Help booting from USB with macbook pro 6,1

I'm a certified bunch of stuff. I'm pretty good command line, I can get my way around a .nix system and then some. I've installed ubuntu hundreds of times for friends and family and for myself. I recently treated myself to a macbook pro and this might be the one thing in my life I can't figure out on my own. I'm hearing mixed opinions that you can't boot from usb but thats definitely wrong.

The only thing that even remotely smells like success was loading the boot image (named boot.iso) of my choice to /efi/boot with a "magic file" called bootx64.efi. It's not exactly clear where this file came from, but it seems like someone compiled grub2 for efi (see here: http://www.puredarwin.org/developers/booting/grub2). Somehow the iso boots, but the gui freezes (i'm assuming because vid drivers don't work) after the purple screen. I can however switch to tty2-6 using control alt func f1-f6. I don't think this process is persistant, and I'm not really interested in this hacky method, was wondering if anyone has successfully done this.

tl;dr: can't boot ubuntu from usb drive using macbook pro