Boston, Bars, Brooklyn, Bulldogs, Beards, Boys (Part 1)

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath. You can finally exhale like Whitney Houston.

I've been back in town for less than 24 hours. My vacation continues, but reality is slowly setting in. I have a couple loads of laundry to do. I have to start napping during the day to get back into nightwalker (or is that streetwalker?) mode.

I just saw Junior Boys with Janice at KEXP. They played a 3-song set. You can listen to it here. You'll have to select today's date (the 29th) and enter the time as 11:15AM. If they had mic'ed the booth, you could hear me giggling like a little girl.
I got to briefly talk to Jeremy (the one in the middle). I told him how much I liked the Morgan Geist track that was released earlier this summer. I'm a total fanboy. There were three adorable girls standing around talking to them, and I was the one who had my picture taken with them. I'm pretty sure they were like, "Dude, who's this homo who wants his picture taken with us?"
Anyway, Jeremy told me that he recorded four tracks with Geist and the others will be released at a later date. He also said that he liked the other tracks more than he liked the first release. So that's pretty rad. They gave us T-shirts and put us on the guestlist. So. Damn. Nice.
So I get to take Matt.
How rad can you get?

Thanks so much for taking me to the studio, Ms. Janice. The only thing cooler than Junior Boys is you!

So tonight my vacation will end with me seeing the Junior Boys.

But, really, you didn't come all the way down to this vault to read about music. You want the dish. How many times did I get laid? (Once, a bulldog in Brooklyn.) How intoxicated was I? (I was so intoxicated . . . ) How many bloggers did you meet? (Five.) Are GayProf and Adam as rockingly cool as they seem? (Obviously.) Where did you hide the bodies? (The Children's Museum, the Hudson, the very first Black Eyed Pea.)

I start with the Junior Boys because, besides the condoms, lube, and chapstick, I also brought the new Junior Boys and Arling & Cameron. Both discs got a lot of play and were the perfect counterpoints to a vacation's tendency to bring contradictory feelings like isolation and excitement, anonymity and hope. Or some other such bullshit.

Sometimes, vacations need soundtracks.

My flight left at 10:30 PST and arrived around 7:00 EST. Check-in at the hotel was 3:00. Still, I wanted to drop my bags off, so I took the blue line from Logan International, got off at the Bowdoin stop. I noticed a lot of people got off at State and deduced that that was a transfer point.
So I dropped my bags off, and the lovely, pert young lady told me that the hotel wasn't at capacity so I could come back in a couple hours to check-in. Excellent.
I walked to Boston Common and the Public Garden. The sketchy people in the Common seemed pretty tame. Their crack deals had a sense of innocence--not that I bought any crack. From them.
Tourists like me stood out. Dressed too casually--even by casual Friday standards. I walked through the theater district. Through Chinatown. Got on the Orange Line. Got off at State switched to the Blue. Learned later that I could have just stayed on the Orange.

I don't use maps. I am also used to cities like New York and Seattle which have the simplistic grid system--even if they don't use numbers, streets generally run perpendicular to one another. Apparently, Boston has too much history to not have been planned well. The streets were fun, though. They were a lot broader than I expected, which made tall buildings less oppressive. People were congenial yet staid (oh, and the accent is kinda sweet).
I found my way back to the hotel and napped.
The free wine was scheduled from 5-6 and meeting GayProf was scheduled for 7. Both appointments were met in a timely fashion. The first yielded 3 glasses of syrah. The second, well, the second . . .

If you're going to Boston, make it a point to meet GayProf. He not only took time out of his busy social schedule on Friday, but also on Saturday. And, really, if you're in a city for the first time, there is no one better than a queer historian to walk around and chat with. Be warned, though, he can turn that gravitas on at a moment's notice.
I got the lowdown on his liar ex (who told many lies). I told him about my trials and tribulations in love (and my ability to convert straight guys even if only for a night). We had a lovely dinner at a Thai place the first evening and went to Fritz after. Sure, we made a wrong turn or two on the way there, but Boston is pretty compact and the weather was nice, so it was no big whoop.

The following day was rainy, and I had planned on walking the Freedom Trail. I got to the trailhead (which is really just a tourist information center in the Common), but opted out because I didn't want to get waterlogged. Instead, I found a cafe on the edge of Chinatown. I grabbed a seat, a sandwich and a latte and finished off one of the books I brought. Then it was back to the hotel for an afternoon nap (Lay off! I was on vacation!) and met GayProf for wine hour at the hotel.

He took me out to Somerville for amazing Indian food. I love samosas. I love vindaloo. Both at this place were stellar! The vindaloo made me break a sweat. That's always a good sign. Then it was onto the Ramrod which was totally dead. Sure, it was early, but it was still pretty dead. No hot sex in the back room. Boo!

Then it was back to the hotel for my final night's stay. The next day I took the Chinatown bus that everyone had warned me about. It was totally fine. Air conditioned, half empty, and relatively fast.

Tennille met me in New York's Chinatown around 4PM on Sunday. We cabbed back to Brooklyn and went to a bodega to buy some stuff to grill. The Moonshine in Brooklyn allows its patrons to bring their own food to grill. Its a great idea for a bar--two large gas grills out back, but little did we know that every third Sunday is bulldog Sunday. I used to think of bulldogs as sweet and funny looking--that was until I saw them en masse. Slobber everywhere and a youngster that humped anything even remotely humpable. Oh, and did I mention the poop? Tennille's friends Neil and Keith met us there and I believe they were equally as perturbed by the bulldogs.
Neil and Keith are also musicians. I forget what their band name is together, but Keith by himself is Wolfgang. You should buy his CD single Not In Love (Not True). It is great vocoder pop with nice bass. In other words, its music I like.

Holy crap. This post is getting hella long. I'm going to stop here. More soon, I promise--

Like other bloggers who were met during the trip and the lovely state of Texas . . .

Oh and Prof, is this color font better?