The Most Overlooked Thing in Boston is Boston Sand & Gravel

★★★★★ The sun shone as if it had never been interrupted. The crosswalk stripes seemed to float above the asphalt. Honeylocust branches made a low ceiling over the sidewalk. Everything was dappled and gleaming. The air conditioning was barbarous and best avoided. No haze separated near buildings from far ones, only the precise mathematics of perspective, as the eyes measured their distinct and certain edges against one another.

Tacos have their roots as a Mexican food but are now a fixture in the American diet. They are among the top five foods ordered at U.S. restaurants, according to NPD Group, which says that taco servings were up 2% for the year ending in June 2017. Their influence has crossed into other restaurant cuisines, such as Korean, Chinese and Middle Eastern fare.

Well I’ll be goddamned if the taco isn’t my own personal bubble tea. A whole article in the Wall Street Journal about the taco-as-emblem and not a single mention of how the food trend is widely represented by an emoji or some other crude symbol that is canonically COMPLETELY different from what it represents in the real world. I know, I know, semiotics and what not, but how come no one talks about the utter whitewashing of the taco? The taco of symbology (thank you Dan Brown) is yellow corn, hard-shelled, topped with lettuce, and contains 88% lean ground beef seasoned with Old El Paso seasoning mix. What the hell is that all about? Is this about Taco Bell? That is the joke taco that El Cortez lists on their menu as “All-American Taco Night,” and yes, I have eaten it and it is good*. Everyone knows what a real taco—the kind of taco Kate Spade customers just LIVE for and “Celebrities such as singer Katy Perry and model Chrissy Teigen have recently been photographed waiting in line for”—looks like: a blob of stewed meat topped with cilantro and onions, plopped atop a floppy pressed, steamed blob of white corn. so please stop lying. It’s me, the taco truther, signing off.

*don’t try me

Image: T. Tseng via Flickr

Image: Michael Dougherty via Flickr

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward schadenfreude. How else to explain the karmic perfection of a solar eclipse captivating us in the summer of 2017, a season when we’ve shown a feeble ability to know darkness from light? I think of Baltimore and Austin, moving under cover of night to remove Confederate statues. And of New York, forcing J’ouvert, the pre-dawn celebration that sets the rhythm for Crown Heights’ West Indian American Day, well past the ability to deliver on its translation. The word means “daybreak,” a detail the event’s new start time, six in the morning rather than four, blithely obscures. According to the New York Times, metal-detecting checkpoints designed to ferret out troublemakers are being imported from the city’s handling of New Year’s Eve in Times Square, an event pointedly allowed to remain oriented toward midnight. “The biggest thing for us is sunlight,” a mayoral task-force member told the paper, of the changes to J’ouvert. “We believe that light is a big deterrent.”

Both these scheduling feints are intended to stem violence: Nocturnal statue excision, in avoidance of Charlottesville-style clashes; J’ouvert’s move, thwarting a small contingent who bring guns or knives, looking to settle disputes. And both departures from the norm can be interpreted as disrupting a tradition. Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh was quoted in the New York Times as saying she felt the city’s Confederate-era statues should be removed “quickly and quietly,” not so much ripping off a Band-Aid as a scab. Also from the Times report: The quickness and the quietness of the removal was such that City Council President Bernard Young did not learn of it until he woke up the morning after. Young “missed a late-night phone call from the mayor because he had taken cold medicine for bronchitis and was asleep.” Each generation gets the consciousness-altering substances it deserves.

“The Kekulé Problem” by Cormac McCarthy in the April issue of Nautilus is the author’s first foray into non-fiction, and it’s utterly bonkers.

Never one for pumping out content for the sake of it—the last thing he published was 2006’s The Road, unless you count the screenplay for Ridley Scott’s 2013 movie The Counselor—McCarthy sets his sights on tackling, or at least knocking around, one of the universe’s bigger mysteries: Where does language come from?

According to an introduction by David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Studies at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy has been kicking around the halls of the SFI for two decades, examining the “puzzles and paradoxes” of language and the unconscious mind. The 3,000-word essay is the result.

Looking back on his career, you can tell he’s been obsessed with these concepts, if only because of what his novels have continually left out. McCarthy’s always been stingy when it comes to insights into the minds of his characters. A free flow between external description and internal thought is one of the tools most often used by authors—it is, perhaps, one of the reasons that fiction exists—yet McCarthy rarely does. (In this way, it makes sense McCarthy has dabbled in screenwriting: His style is similar to films without voiceover narration, while his long sentences—like, that 245-word “legion of horribles” description in Blood Meridian—work like unbroken camera shots in the reader’s mind.)

Photo: Wikimedia Commons user Alter Fritz

In the United States, the first day of school is not a single occasion so much as a confounding, staggered trickle of days whose timing is dependent on individual school districts’ seemingly nonsensical schedules. The result is a steady onslaught of backpacked-and-grimacing kid shots on my Facebook feed from mid-July to damn near October. And while this hallowed moment, whenever the hell it might occur, is essentially a national day of jubilation for destroyed parents everywhere, for American kids it means the advent of nine months of standardized test prep and clique-formation. So we can forgive them for being less than thrilled.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the kids can’t wait for the first day of school. They dream of the first day of school. They long for it! Is this simply because the German love of order and rule-following begins at birth, and life outside of formal schooling simply contains insufficient yelling for the Teutonic soul? Probably, but also, on the first day of the first grade (or the erste Klasse, “first class,” pronounced AIR-stuh KLOSS-uh), kiddies in the Federal Republic happen to get a metric fuck-ton of candy.

Specifically, each German first-grader gets a special first-day-of-school present called a Schultüte (SHOOL-tuuut-uh), or “school cone,” a contraption that is often almost as big as the kid carrying it, and stuffed to the gills with Haribo products, check-ruled notebooks and the cutest damn pens you’ve ever seen. The kids tolerate the school supplies, but they live for the candy.

Have you noticed how this week is moving along much more quickly than the previous one did? Faster, somehow, than you even imagined possible four days ago? It’s no accident: Time is deliberately hurtling you toward the end of your summer because it has decided that you haven’t suffered enough so far this year, even though your suffering has been immense. Expect the days to accelerate way on into Tuesday, at which point the gears will grind to a halt and regular service will resume, with each hour lasting its now-customary day and each day taking a year. Even though you wasted your summer that doesn’t mean you want to see the end of it… which is exactly why it’s going by so quickly now that you are in its final hours. Anyway, here’s another one from the forthcoming Alex Cameron record. Enjoy.

★ The jeans came down off the shelf where they’d been for months. It was necessary to open the blinds to their widest to get enough cloudy daylight to tell which shirt was the black one and which was navy blue. The evening rain in the forecast became afternoon rain in the forecast, then early afternoon rain, its arrival jumping hours earlier each time. Drops were falling before noon. The rain pattered down without drama or spectacle, enough for a rain jacket but not for waterproof shoes. There would be no opera on the big screen at Lincoln Center. A brilliant lilac glow marked the sunset, but new clouds and new rain settled over the night.

Let’s not bury the lede here: Fearless Flyer is my actual earthly nemesis. According to this month’s FF, the periodical debuted the same year that I did (1985) and it is self-aware, just like me (see below for printed proof). And just like any star-crossed pairing, we are bound by something deep and vital. Obviously the reason I give this sweet and well-meaning but utterly cringeworthy publication any attention is evidence of my own deepest anxieties about myself and probably my own writing. And also my cheapness.

Like Harry and Voldemort, the “Fearless Flyer” and I are somehow inextricably linked. Whenever the “Fearless Flyer” is somewhere in the vicinity, I begin to have a searing headache. I experience an almost blinding pain, and when it’s bad it’s especially, paralyzingly bad. But also just like Harry, I contain a piece of the evil that lurks within the “Fearless Flyer”; this is why I recognize it, and this is also why I can never bring myself to destroy it (I have every copy I’ve ever written about at the Awl HQ).

“In its current state, there are some real dangers: broken limbs, wear and tear,” Cunningham said. “But the real crux of this is that I just don’t think the game is safe for the brain. To me, it’s unacceptable.”

The twilight of football has long been upon us, but there is a very long way to go indeed. What comes after early, protective retirement? Ed Cunningham, an ESPN football analyst who resigned citing ethical concerns over the sport, has two sons, ages 3 and 5. Will they ever be allowed to play? It’s time to start asking.

As summer draws to a close and I go insane the way I do every single August, I thankfully remembered this past week that I am a mere month away from the beginning of my symphony subscription. This was a birthday gift I bought for myself that I’ve had to wait almost six months to redeem. In late September, the first concerto I’ll go see is Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 which, you know, we’ll get there when we get there. So this week let’s look at Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (Daniel Barenboim, Chicago Symphony Orchestra).

It’s possible you have no idea who Anton Bruckner is. That’s perfectly okay! I will admit to you that outside of name alone, I had never knowingly listened to or played his music. I very stupidly thought he was English? Look, I don’t know. A big thing to remember about this column is that I am just a huge moron with access to Spotify and Google Docs. Anyway. Anton Bruckner (first name actually Josef… are you one of those people who goes by your middle name? Why? Tell me) was an Austrian composer, living in the shadow of the likes of Wagner and Liszt, a contemporary and sort of enemy of Brahms, who lived from 1824 to 1896. His legacy was complicated and strange: he began in religious music before “pivoting” (internet phrase) to symphonies, a form altogether considered dead by the time he took it up, and did not achieve fame until very late in his life.

His music was also celebrated by—please insert an extremely long sigh here—Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. In fact, it was this symphony, Symphony No. 7’s Adagio that was played on the radio when Hitler died. Uhhhhh… how about don’t do that??? It should go without saying that this column does not endorse Nazis, and that I am going to look at this piece outside of that context before it does not matter to me. It was not as if Bruckner wrote in his will, “please give my music to Hitler” or his dying words were, “I want this music to be taken out of context and given to the world’s worst people.” So. Okay.