My Boston Picks

I've needed to write this post for ages, my favorite places to go in Boston, to give to people who are going up there for the first time. These are just places that I love to go, and not at all "What tourists should see in Boston" definitive kind of list. Heavily slanted towards food, because I love eating.

1. Mike's Pastry for cannollis and other Italian desserts


2. Toscanini's (One in Central Square, and one in Harvard Square) for great ice cream flavors


3. Newbury and Boylston Street shopping


4. Trident Bookstore and Cafe on Newbury St


5. A walk down Charles St (great little shops, and there's an excellent pizza store along it called Upper Crust), then walking up to Louisburg Square


6. Boston Public Garden


7. Walk along the Esplanade, which is a waterfront park. It runs from the Longfellow Bridge to Harvard Bridge. Actually, you can keep going down to the BU bridge, switch to the Cambridge side, and complete the loop on Storrow Drive to Longfellow bridge, but that's LOOONG. Along the Esplanade, you can see the Hatch Shell and watch all the sailboats in the Charles River Basin.


8. walk down the Infinite Corridor at MIT: go to 77 Mass Ave. walk up the stairs. walk straight ahead, and all the way down the hallway. If you don't know the MIT campus well, you might then want to turn around and go back the way you came, or risk getting kind of lost


9. Walk down Commonwealth Avenue in the evening on a sunny day


10. Walk Central Square to Harvard Square


11. In Harvard Square, walk around the Harvard campus a bit


12. Also in Harvard Square, go to the Fogg Art Museum (free on Saturday mornings until noon)


13. Go to Peet's coffeehouse in Harvard Square


14. Go to the great little gourmet store across the street from the Curious George store in Harvard Square. I think it might be called Cardulo's


15. In Back Bay, go to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. My favorite art museum in the world.

Dunkin' Donuts Coffee this morning- it's really good. No doubt that's because I asked for cream, and they put in so much that it's only a few shades darker than white. For all the regional differences that mass media and plane travel are supposedly killing off, a few remain- I can't imagine a shop in Seattle putting your cream or sugar into your coffee for you, for one. Coffee cup lids out here are also largely the annoying kind that you have to rip open-- they seem (thankfully) to be few and far between back home. I'm not the only visitor here dying for some Dunkin Donuts coffee, though- I saw a few other sleepy folks walking through the hotel lobby this morning clutching syrofoam cups of it- there's one only about 3 blocks away, so it's an easy walk.

1996 was my first city summer. I lived in Cambridge, MA, and most memories of that summer involve the particularly sharp bouncing-off-pavement heat that only treeless city streets ever seem to have. Biking home from Star Market, I would squint my eyes against the glare coming off car windshields, staircase railings, and even just the muggy air itself, desperately trying to hold on to each afternoon as September slipped closer in; and waking up early in the morning from the T shaking my loft, I would pull the pillow over my head until I couldn't breathe through the heat. Watching the sidewalks come alive at 10 PM was an alien experience to a suburban kid; summer evenings had meant lightening bugs and swimming, not street musicians and midnight ginger flavored ice cream cones.
That heat has hung around my new home for the last few days, draining me of much desire to listen to anything. I had to put The Private Press into my discman and walk out of the apartment to listen to it; I bought it a few days ago, but it's taken a while to play it. While it sat on my bookshelf, I tried to forget what a disappointment Endtroducing... had been for me. Now the shimmering start of Six Days reflects the heat here; the skittering drumming over the deeper and slower beat under it are the first bits that I start out loving; it's an amazing little piece of a song, wrapped around a sample with the right feeling of August sleepiness. Fixed Income reminds me of Dissolved Girl- maybe it's just the beginnings of both of these songs. I want to play Dissolved Girl right after this one, but the only unpacked copy that I have of it is on my laptop, which still won't play any music without a static overlay. All I'm going on here is my memory of that song, which is probably not to be trusted. Listening to Fixed Income, I'm back to listening to Massive Attack on repeat in the darkroom at school, making print after print, each one maybe 3 seconds more exposure or one filter down. There was a way that Mezzanine was the best possible music for the repitition, which probably colored the version of that album in my head. This afternoon I'm enjoying the non-vocal tracks the most so far, which is I think the opposite of the ones that I like on Rjd2's Deadringer. Both of these albums are hard to write about for me. I was concentrating on what made each song good or not good, and felt that I had no criteria for judging any of them. Guitar band music is easier for me- I know what I consider to be transcendently good playing, and it's a structure that I can understand. When I venture far away from it, I can still tell if I like a track, but I'm at a loss to figure out why, which rules are involved in the sucess of a few of them and the failure of others. Whoops, wrong Massive Attack album title. It just popped into my head over lunch today that I had the wrong one, so I've corrected it now.