Cosmic Laughs in the Square

THE SQUARE is made for cosmic laughs. Jugglers and jackanapes, mountebanks and missionaries, charlatans and saints, revelations and rip offs contend for your attention. This summer promises to be cataclysmic in and around the Square. This article is humbly offered as an aid to the physical layout of the area- and a warning against a few of the more blatant institutional ripoffs.

But although this may mention a few things which you could do at some point in your summer, please do not look on it as a list of Things to Do. The Square is really the world's largest game board, designed for a game with no set procedures- it is equally suitable for making love, hawking wares, chalking slogans, hatching plots, and hanging out.

But the game has two sides, and the Square is not a safety zone. All around are banks and businesses, where the other team plans such things as layoffs, the rape of the environment, and the exploitation of the Third World. Their players wear blue. They probably do not like you.

Two teams have grasped the idea of the Square as Game, and they play it to the hilt. The most conspicuous is the Hare Krishna people. They have shaved heads with pigtails, wear long white robes, and chant HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE/HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE. They contend that this makes their lives sublime, and that it can do the same for you and me. They ask for money and distribute cards bearing the chant I have just outlined. Take a card, because it contains also an invitation to a love feast held every Sunday at their temple in Allston. Lots of free Indian food and skits explaining all about Krishna.

The second team is Process. They wear long black capes, come from London, and worship Satan. They also ask for money to further the cause, and in return they will give you some weird magazines about their beliefs. Neither of these teams matters a lot, but they play a good game of Square.

Other individuals join in the game, selling newspapers, bootleg records, pots of brown rice, stolen cameras, and dope. Some of the newspapers are very good. The Old Mole, published weekly by a group of Cambridge radicals, is probably the best. You can also buy The Black Panther, the Militant, and Broadside Free Press. The brown rice is pretty good also. Buying cameras and dope is probably not a good idea.

Stores

There are a lot of emporia along the game board. We are going to discuss clothes stores first, because I am eager to get in a word about Krackerjack's, which is the mother toadstool in the mushroom cellar of the Square.

Krackerjack's is every bad thing about youth culture and hip capitalism that you could imagine. DJs from WCBN (the local hip-rock station) slither in and out like sleek lizards, nattily attired in the latest $100 mod outfits. Everything in Krackerjack's is very expensive, and the store unconsciously parodies and shamelessly exploits every good thing the movement does.

During the Harvard strike in April, 1969, it sold strike armbands (which people were making in the Yard and passing out free) for 25 cents apiece. As I write, the store is displaying personality posters of Mao Tse-tung, Eldridge Cleaver, and other movement figures. In each poster a cunning slit has been made, and Eldridge is wearing a flowing Krackerjack's cravat, while Mao sports a pair of blue granny glasses.

It is interesting to note that Krackerjack's now has steel garage covers over its windows at night. This is probably because in the two recent riots, these windows were the most methodically and thoroughly demolished of any in the area.

You would probably save yourself a lot of money if you stayed away from Krackerjack's.

But there are a lot of places around to buy clothes, ranging from pretty expensive to pretty good. In descending order of interest:

Central War Surplus (433 Mass. Ave., in Central Square) is worth the walk. Jeans, t-shirts, and so on, are very inexpensive, and their inventory is large. You can also get mess kits, first aid kits, folding shovels, helmet liners, and gas masks there.

Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum (at Mass Ave, and Mt. Auburn St.) is a very good second-hand store, and it has a lot of bargains on new clothes. The owner is friendly and helpful. You sort of have to take pot luck there, because it's impossible to tell just what will be in at any given time.

The Coop is huge, and has everything for the young business student on the way up. Summer School students may join, which means that next November or sometime you get a check for about 5 per cent of everything you spend there. It's probably not your best bet for clothes, but they have other stuff.

J. August and Co. (1320 Mass Ave) has a wide selection of hats and boots. Both are fairly expensive, but good. J. August also has a Xerox machine.

About J. Press (82 Mt. Auburn St.) and Saks 5th Ave. (73 Mt. Auburn St.) I need say nothing. If you intend to shop there, you probably know all about prices and whatnot. In fact, you probably aren't reading this article.

Enough about clothes. Most clothing in Cambridge is too expensive. And it is a sterile thing to buy. Much better to inherit it or find it in the street or get it as a present from somebody who loves you. There are more productive things to buy. For example.

Books

The Square is book country. There are just dozens of people who depend on the knowledge-hungry scholars. So there are a lot of excellent bookstores. For textbooks, let's try our old buddy the Coop again. They get in all of Harvard's textbooks. Or at least most of the textbooks. Sometimes, The textbook department is on the top floor of the annex. To get there, go through the main building (trying not to be offended by the Harvard sweatshirts, T-shirts, garters, cocktail glasses, mugs, key rings, wallets, lampshades, desk blotters, and diapers on display) and cross the alley. Take the escalator to the top floor, where you will follow a series of highway signs to the section for Scan Lit 31 or Eng Sci 267x.

Once you've gotten your textbooks, however, you'll find that the Coop also has an excellent paperback department on the second floor of the annex, and a hardback department with all the bestsellers- Love Story, Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex ( but were afraid to ask )- on the first floor. You get the same rebate deal if you join.

Two other paperback stores are stars. Paperback Booksmith (37a Brattle St.) is open 24 hours a day for those dark nights of the soul when nothing but a book will still the pain. For these times, PB has the best science-fiction selection around, and a lot of good and hard-to-get books on other subjects. The staff is also very cool, and they won't case you out if you spend four hours making up your mind whether you want to buy anything.

The Harvard Bookstore (124 Mass Ave.) is also good, especially for paperback fiction books. They have second-hand textbooks, and at the end of the summer you can sell them yours for pretty good prices.

Reading International (47 Brattle) does all right, its chief attraction being its many foreign periodicals. Passim (47 Palmer, on the site of the old Club 47) also has a good selection of foreign magazines, and some books.

But for foreign language scholars, Schoenhof's (1280 Mass Ave.) is the greatest boon. The store specializes in all foreign languages, from Welsh to Amharic, and it has almost everything you could want. If it doesn't have something, it can get it.

Phillips Books (7 Holyoke St.) has a good hardback selection, and a limited paperback selection upstairs. The Grolier Book Shop (6 Plympton St.) specializes in poetry, and is a lot of fun to poke around in. The Star Book Shop (29 Plympton St.) buys and sells old and rare books. It is, incidentally, located right in the back of the Lampoon Building, which is impressive for its ugliness.

Lampoon Building

This is sort of a digression, but William Randolph Hearst was expelled from Harvard around the turn of the century for the offense of sending to every member of the Faculty a chamber pot with a picture of himself (i. e., Hearst) pasted in the bottom. Hearst, as we all know, became a minor newspaper publisher and achieved fame as the hero of a movie starring Orson Welles.

But in the process, he determined to revenge himself on Harvard by donating a grotesquely hideous building, which is now known as the Lampoon Castle (and always has been, since Hearst was a member of the Lampoon in his undergraduate days). The building is for some odd reason triangular in shape, and has five street addresses (count em): 29 Plympton St., 44 Bow St., 57 Mt. Auburn St., 1 Holyoke Court, and Zero Freedom Square). The tenants of this building put out a magazine several times a year, which brings us to our next point.

Newsstands

As soon as you finish this article, rush over to Felix's (1304 Mass Ave.) and buy something. However, if it is

after June 30, then forget it, for Felix's will have closed- soon to be replaced by a bunch of Xerox machines. Felix's was one of the best newsstands around, and it will possibly reappear farther down Mass Ave. later in the summer. But Out of Town Newspapers, Inc. (in the middle of the Square) is also good, and probably has your hometown paper. Nini's (Mass Ave. and Brattle St.) has lots of magazines, in addition to apples, bananas, and bags of peanuts.

Records

Well, we start at the Coop again. The record department is on the second floor of the annex, and it is fairly complete, especially if you are a classical fiend. But if you like country blues, folk, or just rock, the Coop is a pretty good deal. The prices are low. If you are just looking for rock, then you should look at Cheap Thrills (1003 Mass Ave.). They have some hard-to-get rock records and they have listening booths where you can hear them before you buy, which is very nice.

Minuteman Record and Tape (30 Boylston St.) has a good selection at pretty good prices, with the added bonus that they have tape cassettes and whatnot.

Briggs and Briggs (1270 Mass Ave.) has a severely limited record stock, but you can buy useful musical instruments like Marine Band harmonicas, jaw harps, and baritone kazoos.

Restaurants

You can eat a lot here in Cambridge. And the fare at the Union is notably unsatisfying, so at some point you will probably stray drooling into the Square and environs, rubbing your money. There are many cateries around, all of them U. S.-government inspected 100 per cent disease free. In roughly ascending order of price some of them are:

Tommy's Lunch (60 Mt. Auburn St.) is a good place, sporting two pinball machines, a loud jukebox, and a good counter crew. The food is standard diner fare.

Elsie's (75a Mt. Auburn St.) is more flamboyant, and specializes in feeding you huge amounts of delicatessen sandwiches. Hazen's (just next door) is stronger on the basic hamburgers and French fries. It is also not as densely crowded as Elsie's during the peak dinner hours.

Hayes-Bickford's; at Mass Ave. and Holyoke St., is a cafeteria which has thrived for years on the fact that it stayed open longer than almost anyplace else. A very bad book called Love with a Harvard Accent once said that the Bick was "where the Cambridge bohemians gathered." You need pay this no attention, however, because the same book had its insipid hero stopping into Leavitt and Peirce for a cup of coffee, which is categorically impossible because Leavitt and Peirce only sells tobacco and games. But the Bick is open late.

Two close companion pieces to the Bick are the Waldorf and the Red Caboose. I didn't tell you the location because both are closed: the Red Caboose is gone forever, leaving only an empty place in my heart. It went broke because it was on jinx corner (Winthrop St. and Mass Ave.). The Waldorf is closed temporarily "to open again with a more modern restaurant." Fat chance.

Brigham's (Mass Ave. by the Coop) sells hundreds of ice cream cones for 30 cents. They're pretty good, and so are the cones at Bailey's (Brattle St. near the Booksmith).

Zum Zum (9 Bratile St.) has strings of sausage hanging from its ceiling to symbolize its specialty. The sausages on the strings, however, are plastic. You may, at first, find this offensive. But if you train yourself to look down, you'll find ZZ not so bad. The sausages are inexpensive, and the dark beer is really good.

Bartley's (Mass Ave. by the Harvard Bookstore) explores the hamburger medium as far as it will go. Starting from the basic Bun'n Burger it escalates to the Muenster Cheeseburger, the Super Pizzaburger, the Hawaii Pineapple Burger, the Texas Chiliburger, and so on. If you keep your orders orthodox, you will find it very good.

Somewhat more expensive than the aforementioned are our final group. The Wursthaus (4 Boylston St.) has German American food and crowded atmosphere. The Toga (Mass Ave. by Briggs and Briggs) has sandwiches and above, of basic American variety. Buddy's Sirloin Pit (Brattle St. across from the Theatre) is just what the name implies. Charley's Kitchen (10 Eliot St.) plays the Red Sox games on the radio and has good sandwiches. Cronin's (114 Mt. Auburn St.) is also good.

What, are you still not full?

Well, for Chinese food, there the Hong Kong (1236 Mass Ave.) which has reasonable prices and is open quite late, and Young and Yee (37 Church St.).

Movie Theaters

Movies in Cambridge are much cheaper than they are in Boston, where we are treated to the spectacle of the Cheri charging $4.00 to see Woodstock. The Cambridge films tend to be a little less current than those shown in the plush plastic palaces in the other place.

They are all good. The best is the Orson Welles (1001 Mass Ave.) which is run by freaks. Get one of their calendars, because they have week-long festivals, at least one of which during the summer will be of some director or genre which you love. The others are the Harvard Sq. (in the Square), the Brattle Sq. (in Brattle Sq.) and the Central Sq. (in Central Sq.). They all show a lot of good movies.

There are also some film programs sponsored by Harvard. Ivy Films, at Carpenter Center, will show movies by directors like Chaplin, yon Stroheim, and Rossellini at 7 and 9 p. m. on Thursdays during the Summer term. Film Studies is doing a series on great American directors, also at Carpenter Center, at 7 p. m. on Sundays. And there will be a series of classic films shown at Emerson 105 at 7 p. m. on Fridays.

There are lots of other things going on. Summerthing concerts in Harvard Stadium are the most obvious. Ike and Tina Turner, B. B. King (tonight), and other heavies. They only cost $2.00.

You can't lose.