Dig Boston June 17th, 2015

FICTION

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE

BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

ARTS

FOUND

FOOTAGE FEST

A SALUTE TO WEIRDOS

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NEWS

MCAS-HOLES

“ED REFORM” HEAVYWEIGHTS CONDESCEND ON BEACON HILL

MUSIC

SMASH IT DEAD FEST TURNS FIVE

PUNK AND HARDCORE ANNUAL WEEKEND EVENT CONTINUES TO BENEFIT WORTHY CAUSE

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VOL 17 + ISSUE 24

JUNE 17, 2015 - JUNE 24, 2015 EDITORIAL EDITOR Dan McCarthy NEWS, FEATURES + MEDIA FARM EDITOR Chris Faraone ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran ASSOCIATE FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan CONTRIBUTORS Nate Boroyan, Martín Caballero, Paige Chaplin, Christopher Ehlers, Bill Hayduke, Emily Hopkins, Micaela Kimball, Cady Vishniac, Dave Wedge INTERNS Oliver Bok, Emily Tiberio

DESIGN CREATIVE DIRECTOR Tak Toyoshima DESIGNER Brittany Grabowski INTERNS Amy Bouchard, Stephanie Buonopane, Kelsey Cole COMICS Tim Chamberlain Pat Falco Patt Kelley Tak Toyoshima

ADVERTISING ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Nate Andrews Jesse Weiss FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digpublishing.com

BUSINESS PUBLISHER Jeff Lawrence

DEAR READER Last week we featured a local female comedian, Tricia Auld, on the cover. The photo was tied to the piece we ran focusing on her experience and vantage point tilling the scorched Earth of the legendary Boston stand-up comedy scene.

In a few social media circles, the cover and the article reportedly ignited a hailstorm (I was sent screenshots and given reports from those in the circle), and all that a hailstorm in the digital age can bring with it in the way of blind fury. Heated discussion, trolling, poison barbs, and some short notes and letters sent our way. Some passiveaggressive, others soiled with the tart urine of those who have worked the stages for years, understandably developing a reactionary stance often scented in a “Why them and not me?” perfume, which they released in a thick, frothy stream. This is metaphorical by the way. Nobody actually pissed on a letter and sent it to us. At least I hope not. It was all digital, so people would have been making a mess of their own keyboards.

No matter though—the discussion our feature sparked and the jokes, jabs, and full-out attacks it launched online (and possibly in person given the size of the scene here, which, like the Honey Badger, is small but fierce) is, as DigBoston News & Features editor Chris Faraone commented, “good for everyone involved.”

It’s great to know that the current crop of locally bred comedians working and perfecting their craft here live up to the passionate and pugilistic ethos that made this city a battleground in the first place, and a region known for providing a home for great comedy.

DAN MCCARTHY - EDITOR, DIGBOSTON

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Marc Shepard

ADVISOR Joseph B. Darby III DigBoston, 242 East Berkeley St. 5th Floor Boston, MA 02118 Fax 617.849.5990 Phone 617.426.8942 digboston.com

ON THE COVER This weekend at the Innovation and Design Building check out David buckley Borden’s “hibernaculum” and see another piece from the show on page 18.

Image courtesy Trifecta Editions.

©2015 DIGBOSTON IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY DIG PUBLISHING LLC. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION CAN BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. DIG PUBLISHING LLC CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. ONE COPY OF DIGBOSTON IS AVAILABLE FREE TO MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

DIGTIONARY

BOSTONTATIOUS

adj bästənˈtāSHəs/ 1. The apprehensive reaction to vulgar displays of pretension that marks the true Bostonian’s DNA, especially for those hailing from the working class.

OH, CRUEL WORLD Dear Snake Owner, It’s hard to find the words to tell you how totally cool you are for having that big snake. Awesome stuff man, especially that micro boner you get every time you walk past someone in the street and scare them because they didn’t realize the schmuck walking next to them had a python wrapped around his neck. Judging by your cliché getup, something out of Orange County Choppers or some other show for inbreds, I bet you drive a loud-ass motorcycle too, and rev it when you drive through small New Hampshire towns on your way to sleepaway camp at Laconia. Too bad you weren’t in Texas a few weeks ago.

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OPERATIONS MANAGER John Loftus

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MCAS-HOLES NEWS TO US

Mass “ed reform” heavyweights condescend on Beacon Hill With Massachusetts public schools still in session, pessimists may have expected a low turnout at last week’s Joint Committee on Education hearing on Beacon Hill. Though there’s been an increase in frustration about standardized examinations, countless concerned parties were presumably occupied in classrooms during the opportunity to rail against assessments that direct the fate of students and teachers. Nevertheless, between perturbed parents, labor advocates, and instructors who were able to leave school early last Thursday, enough folks swarmed the State House to jam every corner and crevice of the chamber.

It was a standing room affair, a sauna in which some reporters were forced to sit on the floor with our backs to the hardwood panel of committee members. Our fronts facing a simmering capacity crowd, we waited anxiously for testimonies on H.340, an “Act relative to a moratorium on high stakes testing.” Those behind the bill—many of whom wore bright yellow stickers calling for “Less Testing More Learning”—say demands strapped on the backs of everyone from principals to students are actually driving achievement gaps, and that important lessons ranging from humanities to phys ed have eroded in the assessment deluge.

On the other side are testing moratorium opponents, an apparent mix of inner-city parents, a handful of teachers, and nonprofit ed reform advocates tied to various business interests—private equity, investment banks, mortgage lending, Walmart. This group’s members believe testing is of critical importance as a means to keep teachers in check. To drive that notion home, four state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) honchos—all men—commenced the hearing with a smearing of their adversaries that should register as a revealing moment in modern Mass pedagogical history.

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First up, Mass Education Secretary James Peyser argued that moratorium proponents are peddling the same arguments that public school teachers brought two decades ago, when the Massachusetts Education Reform act first linked student test performance to funding, among other things. Immediately prior to joining the administration of Governor Charlie Baker, Peyser, formerly of the conservative Pioneer Institute, served as managing director at NewSchools Venture Fund, an education nonprofit powered by venture capitalists, as suggested in the name. With that experience likely in mind, at the hearing Peyser, a longtime booster of charter schools and privatization initiatives, conceded that “testing alone” is not the answer, still insisted that the Bay State “won’t retreat from accountability standards.”

In his turn, DESE Board Chair Paul Sagan doubled down on the “vision that’s been nurtured over the past two decades.” Sagan’s not himself an educator; before Governor Baker asked him to serve, he was the president and CEO of a technology firm, and an executive at the venture capital group General Catalyst Partners, which backs more than 200 high-tech companies including ClassDojo, a student tracking app that legal scholars told the New York Times is “recording sensitive information about students … without sufficiently considering the ramifications for data privacy.”

Sagan’s only experience in the ed sector is with the advocacy group Massachusetts Business Leaders for Charter Public Schools, which may explain his blunder at the hearing last week. Without a hint of irony, the former CEO said that in surveying districts about how much class time is used to ready kids for state assessments, his department found that about half of those polled spent less than two days a year on preparation. In response to Sagan’s comment the crowd of opponents, which was relatively tame until this point, erupted into laughter.

Even legislators balked, with one lawmaker noting that many instructors with whom she spoke spent more than three weeks prepping for fill-in-the-bubble tests.

The insults kept on coming. Next to bat was DESE Commissioner Mitchell Chester, who is notorious among teachers for using results from high-stakes tests to shutter traditional public schools and to increase resources for charters and outside partners. The commish pledged that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) will at least be in place until 2019, and chided H.340 supporters for “depriving parents” of standards. His biggest complaint: reforming testing practices, or more specifically lowering the stakes would violate federal compliance mandates, therefore putting Mass at risk of forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars. Interestingly, Chester failed to acknowledge that, in addition to his state gig he’s a board member of two national groups—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), and the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB)—which play key roles in everything from the design of exams to the interpretation of results.

Not to be outdone, former DESE board member and renowned ed reformer Jeff Howard managed an ideal anecdote to aggravate seemingly all of the onlooking educators. To Howard, who has consulted districts nationwide, teachers aren’t to be trusted, with the only possible exceptions being in places like “Weston and Wellesley,” where he contends that parents “don’t accept anything other than top standards.” As an example, in his testimony Howard trashed and mocked the faculty members of a failing school that once hired him; despite that institution being in New York, the consultant then segued to label the contemporary lot of public educators as the most disconnected from reality he’s seen to date.

MCAS-HOLES continued on pg. 6

PHOTO BY CHRIS FARAONE

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

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MCAS-HOLES continued from pg. 4 It wasn’t all doom for the anti-testers. Many lawmakers refused to buy the education department line, and some directly called out Peyser, whose incomprehensible responses sounded something like Dana Carvey debating as George H.W. Bush on “Saturday Night Live.” “Students need to know how to take tests,” Peyser said. “That’s a part of life I suppose.” Chester hardly fared any better on the hot seat, saying he’s proactively asked many teachers for their thoughts on testing, but in doing so tends to become frustrated by their reluctance to use exam scores as a tool.

Before the hearing was moved to a larger auditorium to accommodate all members of the public who showed up to give and witness testimony, a few additional pols approached to flank H.340, or at least the sentiment behind it.

Commenting on stress spurred by assessments, Rep. Carmine Gentile of Sudbury explained how exam companies provide plastic receptacles to be used in the case that a student pukes mid-test; the administering teacher is to open the barf bag, insert the soiled exam, and return it as evidence. Sen. Barbara L’Italien of Lawrence hit just as hard, asking the DESE group, “At what point do we have so much data that we’ve lost track of why we’re there?” For encores, former New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang and Taunton Rep. Shaunna O’Connell separately noted, among other things, that many schools in low-income communities lack computers for exams, therefore leaving pencil-pushing students at a disadvantage.

“Standardized tests?” Lang said, scoffing in disgust. “I’ve never met a standardized kid.”

BLUNT TRUTH

THE MILK STREET DANCE

BY MIKE CANN @MIKECANN When it comes to zoning for the planned Patriot Care Boston medical marijuana dispensary on Milk Street in Downtown Crossing, Mayor Marty Walsh is stuck between pot and a hard place. On one side there are those who oppose the dispensary—his allies in drug and alcohol treatment programs, and powerful folks at the Downtown Business Improvement District (BID). On the other side are those who wish to see it open—cannabis advocates, presumably the 69 percent of voters in Boston who supported medical marijuana at the polls in 2012, and so on.

On July 7, Patriot Care’s application for a special permit is expected to be voted on by Boston’s Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA). As I put it to the Mayor over the phone last week on WBZ Radio, as he was fielding calls on “Nightside with Dan Rea” …

“Mayor Walsh, I want to thank you for a column that I wrote for DigBoston.

It was 10 quotes from you and it was very popular online; people are upset about your statements related to marijuana reform, considering that, how can patients and voters be confident that you will give the dispensary on Milk Street a fair shake in their upcoming zoning board meeting?”

Walsh’s response: “Well, it’s really not up to me. It will be decided by the zoning board later this month. It’s not yet decided. There is some neighborhood opposition but there’s also [resident] support for it. We’ll see how the zoning board decides.”

I had to ask: “But mayor, are you really giving the dispensary a fair shake?

How can patients know you aren’t blocking this with backdoor politics?”

To which he said: “I can tell you I have met with a representative of Patriot Care, the owner. He seems to be a very nice man, so I have done that and we’ll see how the zoning board decides.”

For some perspective on small business permitting in Boston, I reached out to Scott Matalon, a member of the Allston Board of Trade and the owner of Stingray Body Art. “Downtown Crossing is a commercial zone,” he says. “I can’t think of a zone that is more commercial in our city; it’s an ideal location. If not there, then where? If it’s not allowed in a major commercial zone like Downtown Crossing, then where in the City of Boston?”

If Patriot Care is denied a permit on July 7, many residents may be asking the same question: “If not here, then where?”—and looking at Mayor Walsh as the reason for why they have to travel to Brookline or farther for dispensary access.

Who won’t be blamed? For starters, Patriot Care backers like the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance, the Franciscan Friars at St. Anthony Shrine, members of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, and Boston City Councilors Matt O’Malley, Tito Jackson, Ayanna Pressley, and Josh Zakim.

In the past, Mayor Walsh has indicated that he’s willing to spend political capital on opposing a popular statewide marijuana legalization initiative. But how about medical? In the short-term? Is he willing to hobble his upcoming reelection efforts, and to shoulder the blame for blocking a dispensary that will inevitably end up somewhere else in the city anyway? As neighboring cities and towns move ahead on these matters, Walsh may want to finally take reality into consideration.

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Parkway Cycle

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Everett, MA | 617-389-7000 | parkwaycycle.com

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MEDIA FARM

We’re a little bit Kitchen, we’re a little bit Rock and Roll.

Lounge Shows:

Beloved Scuba Mysteries 6/18 Greg & Laura (BKNY) 6/19

OUT OF THIS WORLD DRAG BALL 6/20 Doors at 9pm Dinner in the Lounge 7-12

Join us for Tacos every Monday night 5-10pm in the Lounge

The ONCE Lounge is coming!

Countdown to our new Lounge Bar & Menu 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28...

Guest restaurant GITANA

by Bread & Salt Hospitality June25th - July19th Thurs-Sat Lunch & Dinner Sunday Brunch

RIPS AND PIECES

Random news rants and a brief return to Media Farm form

BY MEDIA FARM @MEDIAFARM Boy oh boy have we sailed off on some tangents recently—old books, that moronic bomber kid who the feds are killing on behalf of Massachusetts.

We almost forgot what it’s like to execute a regular column, one of our compendiums of news raves and waves, successes and unconscionable stinkers.

Time to climb back on the horse …

BDC KILLS We are no longer traveling to a certain corner of Connecticut where Boston.com Senior Writer Sara Morrison’s grandparents live. As we learned from her informative and downright gripping longform piece last week, at least eight bodies have been dumped in the woods nearby, and there appears to be a serial killer on the loose (in addition to those two escaped cons from New York who are believed to be anywhere from Mexico to Canada!). As entertainment, Morrison’s personal touch made the story sing; on the service side, like all great works of journalism, the feature also had a larger mission. As she reports: From Los Angeles to New York, serial killers prey on prostitutes and drug addicts.

Their crimes sometimes go unnoticed for years. Victims’ families sometimes say the police didn’t take their disappearances seriously enough … The news media’s tendency to focus hard on victims who are clean-living, well-off, and white is so well-documented it even has a name: Missing White Woman Syndrome. None of the victims who were reported missing fit that description.

Finally, at the risk of dampening our praise we’ll simply add that it would be awesome if BDC honchos allowed their content farmers to overachieve more often, and perhaps even encouraged them to explore stories like this—ideas for which reporters are passionate—rather than embarrassing clickbait that fails to advance any meaningful conversation.

UNDER HONOR It may may be the most obvious joke since comedians started pointing out that Under Armour is like FUBU for white people: Last week, Under Armour chief executive Kevin Plank, in referring to Deflategate (which we’ve now reluctantly added to our Google Docs dictionary), said New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is “as honest as the day is long.” Brady lends his pretty face to the brand, and the Boston Globe reported that while he “stands to lose $1.9 million in salary from a four-game Deflategate suspension, he doesn’t appear to be in danger of losing any endorsement income from Under Armour.” As for Plank and his exaggerative cliche-mongering; last month, the guy who claims that Brady is as honest as the day is long told Investor’s Business Daily that there aren’t enough hours in that very same day: “I wake up in the morning and I think about one brand,” Plank said. “I don’t have enough time to wake up twice and think about two.” In other words: Brady ain’t so honest after all.

THE HERALD IS TRYING TO KILL YOU There are several reasons that we rarely dive into the Boston Herald cesspool and slap around their so-called journalists. Mostly it’s because the world already knows that they’re a silly bunch of bigots and faux-populists, and that their editors are hellbent on scaring people to tears. While on their site this week to chuckle over former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn’s hilariously bad #Boston2024 advice column, we glimpsed the smorgasbord of fear the Herald is currently pushing, and thought to share some of the scare in case you didn’t know that everyone from gangsters and escaped cons to the MBTA is trying to murder you …

• Woman, 24, held in fatal stabbing of mom • Bulger appeal slated to be heard July 27 • Police: Lowell man threatened to decapitate neighbor • Woman gives birth in a minivan at a truck weighing station • MBTA Green Line inspector dragged by trolley in Boston • Jury selection continues for defendant in UMass rape trial • Escaped killers elude capture in New York • Questions surround man shot near gate at Arkansas air base • Police: 5 dead, 8 injured in balcony collapse in California And don’t forget about the serial killer in Connecticut.

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FICTION

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE

BEAUTIFUL

WOMEN

BY WIL WEITZEL

AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT

I thought growing up. One reason I was so sure is my older brother, Tommy, kept bringing them home. I guess they trusted him, God knows why. They spoke to him on the family couches in a sitting room that was, outside of company, declared off limits. They were deep, plush couches spread around the corners of the room, like benches by the ropes in a boxing ring. Sooner or later my parents and I would excuse ourselves, mainly out of embarrassment, and give Tommy and his girlfriends the space they needed to do whatever they did alone. I studied each of them hard before trudging off, trying to catch their eyes, and always assumed that he touched them once we were gone, even imagined him doing it.

The years went by and Tommy moved out of the house and on to college. I dated a few times, unconvincingly, in high school. But my own act felt overshadowed, imitative.

Girls invariably saw through it. It was an act, after all. As though my brother Tommy would occasionally walk onto my tongue and intone the right words. Then those words would sputter and collapse and the dark, primordial

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shyness of the impostor would creep back in and everyone, including myself, would smell a rat.

So when I met Leticia the summer after my first year at state college, my prospects seemed dim. Leticia had a summer job as a lifeguard at a pond that was quite stagnant and, on warm, breezeless days, smelled of rotting vegetation. She was a rising college senior and, as she put it, “on the way out.” She meant she was nearly finished with her degree but also that her looks and the sharpness of her mind and everything else that she said counted at all were poised to go rapidly downhill from there. She was very funny in this way. She went to the prestigious college none of us even applied to, much less got into.

“There’s the future they go on about, and then there’s your actual future,” she explained to the throng of suitors gathered around her sentinel chair at the pond. “The real one’s where you get all wrinkled.”

I met Leticia early on that summer by pretending to drown. I walked out to where the pond scum was thickest and feigned a heart attack. Once I’d gone a certain distance

beyond the shallows, I clutched my chest, pantomiming cardiac arrest, bending over and stooping to one side. I stumbled out into the algae until it was shoulder height, then one-eightied to steal a final glance at the lifeguard chair before toppling backwards into the murk. The last thing I glimpsed before I went under was the dispassionate gaze of Leticia staring out into her future.

I stayed down for a long time. Prior to this, I’d practiced breath holding for nearly two weeks. I’d read free diving manuals and tutored myself on the mammalian dive reflex. I was prepared to ignore any convulsive protests on the part of my body. But the pond was very shallow and I never arrived at depth. Instead, having equalized six feet down and spread my limbs, I began rising to the surface, then hung there face down like a bloated turtle. I floated like that out in the algae waiting for Leticia—who was famously an expert swimmer though none of us had ever seen her so much as enter the water—beyond the point of knowing where I was.

When I came to, I was laid out flat. A crowd had gathered.

“He’s okay,” someone shouted.

Someone else was leaning over and weighting my chest. It was not Leticia.

“Where’s Leticia?” I asked when finally I could speak.

“What? What did he say?”

“Where’s Leticia?” I repeated more softly.

My head was pounding and water sputtered in the back of my throat that made odd reverberations in my ears. The world was shrouded, bloodless, and there was a moment of confusion I vaguely took in before she came forward. From the little I could see, Leticia herself looked harried, her long hair tangled in her face. By then they were helping me to my feet. Someone who claimed to be a doctor was prying one eye open then the other. His large, strong hands were suctioned to my face.

“Take it easy,” he was saying. They helped me to a log and someone brought cold water. I took a sip.

“What is it?” Leticia asked.

I drew it out so she had to lean in close enough to hear me whisper.

“Nothing,” I told her when she’d come very close. “I was seeing if you were there.”

Leticia had dead straight chestnut hair that ran down almost to the bottom half of her bikini. She was flat-chested and narrow and walked like a wind-up doll.

She remained the same even shade of honey brown throughout the summer despite taking regular shifts almost naked from 11am-2pm on the lifeguard chair and wore green-tinted shades that transformed her into an enormous, seated praying mantis.

Her bikini fit her so tightly and was so minor an article that you could discern everything about her body.

In fact, although I harbored a passion for Leticia that nearly defeated my ability to live a normal life, I had no particular desire to see her stripped of swim wear.

To the contrary, when I fantasized about the two of us becoming infinitely knowledgeable about each other, I envisioned her lying next to me in her bikini that, even dry, seemed perpetually wet and glossy and clung to her with every fiber.

I didn’t go back to the pond for almost a week after my feigned drowning incident. Clearly, Leticia had never thought to save me.

“Hey, what happened out there anyway?” She’d made her way over to my towel, which Lord knows she had never done before. I had my eyes closed and opened them into the sun glaring over her right shoulder.

“No honestly, you really have a heart failure?” She paused, looking down at me carefully, a little shyly. “Or were you pulling something?”

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the light. I squinted and shaded them with a hand, rising up on one elbow.

I took a long look at her body. I jumped from her Ray Bans down to her twitching feet and slowly worked my way along her legs and across her narrow stomach. I lingered over her neck, the pulse of her radiating visibly, powerfully toward her ears. She seemed a kind of deadly machine. Built to destroy. It was the first time, I can say for sure, I felt invented by desire. As though this wild, licking flame was suddenly who I was. It was the first time I’d ever taken a moment to pore over the flesh of a beautiful woman, in a magazine or in life, without being reminded of my older brother, Tommy.

“What?” I asked.

“Wow,” said Leticia. “Idiota.”

For some reason, this encounter gave me confidence.

She’d approached me, after all. I began doing pull-ups because I read in the magazines that they acted quickly on the upper frame of a man’s chassis and gave you a V-shaped figure. I held my stomach in and made it a point to walk past the lifeguard chair, for a Pepsi or a grilled cheese, several times during each of Leticia’s shifts. Yet her shaded, bug eyes remained inscrutable.

So I took to doing laps, straight across the pond. I’d make a big deal of limbering up, like I’d seen them do on television, in the general vicinity of the elevated chair.

I didn’t have a plan beyond a brash show of physical exertion. The key, I dimly supposed, was to demonstrate to Leticia that I was vigorously constructed. Built for robust trials. I hoped she would somehow extrapolate from this that I must be good for pleasure. So I took to my long,

slow laps, initially for an hour or more. By mid-summer I could swim non-stop nearly for the duration of her threehour shifts. Occasionally, I’d stand in the midst of these performances on the muddy bottom of the pond and glare at her, as though I were a god-human hybrid. Once, I caught Leticia shaking her head in disgust and, having grinned at her broadly, I threw myself with renewed intensity back into my laps.

The exertion did help with my physical yearnings but finally, by mid-summer, I was bursting. I was becoming increasingly unconvinced that there was an unlimited store of female beauty. For some reason, this woman was the one I wanted. There was the tawny arrow of her body that I desired to touch, yes, but more urgently than that, I needed to speak with her. I yearned to know what she was thinking up in her chair. I would have traded my prospects with every other woman in the world for a brief chance with this one. It became nearly unbearable not to tell her things. Not to make pronouncements.

At last, in late July when the throng of suitors was somewhat diminished by the weight of the mid-day heat, I approached the chair. I could see Leticia watching me warily through those gigantic shades.

“Can I come up?”

I saw her jerk.

“Come up here?”

While Leticia had a deep, throaty voice in general, this time it came out in a worried bass, like, having finally jogged beyond the pale, I was liable to do anything.

“Yeah, I’d really like to tell you something.”

“No!” she blurted in obvious horror, “you definitely can’t come up. I’ll come down to you.”

She slowly stepped down, not turning to the rungs as she normally would but facing outward, weighting her heels.

“What do you want?”

I halted here. I’d gotten this far, which was light years beyond where I’d ever expected to arrive, and now crashed against the limits of my abilities as a person. I pushed on them.

“Oh God, not this again,” said Leticia. She turned to climb the rungs, apparently discounting all at once both the prospect of any danger and everything else about me.

“Wait,” I whispered, stepping forward as though we were suddenly alone. “I’m just—crazy about you.”

She whipped back around, one thin, paddle-like foot with its stumpy toes on the third rung. I’d offered my confession directly to her calves and for a moment I stared at her foot, particularly the clean brown toes, not sure where else to look. We were surprisingly close so that I could smell her. She smelled like soap.

“What? What did you say?”

“I’m not usually like this. So—such an idiot.”

Leticia smiled. It was the first time I’d ever seen her smile. She had high, beautiful gums with gaps between her teeth.

“Good,” she said, chuckling softly so I could hear from her throat a deep husky rumble, and, turning again, ascended the rungs to her chair.

After that, I’d bring her drinks and casually mention the tremendous heat. She’d accept them just as casually and take a sip while I stood there, gazing up at her with my neck craned.

“You and Leticia?” said one of the guys who loitered near her chair as I did. “She’s robbing the cradle.”

“Hardly,” I answered.

“But you’d like that,” he went on.

“Yes I would,” I said loudly, matter-of-factly, so all of them could hear. “I most definitely would.” And the whole lot, muscled, with bristly hair and clipped names, began to snicker.

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Leticia explained one afternoon when I’d brought her Pepsi, “that you’re so— you know—obvious.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

She seemed to think about this and I realized I enjoyed being outed, having my cards on the table. It put the pressure, if there was any pressure, on everyone else.

“No, I guess not,” she said.

At some point, after weeks of this, Leticia must have come around to the idea that I was not a complete waste

of time because she hemmed and hawed and at last agreed to a movie when no one else was in earshot. On a second date, when I’d done nothing to press my luck, she let me kiss her, long and slowly, in the back of the theater. That night I decided my hunch had been right all summer that nothing else in my life had ever mattered.

I was encapsulated in darkness. From what I could tell, a velvet cover had been thrown over the two of us together and Leticia’s soft, wide lips, her tongue, were the darkness itself.

“I don’t normally kiss boys,” she whispered when we turned back to the film. It was about two German women on motorcycles who looked to be in their late sixties and were traveling across America. They did not wear helmets and their long grey hair spun outward from the screen.

“I won’t want to leave you tonight,” I whispered, deeply surprised at myself.

Leticia shifted her eyes into this message with the brightness of the film flickering on her face.

“God, you’re such an adult,” she said. “We’ll have to watch this again tomorrow—you’ve made me miss half the action.”

I laughed, because there was no action. They were just driving on and on, like us. In fact, as far as I could tell, we were the action.

I lost my virginity to Leticia in the last, cooling week of summer before we’d each returned to college. I found out in late September that I’d gotten her pregnant. For a split second, before she told me the rest, I was stop-gapped with wild joy. It stunned me, in that moment, the concept that she carried us together. We’d had sex the way all first-timers I knew had had sex — if it wasn’t in the back seat of a car or in the bed of a pick-up or if their parents weren’t away — in the churchyard. Among the dead. We’d chosen a relatively level spot between tall, moldering headstones where we were hidden from all but the moon. It came slanting in over Leticia’s naked breasts and stomach, vaguely illuminating their spare contours.

I blurted out before we even got started that I loved her and she told me for Chrissake to shut up. That, as always, I talked too much.

We’d kissed for a long time before we took our clothes off. I came once in my underwear when our chests first touched and then, after a substantial delay in which she was shivering, twice more inside her. The whole time, Leticia never spoke. She never once parted her lips except to kiss. While it occurred to me to use protection, while I’d hidden a pack of condoms hopefully for almost a month, I’d been flooded with the selfish greed to feel her completely. She, throughout, was serious and passionate.

She took me by the back of the head and kissed me hard when I was inside of her. In fact, the main things I can remember are her kissing and the cold, nude feeling of her skin all around me. Beyond that, there remains to this day the chill moonlight that left her trembling and curled up against me, suddenly vulnerable, so my heart flipped over when we walked out between the graves.

“I’m so sorry, Leticia,” I told her once we’d passed through the gate.

“For what?”

“For being such a beast. Not—you know—controlling myself.”

She stopped in her tracks and released my hand.

“You did nothing I didn’t want, idiota.”

We were quiet after that. I walked her home as though there was a moving wall between us. I frankly didn’t have the courage to try to kiss her goodnight. I wondered if the honorable thing was to sleep in the grass beneath her window. Instead, I went home to my bed and looked in the mirror and immediately fell asleep with all the lights on.

“Turns out we’re both fertile,” Leticia said when I got the call in September.

She’d gone back after our summer together to her fancy school where, it had been rumored at the pond, she’d earned a handful of high achievement scholarships in marine biology and established a nearly flawless academic record. Leticia had never mentioned any of this to me. I imagined her at the time of the call lounging in

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BEAUTIFUL WOMEN continued from pg. 11 her dorm room with a Pepsi, wide feet up and swaying, and nobody around.

“So I’m ready.” I told her.

“Forget it. I had the abortion.”

“You what?”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

I began instantly to reimagine her, this time in a hospital, surrounded by blue frocks moving efficiently, handling her, telling Leticia who looked bored and preoccupied that everything was going to be fine.

“But I just found out you’re pregnant.”

“Was.” Something sharp and bitter welled within me. For the first time I could remember, since Tommy would pummel me for playing his CDs and I’d walk out behind the shed, I could feel tears on my face.

“You should have told me. I would have gone with you at least. We could have talked about it first.”

“Since when are you the grown up, idiota? Since you went to the movies and had sex with a girl?”

I couldn’t say anything. My chest was heaving and I was standing there holding the phone then bending over and stifling my own noises. When Leticia spoke it sounded to me as though she were no longer attached to a body at all.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

For a long time, she didn’t return my calls. Tommy came home for Thanksgiving from his new job in the big city, full of what he called “urban energy.” He seemed taller, more polished, more absolute in his convictions. As though the rest of us had finally lost ourselves entirely and shrunken into the corners. But there was no mention of women.

“Mom tells me you had a summer fling,” he snorted.

I winced. I’d grown desperate over the past two months and had trouble focusing on my studies. Twice I’d borrowed my father’s car and driven out to Leticia’s school and she’d refused to see me. Both times, her roommate had fiercely declared her “indisposed.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means she’s not here,” said the roommate. “It means she doesn’t even want to see you.”

“Those aren’t the same thing,” I told her and trudged back out to the car.

Toward the end of Thanksgiving break, on Sunday afternoon, there was a knock on the door. It was Leticia. I stood on the threshold staring at her.

“I tried to visit you,” I said quietly. “But your roommate kept lying—.”

“I know.”

Leticia seemed to be waiting for me to say something else, or to be invited into the house. She was in slick, tight jeans and fidgety Pumas and put weight on one leg then the other while we looked at each other. I struggled, in the meantime, to bring the picture of this woman together with the one I’d had in my mind all summer. I stared back at her, looking for something that was just out of focus.

“Oh God,” she said finally. “We’re back to this again—” “I went down to the pond,” I cut her off. “While you were up at school. After that last time with your roommate.”

She stared at me dumbly.

“At night, you know, when no one was around.”

I decided midstream that these were the wrong words for Leticia. That she would turn and walk away. But I kept going, I don’t know why, because they were true.

“And cold. It was cold—.”

“You’re going to tell me you went out and drowned yourself again,” Leticia broke in quietly. Her eyes were open, but closed. Like she was in some kind of weird trance. “Because I ruined your life. And for the second time, you’re going to say, I wasn’t there to save you.”

She was crying a little, so her mascara was broadening beneath her eyes, raccooning her. “You’re going to tell me you can never look at me again without hating my guts.”

Her whole face quivered and got even smaller than usual.

I thought she was beautiful.

I waited and watched her. Fascinated. Everything started to tremble. All at once, her features collapsed 12

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I held my stomach in and made it a point to walk past the lifeguard chair, for a Pepsi or a grilled cheese, several times during each of Leticia’s shifts.

Yet her shaded, bug eyes remained inscrutable.

together and contorted. She showed me the whole thing, in slow motion, making no effort to hide it. If anything, she brought herself closer. Lifting her bruised eyes to stare at me.

“No,” I said after a while. “I was just going to tell you I finally sat in your chair.”

Inside, the family had magically moved into the sitting room. On the long sloping couches, Leticia was suddenly, and for the first time, amongst them. Though we’d been nearly inseparable for the month of August, I’d never bothered to introduce her to anyone. She’d never once invited me over to her house. It had seemed irrelevant at the time. As if, despite all my fantasies of intimacy, we hadn’t gotten that far. Now she sat slumped on the couch near the fireplace beside me.

“This is Leticia,” I announced to my parents. I watched Tommy take her in.

“Yes, we suspected as much,” said my mother shyly and my father smiled.

We were all quiet. I suppose everyone was waiting for me to speak, to break the ice. But just as in the old days, the cat had my tongue. I sat there, at a small distance from Leticia, swooning in a deep, private silence.

“Are you guys dating?” asked Tommy at last, archly, aggressive in his tone.

I half stood up then sat back down. I felt myself redden and begin to sweat. When I turned toward Leticia, she had cleaned up her eyes and was smirking, having slumped even farther into our couch.

“How old are you?” asked Tommy, looking suddenly alert, interested.

“Old enough to be past my prime,” answered Leticia, grinning not at Tommy but at me, as though he didn’t exist. She was now nearly horizontal.

Tommy shifted forward on his opposing couch, forcing himself practically upright. His chest was puffed out and the solid wave of his hair swung across his brow and collected above one ear. My parents, I could just make out in the slow unfolding of these moments, were both staring at Leticia in something like amazement.

At the sound of Leticia’s voice and perhaps comforted by the strains of her wry humor, as though surfacing after so long and allowing myself to breathe, I suddenly came to. I abruptly leaned far over and down and pressed my lips onto hers. She had a look of genuine shock on her face as I closed in but, after that first moment, when she literally tried to spring upwards and the couch forbade it, didn’t resist me. After a few seconds, she even curled her honey-brown, aquatic hand around to the back of my head and locked me onto her.

“Leticia and I are in love,” I announced to the room, looking at no one in particular, once we’d both come up for air. “We’ve been in love since the summer.”

At this Leticia guffawed and slumped all the way down, her spine completely flat, as if we were back in the churchyard, but at a sharp angle, toward my shoulder. She nestled into me.

“It was quite a summer,” she added, grinning at the ceiling. “Really something.”

There was dead silence in the sitting room. My parents were slack-jawed. Tommy had eased himself back down.

His hair had retreated. Leticia meanwhile folded her narrow hand neatly into mine. We looked hard at one another and before I knew it the others had all risen and quietly left the room.

Wil Weitzel spends a lot of time thinking about a new used motorcycle. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He is currently at work on his first novel.

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SAFE MAN

This guy may help you skip your next DUI

BY DIGSTAFF @DIGSTAFF

THE TOWNSHEND

Finally, a serious cocktail spot sans-pretension. Found, naturally, in the mighty Q.

BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF When you ask people in the know where the best spots are for really well-made, serious cocktails crafted by industry vets with solid townie pedigrees—where, specifically, their chosen Quincy haunt for such things is located—the answer is often some form of “actually, nowhere in Quincy.”

But that’s changing. Circumstances have for some time been leading to a revitalization of the static and ho-hum nature of the serious eats scene down there, be it the relatively inexpensive nature of real estate and liquor license price tags compared to Boston, or the facelift all of Quincy center is currently receiving. Either way, things are starting to look bright where once it was nothing but Bud Light.

And now that The Townshend has opened on Hancock Street, right across from the burial ground of presidents John Quincy and John Quincy Adams in the Presidents Place complex (which also houses Quincy College), those looking to slip out of the city and take the Red Line right to Quincy Center have a pretty stellar new option for polished but unpretentious cocktailing, courtesy of owner and bar master Devin Adams. Townshend’s libation list bears the mark of the cocktail programs that those spots like Drink and Island Creek Oyster Bar, places Adams and his team cut their teeth in, are famous for.

“People are looking at us like, ‘These are the only people doing classic cocktails and fresh citrus on daily basis [in Quincy],’” he says. “I feel as if we’re getting in here now to test the waters.”

Adams says since the current market there is rife with

those that rarely if ever seek out and indulge in the types of cocktails Townshend will be brandishing (“There are little sparkles of it, but it’s not quite there yet,” he says) he and his team are potentially laying the groundwork for other upstarts hoping to plant a flag in Quincy.

“What I learned going through opening Island Creek Oyster Bar is value,” Adams says. “You gotta offer what people want.”

In the case of the lithe seasonal lineup of tipplers, all of which come in a range of mismatched vintage glassware from Goodwill, there are nine options, all with a seasonal bent. Think: lots of fresh herbs and citrus, some smoke here, some cava there. The team also wanted to find connections between the drinks and the history of Quincy, be it the refreshing cucumber and vodka Adams Green, named for the plot of turf located across from the restaurant (“We are playing to our field here, and you just can’t not have a vodka drink on the menu”), or the local Privateer rum, fresh pineapple juice, and herbal Peacefield, named for the home of John and Abigail Adams (“A good summer drink … gets you where you need to be”). In the end, Adams says setting the bar high for quality but lacking the snootiness that can sometimes come along with that quality is the key for Townshend making an impact on locals.

“We’re very much like the blue-collar style of bartenders within the [serious cocktail] world,” he says.

“We know our shit, we’re trained well, but we’re not here to present the gospel about how everything should be done from now on.”

>> THE TOWNSHEND. NOW OPEN. 1250 HANCOCK ST., QUINCY. 617.481.9694. THETOWNSHEND.COM 14

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>> GET HOME SAFE. NOW AVAILABLE. GETHOMESAFEMA.COM

THE TOWNSHEND PHOTOS BY DAN MCCARTHY

DRINKS

We’ve all been there.

Whatever your plans earlier in the night may have been, with pledges to only have a couple and be fine to drive home, suddenly you find yourself at a moment of slow, dawning realization that not only are you drunk, but you’re also supposed to drive home.

As anyone who has ever found themselves on the receiving end of a DUI arrest and the subsequent wallet-drain of lawyers and fees and so on can attest, drunk driving just isn’t worth it. And now a former bartender quietly operates an alternative, Get Home Safe, a South Shore word-of-mouth livery operation centered around the unfortunate scenarios heretofore described. For Powell, the genesis of the service stemmed from personal experience.

“I was previously a bartender,” he says, “and I would go out with friends for a party and one person couldn’t have fun. [But] once alcohol is involved, everything goes out the window.”

Here’s how it works: You call him 24 hours a day, seven nights a week when you’re in a boozy tight spot. He and his team of ex-cops, public school teachers, and a small force of vetted drivers charge you a flat fee of $249.

Whether you’re in Revere and need to get to Southie, or spent the day drinking along Quincy’s beaches and realize driving home could be a disaster, it’s always the same rate. He discreetly picks you up, and his driver takes over his registered livery car, a black GMC Yukon SUV, while Powell jumps in your car and you ride shotgun. He then drives you to your place, parks for you, and slinks back off into the night.

Of course, you could always just call a friend willing to drive your ass home, or get a hotel if you’re far enough away that a taxi won’t cut it, so just consider this one of those numbers to keep in your phone when all else fails.

Or when you find yourself saying things like “Man, gin tastes so much better out of the bottle” way too early in the night.

MMMerica (the summer dining issue) JUNE 24th.

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HONEST PINT

MICRO MACHINE

Throw this brewfest on the docket for your next Seacoast road trip

BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF There are times when the sun shines brightly over chosen locales, and the laws of the land are forced to overturn, altering themselves for the greater good of beer.

And back in 2011, that weather pattern passed over New Hampshire causing the Granite State to become the first state in the union to recognize nanobreweries, those producing fewer than 2000 barrels per year (and often producing far less). Over 20 new breweries have since then opened and are now thriving, but distribution laws keep a bureaucratic stranglehold around the necks of brewers, preventing many of these stellar suds from landing on tap and in stores across state lines. With plenty of standouts, a whole market isn’t being serviced in Mass.

A temporary remedy to can be attributed to Karen Marzlof and Dave Boynton, co-founders of the Seacoast Microbrew Fest happening in July. It’s the first of its kind in New Hampshire and highlights a baker’s dozen or so local nanobreweries, mostly focusing on those in Portsmouth/Dover/Newmarket and pockets of surrounding areas, with extensions to nearby Maine for groups from Kittery and York.

Besides the fact there will be live local bands on the premises all day, along with a host of food trucks from great local eateries, the main feature involves the chance for attendees to sample the wares of a lot of great hyperlocal and independent brews. Some are well recognized (Smuttlabs, Portsmouth Brewery, Blue Lobster) and others are scant on the general radar (Neighborhood Beer Co, 7th Settlement, Earth Eagle Brewing).

Boynton is also a co-owner of 7th Settlement Brewery out of Dover, NH (hence the name—Dover was the seventh settlement in the New World), a brewing co-op done with One Love Brewing. He says that the festival and spotlight on the food and beer movement up there is a long overdue. “[My partners] and I love beer and the community that it creates, and we wanted to do that for Dover,” he says.

Marzlof, speaking from a friend’s produce farm she helps out at, agrees.

“It’s right on time, and it kind of grew up with local food movement here. Portsmouth has several downtowns only 10-12 miles apart in Durham, Newmarket, Dover—and now every town seems to have a hometown brewery. Feels like it’s on schedule with local food movement.”

As the first annual anything, you want to get things right. And for starters, all involved wanted to focus on wholly regional microbreweries, with many falling in very small output groupings. Some three- and seven-barrel breweries, a few 15-barrel breweries. While the vendors are small, there’s still a flowering array of varieties. “We have an eclectic mix,” says Boynton. “All brewers around here are friends; it’s a great community [and] part of a greater movement and new sense of camaraderie amongst brew pub owners. When you’re supporting one you’re basically supporting them all.”

That support, as the once microbrew-now-local-craft-beer juggernaut Smuttynose (whose Smuttlabs will be on hand) proves, is the life force for those upstarts with small beginnings that eventually pick up and grow into national favorites. Which isn’t to say the recent swell of these types of breweries and brewpubs across the coastal beer terrain will necessarily mean there are macro futures for everyone. “Over time, some of these breweries will eventually become larger,” says Martzlof. “Some will stay small. We hope by creating this festival we can build this network and community [and] it will provide more support for brewers, and also more recognition regionally for what’s available right here.”

As for where this could go from here, Marzlof sees sunny skies : “It’s so funny, whenever I talk with people [about it] they say they love local beer. So I think we’ll attract a lot of people to come to one place to try everything the Seacoast has to offer from beer, and refer their friends back to the Seacoast to have people come check it out.”

>> FIRST ANNUAL SEACOAST MICRO BREWFEST. SAT JULY 11. 12:20-4PM/21+/$30-50.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT SEACOASTBREWFEST.COM

DAWG GONE DOGS Wednesday’s June 3rd – 24th 5-11pm

MENU CHILI CHEESE DOG

Wicked good chili cheddar cheese scallions tater tots

HOT DOG SLIDERS

America cheese grilled potato roll fried egg hand cut fries

WINDY CITY

Mustard tomato onions sport peppers neon relish celery salt onion rings

BAHN MI WEENIE

Asian sausage crispy vegetables Red curry mayo cilantro baguette fried wontons

TWO PIGS IN A BLANKET

Bacon wrapped jack cheese diced tomato avocado mayo chicharrones

GERMAN SHEPHERD

Beer steamed knockwurst Swiss sauerkraut mustard pretzel roll potato salad

ROAD DOG

Smoked hot dog pulled pork coleslaw crispy onions fried pickles

CORNDOG

Battered fried hot dog on a stick honey mustard sauce hand cut fries

MAGOUNSSALOON OLDEMAGOUNSSALOON

518 Medford St. Somerville magounssaloon.com 617-776-2600 NEWS TO US

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THU 6.18

FRI 6.19

FRI 6.19

SAT 6.20

SAT 6.20

SAT 6.20

Select Oyster Bar @ Colonnade Rooftop Pool

Pat Falco: Untitled Art “Show” Thing

Friday Night Flicks: Soul Power

All the Single Ladies

Meet The Makers: Hibernaculum

Guitar Heroes

The rooftop pool at The Colonnade Hotel has a lot of sexy awesomeness to it, sure. But add the likes of Select Oyster Bar, who will be popping up for one night only with admission includes pool access, one free drink, unlimited oysters, lobster rolls, and other lavish treats from the sea, and it may be the best $15 you’ll spend this week.

You might recognize Pat Falco as the artist who does our The Strangerer comic each week. As it happens, he’s also a damn fine artist (you may have even seen his art-as-newspaper-boxes around the city). So if you like him in the Dig, you’ll like him in a gallery, so hop on the ferry to P-Town in the name of local art.

For the month of June, Fridays at the Lawn on D belong to the sunset and free outdoor flicks. This Friday is no exception. A live set from Eli “Paperboy” Reed will precede a screening of the music documentary Soul Power, which details the world of ’70s R&B (BB King and James Brown, anyone?).

You’ll have to pay for the food trucks and full bar, though.

Attention single ladies and Beyonce fans alike: Improv Asylum’s latest production was made for you. Whether you’re looking for an alternative to the run-of-the-mill bachelorette party or just want an excuse to party with girls, Improv Asylum is bringing a lot of comedy, dancing, and naughtiness just like a trusted friend on a wild night out. We can’t promise it’ll hold your hair while you puke, though.

The word “hibernaculum” refers to a place where a creature seeks shelter in winter. Add collaborative works of art and a gallery to display them, and you get an amazing array of creations, all inspired by nature. This weekend, you have a chance not only to check out the art, but also to meet the artists themselves. From printmakers to lettering artists, all experimental art freaks will jump for joy.

Get hip to the more discreet art galleries in the area, like Panopticon Gallery, which is just inside Hotel Commonwealth in Kenmore. Its current exhibition channels the essence of the musicobsessed teenagers with photographs of Jimi Hendrix all over their bedroom walls, except way bigger and better. Luckily for you, the gallery is open 24/7 and will be showing incredible photographs of your favorite “guitar heroes” until September. Rock on.

The Colonnade.

120 Huntington Ave., Boston. 5:307:30pm/21+/$15. For more information, visit selectboston.com

Room 68. 377 Commercial St., Provincetown. 7-10pm/ all ages/FREE. For more information, visit room68online.com

The Lawn on D. 420 D St., Boston. 8pm/all ages/FREE. For more information, visit lawnond.com

Ned Devine’s. 1 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston. 7pm/21+/$35. For more information, visit improvasylum.com

Innovation and Design Building. 1 Design Center Pl., Boston. 6-10pm/all ages/ FREE. For more information, visit trifectaeditions.com

Panopticon Gallery.

502c Comm Ave., Boston.

24 hours/all ages/$10. For more information, visit panopticongallery.com

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IMAGE COURTESY TRIFECTA EDITIONS

DAVID BUCKLEY BORDEN’S HIBERNACULUM WILL BE SEEKING SHELTER AT THE INNOVATION AND DESIGN BUILDING ALL SUMMER LONG.

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MUSIC

EQUALITY OR BUST

MUSIC

Smash It Dead Fest turns five

Jessica Pratt faces down solitidue thru folk guitar

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

LONELY RANGER

Three years ago, Jessica Pratt was a warm soul cloaked in the Gothic drapes of a witch’s robe.

Today, she’s writing at a time of dissolution.

Pratt’s sophomore LP, On Your Own Love Again, came immediately after her long-term relationship ended and her mother passed away, leaving two cavernous gaps in her mental and social well-being.

“In my case, you can only process so much immediately,” she says quietly. “You have to unconsciously tuck part of it away so that you can continue to function for a while. I went into a bit of an ‘on silent’ mode. In a weird way I feel like it lent me a raw sense of focus.”

So she did what any 27-year-old left on their own does: uproot. San Francisco dried its eyes to wave goodbye as Pratt left for the high-profile vibes of Los Angeles. She was, all at once, totally friendless. “I was able to isolate myself completely,” she says. “It was lonely and depressing, but it was actually a perfect situation in which to work.”

She’s the same songwriter in 2015, but she bears tougher, love-scored skin nowadays.

It lets her insert things like Duran Duran’s downward vocal spiral from “Hungry Like the Wolf” into her original song “Strange Melody” like a wink from across the bar. “When you listen to a lot of music, aka existing in the world, you’re inundated with constant sounds and images,” she explains. “It’s interesting what comes out sometimes as a result.”

If that means music that’s comfortable in its own loneliness, then Pratt should keep pushing herself through losses of love.

Hypnotic spells like hers should never end, especially when she’s hunched on the flat top of a bar stool, fingerpicking her way through songs that quiet the rowdiest pubs.

DUG UP FROM A TIME CAPSULE IN CENTRAL SQUARE WAS THIS OLD TIMEY PHOTO OF THE FIRST PUNKS, CIRCA 1788 We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: racist, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic, and oppressive attitudes make equality a hell of a harder battle than it should be. Then again, it shouldn’t be a battle at all.

Smash It Dead Fest—an annual weekend of shows, workshops, and readings—is a hardcore and punk event to raise money for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. On June 19-21, the Smash It Dead’s radical queer feminist and POC-centric positivity take over the Democracy Center and the Cambridge YMCA. Each year, the festival grows larger and raises more money than the last. This year, the organizers are ready to do all of that—and more.

“We pick bands that we think are important and are excited about,” says Ali Donohue, a member of the Smash It Dead organizing collective. “One of the goals of the fest is to highlight and give space to artists who represent identities that are often ignored in mainstream—and underground music, to be honest. So because of that, we have a lot of a performers that are queer, artists of color, women, trans, etc. that are on the bill.”

Punk icon Curmudgeon is ending a five-year run as a band with a set on Friday, June 19, at The Democracy Center.

With the Curmudgeons billed alongside +HIRS+, Hard Nips, and Ursula, it’s sure to be an evening of nonstop energy and melodic retaliation. Then come the next two days, a packed bill featuring the likes of Malportado Kids, Aye Nako, Trophy Knife, and more.

“Sometimes you need to fight for space to help foster the kind of shows and scene you’d like to be a part of,” Donohue explains. “I wish every show that was an all-locals show was a benefit for a worthy cause, and I wish every show highlighted artists who represent many different identities and experiences.”

To help with that process, the festival features a series of hands-on workshops led by well-versed locals like Deconstructing Anti-Blackness, Active Bystanders, and classes on responding to disclosures.

Last year they raised $5,789 for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. This year we’re determined to help them raise even more, and to make the fight for equality a quicker, smoother, and more loving process.

Can’t go? Lend a hand anyway. “Get involved with BARCC,” says Donohue. “Support and book artists on local shows that aren’t just made up of straight white males; that’s lazy and happens all too often.”

>> JESSICA PRATT W/ RYLEY WALKER. TUE 6.23.

GREAT SCOTT, 1222 COMM AVE., ALLSTON. 617.779.0140.

9PM/18+/$10. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT GREATSCOTTBOSTON.COM.

>> SMASH IT DEAD FEST. FRI 6.19 - SUN 6.21. DEMOCRACY CENTER AND YMCA CAMBRIDGE. 6:30PM/ALL AGES/$10.

FACEBOOK.COM/SMASHITDEAD

MUSIC EVENTS WED 6.17

THU 6.18

SUN 6.21

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 8pm/18+/$15. sinclaircambridge.com]

[House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston.

7pm/all ages/$27-37. houseofblues.com]

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 7pm/18+/$20. sinclaircambridge.com]

A-MURICANA HONEYHONEY + SONYA KITCHELL

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“EXPERIMENTALT” BLONDE REDHEAD + TALK IN TONGUES

MON 6.22

ALT + INDIE MIXED BAG BRAZIL + ANIMAL FLAG + CLEARANCE + PALM SPRING LIFE

[Charlie’s Kitchen, 1000 Mass Ave., Cambridge.

8:30pm/21+/$5. charlieskitchen.com]

TUE 6.23

WED 6.24

[Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave., Allston. 9pm/18+/ $10. greatscottboston.com]

[Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave., Boston.

7pm/18+/$20. crossroadspresents.com]

TIMELESS SINGER-SONGWRITER JESSICA PRATT + RYLEY WALKER

SAD HAPPY DANCING REAL ESTATE + WILLIAM TYLER

%RVWRQ·V Best Irish Pub

DOWNSTAIRS WED 6/17

BILLY’S BAND (ST. PETERSBURG)

SUNDAYS

MONDAYS

DOUBLE TAP

MAKKA MONDAY

Weekly Gaming Night: The same guys who bring you Game Night every week at Good Life bar are now also running a special Sunday night.

14+yrs every Monday night, Bringing Roots, Reggae & Dancehall Tunes 21+, 10PM - 1AM

21+, NO COVER,

THURS 6/18

GBH, TOTAL CHAOS THE WELCH BOYS

512 Mass. Ave. Central Sq. Cambridge, MA 617-576-6260 phoenixlandingbar.com

6PM - 11:30PM

FRI 6/19

TUESDAYS

WEDNESDAYS

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER THE LUDLOW THIEVES

THIRSTY TUESDAYS

GEEKS WHO DRINK

SAT 6/20

LEEDZ: TRAPPED IN THE 90S FT. FLOORLORDS WED 6/24

SHONEN KNIFE / CJ RAMONE

PETTY MORALS

UPSTAIRS WED 6/17

DAVID LIEBE HART (OF TIM & ERIC’S SHOW) GYMSHORTS, BLACK BEACH THURS 6/18

ILLEGALLY BLIND

KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD + MORE FRI 6/19

WESTERN EDUCATION SAT 6/20

BOWERY PRESENTS:

SUPERHEAVEN SUN 6/21

TIM BARRY NORTHCOTE, ALLISON WEISS MON 6/22

LEEDZ PRESENTS:

CES CRU (STRANGE MUSIC) TUES 6/23

THE ATARIS THE OKAY WIN

Live Resident Band The Night Foxes, Playing everything Old, New & Everything Inbetween 21+, NO COVER, 10PM - 1AM Live Stand Up Comedy from 8:30PM - 10PM with no cover!

Free Trivia Pub Quiz from 7:30PM - 9:30PM

RE:SET WEDNESDAYS

Weekly Dance Party, House, Disco, Techno, LoFDO ,QWHUQDWLRQDO '-·V 19+, 10PM - 1AM

THURSDAYS

FRIDAYS

SATURDAYS

ELEMENTS

PRETTY YOUNG THING

BOOM BOOM ROOM

15+ Years of Resident Drum & Bass Bringing some of the worlds ELJJHVW 'Q% '-·V to Cambridge 19+, 10PM - 2AM

·V 2OG 6FKRRO 7RS Dance hits 21+, 10PM - 2AM

·V ·V ·V 2QH +LW Wonders 21+, 10PM - 2AM

THE BEST ENTERTAINMENT IN CAMBRIDGE 7 DAYS A WEEK! 1/2 PRICED APPS DAILY 5 - 7PM RUGBY WORLD CUP SHOWN LIVE, STARTING ON SEPTEMBER 17TH WATCH EVERY SOCCER GAME!

927(' %26721·6 %(67 62&&(5 %$5 ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE Saturdays & Sundays Every Game shown live in HD on 12 Massive TVs. We Show All European Soccer including Champions League, Europa League, German, French, Italian & Spanish Leagues. :20(1·6 :25/' &83 Come watch the Womens World Cup at The Phoenix Starting June 6th CHECK OUT ALL PHOENIX LANDING NIGHTLY EVENTS AT:

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ACK-FEST

A cheat sheet to the upcoming Nantucket Film Festival

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Our summer preview issue was last week, but to see the movies opening throughout the season, you’d do well to consider a festival starting next week. The Nantucket Film Festival will be playing movies slated to open in Boston throughout the summer, so here are some seasonally appropriate hot takes on the best and worst.

SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE [RATED R. LIMITED RELEASE BEGINS ON FRI 8.21] Leslye Headland won us over immediately with the incomparably mean-spirited Bachelorette. Her latest eases up on the cruelty: Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie play a pair of “just friends” fighting off their desire for one another. The romcom hallmarks are all here, right down to the wacky BFF who’s here only to offer Brie dating advice. Then Headland’s script stops for zipped-up arguments about fingering techniques, or for sexting sequences represented via text-on-screen.

She follows the genre’s blueprint, but she works blue while she does it.

THE END OF THE TOUR [RATED R. LIMITED RELEASE BEGINS ON FRI 7.31] David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) interviews David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) right after Infinite Jest is published—meaning he has to unravel the mystique, while Wallace protects it. One beautiful moment ensues: they go to see Broken Arrow.

A shot gives us the story of the entire movie. Wallace looks forward, his strange psyche entirely engaged, while the befuddled journalist can’t help but stare— awed and somewhat annoyed—at his peer. Otherwise, the camera pans, moves, and searches for a way of telling this talky story in a visual manner, never finding one. It’s as lost as Lipsky.

THE WOLFPACK [RATED R. OPENS AT THE KENDALL SQUARE CINEMA FRI 6.19] Documentarian Crystal Moselle saw five brothers walking the street, with modelish good looks, dressed like the cast of Reservoir Dogs. She followed them home to find that they rarely left it: Their father raised them as shut-ins, letting them spend their time obsessing with and re-enacting movies instead of socializing. Moselle gives them this film; their recreations and visual art command entire passages. The resulting profile is often shapeless, but the story itself—drawing together mass-level commerce and street-level cultishness—is irresistably beguiling.

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL [RATED PG-13. OPENS IN BOSTON-AREA THEATRES FRI 6.19.]

Earl is a racist’s caricature of an African-American teen—he never goes to class, and considers women solely on the basis of “dem titties.” The “Me” is Greg, a white high-schooler suffering from Max Fischer syndrome. (He’s charming and creative, but also self-centered, and needs to get laid.) And the dying girl is just that—an ill classmate who exists only to teach Greg about what matters in life, Fault in our Stars-style. This is the nadir of years of post-Rushmore bildungsromans about sad-but-quirky boys who flourish thanks to the help of otherwise-disposable side characters. Just the worst. >> NANTUCKET FILM FESTIVAL. WED. JUNE 24 - MON. JUNE 29.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT NANTUCKETFILMFESTIVAL.ORG

FILM EVENTS

Spread the word!

THU 6.18

INGMAR BERGMAN’S

SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT

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[Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge.

4:45, 7, 9:15pm/NR/$9-11. brattlefilm.org]

THIS IS A GREAT TITLE

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE [Museum of Fine Arts. 465 Huntington Ave., Boston.

3:30pm/PG-13/$9-11. Also plays Fri 6.19. mfa.org]

FRI 6.19

A PRE-EXORCIST EXORCISM

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET

[Harvard Film Archive. 24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 9pm/NR/$7-9. hcl.harvard.edu/hfa]

NIGHT ONE OF A SAMUEL FULLER RETROSPECTIVE

[Harvard Film Archive.

24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7pm/NR/$7-9. hcl.harvard.edu/hfa] SAT 6.20

BROOKLYN BREWERY MASH PRESENTS ANIMATION BLOCK PARTY

[Somerville Theatre. 55 Davis Sq., Somerville. 2pm/NR/$5. somervilletheatreonline. com/somerville-theatre]

THE DEMON

TUESDAY 6.23

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE, PREMIERE SCREENING THE TRIBE

[Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle St., Cambridge.7pm/ NR/$10-12.]

Parkway Cycle 1865 Revere beach Parkway

Everett, MA | 617-389-7000 | parkwaycycle.com

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FILM

BAD DAD

Critically revisiting The Shining

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Stephen King famously has a beef with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining: He thinks Jack Nicholson looks too damn crazy for the lead role. King says the character demands an actor who can believably embody an arc that carries him from kindly dad to crazed killer—not an actor who seems crazed every moment of the day.

Judge for yourself when the Brattle plays The Shining on Father’s Day. But— not to throw shade at Stephen King—Kubrick’s films were after something far more elusive than well-worn downfall narratives. It’s no accident that the three members of the family already look bored with each other during the first ride up to the Overlook. Kubrick didn’t want to see the all-American family break down— he wanted to explore the idea that they’re inherently broken.

Think of the scene where Jack speaks to his son, assuring him that he loves him, and would never hurt him. Kubrick lets Nicholson undercut every sentimental word with violent gestures, living proof of a disconnect between his obligations and his desires.

The menace is terrifying, not because of a contrast with an earlier scene, but because it speaks to the contradiction at the heart of the relationship everyone has with their father: Dads, by nature and necessity, play the role of both Don't forget benevolent caretaker and malevolent your dad on arbiter of parental justice—and Father's Day, they do so at the whims of their own Danny! mood. Kubrick’s Shining isn’t about a “downward character arc;” it’s about something much scarier: family. >> THE SHINING. RATED R. BRATTLE THEATRE. 40 BRATTLE ST., CAMBRIDGE. SAT 6.20. 6PM. $9-11.

FILM

DOPE INTERVIEW

A chat with Shameik Moore, star of Dope

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Actors need confidence. But Shameik Moore—who plays his first lead role in Dope, a Superbad-by-way-of-black-culture teen comedy opening this weekend— has more than that. Speaking to us months after a successful premiere at Sundance, he’s downright cocky.

“The way I think is: When I get the chance, it’s going to be the biggest movie out there. So did I expect this response? Yes, I did. I’m thankful for it—but I did expect it.”

Moore, who played tiny parts in a few movies and had been uploading his own rap videos to Youtube, was living in Atlanta when he got the call for Dope.

Less than a week later, he was out West watching movies with his co-stars (“[A$AP] Rocky showed me Boyz n the Hood, Menace 2 Society, Superfly.”)

Then he was cutting the soundtrack—his character’s an old-school rap nerd fronting an indie band—with Pharrell.

When we asked if he was concerned he’d been seen as an actor-first, musician-second, he (no hesitation) compared himself to Drake. Then he told us his master plan.

“It doesn’t matter if you see me as an actor first, because I can sing, and I can make great music. Period. If I put my heart and soul into what I’m doing, then you’re going to receive it the way I want you to receive it. I’m recording an album while I’m shooting The Get Down [a Netflix series directed by Baz Luhrmann.] Then I’ll hit you guys with the tour.

Then I’ll blow up.” >> DOPE. RATED R. OPENING IN BOSTON-AREA THEATRES FRI 6.19 24

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JURASSIC WORLD If you didn’t know that ’90s nostalgia has hit critical mass, then see the new Jurassic Park film—judging by the box office receipts, you probably have already. Every single sequence in the Chris Pratt-lead sequel is centered around callbacks to Steven Spielberg’s original film. Have you been waiting 20 years for another look at the dino that blinded that film’s secondary villain? You’re in luck! Then the film has the nerve to make jokes about the overbranding of stadiums and theme parks. This whole film’s a branded advertisement—reinforcing our reverence for a film we already saw 20 years ago.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD Max is almost mute. Car chases fill the entire running time. Backstories are illustrated using only the scars and wounds on character’s bodies.

Fury Road speaks to us visually—it’d work entirely without sound. There’s only one verbal motif: Who killed the world?, shouted by the film’s six heroines toward the patriarchal figures who scorched their planet.

Scoff at the inclusion of progressive politics in a film this unashamedly violent, but everything eventually clicks together. We see a world in need of tearing down. Fury Road finds great cinematic beauty doing exactly that.

PITCH PERFECT 2 The first Pitch Perfect played in the sandbox with Mean Girls—it was another teen comedy about an outsider being indoctrinated into a bitchy subculture. But the sequel sacrifices those story beats, instead stringing along a series of underdeveloped subplots. (It’s more like Spice World.) The humor has taken a hit, too. New director Elizabeth Banks instills a hatefully stereotypical tone: The gay girl is mean, the fat girl is sloppy, the Germans are stern, and so on ad infinitum. If that doesn’t offend you, the general artlessness probably will.

RESULTS Personal trainer Kat (Cobie Smulders) spurns smitten customer Danny (Kevin Corrigan), expecting him to politely terminate their working relationship. Instead, he befriends her boss Trevor (Guy Pearce) and buys half of the gym. The love triangle that emerges is standard—but the way it plays out is anything but.

Danny’s plagued by lust, Kat by fury, and Trevor by an inability to let anyone into his life as easy as they’re let into his bed. Genre cliches get imbued with the messiness of sexual psychology. Results takes the romcom and makes it human.

FILM SHORTS BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN ENTOURAGE There’s a moment when the non-plot pauses so a series of supermodels can stare directly into the camera’s frame—just so we can stare back.

But it also gives us a moment to wonder: Why did I pay to watch this mediocre TV show on the big screen?

Entourage: Movie Version is but a failed act of career maintenance perpetrated by its already forgotten actors, as embarrassing to watch as it must have been for Mark Wahlberg to appear in. He plugs Ted and Wahlburgers in his two minutes onscreen—his shameless salesmanship becomes the film’s sole impressive quality.

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT Harley, a New Yorker, is an addict.

Directors Benny and Josh Safdie observe her whole routine—reselling stolen goods, negotiating for couch space, begging for a fronted bag. But they do so from the outside looking in. Shots are composed from across the street, or from outside glass windows. And the views are obscured by uncaring commuters, or by ads for Dunkin’ Donuts and Duane Reed.

What other movie is this astute about urban life? Corporations mark the territory, the poor scurry through gathering scraps—and the working class walks by, apathetic, considering themselves lucky.

I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS You hear that this stars Blythe Danner as an elderly woman being seduced by the gentleman from the country club (Sam Elliot), and you think you know what to expect: romance so gentle that it could be knocked over by a slight wind. But you’re wrong. Writer/director Brett Haley swings between subplots ranging from the innocuous (Danner meets a drinking buddy, played

by Martin Starr) to the tragic (we start off with a dead dog), painting a portrait of the character’s life. He slowly stuns you with sneaky, lifesized expanse.

INSIDE OUT It’s a head trip: The new Pixar movie takes place inside a teenage girl’s psyche, where characters like Joy (Amy Poehler) and Anger (Lewis Black) dictate her actions. The stakes are low—her family moves, and some non-humans get lost, just like Toy Story—and the resulting drama is inevitably inert. But who cares?

The beauty is in the details, like say in the way the emotions’ bodies are rounded off by amorphous blobs of energy rather than by hard lines.

Dramatizing chemical imbalances is admirable, but doing it with such aesthetic vigor? That’s beautiful.

NEWS TO US

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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

25

COMEDY

Thursday June 18 8PM Bill Blumenreich Presents:

CAMERON ESPOSITO (Comedy)

Thursaday June 18 10Pm

#TBT THROWBACK THURSDAY DANCE PARTY hosted by DYSKO (Dance Party) - Free

Thursday June 18th - 7pm

COMEDY

NIGHT

DJs: Chris Pennie, Tim Sturtevant, Anjan Biswas + Cut-Throat Comedy Genres: Comedy No Cover | Downstairs | 21+

PICO Friday June 19th - 10pm

PICANTE DJs: Special Guest TBA, Riobamba, Ultratumba Genres: Tropical Bass, Digital Cumbia, Global Bass $5 before 11pm, $10 after Downstairs | 21+ Friday June 19th - 10pm

UNITY

Friday June 19 7PM

CARAVAN OF THIEVES

(Gypsy Swinging Circus Freaks) Friday June 19 10PM

MISS TESS & THE TALKBACKS + THE WILES (Songwriter/Blues/Swing/Country/ Folk) Saturday June 20 7:30PM

SLEEPY LABEEF’S 80TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION +

ROY SLUDGE, ANDREA GILLIS, MARC PINASKY, DJ EASY ED (Rockabilly) Wed June 24 7PM

PAPA MALI RECORD RELEASE (Blues/Soul/Funk) Every Sunday Open Blues

Dr. Grant & The Medical Marijuana Band 17 HOLLAND ST., DAVIS SQ. SOMERVILLE (617) 776-2004 DIRECTLY ON T RED LINE AT DAVIS

SWEET SHOP

DJs: Pittsburgh Track Authority, Matt McNeill, CS, DJ Brek.One Genres: House, Techno $10 | Downstairs | 21+

Free | Downstairs | 18+ until 10pm

June 25th 7:30pm

Lee Ann Womack

(Country/Grammy Award Winner)

(Country)

Fri July 10 7:30PM

EMISUNSHINE (10 Year old Virtuoso Gospel and Americana)

28 KINGSTON STREET

DOWNTOWN BOSTON GOODLIFEBAR.COM

617. 4 51 . 2 6 2 2 GOODLIFEBOSTON GOODLIFEBAR GOODLIFEBAR 26

06.17.15 - 06.24.15

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BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF Since 2009, New York-born Rannazzisi has been starring as Kevin MacArthur on FX’s fantasy sports comedy The League, alongside the hilarious Nick Kroll and their castmates (which includes Maine-born actress Katie Aselton). Additionally, his stand-up tours have had him cross the country several times over the last 13 years.

Now he’s in town taping his upcoming Comedy Central special at the Wilbur Theatre on June 21, so I caught up with him to talk about Boston drivers, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and why Nick Kroll would make a fine sweater.

As a pretend sports league commissioner, how would you have handled Deflategate had it landed in your lap?

It’s pretty ridiculous. I think people are making too big a deal out of it. [And] I’m a New Yorker. We’re bred to hate anything to do with Boston, the Red Sox, and the Patriots.

Let’s talk about your new Comedy Central special. Why film it in Boston?

I was asked [by Comedy Central] where I’d like to shoot my next special. First place that came to mind was if the Wilbur is open or available that would be the perfect spot. I love the area and the venue.

You’ve shot doomed pilots with both Heather Locklear and Bradley Cooper.

Who’s prettier?

I don’t know how old [Locklear] was when we did the pilot, but she would rival any 25-year-old on the street. A genetic freak. Bradley, all smoke and mirrors with him. He’s not that good looking. I’m much better looking. If you like nice hair and a structured symmetrical face, I guess you’d be down with Bradley Cooper.

You’re turning 38. Do you feel like you’re in your mid-thirties or late thirties?

I feel like I’m 65.

If he was an item of clothing what would he be?

He’d be a nice warm sweater.

You’re protected, but you will always be a little itchy, a little “blech.”

Saturday June 20th - 10pm

GAME NIGHT

Steve Rannazzisi on Deflategate, Nick Kroll, and Boston

How is Nick Kroll to work with?

He’s great to work with.

Wait no, he’s a monster. You can write that down. He’s a monster to work with. Human garbage.

DJs: Adam Rios, Francesco Spagna, Cruzz Genres: Classic, Deep, & Soulful House $5 before 11pm, $10 after Upstairs | 21+

Tuesday June 23rd - 6pm

LEAGUE PLAY

Fri July 31 7:30PM

TED DROZDOWSKI’S SCISSORMEN plus PETER PARCEK (Americana/Roots)

17 Holland St., Davis Sq. Somerville (617) 776-2004 Directly on T Red Line at Davis

Where does Paul Blart: Mall Cop fall in the pantheon of comedic films?

[Laughs] when we were making it we knew we weren’t signing on to go to the Academy Awards.

There was a sequel right?

I knew I wasn’t going to be called back for that. There was no reason for [my character] to return.

Do you have a go-to Boston anecdote?

Yes. I was in town once and walking through the park, I think. While crossing the street, I was wearing my Yankees hat, and this guy slowed down and swerved in my direction and almost hit me. He rolled down his window as he drove past, after I almost shit my pants, and he just yelled: “Get the fack outta heah.” And I was like, “Ah, welcome to Boston.”

Just for your hat?

Just for wearing a Yankees hat. Just crossing the street, minding my own business. I wasn’t yelling, “Go Yankees!” or “Fuck the Sox!” or something. I was just a human being wearing a piece of clothing. In fact, I take it back. Nick Kroll would be a Yankees hat in Boston. >> STEVE RAZZANNISI. PLAYING THE WILBUR THEATRE JUNE 21.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT THEWILBUR.COM

Sara Bareillies, Composer of WAITRESS

Great theater lives here.

WAITRESS

GHOST QUARTET

A new musical based on the film, music & lyrics by Sara Bareilles

A song cycle about love, death, and whiskey

NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 Based on a scandalous 70-page slice of War and Peace

NICE FISH

Mark Rylance brings the acclaimed prose poems of Louis Jenkins to life

KANSAS CITY CHOIR BOY Featuring Courtney Love & Todd Almond

SONG OF A CONVALESCENT AYN RAND GIVING THANKS TO THE GODHEAD (IN THE LYDIAN MODE) A true story of a boy and his migraines

1984

ONE CHILD BORN: THE MUSIC OF LAURA NYRO

A seering adaptation of George Orwell’s book

One of the 20th Century’s most influential songwriters

ROOSEVELVIS

UBU SINGS UBU

A hallucinatory road trip from the Badlands to Graceland

IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD

Starring Tony Torn and Julie Atlas Muz

H.M.S. PINAFORE

The final installment of The Hypocrite’s zany Gilbert & Sullivan trilogy

Written & performed by Tony Award-winner Eve Ensle

Season tickets from $99

americanrepertorytheater.org NEWS TO US

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ARTS

FOUND AND FOUND Q&A with Found Magazine’s Nick Prueher

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON

Make no mistake about it: DigBoston was among the first publications anywhere to lose its hipster mind wholeheartedly over Found Magazine and its compendiums of random junk. The same goes for its blog and roving Found Footage Festival, which comes through Brookline on Thursday in its incarnation “A Salute To Weirdos.” Offered a preview of some items the festival has on the road with it, we threw a couple of queries at Found co-founder Nick Prueher about why he’s bringing this particular junk to our city …

With so many people making instructional videos these days—you can YouTube for a how-to on changing the RAM out of a specific type of computer, for crying out loud—what does it take for an old instructional gem to really stand out?

NP: For me, I think it’s hard for anything online to recreate the sort of wide-eyed innocence and naïveté that people had during the VHS era. In the ’80s and early ’90s, VHS was a new technology and people were still figuring out how things worked and trying out new ideas, many of them ill-advised. Nowadays every laptop comes with a built-in camera and editing software so people are savvier.

What really sets the “Magical Rainbow Sponge” apart from other instructional videos is the over-the-top enthusiasm of the host, Dee Gruenig. With every pattern she makes with her paint-covered sponge, she lets out a series of excited yelps— there’s nothing forced about it, she is genuinely ecstatic about sponge painting. I wish I could be that excited about anything. We actually hired a private detective to track down Dee, and I’m proud to say we’ve found her and are hoping to meet her one day. Ironically, she doesn’t sound too excited about the prospect.

Do you watch a lot of community access TV these days? I do, and I feel like it’s just not as weird as it used to be. Not so much fun anymore. Do you find that to be the case? Is it because all the eccentricity is online?

NP: [Co-host] Joe and I spend a lot of time in hotels, so we still watch a lot of public access TV late at night after our shows. There is still a lot of good stuff on there—religious weirdos, terrible bands, call-in shows. Back home in New York, we recently discovered a show called Sci Fi Ninja Theater where a short guy in a ponytail conducts awkward interviews at horror conventions, and we can’t get enough. As always, you have to wade through a lot of boring public affairs shows and nursing home lunch menus to get to the good stuff. Luckily, we’re more than willing to do that so you don’t have to.

You claim to be bringing a throwback clip of “consummate weirdo Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 1983 travel video called ‘Carnival In Rio,’ seductively feeding a woman a carrot.” Where the fuck did you find this, and how much of a boner did you get upon realizing what it was? Is this something that could have stopped his political career in its tracks back in the day?

NP: Oh man, I’ll never forget it. I had just moved to New York and was browsing around at a video rental store when I found a tape called “Carnival in Rio” for sale in the bargain bin for $2. We were already big video collectors at the time, so when I saw it was hosted by pre-Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger I knew it was something special. Essentially, a producer sent Arnie to Rio during Carnival in 1983, hired a few Brazilian escorts for him and said, “Go nuts!” And he does, harassing and groping just about every woman in sight. I was working at the Late Show with David Letterman at the time, and we ended up playing incriminating clips from it during Schwarzenegger’s run for governor, but it didn’t matter.

People are willing to overlook those sorts of things when a muscled man from the movie screen is up for election. >> FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL ‘SALUTE TO WEIRDOS.’ THU 6.18.

COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE, 290 HARVARD ST., BROOKLINE. 9PM/ALL AGES/$9.

FOUNDFOOTAGEFEST.COM. COOLIDGE.ORG 28

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29

SECRET ASIAN MAN

BY TAK TOYOSHIMA @TAKTOYOSHIMA

THE STRANGERER

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY WHATS4BREAKFAST.COM

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

SAVAGE LOVE

JACKHAMMER

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE I’m a 25-year-old heterosexual female, and I’ve been in a longterm friends-with-benefits relationship for a little more than four years. My FWB partner and I have recently decided to move from being FWB to actually dating. The issue is that we’ve both become so accustomed to the late-night sexting-and-hookup routine that going on dates seems awkward and forced. It doesn’t help that neither of us has been in a relationship before, so we both feel a little in the dark on how to navigate this. I really do like the guy (and our sex life is amazing), but I’m not sure how to move past the in-between phase we’ve found ourselves in. Have we been in FWB-land too long to come back?

Lost In Datingland Dating is what people do before entering into a relationship— or it’s what most people used to do—and you two are already in a relationship. It was a FWB relationship, yes, but it was still a relationship. And people in relationships don’t typically go out on dates. So, yeah, the reason going out on a date with your boyfriend feels awkward is because you’re not dating, LID, not at this stage. You’re together. So be together: Go places, do things, have dinner, see friends, go home, sex amazingly. Spend more time together, build on what you’ve already established, (ie, the emotional and sexual connection that carried you 30

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through the last four years), and stop stressing about performing the roles of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.”

Recently, while masturbating, as I was approaching climax, I had a sharp pain in my abdomen. It felt like my intestine wanted to burst though my abdomen, kind of like a hernia. It really sucked and it ruined my orgasm. This has happened a handful of times in the past. I mentioned it to my doctor once, and I tested negative for a hernia. I’m a 52-year-old male in reasonably good shape; I’ve been going to the gym on the reg for the past few months. This sucks in that when my wife and I play, part of it involves my wife putting me in four-point restraint, masturbating me, then tickling me post-orgasm. It would really suck for this to happen while tied up and has me concerned about our sex play. Advice, an explanation, or a good theory would be welcome.

Gut Ruins Orgasms, Addling Nerves I would advise you to speak to your doctor, GROAN, but I don’t think you should worry about this too much. And I would theorize that you tense a particular muscle or set of muscles when you masturbate and every once in a great while this muscle group revolts and spasms painfully; your return to gym going may have contributed to your most recent spasm.

So long as your doctor gives you the all clear, GROAN, I don’t think you should stop going to the gym—or masturbating, or letting your wife tie you to the bed. Risking the occasional spasm, however painful, seems a reasonable price to pay for regular orgasms and adventurous sex.

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