 1993 and 1995, I'd switch between the two. WFNX's music selection had started getting repetitive, and 'BCN's newly minted alt.rock playlist had a much wider selection that I could really groove to. I listened to the station almost exclusively in the summer of '95 when I was living at the Allston apartment, staying up way too late playing Solitaire and writing True Faith and its variants, and having a good time despite being broke most of the time. I also remember the day Carter Alan--the man who, by the way, championed U2 in the States back in 1980 when no one else would play them--had the world premiere of their song "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" from the Batman Forever soundtrack.

I still have some of the radio tapes from that summer, most of which were indeed taped off of that station. Songs that I equate with that summer, and thus with WBCN:
--U2, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"
--Ned's Atomic Dustbin, "All I Ask of Myself Is That I Hold Together" and "Stuck"
--Belly, "Super-connected" and "Now They'll Sleep"
--White Zombie, "More Human Than Human"
--Radiohead, "High & Dry" and "Fake Plastic Trees"
--Weezer, "Buddy Holly", "My Name is Jonas", and "Undone (the Sweater Song)"
--Presidents of the USA, "Lump"
--Silverchair, "Tomorrow"
--Hum, "Stars"
--Filter, "Hey Man, Nice Shot"
--Everclear, "Santa Monica"
--Soul Asylum, "Misery"
--Blur, "Girls & Boys"
--Foo Fighters, pretty much their entire first album
--Garbage, "Vow"

I'll admit that I rarely if ever listened to the station once I moved back to Athol, mostly due to the fact that the station didn't come in that far out in the state. I've popped onto their website and listened to the streaming station now and again, and they still play the rock music I expect from them. They've even re-embraced the classic rock they were known for in the 70s and 80s, incorporating Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and all the staples you'd expect (come on, any Boston straight-ahead rock station worth their salt HAS to play Aerosmith, right?).

But I have to say that it's kind of sad to see such an institution fading away...I know most stations have done this by now--WNEW is nowhere near the station it used to be--and it's pretty much par for the course in the radio business, but still...I'm sure it'll be strange for people to land on 104.1 and not hear rock anymore. It'll be replaced by its sister station WBMX, playing "hot adult contemporary". Can't get any further from the original than that.

WBCN will still be playing rock at their website, and for the most part I think that looks like where most stations are going that are still terrestrial but aren't satellite yet.

Still...shocking to see them go...and they will be missed on the dial. :(

When I'm working from home, I tend to listen to a lot of music via my mp3 collection, and lately I've been listening to Beck's Sea Change a lot. Partly because I just really like that album a lot, partly because "Little One" from that album keeps popping up in my head lately.

The interesting thing is that listening to that album makes me think of when I used to go to a sadly-departed bookstore in Harvard Square in Cambridge (Wordsworth Books) when I lived in MA. That store was always one of my main stops when I did a daytrip into the Boston area, usually near the end of the day after lengthy stops at used record stores. I'd spend the final few hours hanging out there, more often than not buying a few titles. The reason the Beck album pops up is because they'd played it in its entirety one of the times I was there.

It also ties in with the book I'm currently reading, Endgame 1945 by David Stafford, mainly because it's about immediately-post-WWII Europe. Why, you say? Because that was the same evening I bought The Children's War by JN Stroyar. So now that I'm listening to that album and reading the Stafford Book, I keep having this nagging urge to read Children's War as well as House of Leaves again, which are two rather large books I like reading every few years or so. The last I read both were about the time we moved here, so it's high time for me to pick them up again. Thing is, I have way too many other books before it to pick them up now! :p

This is also bringing up the fact that I've been thinking about the IWN again lately. Sure, I have two other current WIPs going on, so it isn't helping that I want to pick it up again, especially with the current political climate over the last six months. I figure that urge will die down a bit once I'm finished with the Stafford book (less than 100 pages to go at this point), but it does amuse me that I still get urges to write specific things due to what I'm reading or listening to.