I never cared for the whole Diana Ross thang. She married the boss; threw her friends over the side; I never thought she was all that pretty — though many people always have and still do — just sorta brittle looking.
When we’d drive to family gatherings in my Dad’s broken down old cars with the crackly AM radio fading in and out, it was the Four Tops or The Temptations I’d hope would fill the Motown slots on the endlessly repeating one hour playlist, not the Supremes. Let’s put all that aside, and wonder at the perfection of this:
The first is the old Boston City Hall. It’s still standing, on School Street in Boston. It’s in a pleasant little courtyard, across from the venerable Parker House Hotel. It doesn’t have any civic function any more. It’s filled with restaurants and offices now. It’s a handsome building.
The second picture is what’s called by real locals as the “New City Hall.” It’s almost forty years old, but Boston is a provincial place. They’ll call it that forever. I’m from Boston. Let me assure you all: The New City Hall and environs is the ugliest place in our solar system. They should read Vogon poetry from a balcony there every day, all day.
I’ve been in the New City Hall. I’ve talked to lots of people that have been in it, and plenty more that have worked in it. And it’s been unanimous. It’s the most hateful, anti-human, drafty, cold, forbidding dungeon in the world.
They should demolish it. But that’s not enough. They should exhume the corpses of the architects, and the politicians that hired them, and shoot them into the sun. If they’re not dead, all the better. They constructed the worst place on earth. Expiation of that kind of guilt requires a substantial gesture. Not the sun though, now that I think of it. It’s too warm there. The sun never shines in that building. Pluto.
Let’s say you’d never seen that building before. The monstrosity, not the pleasant one. I could tell you it was a prison, and you’d not only believe me, you’d write your congressman to complain about how poorly treated prison inmates must be to be housed in such a place. If I told you secret police in East Germany tortured people in there, what visual clue could you glean from the photo that would give away the misattribution? No one would enter an upside-down abattoir looking place like that unless they were handcuffed and screaming, would they? If it said Arbeit Macht Frei over the door, would it surprise you?
The first one is a Second Empire dustcatcher. In America, they called Second Empire style General Grant style. It’s visually very dense and interesting to look at. It’s elegant inside too. And the sober, serious nature of the place still reflects a profound respect for civic government. It just doesn’t visually scream: Submit or Die… and pay your Water Bill Here like the second one does.
People elsewhere call Boston Beantown. Locals never do. Some call it The Hub. But when this building was built, Boston was called “The Athens of America.” Boston’s rich tradition of civic virtue, education, culture made it an accurate description. But the basis of all culture and sophistication is an appreciation for mankind.
When you are designing and building a building, the human being is the template. All that stuff applied, and the forms of the spaces themselves, trace their proportions and rhythms and coloring back to the human form, and the world he inhabits. It’s the reason why the Parthenon doesn’t look goofy to anybody. It’s based on all humanity.
What is that miserable pile of brick and brutal concrete in the second picture representing? The worst instincts of men; no less. You are made to submit your humanity at the door — my mistake, the curb… hell two blocks away this thing sucks the life out of a passerby. At any rate, it’s the perfect example of the late sixties intellectual and architectural zeitgeist, that buildings are a machine that answers only to themselves and the crabby fools that design them, and their users are just fodder to be fed into the front door- if you can find it.
The current Mayor of Boston might be the least attractive example of a public official I can imagine. If he didn’t exude a sort of lumpen aura of venality and corruption, like a dim plumber who cheats on his bills, he’d have no interesting attributes at all. Even he’s got enough sense to want to tear the place down and start over. But the same sort of insane fans of Brutalist anti-human architecture that built the thing are trying to declare the building a Boston Landmark, so no one will ever be able to touch it. They understand that it would be a repudiation of their worldview, not just the building itself, and they’re going to be wrong, wrong, wrong right to the grave. They’ll fight tooth and nail for the Brezhnevian thing to the bitter end.
They built the new city hall because the old one was too small. The population of Boston is about 600,000 now. When they built the new one, it was about 600,000. When they built the old one, it was about 500,000. The government got big. It was the people that got small.
You have to understand everything to be in business.
Please note I said “understand,” not “be good at.” But if you’re going to turn over part of your efforts to others, for money, and you don’t have a grasp of what they’re doing –or supposed to be doing — you’re in for a lot of trouble. See: 1999 CEO investments in web-based business models if you need a refresher.
What is that allegory about the blind men feeling the elephant? Something about each man describing the animal differently because they can’t see the whole thing. Each fellow is feeling a different part of the beast. I’m sure it’s very Zen and Tony Robbins and Rah Rah Let’s Go Out There and Sell People! if you tell it right in a multi-level marketing motivational speech. But I can’t be bothered to remember it, and believe me, in real life, it’s the elephant that’s blind — and angry, too — and if you’re lucky he just steps on your toes and doesn’t sit on you. And by the way, everybody always is positioned in the same spot under the elephant of commerce: under its tail.
Anyway, I was put on notice that there would be no mercy shown to such as I a long time before I heard : “I can’t save every undercapitalized business in America.” That wasn’t even the first time such a person mentioned they weren’t going to be interested in throwing me a flotation device, even though I didn’t really need one until they had just hurled me into the ocean. The only thing you can ever pray for in business is to be left alone. I must pray in the wrong church.
I make things because it is in my bones to do so. Every once in a while –fairly often, thank God — someone sends me a letter or an e-mail, telling me that the thing I made for them made them happy to look at it, or helped their children to reach the sink to brush their teeth, or some other detail that made their life a little more pleasant. And I have to trust that many more feel that way but are anonymous. You have to put your efforts out into the ether, and doggedly trust sometimes that they are worthwhile. You can’t always tell right away. The penalty for trusting the wrong things is… I can’t save every undercapitalized bu…
The customers feed my children, and my soul. And like the fools we all are, they thank me for it.
There’s be no point to it, anyway, as a deer is like a bunny rabbit around here. They eat at the prickly barberry bushes and nibble the spiny leaves off the hollies now. It would be a 24 hour counterassault to try to safeguard actual food from them. Neither one of us comes by it naturally anyway.
My beloved Uncle Raphael grows things to eat. He has a soft spot for enormous gaudy flowers, too. In the early summer he’ll attend any fete with a huge bucket of blooms for the hosts. But this time of year, it’s all food he brings.
I can’t remember the latin term, exactly. Glebae ascriptii, I think. Google is no help. It might be forty years since I read the term, but it stuck. It meant tied to the land, I believe. It referred to people who were serfs, who literally came with the property.
I can’t imagine our ancestors were very wealthy before they crossed the ocean in big rusting freighters to scratch out a life here in America. When I think of paisan, I think of peasant. That is its literal derivation, though that is obscure now. You are my friend, my countryman, my compatriot, because like me, you scratch your living out of the same earth.
I wonder if we were glebae ascriptii. I’m sure we were paisans. I wonder if it is in our bones, somewhere, the wonderful magic of bringing forth life from the land. If it’s in my bones, it is hiding well. Maybe Uncle Ray got mine. He certainly got more than his share. I can’t think of another man that has conjured more things out of this earth and sea than he. It has to be enough, perhaps that he is my zio Raphael, and thinks to give the fruits of his labor to his nipote.
It was common in the working trades to labor next to those that were older, and learn from them. That was the compact. The grail for the younger man was always the grudging respect you could earn with your effort from the older and wiser man. His nephews all took a run at it. Uncle Ray wore us all out. We brought in reinforcements and they flagged. He’s retired now, long after he should have been. Now he wears us out with his tomatoes. Someday he’ll wear out the other archangels with his smile.
Month: September 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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