Thursday, October 25, 2007

Boston

During a week kicking around in Boston waiting for my conference to start...

Acorn Street ("the most photographed street in America") is really beautiful street: lovely narrow cobbles, nice brickwork and when I visited it was just the right time of the day for the light to fall in hazy yellow shafts over a dangling american flag. Then someone opend a door from one of the houses in the street and a dog ran out, squatted in the middle of the cobbles and had a shit. I nearly wet myself.

This morning I was walking across a junction in the city and spied a load of police on motorbikes surrounding me. I got out of the road and asked what the deal was. The big american policeman turned round and looked at me squarely in the face, with his silver aviator sunglasses, and said simply "The Elephants are coming". "OK?!" I said. That's code for something I thought, something like the president or the army or maybe a big natural disaster. I waited 30 seconds and then coming up over the top of the highway, to my utter disbelief, was an elephant. Then there were 9 of them all walking past me into Boston. The elephants were definitely coming.

Finally at MIT Media labs I find myself in an elevator watching the most surreal spectacle. A fantastic guy called Noah (who's sensitive to certain air pockets) plays a homemade windup electronic keyboard as Dr B bends over a speaker and knocks out some base by twiddling a stepper motor. It was like some kind of weird electro-french-folk performance, punctuated by the occasional "Ding, level 4". It cracked me up so much that we must have travelled up and down that building at least twice before we got out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

haaaar hahahahaha. Love the dog story, and the picture of Dr B knocking out bass in an elevator going up, and down, and up, and down