Winter | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Feb

when people wore adidas and lived life slow

Posted by Perich at 12:21 pm

Six weeks of piled snow have given Davis Square ramparts, like a besieged colonial fort. Crossing Elm Street on Saturday with my weekly Spike’s order, I fell in line behind a woman with two leashed dachshunds. She prompted them through the narrow footpath between two mounds of gray snow, dragging a rolling suitcase behind her. A car idled next to us, waiting for us to leave the crosswalk.

“C’mon, babies,” the woman said to her dachshunds.

The car edged forward a foot.

“Would you wait?” the woman yelled, turning and waving a hand at the car. I don’t know how she managed to guide two dachshunds, drag a suitcase, and flail at a driver with only two hands. Bruce Lee’s mastery of Wing Chun made his hands literally quicker than the eye; I know such things are possible.

“Got this crazy driver trying to turn us into pancakes here!” the woman said to me as I followed her up onto the sidewalk. “Life is not that important!”

The beauty of the English language is its near total malleability. Not only can you construct a sentence that sort of means what you intend, you can construct a sentence that means the exact opposite and still be understood. I could care less. She literally screamed her head off. Life is not that important.

Most of the Davis Square neighborhood is a web of one-way streets, designed to baffle outsiders and funnel enemies into chokepoints. The street I live on starts one-way but becomes two-way by my block. It’s tough enough to navigate when the street is fully plowed. With waist-high snow banks edging cars further into the street, it becomes impossible^*.

I witnessed a stand-off between a van and a sedan driving head on just outside my front door. The van driver made a frustrated but humane gesture. The sedan driver shrugged, indicating the SUV that had edged up behind him. For the sedan, compromise was impossible. Making compromise impossible often strengthens your negotiating position; the van driver backed into a driveway and let them by. Why make a big thing of it? Life is not that important.

There’s another 16 inches forecast for Boston between today and tomorrow. When there’s no more room in the snow lots, the pedestrians will WALK THE STREETS.

^* Or, as they say in Boston, “impassable.”

Feb

pour salt water on the wounds

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 10:46 am

Things I learned this past weekend:

New England is Cold In The Winter

I tried going to Razzy’s for Karaoke on Friday night, since some Yelp folks had put out a call. We’d tried going the week before, but had found a half hour line just to get inside – not to sing, just to enter the bar – at 10:30. That’s unreasonably early for a bar that doesn’t charge a cover.

So this week, we tried getting there at 9:15, noting that the back room – with all the karaoke – doesn’t even open until 9:00. Again, a knot of people outside, waiting to get in. So we turned around and headed north to drink at Porter Square.

I wouldn’t call the walk from Porter Square to Razzy’s long by any stretch – it’s a quick ten minutes. But the biting wind that had been at our back on the walk down slapped us in the face on the way up. Tears streamed down our faces; the wind checked our stride. We choked out small talk in bitter gasps.

Windchill was at -12 F after midnight on Friday. Over forty degrees below the point of freezing. When I looked in the bathroom mirror back home, a face raw with windburn stared back at me. I wonder how long I might have lasted before frostburn set in.

boston-windchill

I Need To Work On Sincerity

Sunday, after sampling some micro-brews and homemade pizza with jiu-jitsu friends at Keith T’s house, I stopped in at Greg’s in Cambridge for an evening of Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game.

Presuming some familiarity with the TV show: BSG:TBG sets you aboard the Galactica and Colonial One, besieged by Cylons and running low on everything. Your mission is to keep the human fleet alive until you can jump to Kobol. Every turn, new crises pop up that’ll force you to make the better of two awful choices (lose 2 food, or lose 1 population and 1 morale; etc) or deploy more Cylons in space around your ship.

The complication: every player has a chance of being a Cylon. You get a card at the start of play, and another halfway through the game, that determines whether you are a Cylon or not. If you are, your goal is to secretly undermine the group’s efforts to survive crises while keeping your cover. You can reveal yourself as a Cylon at an opportune moment, causing havoc on the ship and unlocking a whole host of new Cylon powers.

In last night’s game, President Tom Zarek (yours truly) released some Cylon mugshots early in the voyage, insinuating that Captain Lee “Apollo” Adama (Greg) was a Cylon. Sadly, while everyone suspected Apollo, Zarek couldn’t muster the support of the rest of the crew, leading to Admiral Saul Tigh (Amy) to declare martial law and seize the presidency. Zarek, realizing the tide was against him, called for a new election and put Sharon “Boomer” Valeri (Joanne) in the President’s chair. Apollo then ordered Zarek’s arrest.

In a desperation move, Zarek gave his evidence to “Chief” Tyrell (Fraley) in the hopes that he could arrest Apollo. But Apollo stalled his trip to the brig long enough to reveal himself as a Cylon, ordering Tigh’s arrest and then vanishing. Boomer outed herself as a Cylon thereafter. Losing the Galactica’s two best pilots proved fatal, as this led to a desperate scramble to defend civilian ships from Cylon Basestar attack. With Kobol merely one jump away, the fleet was wiped out.

I’d have been more upset about not being believed when I accused Greg of being a Cylon (I’d looked at his card! the President can do that!), but I was having too much fun playing up Tom Zarek’s smarm. Still, important lessons for future confrontations: make sincere eye contact and let your accusation stand for itself. And don’t let the Cylon put you in the brig.

battlestar galactica board game

Dec

not long is how long that this rhyme took me

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 11:20 am

I lost every winter hat I own in twenty-four hours. The first one I left on the work shuttle; the second I left in a friend’s car. So while I hope to get that second one back, I bought a new hat at Filene’s Basement on Thursday. This is always A Process for me, as I have a remarkably big head and hate spending money, but I found a lambswool/acryllic cap that comes down over my ears.

I tried it on this morning, in anticipation of the upcoming storm, and it fit perfectly. As I jogged down the stairs to the train, however, I heard something tap-tap-tapping on my head. The Davis Square station disintegrating around me? No – the tag on top of the cap, bouncing off my head as I ran.

Should I cut it off with a pair of scissors, like I meant to this morning? Or should I leave it on and try and make it A Thing, like leaving the hologram sticker on a baseball cap? How would I fare as a trendsetter?

# # #

Maybe it’s The Onion, maybe it’s the continuing disintegration of American banking, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the Wu-Tang Clan lately.

Turn the pages to 1993. Dre has just released The Chronic, but we’re about a year away from Ready to Die and three away from All Eyez On Me. The rap scene is about to enter a long, derivative cycle of people imitating the success of Biggie and Tupac – spitting about obscene amounts of money, having sex with women and then never calling them, and about shooting cops. We’re minutes away from the start of the East/West feud.

Into this scene drop three cousins from Staten Island: the RZA, also called Prince Rakim; the GZA, sometimes called the Genius; and the Ol’ Dirty Bastard. They assemble a crew of nine MCs, each of whom has enough talent in his own right to headline his own album. While everyone else is shooting in nightclubs or beach parties, they film their videos in abandoned warehouses and junkyards. They rap about mis-dubbed kung fu movies and Iron Man comics. They rap about nothing but their own lyrical superiority and the pain they’ll inflict on competitors.

And their flow is sick.

My style’s illegal and death is the penalty
What justifies the homicide, when he dies?
In his own iniquity it’s the
Master of the Mantis Rapture coming at you
We have an APB on an MC Killer
Looks like the work of a Master
Evidence indicates that’s his stature is
Merciless, like a terrorist hard to capture
The flow changes like a chameleon
Plays like a friend and stabs you like a dagger
This technique attacks the immune system
Disguised like a lie paralyzing the victim
You scream as it enters your bloodstream
Erupts your brain from the pain these thoughts contain
Moving on a nigga with the speed of a centipede
and injure any motherfuckin’ contender

Consider: this is the crew that gave us Method Man, an MC respected enough to guest on both Ready to Die and 2Pacalypse Now at the height of the East/West feud. This is the crew that RZA built from nothing with little but Machiavellian maneuvering and a rigorous eye for the bottom line^*. This is the crew that made a celebrity out of O.D.B.

This is a group that, by any reasonable standard, should not have succeeded. Their contracts were bizarre, with any member being allowed to record with any other label at any time. Their sound was so far from the mainstream it was practically alien. And the idea that nine incredibly talented MCs could collaborate without feuding or violence for so long is unheard of. But, for a while, it worked.

Stories like this are what give me hope for hip-hop.

^* And steamrolling over internal dissent, if U-God is to be believed.