boston, 9/29-10/2

My journal method for the trip was this: I bought a little blank book with pages in various bright colors. Along the way, stopping for meals or sleep, I would jot little notes to myself about what I'd done and seen, notes like "looking for Belgian waffles" or "trying not to step on the cat" or "Jews in Denmark in WWII". The idea--which worked out for a while--was that I would get to a computer soon enough that these fragments would jog my recent memory and I would know what to say about them in full sentences.

I have no notes from Boston. But I remember I had a great time.

Boston (and Cambridge and Somerville) was the most aggressively nostalgic stop on my trip. I figured I had a lot of old favorites to visit, and only a few days to do it, so I'd better not waste any time. With a few exceptions, I went only to restaurants and stores and cinemas and places where I'd hung out when I used to live there. People would say "I know this really great Greek restaurant" and I'd veto it solely on the grounds that I'd never been there. So I went to the falafel place across from my old school, and the Thai restaurant down Mass Ave., and the CD shops in Harvard Square, and generally was all about rekindling old affections.

The major exceptions to the nostalgia campaign were the open mikes. I played at the Cantab and had a good time, and played at the BCCA and had a good time, and in between I played at Club Passim, which felt like an achievement even though I only got to play one song and I had to pay to get in.

The one song ("Snowblinded") went over well, though--after a long, depressing drought across the south, I made my first CD sales to people who didn't already know me. I also traded CDs with Sam Bayer (who traded me his mammoth 3-CD compilation for my 22-minute EP) and Myq Kaplan (who I hadn't seen but who turned out to be really funny) and I think some other people but it was a while ago and to be honest I haven't unpacked the CDs yet. And also The Animators were there and it was great to see them again, and I stayed an extra night partly so I could see them at the BCCA.

And in the process of eating at old haunts and playing at new venues, I met some online friends for the first time and saw some other friends for the first time in years and saw some other friends I'd seen earlier that week and saw a whole lot of dougo, who I was staying with. I'm doing this from memory, so I'm sure I'll forget someone, but let's see: There was bnewmark and perci and evandra and shoebox_bird and rawrin. And dougo. Seems like there were more. Anyway, all of whom were fun to hang out with. Except one. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Just kidding, it was all fun.

The one sad thing about visiting Boston was this: If visiting New Jersey was emotional but fraught, and visiting New York was thrilling but exhausting, visiting Boston was... well, nice. It was nice because it was a nice place where I used to live, and I knew where some cool stuff was. (Somewhat proudly, I didn't pull out a map the whole time I was there.) There was nothing about it that I didn't like. But it didn't pull me back the way it used to, the way I expected it to.

So maybe next time I visit I'll try to cut the strings of nostalgia and see Boston like a new place. But on the other hand, I miss Bangkok Cuisine and Boston Shawarma again already, and I'd hate to miss whatever's showing at the Brattle, and I didn't even make it on this trip to the Someday Cafe or the Museum of Fine Arts. So maybe I won't.

boston update

OH and also at Club Passim I hung out with marm0t, the most remarkable person I have ever met. (Right? I'm doing this from memory, remember. Please don't dock my pay.)

Buffalo, 10/1-10/2

My original plan was to spend three days travelling from Boston to Chicago, via Ohio, where I had a friend to visit. But when the Ohio plan fell through, I figured out I could stay an extra night in Boston (to see, you may recall, The Animators) and drive a more direct route to Chicago in two days.

The halfway point was somewhere in upstate New York or Pennsylvania, but none of the cities around there particularly captured my attention, so I picked Buffalo more or less at random. (I did think about routing the trip through Toronto, a city I loved last time I visited, but one of the goals of this trip was "see America," and crossing the border seemed like a dilution.)



When I got to Buffalo, I realized two things: that one of its selling points was its proximity to Niagara Falls, and that, despite this, it was probably a more interesting place than I'd suspected. There were lots of interesting-sounding restaurants and buildings and things, but what I wanted to do was hit an open mike, and to my surprise there were at least five listed for that night in the local arts weekly. So I chose the one that sounded like a coffeehouse and looked close to my motel and headed out.

What that turned out to be was... a different conception of the open mike than I had previously encountered. The first thing that struck me was that, although there was something musical happening, the cafe was completely full of people talking loudly to their friends. The second thing was that I was older than their friends by at least ten years.

While I was ordering a cup of tea, the guy who seemed to be in charge--I think he brought the amp--yelled to one of his friends, "Hey, you should play something," and that set up his friend as the featured performer for as long as it took me to finish my tea and leave. The performance consisted of him sitting at a table playing sullen riffs on an electric guitar, while another guy sitting next to him sporadically started to sing something and then subsided.

You win some, you lose some.

---

The next morning I went to Niagara Falls. I'd never particularly intended to go there, but I was right next door, and I figured, if not now, then when?

What I learned is this: Niagara Falls is not a good tourist attraction for a person with even a mild fear of heights. It had been raining all night, so the sidewalk was slippery. It was still raining a little, so I was carrying an open umbrella. It was windy, so the umbrella tugged gently in various directions. And the sidewalk? It slopes down towards the falls.

But I went out there anyway, because I hate feeling constrained by fears. I wasn't actually able to look at the falls for more than a split-second at a time, but I did manage to look at the camera's viewfinder long enough to produce this utterly unexceptional photograph of America's oldest state park: