ornoth

It’s been many months since the Friday Five went away, so I guess I’ll take a stab at these questions that are doing the rounds. You didn’t think I’d miss an opportunity to be unique, did you? Mind you, I’m not about to limit myself to one answer each! Let’s get esoteric!

Name a book you own that no one on your friends list does

Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, Tristan Tzara: Why doesn’t everyone have a copy of the original Dada manifestos? I don’t know, but I do know that Tristan Tzara considered himself rather likable.
A Diplomatic History of the American People, Bailey: It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that just as today, the entire history of American foreign relations is rife with tales of belligerent, ignorant Merkuns.
Calhamer on Diplomacy: The Boardgame “Diplomacy” and Diplomatic History, Allan Calhamer: A fascinating discussion of the correlation between the world’s greatest game, Avalon Hill’s Diplomacy, and the real-world geopolitical situation in pre-war Europe that it simulates, written by the game’s creator.
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, Stephen Puleo: A chronicle of one of the most surreal—yet painfully real—tragedies in Boston’s storied history.
Eugenics and Sex Harmony, Dr. Herman Rubin (1933): The full title of this 1933 book tells it all: Eugenics and Sex Harmony; The Sexes, Their Relations and Problems; Including Fascinating Medical Discoveries, Prevention of Disease, and Special Advice for Common Disorders; by Herman H. Rubin, M.D.; Author of “Your Mysterious Glands”, “Glands and Health”, Member of American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Eugenics Society, Eugenics Research Association, Contributor to Scientific and Medical Literature, etc. Imagine all the fun to be found in a 75 year-old sex ed textbook. A wonderful time capsule, chock full of bigotry and ignorance.

Name a CD you own that no one on your friends list does

Liabach, Let It Be: Laibach is a Slovenian art movement and industrial dance band with an affection for everything Germanic, covering every song on one of the Beatles’ most popular albums: how can you go wrong? Their revision of “One After 909” is truly righteous.
Various incl. Laibach, Trans Slovenia Express: Laibach again, paired with other Slovenian bands, doing remakes of Kraftwerk’s most popular songs. Musique… non-stop.
HWA (Hoez With Attitude), Livin’ in a Hoe House: The original bitches, HWA did for rap what Lords of Acid did for dance: sexualized it by bringing forth the nasty attitude of the powerful, sexually-motivated woman.
Concussion Ensemble, Stampede: Concussion, indeed! Imagine a high-energy band, sans vocals, fronted by three drummers, backed up by bass, guitar, and a found-objects percussionist. It’s a tragedy that these guys didn’t stay together.
Devo, Devo E-Z Listening Disc: Devo. Muzak. We must repeat.

Name a DVD/VHS tape you own that no one on your friends list does

Yawn. I only own two DVDs, and surprisingly both are animated features. The first is Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, a wonderful romp through pop philosophy and navel-gazing. The other… In the summer of 1981 I was between junior and senior years in high school and just coming into possession of a teenaged boy’s cockiness offset by sexually frustrated angst. Ivan Reitman’s Heavy Metal captured that time perfectly in a splat of kitschy sci-fi spiced with sex, drugs, music, and violence. It’s a one-way ticket to midnight. As for VHS tapes, that box hasn’t been opened since 1990, and is going to stay that way.

Name a place you’ve been that no one on your friends list has been

I think I have two to pick from here, and they’re my only two trips outside the US (no, Canadia doesn’t count). My 2000 trip to Barbados with some of the Staples project team was absolutely wonderful, as was the 2002 DargonZine Writers’ Summit, where my writers and I spent two weeks travelling all over Scotland. I’d repeat either of those trips in a heartbeat.

Loyal readers will have seen many of them, but there's still several new photos in a post I just made here.

Last week was my final Digital Photography class, and we had to turn in our final project: a portfolio of ten photographs, all relating to a certain topic.

I spent a lot of time out shooting, but only tied my images together vaguely with verbal bullshit. However, here are a few of the images I kept.

The top row includes: a nice shot of the Big Dig with a tangle of rebar in front of the Customs House tower, a basset hound shot in front of the State House at the annual “Patriot Plod” basset parade, and a stitched panoramic shot of a support for the old High Bridge in front of one of the towers of the new Zakim bridge that replaced it.

The images in the second row are intentionally a little obscure. The first is on the grounds of the JFK Library, and the second is in the park around Cambridge’s Fresh Pond.

In all, I’m pretty happy with how this assignment turned out, as well as how the class overall went. Hopefully this won’t be the end of the photos that I take or post here. I really enjoy the work, and would love to be able to turn it into something I could make some income from.

Three more weeks of Digital Photography class have yielded two more photos to share.

Both of these pictures were experiments in depth of field. The unfortunate thing is that when you reduce the size of a photo, it totally flattens the depth of field, so that areas that were out of focus on the original look about the same as the in-focus areas. But trust me on this one: the originals look really cool.

The first image was taken at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where people like Harold Edgerton, B.F. Skinner, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are buried. The spruce bough in the foreground is in sharp focus, while the tombstones in the background (with the shadows of the same boughs on them) are blurry.

The second shot was more serendipitous. We were shooting flowers in the Public Garden, and I wanted to shoot these two foot tall lily plants, but couldn’t take a side shot because the only backgrounds I could set them against were people or cars parked along a street. So I walked up and took a shot pointed straight down, and got a tremendous image. The leaves spiraling out from the central stem work great with the limited depth of field, which left the ground and the lower leaves a bit blurry.

I’m really pleased with how these two images came out, and look forward to playing around and building up a higher level of proficiency with controlling depth of field.

There are two kinds of New Englanders:

those who have permanently given up on the Red Sox,

and those with a major learning disability…

One of the things Americans rarely think about is history. Very few of us have any sense of what has gone on in our town, our neighborhood, perhaps even our building. In that sense, we Bostonians have a bit of an advantage, since Boston is a very small area with a long and rich historical heritage (for America, at least). Walk the streets of Boston and on virtually every block you’ll come across a building that has some noteworthy story associated with it.

I happened to buy a unit in one of Boston’s most noteworthy buildings. The initial Hotel Vendome was designed and built by William G. Preston in 1871 in Boston’s newly-filled Back Bay neighborhood, then greatly expanded in 1881. It is the finest example of the French Second Empire style in Boston, and located on the broad Parisien boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue. In 1882, it was the first public building in Boston to be furnished with electric lights. It was the site of many prominent social functions, and the guest register included stays by Ulysses S. Grant, President Grover Cleveland, P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and John Singer Sargent. In 1903 the visiting team— the Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Honus Wagner—stayed at the Vendome during the first World Series ever held. In a bit of synchornicity, both my mother’s and her sister’s graduating classes from nursing school held parties in the Vendome during World War II.

But that’s all nothing compared to the fire: the worst firefighting tragedy in Boston history, one of the twelve worst in all of U.S. history, getting an entire chapter in Stephanie Schorow’s “Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston” which I recently read.

It happened on Saturday June 17, 1972—the day before Father’s Day—while the Vendome was undergoing a major renovation. The fire broke out in the upper stories, and eventually sixteen engine companies, five ladder companies, two aerial towers, and a rescue company fought the blaze. The fire was under control, and fresh firefighters were conducting mop-up operations when an overloaded beam under the second floor gave way and the entire southeast corner of the five-story building came down, killing nine firefighters, injuring eight more, and destroying a ladder truck. Two of the twenty-five orphaned offspring would go on to become firefighters.

Twenty-five years later, a memorial to the firefighters who lost their lives was dedicated on the Commonwealth Avenue mall. A long, low arc of black granite describes the events and gives the names of the men who were lost. A fireman’s helmet and coat are casually draped over the stone, but forged in bronze. Every year a brief ceremony of observance is held.

As a resident of such a building, it’s hard to forget its history. I live on that same southeast corner, surely within inches of the 40 by 45-foot section that collapsed. I live on the second floor, surely within inches of the resulting pile of debris, which was noted both as 26 feet and two stories deep. I live within inches of the place where eight men died.

Knowing that you are living in the middle of the site of such an infamous tragedy would probably be enough to freak a lot of people out. It doesn’t bother me, really. After all, I’m proud to live in a building with such historical significance. But there’s another reason why it doesn’t bug me: it’s because even though I wasn’t here way back in ’72, I still remember and honor those men, and I view my presence here not merely as just some place to live. I consider myself something of a steward of this very important landmark, and want to do my part to see that it is kept for future generations, and not forgotten in our uniquely American ignorance of who and what have come before us.

For more information and photographs about the Vendome fire and memorial, go here or here, or read “Boston on Fire”.

While I haven’t talked about it much in my journal, one of my hobbies is Boston’s topographical and architectural history. One of the many items of interest in Boston’s history that few people know much about is the great molasses flood of 1919. Sure, a few people have heard about it, and there’s the persistent urban legend that you can still smell molasses in the North End on a hot summer day. But there was never any memorial or other notice that the event had happened. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a single small plaque was put on a public wall by the Bostonian Society to commemorate the event and indicate the place where it happened; but good luck finding it!

Even those few who have heard about it have little understanding of what really happened, which is odd, given its remarkable nature and the facts that (1) it was an immense industrial disaster that killed 21 people and injured 150 and severed the important elevated rail line between South Station and North Station; and (2) it spurred one of the largest and most influential civil trials in American history to that point. To this day people still look up and think the molasses flowed downhill from a storage tank at the top of Copp’s Hill, but in fact the tank was at the foot of the hill, at water level, right next to wharf where the molasses was offloaded from steamers from the Caribbean. Still, the fifty-foot tank itself was nearly as tall as Copp’s Hill. At the time it disintegrated as a result of negligent construction, the tank released 26 million pounds—13,000 tons—of molasses: enough molasses to fill more than 350 modern 18-wheel tanker trucks, sending a 15-foot high wave of heavy molasses and flying steel plates in all directions in a crowded residential and commercial neighborhood.

Anyway, all the misinformation and lack of knowledge can be set right if people read a new book that just came out. “Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919” is incredibly the very first book to examine this event. The book sets the tragedy in historical perspective, and contains the personal accounts of many of the people who were present when the tank collapsed. The author, Stephen Puleo, drew most of his portrayals directly from the more than 25,000 pages of incredibly detailed testimony that came from the court case that (pun intended) ensued. It is, needless to say, an excellent and long-overdue treatment of a meaningful episode in the city’s history.

I first learned about the book about two years before its publication, at a lengthy and detailed presentation that Puleo did at the Medford Public Library, if I recall correctly. I also read his article in American History magazine, and additional articles in Yankee and Smithsonian. It’s an interesting topic, and a fascinating part of Boston’s heritage that has long deserved a conscientious telling.

And another historical book review will be coming shortly, this time with an even more personal note…

Loyal readers will recall that I gave up on the Friday Five when the administrator decided to take a couple months off. Now that she’s back and has been regularly posting, I suppose I’ll resume.

How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life?

That’s a difficult one. Let’s enumerate, and hopefully I won’t miss any…

Gloucester, MA (1 year)
Portland, ME: 50 Highland Avenue (6 years)
Augusta, ME: 5 Manley Street (13 years)
Orono, ME: UMaine, 412 Knox Hall
Orono, ME: UMaine, 129 Gannett Hall
Orono, ME: UMaine, 131 Gannett Hall
Orono, ME: UMaine, 429 Gannett Hall
Orono, ME: UMaine, 4?? Somerset Hall
Orono, ME: Mill Street (funky summer sublet)
Orono, ME: Main Street (dump, 1 year)
Bangor, ME: 221 Center Street (attic apartment, 2 years)
Shrewsbury, MA: 33 Sheridan Drive (complex, 2 years)
Natick, MA: 20 Village Way (complex, 2 years)
Natick, MA: 5 Harvard Street (2 years)
Boston, MA: 64 Queensberry Street (6 years)
Boston, MA: 160 Commonwealth Avenue (condo, 2 years and counting)

Which was your favorite and why?

I’d have to say that my current and previous residences were by far the most enjoyable. It took me quite a while to realize that I wasn’t happy in the suburbs, but since moving into the heart of Boston I’ve really enjoyed where I’ve lived. They both have had all kinds of interesting stuff going on just outside my door, while simultaneously being my own little pocket of isolation where I can enjoy just being at home.

Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful? Why?

That entirely depends on how much of an “improvement” the new place is over the old one, really. On one hand, I do enjoy the opportunity to go through all my stuff and organize it and throw away all the useless cruft that’s accumulated since my last move; however, moving really sucks, and I no longer enjoy the manual labor element of it. When I moved into my present place two years ago, that was the first time I’d ever hired professional movers. Now that I own, and am very happy with my building and location, I don’t forsee moving again for a long, long time.

What’s more important, location or price?

Hahaha! Dude, I live on beautiful, tree-lined Commonwealth Ave., in a historic landmark: the first public building in New England to use electric light, and the site of one of the worst firefighting tragedies in American history. People throughout Boston recognize my building by name, rather than by address. Just outside my window are fashionable Newbury Street and the DuBarry mural, both old and new Hancock towers, the Pru, the New Old South Church, 222 Berkeley and 500 Boylston, the Boston International School, and Copley Square. I’m within a block of the Boston Public Library, two MBTA stations, Trinity Church, the Copley Place mall, the Ames-Webster Mansion, the Exeter Street Theatre (formerly Waterstone’s bookstore). I’m within 2-3 blocks of the Charles River Esplanade and Hatch Shell and the Public Gardens, and within walking distance of the ocean and everything Boston and Cambridge have to offer. You can’t buy a better location! Let’s not talk about price, shall we?

What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.)?

To a large extent I’m living in my dream house. Sure, it might be nice to have some secret hiding places and passages, and room for ping pong and pool tables, but I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got. About the only thing I might change would be to also have two summer places: a camp on an isolated lakefront deep in the woods somewhere, and a beach place on Cape Cod, but I need someone to give me lots of free money before those happen, tho…

What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?: Typically, I'll go off and find a place to be alone and enjoy nature and the sun. That often means a walk up to one of the docks on the Charles River, where I'll sit in the sun and watch the water. Or a bike ride down to the Arnold Arboretum's "Conifer Path", where I have a particular spot where I'll sit and enjoy the pine meadow and the hillside beneath me. Or, if I want to ride further afield, down to Castle Island, where a radio tower is on a tiny island out in Boston Harbor, connected to the mainland by a long, narrow causeway. But regardless of where, what's important is the quiet contemplation and sense of appreciation that it fosters.
What do you do the moment you get home from work/school/errands?: Well, I guess the only thing I reliably do upon getting home is check the cat, AIM, and email.
What are your favorite aromatherapeutic smells?: In case you didn't read my 8/14 post "Heaven on the Seventh Floor", I don't like most smells, and I particularly hate manufactured smells. One of the few odors that I enjoy is the smell of an evergreen forest on a summer day, experienced first-person.
Do you feel more relaxed with a group of friends or hanging out by yourself?: If you want relaxed, then definitely alone. Being with a very small group of close friends can be energizing and exciting, but it's not often 'relaxing'.
What is something that you feel is relaxing but most people don't?: First: drumming. I find both hand and kit drumming to be a good emotional release. Second: the city. I derive energy from urban areas: all the interesting people to watch, the beautiful architecture, the energy of youth (particularly here in college-oriented Boston), the vibrancy of a thriving arts community, plenty of nightlife, lots of like-minded people, and it all within walking distance of my own private enclave of peace and quiet.

Ornoth's profile

Frequent topics

books - 28 uses
boston - 49 uses
buddhism - 101 uses
cats - 27 uses
cimc - 26 uses
cycling - 58 uses
dargonzine - 36 uses
death - 31 uses
friday five - 67 uses
humor - 114 uses
inna - 39 uses
meditation - 37 uses
music - 36 uses
philosophy - 36 uses
photographs - 50 uses
photos - 32 uses
pmc - 145 uses
travel - 41 uses
voice post - 101 uses
work - 28 uses

Entries tagged with boston

Meme sheep on parade

More photogenesis

After the Shooting

Please Come to Boston for the Springtime

Reverse your own Curse

Orleans, Beaugency, Notre Dame de Clery…

Slower Than Cold Molasses

Friday Five resumption (#14)

Friday Five #6

Ornoth's profile

Links

Frequent topics