"What street?"
I say the name of a street I walked past on the way over.  

"What number?"
I say the number of the house on the corner.  

They read a name aloud.
I say "Yes".  

They hand me a ballot.  

So don't let me hear anybody complaining that democracy is hard to administer.

The sad truth is that Wordsworth was never a great bookstore. It was a good bookstore, on a prominent corner, and it committed the appealing heresy of discounting what was once otherwise an obdurately retail commodity. It was a bastion of an age in which it took only 10% more commitment to be good, and in which even a merely-good bookstore was a simple greatness, and it died yesterday with its dying era. A block away, a thinly-disguised Barnes & Noble beckons expansively, and it's harder to sustain a polemic against corporatism when independence had nowhere to sit down, a deteriorating selection, no coffee, and basement premises that never quite smelled right. We walk willingly into our comfortable self-corruption, half the time, because the moral alternatives let us down.  

The night Wordsworth dies, the Brattle is playing Goodbye Dragon Inn. I say goodbye to an icon of books and their places, and walk across the street to watch a movie about the death of an icon of movies and their places. As ghosts haunt the dark corridors of Tsai Ming-Liang's forsaken movie house, somebody keeps walking through the shadowed wings of this one. I am a ghost of places just by sitting here, saying goodbye to a place I am now too late to see.  

And yet, the books outlive the bookstores, and the movies outlive the theaters. We are ghosts, but alive. We take the places into ourselves, and so, as best we can, become them.

Pervasive witness can't moralize evil, but it can change the calculi of expedience. The cameras remind us to see ourselves.

If I were trying to improve Boston, I'm sure my plan would not involve jacking up the entire city and installing twenty miles of food courts underneath, nor teaching all residents to begin conversations in a foreign language. And yet, I love Montreal.

One system's obvious flaws conceal some other system's deeper ones.  

After a day and a half of this corporate vanity fair I realize the most remarkable thing about those urinals, by far, is that they are not individually sponsored.

1. Arguably business is more precisely the discipline of determining what you can convince people to pay to believe they are averting.  

2. The two urinals for shorter people are, of course, next to each other. Sorting is not exactly the same as design.

There is something elusively dehumanizing about standing, alone, in a room designed for 34 adult men (and 2 shorter ones) to urinate at once.

Business is the discipline of determining what people will pay to believe they are improving. Service is the much different art of actually improving something.

If a tenth of a percent of the marketing effort squandered on cars in this country went to glamorizing public transportation, and a tenth of a percent of the expense were spent improving it, our cities would be very different.