- Malcolm Smith
- “This cringe-worthy building was greeted with lots of praise and back-patting.”
And commenters already do not like his not liking it. Representative comment: “This article was so fucking stupid, second only to the cloud article from last year.”
I disagree. You gotta read it. It begins:
You have seen this before. An immigrant is having a drink by himself at a bar. He is enjoying his day off. He works so hard for his money. He is giving himself a little treat by not ordering the cheapest beer. He is dressed in some of his best threads and wears with pride a hat that’s a bit fancy—it’s a safari Panama straw fedora. Suddenly, a group of drunken white men burst into the bar. They are loud and laugh at anything that falls from their mouths. As one of them requests a bucket of beer (it’s party time!) from the bartender, another begins to show great interest in the immigrant’s exotic hat. “Man, that’s really cool,” the white man says to the immigrant. The immigrant smiles weakly and continues drinking. “Can I try it?” asks the white man. But before the immigrant even gives him an answer, the man grabs the hat, puts it on his own head, and begins to move his neck back and forth like a funky chicken. “Man, I should buy one of these. It’s so cool.”
You have seen this sort of thing before. You have seen it and felt your soul cringe, felt it crinkle like tinfoil. Oh no, he didn’t. Oh yes, he did—and he just won’t stop doing his jive thing with the rim of the hat low on his eyes.
Keep that image in your mind and now think about the Beacon Hill Library…
