Boston gets a B+ (But an A for effort!)

I’ve been a fan of New York City since before my family moved to the greater megalopolitan area last summer. This is even in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that my first two experiences with the Big Apple occurred on and around the 1998 Puerto Rican Day Parade and December 31, 1999. “Too big, too crowded, too snobby!” cry the detractors, and I respond with “So fun, so exciting, so sophisticated!” I also fully adopted that venerable journal, The New York Times, as my own, when my parents signed up for the Sunday edition a number of years ago. Sunday mornings I would find myself confronted with two large piles of newsprint: the hometown rag featured stories about three-year-olds dying in apartment fires, an editorial page that twice endorsed King George II, and a section called WomaNews. The visitor from the East featured an incredible magazine, travel section, and book review, in addition to an Arts & Leisure section so large it was actually two sections, and yes, I admit it, SundayStyles. Upon arriving in the Purple Valley, I began consuming the paper in its online format almost 24/7 (a trait painfully obvious to those who know me), which meant that on the occasions where I did pick up a physical copy of the Times, I had usually read most of the articles. The paper, like the city it hails from, also has its critics of course. “Too smug! Too biased!” they yell, and I say “So witty! Yes, but in the right direction!”

The NYT travel section has a regular feature called “36 Hours in…”, which gives a kind of play-by-play schedule for a weekend trip to a certain destination. This week’s happened to be the South End of Boston. Wow, I thought. It’s not very often that an individual neighborhood gets featured. Boston must be doing pretty well on the Trend-o-meter. But as soon I read the first sentence, I started to question my spirited defense of the city and newspaper that so many people love to love and love to hate:

Boston, while still not quite an avatar of cool, is showing plenty of signs, for better or for worse, of hipness.

Translation: If you thought that you were going to be reading about the next SoHo, think again. We are dealing here with mere signs of hipness, not the pure, undiluted hipness that can only be found below 14th Street (or possibly in Brooklyn).

Spending 36 hours in the South End proves that Boston has a happening, maybe glamorous, scene — even if some Bostonians still believe in eating supper at 5 o’clock.

Translation: You know, it’s really quite nice of us to even consider using the word “glamorous” in conjunction with your humble city. We had to put that crack in there about eating early just to even things out.

The tiny, tin-ceilinged room is packed with the South End’s beautiful people listening to Nuevo Latino music and drinking plenty of wine — malbec from Argentina, carmenères from Chile — as they wait for tables. And there isn’t a lobster roll in sight.

Translation: OMG! A Boston restaurant with, *gasp*, “beautiful people”? (Oh wait, they’re actually just “the South End’s beautiful people”. Because, I mean, statistically, every city must have a few people that are more attractive than average.) And it doesn’t serve some stereotypical food item? I must be dreaming!

There are Bellinis, pomegranate cosmos and Herradura tequila and Cointreau margaritas to be downed with a mixed crowd of Euro-students, chic-beyond-belief adults and neighborhood regulars. This bar alone fills Boston’s glamour quotient.

Translation: Boston can really only handle one glamorous establishment. You add a second, and then you’re just spreading the beautiful people too thin.

Sure, it’s not New York City, but grab a bagel stuffed with salmon and slathered with cream cheese, anyway, at the South End Buttery (314 Shawmut Avenue, 617-482-1015).

Translation: What a trial it is to force these inferior provincial bagels on my refined Manhattan palate! But I suppose I must bear it.

Methinks I doth protest too much. There are actually a lot of great recommendations in the article, especially for those of us who work in the South End or who otherwise find themselves in Boston, and those who will find themselves there shortly. But come on, New York, this whole condescension-through-back-handed-compliments act is getting really old. A city that prides itself on being so cosmopolitan can often come across as startlingly narrow-minded.

On Requiems; Music to Operate By (Hopefully not both at once); Facebook stalking with consequences; and yes, The Hamp

My apologies, loyal readers, the lack of recent entries. As an officially unemployed bum, one might have expected my blogging to have been more prolific than this (as per the considerable output of my comrades-in-blog). But, without further ado, I welcome you all to a new installment of “So, I was reading in The New York Times…” This iteration will actually veer away from my usual heaping of scorn upon those who have perhaps accrued larger bank balances than they deserve, and will instead focus on…well, other things.

Item No. 1 comes from May 28 (and because of my blogging laziness, now unfortunately requires a TimesSelect subscription to view, so let me know if you’d like me to e-mail it to you) and was actually cause for much personal jubilation, as it provided a very adept to refutation to the army of Chickens Little who seem to take almost a perverse pleasure in foretelling the imminent doom of classical music in America:

EVERYONE has heard the requiems sung for classical music or at least the reports of its failing health: that its audience is graying, record sales have shriveled and the cost of live performance is rising as ticket sales decline…All this has of late become the subject of countless blogs, news reports, books and symposiums, with classical music partisans furrowing their brows and debating what went wrong, what can still go wrong and whether it’s too late to save this once-exalted industry. Moaning about the state of classical music has itself become an industry. But as pervasive as the conventional wisdom is, much of it is based on sketchy data incorrectly interpreted. Were things better in the old days? Has American culture given up on classical music?

The real problem, it turns out, is that this doomsday cult has been ignoring the innovations being made in the industry and looking at the numbers with a 1950s mindset. For instance, if one looks at the number of classical recordings in the major labels’ catalogs, as compared with the period 1950-75, the results look depressing, but this ignores the fact that so many great discs are now being put out by more adventurous smaller labels, or the amazing Naxos, a midprice label with a huge range of offerings. On the Apple iTunes store, classical tracks account for about 12% of a sales, quadruple its share of the CD market, while classical CD sales have held steady, suggesting that mp3 downloads are reaching untapped markets (which makes sense – if you’re interested in classical music, but don’t know much about it, you’re probably more comfortable downloading a couple of $0.99 tracks from iTunes store than dropping $15.99 on an entire CD). Concert subscriptions have declined, but concert halls are hardly empty as people have shifted their habits to last-minute ticket purchases. I remember sophomore year in high school, my family bought a Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription, and nearly every concert seemed to fall the night before a chemistry test. Buying our tickets a la carte meant I could listen to The Rite of Spring without trying to remember whether or not lead salts are water soluble. I’ll spare you any more details, but suffice to say it brightened my spirits to read that the industry I’m hoping to work in is not in fact on the fast track to the morgue.

Item No. 2 is not about the health of music, but rather health and music, specifically the use of music in the operating room:

Music can become a subtle bone of contention among the members of the surgical team or a practical aid. Loud rock ‘n’ roll is good for routine operations, they say, Mozart for trickier ones. There is even a genre called “closing music”: raucous sounds to suture by.

(I’m sorry about the excessive use of block quotes – I just figured out how to do them, and I think they look kinda neat, or at the very least lend the blog a little more credibility, almost as if I’ve actually done research.) If I ever happen to find myself in the role of a surgeon, I know exactly what I would play: John Cage’s 4’33”. Why, you ask? Because if I was listening to music that I liked while at the same time attempting to perform delicate maneuvers involving sharp objects and people’s vital organs, I would probably kill all of my patients. This might surprise you, but I actually don’t listen to music that often. Certainly never when I’m reading or writing – in fact, earlier in this blog post, I was listening to Keane, something totally innocuous, and I was operating at about half mental capacity. In high school, I’d listen to music while doing math or physics homework, but then in college math and physics homework (sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference) got hard, and I knew that listening to anything would be tantamount to full-blown procrastination. The article goes on to mention that sometimes even the patient gets a say in what music is played, and that would be a different story. It would be hard for me to choose one thing; I think that I’d have to construct an entire surgery sound track. At the beginning, when I’d be getting all anesthetized, I’d probably play Beethoven, which is all about overcoming struggle and emerging victorious. And then in the middle, I’d want them to play Philip Glass, because I think minimalism would help the doctors stay focused during the important parts. And the “raucous sounds to suture by” would definitely be The Killers. And now I invite you to count the colors in your bedroom. Oops, sorry, stray Friends reference. What I meant to say was, I invite you to come up with your own surgery soundtracks. (And now that we’re on the subject of Friends, I think that just having Phoebe in the room improvising songs would make a pretty awesome soundtrack.)

Item No. 3 concerns everyone’s favorite procrastination/stalking site, www.facebook.com, and the bad, baaaad things that happen when potential employers happen upon a candidate’s profile and read things like “Mary, you bitch ho, you were OoC last night – that was so crazy when you thought you were Joe!” or perhaps happen upon a photo of said candidate inexplicably dressed as a construction worker, having his way with what appears to be an inflatable woman. Possibly my favorite part of the article is the way the Times tries so hard to keep the article PG:

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company’s president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois. At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate’s Web page with this description of his interests: “smokin’ blunts” (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.

I really want to see a resume one day with a section that says:

Other Interests
- Smoking blunts (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana)
- Shooting people
- Traveling
- Obsessive sex

Because I mean, you can’t use “vivid slang” in a resume. Obvi!

Well, I try so hard, but I just can’t resist a chance to take a dig at the undeservedly rich, especially when the story also involves our favorite vacation spot. The money quote (pun most definitely intended):

”Public fighting is the worst,” said Diane Saatchi, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group East End in East Hampton. She described the frustrated wife, shopping for a $3 million summer home, who turned to her husband and uttered one line that said it all: ”I wish you had a good job so we didn’t have to live like this.”

Mercedes Menocal Gregoire, an agent for Stribling & Associates, is surprised at what is sometimes revealed. ”People get absolutely shameless in front of you,” she said. She recalled a well-known New York developer — she would not name him — whose idea of a pied-à-terre fell short of his wife’s. ”In the middle of Park Avenue, she started screaming at the top of her lungs: ‘I can’t take it anymore. You never give me what I want.’ He says, ‘I give you whatever you want,’ and he bought her the apartment.”

It’s in trying times like these that people need to look deep into their hearts and say to themselves WWTD? What would Tinsley do?