Certainly a bit of this is self-preservation: when other media jerks aren’t looking, these stories won’t be told elsewhere first. But more important, I’d rather write about things that don’t exist solely for public attention. Call me naive, but I still haven’t given up on pure intentions — I’d rather document creations that are (or at least convincingly seem) inspired by all those other crazy intangibles: desire, urgency, faith, ambition, passion, fear, curiosity, community, rebellion, hunger, truth. Yeah, I’m still foolish enough to believe in this stuff.
As a backdrop for this, Boston does sometimes feel like an airport. Blame it on the city’s educational institutions, its satellite-like proximity to New York City, or the behavioral models of recent traitors like Johnny Damon and Mitt Romney. But few people creatively shaping culture here are from here. Even fewer people plan to stay, and the people who consider themselves home are returning from somewhere else. (Similarly, strangers in Boston always seem to be either unapproachably uptight or very drunk.)
But people in flux are restless. That restlessness fosters an energy, and that energy begets a hungry hustle that sometimes merits its own story. Like something as simple as those strange gray, drippy, brain-shaped painted clouds that kept appearing all over the city a couple summers ago. Some kids complained about the clouds’ spongy artlessness, others loved the tirelessness implied by their ubiquity, and one straight-edge kid in this office even got those globular particles tattooed on his right bicep. (Don’t ask me.) Turned out the person behind the cumulus was a hyper former graf writer calling himself Darkclouds who at the time kept getting fired from bar-back jobs, but was determined somehow to assert his presence in the world with a different kind of drive. (Of course, last I heard, he was in New York.)
You could say that writing about such nuances is not very important in the scope of things — y’know, bolting clouds to street signs or paying bands to perform in your beer-can-littered firetrap of a basement isn’t stopping Greenland from melting. But there’s an opportunity here to work through things like, say, mortality. Take MySpace: specifically, how people who’d lost loved ones used their still-extant MySpace profiles to mourn their deaths. Or exploring what a vague concept like anarchy looks like when a group of anti-authoritarians calling themselves the Bl(A)ck Tea Society gathered in 2004 to facilitate protests against the Democratic National Convention. Answer: a crapload of organization.
Sometimes I think it’s important to delineate worlds most people don’t realize exist — and if they do, they’re surprised anyone has else has noticed. Like the Glass Slipper, Boston’s oldest strip club, where each performer historically sanitizes the stripper’s pole right before she starts her nudie routine. Or Second Life, a now-exploding virtual 3-D environment where fake people make real money by selling fake objects. Or a proud asshole’s baby: Lollipop magazine, a feisty little rock rag that’s managed to survive more than a decade despite the fact that its bitter, gutter-mouthed, proudly smelly editor-publisher has made a point of pissing off everybody he’s ever met. Or Blaine the School, an urban cosmetology training camp formerly in Kenmore Square where many of the sassy students would’ve rather pulled each others’ weaves out than braided them back in.
