Musings from the God of Cities

"...The dead man was identified as a 45-year-old Seattle resident. According to the King County Medical Examiner's Office, he died of acute peritonitis due to perforation of the colon. The man's death is not being investigated because it did not result from a crime, Urquhart said.

The Seattle man's relatives said yesterday they never suspected he was involved in bestiality. They said they were surprised when they learned he had purchased a Thoroughbred stallion earlier this year. The man told his relatives he boarded the animal with some friends in Enumclaw..."

ever since dw, the ole ball and chain, left for the great white north i've been visiting the new england more than usual. i'm familiar with the area 'cause i lived in boston for five years while getting my undergraduate and graduate degrees at boston university (go terriers!) and still visit old friends there pretty often. wanting dw to take full advantage of his time up there, he and i have been powering through as many neighborhoods and neighboring cities as we can. i took my camera everywhere we went and tried to take pictures of art and artful stuff we saw throughout our travels.

dw's living in quincy right now. quincy is a fairly shitty berg, though it is home to a pretty good comicbookery. it also has some fairly interesting art-type stuff like

the fun, and wholly unironic thrift-shop americana at the breakfast hut downstairs from dw's pad:










as well as this statue dedicated to fallen soldiers


quincy is apparently home to some quirky folks, as i saw an upside down pentagram on a tombstone at the local cemetery

(do non-satanists use upside down pentagrams?)

at the same cemetery there were a bunch of tombs with freemason symbols. i thought this was weird until i realized that there was a big ole freemason building in town replete with

an all-seeing eye

and funky egyptian-flavored decorations like the top of this doorway


this urn


and these creatures on the side of the building


i don't know if this counts as art, per se, but i thought it was kinda charming that the local good year tire shop had decorated their windows with a red sox theme


as had the dunkin' doughnuts i saw in brighton while i was helping mister and the soon-to-be missus eejit move


while in brighton (where i used to teach, for those of you keeping score at home) i also spied this pretty lady


and this weird mound


when we were in boston proper, i took andrew to the public gardens to see every bostonian stoner's favorite sculpture

i don't know what it is about this depiction of a cougar felling an owl, but i can't tell you how many times i've heard people tell me stories about how they once stumbled through the park one night, all f'ed up and came upon the statue and had a whole moment about it.

also in boston was this dude painting a painting


this portrait


this series of statues of notable women






this bjork(?) stencil


and this disembodied woman piece

which i saw at a tapas restaurant we went to. speaking of fancy eateries, dw and i sort of dared each other to eat at an outback steakhouse where the food was mediocre (what did i expect, right?) and where the bathroom was ultraclassy

(again, i'm not sure that this necessarily counts as "art" so you should feel free to love it or shove it as you see fit)

as for boston's "outer boroughs," i'd have to say that cambridge is probably the least awful, and the most artful. cambridge is a pretty artistic place to live, as is evidenced by the random bits of art scattered throughout the city






as well as the lovely, colorful houses and buildings that are common there






some being more colorful than others, like this house near central square which is just about the koo-koo-krasiest thing for miles






the fence of which is decorated with (among other things) images of cosmic animals and odd writings




























also in cambridge is M.I.T., which, despite being full of egg-heads is responsible for some pretty rad art like these nature-inspired works in one of the school's apartment complexes














M.I.T. campus also had some pretty cool buildings and architectural flourishes like these






and the list visual arts building with art all up in it









(the multi colored wall is kenneth noland's "here-there", by the by.)

by far the coolest buildings that i saw at M.I.T., were the ones that made up frank ghery's stata center


























upon deciding to go to an even further borough of boston, dw and i hit providence, rhode island where we also saw some arty stuff like

this drawing glued to a mailbox


this white dude in the river


and this high-up statue


we visited the brown university campus for the usual shits and giggles, and saw

a lichtenstein piece


and the (pardon the pun) brown bear


and finally, dw and i hit the risd museum where i sneakily snapped the following pictures:








outside of the museum there was a bus-stop that had been decorated with fun tiles and sea-shells, presumably reflecting rhode island's connection to the sea.








i thought it was pretty great, and while some people agreed


other people seemed more enthralled with... other things

the manpanion wrote a very sweet pice for the july 4th issue of the washington post. you can read it here.