That amorphous blob?  ME.

Yeah, I listen to Boy George.  What of it?  I mean we all have our guilty pleasures in life, but that one isn’t one.  I unabashedly love Culture Club.

Alas, this entry is not about that band, but another band.  As my faithful readers may have seen, I posted a photo of New Kids on the Block’s own Joey Mcintyre, Jordan Knight and Jonathan Knight.  They were all at last nights lovely Christmas tree lighting in Boston Common.

See that those three boys were to be performing filled me with a lot of different feelings and the first, surprisingly, was not snark.  I mean yeah, maybe the 13 year old me would have snarked on those people, but this older (but probably not wiser) version of me isn’t going to snark.

Instead I’ll take you blog readers down a memory lane seldom mentioned up here.  In 7th grade, I changed schools from one I liked to one I did not like.  The one I did not like was filled with little aliens wearing New Kids on the Block t-shirts, carrying New Kids on the Block notebooks, professing their love to those people.  Embarrassingly, I had none of this gear.  And no idea who this band was.  The transition to the new school didn’t exactly go well, so whatever those people professed to like, I was going to hate.

New Kids on the Block was this crazy phenomenon, though.  Imagine waking up one day and your face and that of your close friends is literally everywhere.  But here comes the heartache part — eventually their faces weren’t anywhere anymore.  One day the New Kids t-shirts worn by my classmates got turned inside out and Eddie Vedder’s scowling mug was staring back at me from every which was.

And the New Kids disappeared.  Luxury to heartache, huh?

Well, all of this went through my mind last night when I was standing there listening to them perform.  But then I thought, there are Boston boys and they tried to stay true to their hometown, which is pretty admirable.

Anyway, here’s to you Joey Mcintyre.  Hope you forgive me for the all nasty things I said about you and your band when I was 12:

Enter reindeer stage left:

Some places you live and you instantly love them.  Some places, you live and you slowly grow to hate.  Some places, you have such a complicated relationship with them, that it defies description.  And some places you expect to love and it never comes together.  I guess it’s kind of like finding the right guy.  Were said guy to be a major metropolis of course and not a living, breathing being.

When I lived in Copenhagen as a student, the love was pretty much instant.  The air seemed cleaner, the people unbelievably beautiful, it all too good to be true.

I need to put my feelings about Washington DC in a separate sentence away from Copenhagen because they are so intensely different.  I started out liking, if not loving Washington, but slowly over time grew to hate it.  At the time I thought it had nothing.  There was nothing there of any kind of interest to me and it was all so square and old fashioned.  With the perspective of time, I’ve realized that perhaps my experiences there rather than the place itself affected how I felt about it.

Now I come to New York City.  My relationship with that city would make for a very interesting Scandinavian psychological drama starring Max Von Sydow, except our chess match with death would take place some place in Chelsea.  I lived in Manhattan as a child and love the place.  I worked there later on and my opinion of it changed.  But with so many other things in between.  Well, this is neither the time or place for that now.  Let’s just say the next time I visit New York, I’ll explore why exactly Max Von Sydow and I play chess with death.

Which brings me to Boston.  I never in a million years expected to like this place as much I do.  Never ever.  I used to visit and think “decent place to visit, but that’s it.  I need excitement.”  Now I live here and I don’t need excitement.  Sure the green line raises my blood pressure, but otherwise living here has been pretty great.  Attending the Christmas tree lighting in Boston Common today made me realize that no matter what, in Boston, one is among friends, even when a person is alone.  People aren’t aggressive, so going to big public events is fun and takes the edge off.

The tree lighting is a big deal of course and a lot of grandees show up.  Like these guys:

Don’t recognize them?  Don’t worry.  The girl behind me had to phone her mother to find out who they were.  These guys are Jordan Knight, Jonathan Knight and Joey Mcintyre from New Kids on the Block.  I was lucky enough to have gone to junior high school at the beginning of the 1990s and I experienced their popularity first hand and by that I mean when someone, usually a girl, blew past me in this purgatory known as the 7th grade wing of my school, they were usually wearing a t-shirt embossed with the mug of one of these boys.  Their 13 year old selves wouldn’t have been able to believe my luck that I took this photo.  Or that digital SLRs with mammoth lenses even existed, given the fact that was waaaay far away and unbelievable I was not yet a photographer.

Well, anyway, let’s get out of memory lane and move on to other things.  There were other performers.  Now let me explain something.  These were all taken from a mile away from the middle of a crowd.  In other words, my vantage point pretty much sucked, but I made the best of it.  Usually my vantage point sucks and I never explain, letting the work speak for itself.  But since we are about to see 10 consecutive photos of Rockettes, I needed to explain.  See, these ladies, they reach the back seats.  And when their photos are converted to black and white, they start to look like stars of some kind of Parisian revue from the 1920s:

Yes, that is quite a few Rockettes.  Now remember, I was taking these from about a mile away and the Rockettes are meant to reach the back row.  Still, I was pleasantly surprised so many turned out so well.

The night also featured some local talent, singing and dancing.  Siobhan Magnus, the young lady in the next two photos appeared on the American Idol program.  She also, thank god, wore something that was sparkly and photographed very well:

And two very nice acts, singing Christmas songs and about Boston:

And finally for the main event.  Boston Mayor Tom Menino, came to light up the Christmas tree.  He uh, well, he isn’t as prepossessing as the other attendees.  But I got him, somehow, photography smoke and mirrors, he made the blog.  Tom Menino, if you read this blog, you, along with Rufus the Colored Bull Terrier, Victoria Beckham and the Green Line are featured on a blog.  Try to get on with life.  Photos:

Well, that’s it.  Tom came and light up the Christmas tree, to everyone’s great delight.  Then we all retired to our warm homes after a night out in the Boston cold!

Well, I’m not going to write about the books here because I haven’t read them.  But I will tell a very short story and then I will post some photos and explain the choice of title.

The Dragon Tattoo books take place in Stockholm, a place I lived in for a spell a while ago.  If you look back on this blog about a gazillion entries you will see ones from Sweden.  Living in Sweden was hard on many different levels.  I’ve never really felt alone in my life, but there I felt very alone and homesick.  Of course being away from home would have that effect, but this was something different.  Sweden can be cold and very dark.  When I see the previews for the new Dragon Tattoo movie, they got Sweden right.  It is the cold, oldest sibling.  After the green hair youngest sister, it was a bit of a shock.

The Sweden experience didn’t turn out that way I wanted it to, but it taught me many different things about myself.  Without it I wouldn’t be on the path I am on now and that in a way makes me think of it in a positive way, even though my thoughts about it for a long time were negatives ones.

Here’s to my Swedish experience, darkness and all (Boston style):

Grey Gardens is a movie that I love and simultaneously gives me the creeps.  Kind of like the house in these photos:

Lines.  Yeah, that’s the theme:

He’s been up here before but this time, he is much, much, much, much smaller:

That is the impression that these pictures give:

Come on.  If I didn’t tell you this wasn’t Cambridge, Massachusetts, wouldn’t you think this was England?: