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NEWS

DOCUMENTS REVEAL “JUSTIFICATION” FOR POLICE MILITARIZATION DRINKS

BEE’S KNEES ALLSTON COFFEE TIME

DIGBOSTON.COM 8.12.15 - 8.19.15

JOHN ARTS

HODGMAN ON BOSTON, DRESSING LIKE DOCTOR WHO, & PODCASTS

EATS

HOW TO ND A B A S A T MAKE I

S K N U P S PUNK’ 5 TURN 2

THE FROGMORE

THE LOWLANDS THE SOUTH COME TO JP OF

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VOL 17 + ISSUE 32

AUGUST 12, 2015 - AUGUST 19, 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, Mitchell Dewar Christopher Ehlers, Renan Fontes, Bill Hayduke, Emily Hopkins, Micaela Kimball, 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

DEAR READER As the summer continues to wind down, it becomes ever more important to take advantage of what bright shimmering days are left.

Here’s a suggestion: Find yourself an unoccupied barstool or patch of sunny grass, throw on some background music or just let the urban hymn around you be just that, and settle in with this week’s issue.

If you’re feeling in the mood for something, anything, fiction-y that ideally involves at least one trampoline, well, you’re in luck. Just turn to Page 10.

(Related: You have very specific moods.)

If you’ve at all been following the fracas between the cab unions and the rideshare programs in the city (and if you’ve tried getting either of them lately, you no doubt have), take a sip of beer and turn directly to Page 8 for a venom-dipped distillation of the imbroglio as told through Boston media. Maybe take two sips.

Maybe you’re planning on taking in a film this week, and want to know what all the hubbub is about with that new Meryl Streep movie where she’s an aging rock star, written by the woman who wrote Juno and directed by the guy who did Silence of the Lambs. And if not, you gotta admit that’s a novel lineup, and the results can be found on Page 22.

Or if you’d just like to know what comedian John Hodgman does when at home, often in his underwear … … oh, you get it.

DAN MCCARTHY - EDITOR, DIGBOSTON

BUSINESS ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Marc Shepard OPERATIONS MANAGER John Loftus 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 Maine resident John Hodgman tells us what he thinks of Boston comedy and his underwear clad podcast. Photo by Bex Finch.

©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

DE-LIVERY-ANCE

noun dəˈliv(ə)r-ee-əns 1. The action of being rescued or set free from the constraints of the warring taxi and rideshare services in town in order to actually get where you’re going.

OH, CRUEL WORLD Dear Operator, Let me get this straight.

You’re claiming, “Due to an unexpectedly high call volume,” I have to wait forever on the phone to tell you just how badly my internet sucks. Really?!?

Is that right, you godless Fios earth controllers?!? Well it’s wicked late on a Thursday, so how many people besides me are really calling? Or maybe lots of people are ringing, in which case, how unexpected is my call after all?

Come to think of it, you probably get dozens of angry people like me every minute hollering at you dickholes. I’ll wait on the line, just please cut the bullshit. I would get another provider, but you appear to have a monopoly.

ILLUSTRATION BY AMY BOUCHARD

PUBLISHER Jeff Lawrence

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

3

NEWS US

THE DEFENSE OF OFFENSE NEWS TO US

Documents reveal “justification” for Mass police militarization

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 With coast-to-coast Black Lives Matter actions and remembrances this past week for the many killed by law enforcement all across America, we thought readers might be especially nauseated to know the lengths to which authorities in Greater Boston go to defend their militarized arsenal. Thanks to a report that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts recently obtained from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was in turn shared with DigBoston, the public has a brand new window into excessive defense spending, from spy cameras to urban tanks, and the view is even uglier than some critics imagined.

We spent hours digging through the 46-page “Investment Justification” for the “Boston Urban Area,” which was compiled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) branch of DHS to outline and defend expenditures. In some cases, the report lazily explains spy and other types of programs through which federal authorities funnel millions of dollars to regional and local forces in no more than a couple of sentences. More than anything else, the justification docs show that while spokespeople from the Boston Police Department and other crime-stopping outfits continue to sweet talk a doting media, claiming to be judicious in their militarization, in reality they’re at the center of a drastically metastasizing national armament trend.

If any of this sounds conspiratorial as President Barack Obama slows the flow of grenade launchers and tanks to municipal cops, consider all the other gear that still transfers with regularity between such agencies as DHS and the men and women who patrol our streets.

Furthermore, think about the ease with which police obtain these items, some of which are lethal, others of which seem either bizarre or wasteful. The Metro Boston Homeland Security Region (MBHSR), for one, feasts on fed dollars galore, and reports “a multitude of complex and diverse threats that pose high levels of risk to the people and critical infrastructures within its region.” Few would argue that such outfits do stand guard against “terrorism threats with high consequences,” as per their documented justification for funding, but in light of all the resources this robust apparatus consumes, and of how their sophisticated tools and trainings are paid for with public subsidies, the rationale for DHS largesse leaves much to be desired.

The newly surfaced report is based on in-house law enforcement research, which tends to favor costly militarized answers as opposed to mediative approaches. With information gathered from “the Boston Regional Intelligence Center as well as federal threat reports,” it identifies looming disasters ranging from “blister agents and toxic industrial chemicals” to “biological threats from weaponized aerosol anthrax,” from the disgusting-sounding “weaponized plaque” (we think they mean “plague”) to “zoonotic livestock diseases.” Not scared yet? MBHSR is also tasked with saving us from “vehicle borne improvised explosive devices,” “cyber threats,” “winter storms such as blizzards and ice storms,” and “hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, extreme heat, tornados, thunderstorms and lightning.”

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Throughout the FEMA report, authors pepper their validation of a homeland security spending spree with boilerplate You’re all gonna die scare tactics.

Behold: “The consequences of many of these threats include mass fatalities and injuries, physical damage, economic disruptions, and utility interruptions.”

Do you remember those menacing urban tanks and tricked out SUVs that police used during protests in Ferguson, Missouri? We’re getting more of them.

According to documents, the “MBHSR will embark on developing regional SWAT operations for our UASI region … This project will encompass the Boston SWAT team, Quincy SWAT team, North Metro SWAT team, and the Brookline Special Response Team (SRT) [and] utilize a total of [$707,620] in funding to enhance each of the aforementioned teams with special response vehicles, personal protective gear and training equipment.” We feel safer already.

Don’t forget Big Brother. In a line defending more than $2 million in spending, we learn “this investment area will seek to enhance the region’s critical infrastructure monitoring system through the enhancement of the existing data network, existing cameras, and the installation of new camera sites (stationary and quick deploy).” To boot, “this project will maintain the existing gunshot/explosion location systems throughout the region through continued system maintenance and will fund expansion to include additional geographic coverage.”

Other acquisitions seem more reasonable. Following the clear lack of coordination between federal agencies and local police departments before and after the Marathon bombing—as you may recall, the dispute over who should have preemptively sniffed out Tamerlan Tsarnaev ended in the FBI and BPD pointing fingers at each other—it may be good news that the government is pumping an additional $1.5 million into “collecting, analyzing, linking, producing and disseminating timely and actionable intelligence related to the public safety and homeland security threat environment.” To their slight credit, said investment is intended to “addresses a gap identified in the BRIC’s 2014 Fusion Center Assessment.” There are other potentially justifiable purchases—take, for example, the millions for “threats and hazard identification,” and for “mobile digital x-ray equipment which enables technicians to perform rapid assessment of hazardous devices.” Nevertheless, many of the explanations offered

by FEMA seem demonstrably understated.

Toward the end of the DHS justification document, descriptions get especially short and lazy, as if the person filling out the forms grew too fatigued to bother. In one case, the whole description for a $90,000 purchase reads: “Implement a risk management program capable of supporting regional risk analysis, and the prioritization and implementation of risk reduction strategies.” For a $250,000 item listed under “Strengthen All-hazards Recovery Capabilities,” the agency gives a mere two-word explanation: “Thira [Threat and Hazard Identification

STÖRMTRUPEN armed to the teeth to make you feel safe

707,620

$

and Risk Assessment] Info.” The convenience of acquiring equipment considered, according to the ACLU which surfaced these documents, it may be as important to examine what police departments opt not to purchase with their blank checks as it is to expose all the toys they have amassed.

“Last week, [BPD] Commissioner Bill Evans testified before the Boston City Council and the public that we should hold off on procuring body cameras for his police officers, in part because of the financial cost,” says Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty project at the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Even if the city got money from the federal government for the initial costs, Evans said, Bostonians might later bear the burden of picking up the tab once federal grants for body cameras disappeared.”

Crockford continues: “Ironically, we’ve never once THE DEFENSE OF OFFENSE continued on pg. 6

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THE DEFENSE OF OFFENSE continued from pg. 4

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heard a law enforcement officer invoke such reasoning to reject federal funds for surveillance cameras or militarized police equipment. To the contrary, the Boston Police Department has received millions of dollars through this DHS funding program to build a so-called ‘counterterrorism’ fusion center and to blanket our city in surveillance cameras … The BPD has accepted DHS and DOJ funds for staffing, surveillance, and equipment for decades, seemingly without fear that when the money dries up, local taxpayers will be on the hook. But when the talk turns to technology that would document police encounters with residents and offer a modicum of accountability, the police commissioner suddenly is worried about unfunded mandates. Anyone who sees this latest DHS grant application—just one among many like it—will find that excuse hard to swallow.”

BLUNT TRUTH

OVERDOSING ON STUPIDITY Political ignorance on cannabis continues

BY MIKE CANN @MIKECANNBOSTON Last week was a good one for local medical marijuana patients, as Patriot Care was granted a permit to open a medical cannabis dispensary on Milk Street in Boston after a third and final Zoning Board of Appeal hearing. The news came after an unnecessary battle with the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District, and on the heels of Mayor Marty Walsh doing what many marijuana advocates never believed would happen: he actually listened to constituents, then helped to break the logjam. “The concessions came a long way from where it started,” Walsh said about Patriot Care’s appeasement of their opposition.

In other news, however, it wasn’t long before authorities and pols in the Bay State got back to bashing marijuana reform, not coincidentally around the time that two groups—the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, and Bay State Repeal—officially submitted language for their separate pot legalization ballot initiatives. For starters, there’s notoriously intolerant state Rep. Colleen Garry, who brought heroin into the conversation. “We all see what opioids do,” the Dracut legislator told reporters. “I don’t think we should be adding fuel to the already raging drug issues in Massachusetts.”

This is all to be expected. But what’s important to acknowledge is how Garry ignores everything that science tells us about cannabis in relation to opiate use. A 2014 JAMA study, for example, titled “Lower Opioid Overdose Death Rates Associated with State Medical Marijuana Laws,” found that in states that implemented medical programs between 1999 and 2010, 25 percent less people died from opiate overdoses than in intolerant states like Mass at the time.

Then there’s Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans, who claims, “A lot of home invasions always seem to revolve around someone selling marijuana. Young college kids trying to supplement their income. We get a half-dozen every year where they invite regular city kids over and next thing you know, their door is getting broken down and they are getting robbed.”

There’s enough that’s wrong with that ridiculous comment to warrant an entire column of criticism, but at the very least, Evans doesn’t seem to understand that legalization would dramatically damage the black market, as has already proven to be true in Colorado.

And what was that we heard from Mass Attorney General Maura Healey? Oh yeah, she said that a conversation with her Colorado counterpart convinced her that, while there have been “some revenues and that was part of the motivation behind this,” “at the end of the day they’re seeing some real problems, particularly with the illegal drug and gun trafficking, because oftentimes guns go along with the drug trafficking there.” Healey must think that she can just say any old bullshit without getting called on it. In reality, violent crime has dropped in Denver since legalization. So has property crime for that matter.

Finally, there’s Governor Charlie Baker, who is blaming his stubborn position on the absurd notions of others. He recently told an interviewer, “I’m in the same place Mayor [Marty] Walsh and the attorney general are on marijuana, which is I don’t support legalizing it.” To think that these are the people who are fighting for us on the front lines in the battle against the over-prescribing of opiates.

And they wonder why the deaths continue.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

7

MEDIA FARM

CAB FAIR

Boston media does rideshare battle justice

BY MEDIA FARM @MEDIAFARM If other journalists are anything like us (that is to say, somewhat progressiveminded Greater Bostonians who like to actually get where they’re going) then the eternal flame war over free-wheeling enterprises like Uber—which surfaced yet again in local news rounds last week when traditional cab drivers in Cambridge picketed outside their City Hall—may present an ethical conundrum.

On one side, reporters tend to respect worker rights (not always, but for the most part), and are appalled that the enforcers of municipal medallion systems have done so remarkably little to curb the systemic abuse of drivers for decades.

On the other hand, as patrons ourselves, it is easy to be outraged over costly and in many cases nasty and neglectful taxi services. So we’ve been pleased to see that, for better or worse, almost every outlet we checked managed to apply some balance and restraint in covering this matter (no sarcasm). As Massachusetts legislators field at least two bills that would effectively bring services like Lyft and Uber closer to the regulations that are required of livery outfits, insurance liability and all, the tone of journalists may have an impact on the outcome.

When some of us from DigBoston were in San Francisco for a conference last year, certain journalistic counterparts from the Bay Area suggested that influential and boosterish tech media coverage helped Uber crush their adversaries in the press there, as arguably happened in New York as well. An image war still wages in San Fran, with Uber users looking down their thick black frames at the typically more artsy Lyft folk, who in turn consider Uber to be ridesharing for one-percenters; as for the initial war against old-fashioned cabs, innovation writers closed that chapter long ago.

With a plethora of neoliberal yuppies populating newsrooms in these parts, it’s surprising that more journos, from city desks to oped pages, haven’t run the taxi union out of town already. To their unanimous credit, from the Boston Globe to WGBH to the Metro, headlines simply brought attention to the issue (i.e.: “Cambridge taxi drivers strike to protest Uber, Lyft”). There were slight exceptions; you might say Wicked Local’s “Angry cabbies bash Uber, march on Cambridge City Hall” was somewhat aggressive, but overall even the Boston Herald, which has hunted cabbies in the past and isn’t known for sympathizing with immigrant labor forces, played the story down the middle.

One outlier, Tom LeCompte’s rant on WBUR’s Cognoscenti, reminded readers of the underwhelming nature of last Monday’s demonstration. But while snark and lippy observations are welcome, it’s probably best for the media to restrain themselves from piling up on yellow cabs, or, on the other side, from demonizing any particular rideshare apps of the taxi apocalypse. We can do like our progressive friends in San Fran, who loathe Uber but embrace Lyft, but in a sense, we tried a similar tactic with Wal-mart, and while it seemed successful in the short term, now we have a Target down the street from Fenway Park.

FREE RADICAL

BID FROM THE DEAD

BY EMILY HOPKINS @GENDERPIZZA In the wake of the United States Olympic Committee’s decision to nix Boston’s bid for the 2024 Summer Games, the city and its people reacted in a fashion reminiscent of the Wicked Witch death dance from The Wizard of Oz. The dragon had been slain, the money-sucking vampire vanquished.

Said excitement notwithstanding, anybody who believed the death of those dreams meant the bid will disappear are sorely mistaken, as Mayor Marty Walsh seems keen on keeping the zombie 2024 plans in play. Despite a resounding “no” from the people of Boston, major development remains a top-down process guided by the city’s elite. In his role, Walsh is sticking with ideas that were rejected. Why? Like his spokesperson told the Boston Herald: “Millions of private dollars were spent on the Olympic plans, and it’s critical that we take advantage of that work to move Boston forward.”

Those claims aside, the city doesn’t need whatever scraps of the bid that Walsh and his Boston 2024 pals want to salvage. What’s needed is legitimate community involvement. The process won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap or fast.

But like the people behind the Boston Olympic bid will probably tell you, it’s hard to manifest success when working in a rush behind closed doors.

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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

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EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN

FICTION

BY BEN HINSHAW

THE HOUSE SEEMED FINE

until she noticed the trampoline. A cheap old thing more weathered than worn out, it stood in the corner of the sunlit lawn, taunting Melissa as she smoked on the porch watching bees rove from flower to flower. Without hesitation she blamed its presence on her younger sister, who had arranged this trip for the two of them, only to bail with days to spare so she could go instead to Florida with a boyfriend who, in Melissa’s opinion—she had met him twice—was suspiciously polite. Suve was his name, short for something. Who could remember what?

Shirtless men were erecting a marquee in the garden next door, owned, so the ring-bound house handbook claimed, by the Zeldins, a “delightful” couple with two small children. She checked her phone—no signal.

Isolation was already enveloping her. She asked herself aloud if she mightn’t like a drink.

Monsegur was fifteen minutes away—she had passed through it on her drive from the airport. In the 10

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supermarket now she was reckless, selecting multiple cheeses and bottles of wine, strange vegetables, slabs of unidentified meat, tubes of extravagant cookies. This week of seclusion in the vineyards of Bordeaux had been conceived as a kind of regrouping. But that was before it had become a solitary affair—one featuring an old trampoline and a party to which she was not invited.

In her teens, trampolining had been her thing. At the encouragement of her PE teacher, Mr. Pitt, she’d competed in regional meets, qualifying at sixteen for the nationals.

Popular girls, her sister Nicola included, taunted her for spending more time with Mr. Pitt—a forty-something unmarried townie, tall, bearded, with enormous hands, owner of a navy blue VW Westfalia camper as well as a silver Kawasaki—than with boys her own age. But the truth was she thrived on his attention. As much as it was a discipline, a sport, trampolining was also a performance, and she knew no elation to match that of executing a flawless routine as Mr. Pitt watched with somber approval, arms crossed, nodding in his shabby sweats.

Her commitment had been total until, during one of four weekly after-class sessions, she lost concentration when her coach’s interest diverted visibly to a younger girl stretching on a nearby mat. The resulting fall demolished the ligaments in her right knee. Even after surgery and months of physio, the doctors were adamant. Mr. Pitt said it was a terrible waste. Heartbreaking, he said. But it was clear he’d already moved on, wrapped up in his latest protégé. That was fifteen years ago, more. She hadn’t set foot on a bounce mat since, though her recent attempts to forget about Jonathan had brought to mind the leadenlegged feeling of stepping down and walking away.

She texted Nicola from outside the supermarket— Arrived safely, house gorgeous—then sat in her rented Fiat for a while watching French wives load their own cars with groceries. One dropped a bag and shrugged as three oranges rolled away. Melissa was waiting for her sister to reply, fighting the urge to text Jonathan also, six weeks now since his letter. Flora is making me run with her, he’d written. In other words, she knows. His familiar childish

scrawl had prompted an unwelcome surge of affection.

I just hope you realize how much you have meant. She hadn’t written back but had added the letter to her collection of trinkets from their time together, a pathetic array of receipts and stolen cutlery she wasn’t yet ready to throw away.

Today was Saturday, the half marathon was tomorrow.

The instructions to her sister had been simple—get me out of Massachusetts that weekend! By which she meant—save me the indignity of clinging to a railing in Rockport, fighting for a glimpse of him sweating beside his wife! By the time her phone buzzed, the supermarket was closed. Good job, Miami a-mah-zing too! Suve says hi, how are you.

Twice a week they had gone to her apartment after work and spent an hour or two together, watching television afterwards, wallowing in bed like a real couple. With her, Jonathan had laughed at the same lame sitcoms he sneered at his wife for enjoying. He was liked by his staff, well-dressed but not showily so, stern when necessary but generous and approachable. His glasses were fashionable, if a touch too young for him, and every Monday he went to the barber for a trim and cutthroat shave. For most of her five months as his assistant, she had also been his mistress, a word he used often and to which she outwardly objected, though the prim authority it granted her always inspired a little thrill. Lover would have been a preferable term—one she knew he could never use. She went down on him once in his office, in the middle of the day with telephones ringing and door unlocked, just because he teased her that she didn’t have the nerve. After that it had all started to lose its sheen. She knew he would never leave Flora, wasn’t sure she even wanted him to. There were children too, three teenagers. The two daughters beamed out of picture frames on his desk—pretty, privileged, just the sort of bitches she’d hated at school.

Near the end, he asked her to name her favorite perfume, and returned from lunch carrying a small bag from Nordstrom, thick black paper embossed with gold.

Closing his door she turned to him with a conspiratorial smile, the thought of which later made her want to throw up. “Okay for tonight?”

He shook his head without looking up, typing on his laptop. “Anniversary. Two days ago, actually.”

She gave notice that same week. On her last day the whole floor gathered while he wished her well at a rival agency. Don’t give away our secrets, he said. Everybody laughed, clutching their little plastic cups of prosecco.

So, they knew all along. One of the other PAs gave her a long hug. Don’t look so blue, the woman said, we’ll all keep in touch.

----The commotion of the marquee party sounded strange, surrounded by so many empty acres. She wondered how far into the vines she’d have to walk to escape it. She imagined the guests—healthy and tanned, grinning in the flow of their idyllic lives—and lit another cigarette. By the time darkness settled, the wine bottle was empty.

A knock at the front door woke her—sprawled on the sofa, lamps on, laughter still audible. The man on the porch stood a polite distance back in a crisp shirt, chinos, expensive leather sandals. His thick dark hair was neatly cut and his teeth caught the light from inside as he smiled. He was stubbly, in need of a cutthroat blade. One eyebrow ran into the other.

With a firm handshake he introduced himself as Vincent Zeldin, the neighbor. The handbook said he was an orthodontist and she felt he looked like one. She ran her fingers through her sleep-flat hair as he apologized for the noise, gaze flicking beyond her into the house.

“You are alone?”

“Nicola went to Miami instead.” When he asked if she’d like to join them in the marquee—my birthday, he said— she indicated her outfit, her face. “Merci but I’m—a mess.”

He repeated the word and shook his head. “You are perfect!”

After he left she went straight to the mirror, adjusting her hair, sucking in her cheeks, pulling back her shoulders. Eyes too close together, wide nostrils, shiny forehead, dull and crooked teeth. Her figure was better— good legs and C-cups she got from her mother, not like Nicola. Getting a little top-heavy for the tramp, Mel, Mr. Pitt would say.

There was a crease down one side of her face from the sofa.

“Perfect,” she said.

----In shuttered darkness she woke with a headache and no idea of the time. On the white walls were mosquitoes she had killed, paint stained with smudges of their blood mixed with hers. The garden was wet from halfremembered morning rain and grey clouds packed the sky. She ate a tube of cookies on the sofa and tried not to think about the marathon. Later she strolled barefoot around the lawn. Dead apples, figs and plums lay scattered beneath their trees.

She approached the trampoline as if it were a seething hive. The mat was slick, the springs rusty. She mounted and for a while stood completely still, feeling the material stretch under her feet.

With faint movements of her toes she began to bounce, hardly breaking contact. Dizziness washed over her. In her knee, not pain so much as the memory of it. The rain started up again.

At four-thirty she opened a bottle of red and sat down with the guestbook. Everyone had remarked on the splendid weather, the incredible walks, the gardening. Most had taken trips to bastides and châteaux, rented bikes, ridden horses, played golf. Everything was just right, someone wrote, exactly what we needed.

----The morning walk to Taillecavat, longer than the handbook implied, took her past fields of sunflowers and vines slathered in light. Cows came to greet her, lowing over the wire, and in a garden there were tiny chicks, stumbling and chirping, yellow down ruffled by the breeze. As she entered the empty streets of the village, a dog trotted out, barked once and disappeared.

The bakery was closed. Fermé le lundi, the sign said.

She wondered if Jonathan had gone into work, if he could walk after yesterday. He probably had blisters all over his feet. She imagined bursting them for him with one of those little olive forks—there were two in her collection, lifted from their first lunch date.

Her phone buzzed. Guess who just got engaged! She gazed through the window at the empty shelves, trying to compose a response. The bakery is closed, she wrote.

Something more was needed but she couldn’t think what. She sent it like that and dropped the phone into her bag.

As she walked back a woman came jogging towards her in a vest and little shorts. They smiled as they passed. Just before Melissa reached the house the woman approached again, this time from behind, out of breath, her vest damp with sweat. She slowed, offered a clammy hand.

This was Claudine, the orthodontist’s wife. She looked twenty-six or -seven, with blue eyes and covetable cheekbones and the figure, Melissa thought, of a mother trying to get back to her best. There was desperation in her friendliness, a glimpse of endless hours at home with the kids.

“Our party is not bad for you? I send Vincent maybe to bring but you sleep, I think.”

Melissa blinked. “Oh. Yes, I was very—I mustn’t have heard the door.” Claudine invited her in for coffee. “Thank you but I have some work to do.” Why was she lying to this woman?

Later she looked over the bookshelf in one of the bedrooms. Her eye was caught by the name—Marguerite Duras—on a slim volume, The Lover. Duras was the name of a nearby town, one that both guestbook and handbook talked up. She pulled the book out and read NEWS TO US

the blurb. The word ‘devastating’ appeared twice. She put it back on the shelf, picked a dog-eared thriller instead.

Sprawled on a lounger, straps off her shoulders, she read in the sun. After a while she heard voices and car doors through the trees and sat up to see Vincent waving off Claudine and the children. When they’d gone he began to mow the lawn, his chest and shoulders thick with hair, hint of a gut above his orange shorts. She stood, removed her sunglasses, pulled her straps up.

The rusty springs creaked as she clambered up, the mat hot under her soles. She began slowly, building momentum as Mr. Pitt had taught her, creeping higher and higher as her confidence seeped back. With each leap the landscape opened up, snapping back again as she dropped. Beyond the trees, Vincent pushed his mower. She went through some of the basic moves— somersault, straddle, twist-to-seat. Each felt tremendous.

Why had she deprived herself for so long? Her hair was in her eyes—she hadn’t tied it back—but she sensed him watching, one hand up to block the glare, and his watching urged her on.

Her strength soon started to fade, her thighs burning.

Still she went into another somersault, in pike this time, digging what life she could from the old springs. But the take-off felt wrong, her trajectory was off, and before she was halfway over, she knew.

The immediate stillness after impact was shocking, the sudden pungent earth against her cheek. Her vision was all sparks as she rolled over, whimpering. Vincent appeared, crouching, his hand on her forehead, smiling like a man trained to inflict one pain with the intention of easing another. He lifted and carried her inside, his damp chest hair soft against her skin, setting her down on a familiar sofa strewn with cookie crumbs.

He fetched a glass of water, perching on the coffee table as she sipped. “You are okay,” he said. He looked older than the other night—middle to late thirties. His hair was pushed back off his sweat-slick forehead as he gestured towards the trampoline outside. “Wow! Fantastic!”

She shifted, wincing. There was pain in several places but the worst of it was in her knee, the jagged agony deep in the joint as familiar as the voice of a sibling. He traced his fingers down the leg from hip to ankle. “No fracture, I think.”

“It’s my knee.” She drank the rest of the water. “I know what it is.” She could smell him, the smell of a man’s body. Her breathing had steadied and her head was clearing but still everything seemed unreal. “Thank God you were here.”

He seemed to know it had all been for him. She glanced away as if caught out, but the pretence was thin.

As he took the glass and began to stand, she put her hand on his knee. He paused, then leaned to kiss her, on the forehead, cheek, mouth. She tasted sweat around his lips, coffee on his tongue, feeling a rush of something—the absence of remorse, perhaps. He knelt, tugging her bikini bottoms down and placing them on the low table like a surgical instrument he might need again. Sunlight in the room, his head between her thighs—too much. She closed her eyes. He rose up off his knees, his mouth finding hers.

Afterwards she looked away as he pulled up his shorts, straightening her bikini top. He handed her the bottoms like they were a cup to spit in. “Voilá.”

The mower started up again. The blanket underneath her needed washing and she carried it, limping, down to the machine. In the corner of the basement was a plastic paddling pool which she took out to the garden behind the house. With barely an inch of cold water in the bottom she stepped gingerly in and lay down, letting it fill up slowly around her until it overflowed.

-----

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EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN continued from page 11 The road to Duras wound through neat swathes of forestry, sunflowers, vineyards, weathered old houses.

The town was a warren of cobbled streets on a hill. On the roof of the château she lingered for an hour, looking out over the countryside, her knee throbbing despite painkillers. She tried to locate the house in the distance but could not.

A plaque at the edge of Place de Marguerite Duras seemed to say that the little square had been renamed for the writer after her death in 1996. Outside a shaded café in the corner she was greeted by a waitress, a big woman in her sixties with thin graying hair and glasses on a string around her neck.

“Marguerite Duras?” Melissa said, indicating the empty square.

The woman’s face brightened and she began to speak quickly, leaving Melissa to pluck translatable fragments from the stream—writer, very sad, alcoholic, Vietnam, famous, Nazis, sex, important, death. Then she switched unexpectedly to English: “You ‘ave read The Lover, yes?”

“Oh yes,” Melissa said. “Devastating.”

She drove on to Eymet, another bastide town with ancient walls and the same empty afternoon indolence.

At another café she tried to write a postcard but the platitudes wouldn’t come. She imagined sending one to Jonathan’s house, Flora presenting him with it at dinner. Stalls were setting up for an evening market. In the end she just wrote Wish you were here, dropping the card unaddressed and unstamped into the post-box she passed as she limped back to the car.

She was halfway home when her phone began to ring, its unexpected melody startling her. Pulling off the road onto the graveled shoulder she dug the thing out of her purse.

“Have you heard?” her mother said, unusually shrill.

“I got a text, yes.”

“Really? From who?”

They were talking about different things. Four women, all former pupils from the eighties and nineties, were pressing charges against Mr. Pitt, citing various incidents in the changing rooms and in the back of his camper. The news had just broken locally—he still worked at the school and Waltham was scandalized.

“Did he ever…?” Her mother’s voice got quieter. “You’d say, wouldn’t you, love? If he ever did anything to you?”

“Never,” she said.

A car went past. Through its rear windshield she saw two little girls looking back, sticking out their tongues, their faces screwed up. Her mother asked if she was surprised. She watched until the car disappeared around the corner.

“Not surprised exactly,” she said. “Maybe disappointed.”

“Yes,” her mother said. “I know what you mean.”

----Morning, her last full day at the house. In the corner of her room a spider hung in its web, surrounded by offspring, new overnight. Dozens of them, tiny things suspended in the gauzy mesh.

Around noon, lying out in the garden, she heard what sounded like a motorcycle tearing down a distant stretch of road. She imagined a silver Kawasaki, chassis glinting in the sun, until the whine was suddenly oppressively loud and as close as if it were inside her head.

The swarm surged up from behind the far trees, a teeming mass coming directly towards her.

In an instant she was on her feet and sprinting across the lawn, oblivious to the pain in her knee, not breathing, feeling the sound in pursuit, through the trees separating the houses and on into the Zeldins’ garden, to an open door and through it, slamming it behind her and moving down a hallway into a kitchen where she yanked shut one open window after another. Only then did she spin and see Claudine at the sink and two children at the table.

“Bees!” she screamed. “Bees are coming!”

The baby girl began to wail. The boy, two or three years old, covered his ears with his hands, squirming 12

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SHE APPROACHED THE TRAMPOLINE AS IF IT WERE A SEETHING HIVE. THE MAT WAS SLICK, THE SPRINGS RUSTY. SHE MOUNTED AND FOR A WHILE STOOD COMPLETELY STILL, FEELING THE MATERIAL STRETCH UNDER HER FEET. in his chair, the Lego blocks in his fists clattering to the tiles. For a moment Claudine seemed frozen, watching Melissa with wide eyes, but then she stepped into her path, shouting in French to stop, relax. Melissa circled the table, grabbing at her hair, panting, trying to calm down.

Things began to come into focus, the throbbing in her knee asserting itself. Frightening the children she forced a smile that seemed only to worsen her effect.

The baby kept howling and Claudine picked it up.

“The bees are not bad,” she said. “They only search for new nest.”

Abruptly aware that she wore only her bikini, Melissa folded her arms across her chest, then put her hands over her eyes and apologized. Claudine, her touch unexpectedly gentle, pulled her hands away. Melissa mumbled again that she was sorry and moved towards the door.

“Please, stay! This little monster will sleep now, yes? Etes-vous prêt pour une petite siesta maintenant ma chérie?” The French woman pulled out a chair and gestured for Melissa to sit. “Jean, s’il vous plait soyez gentil avec madame OK?” This she directed at the boy, who uncovered his ears reluctantly and fumbled again with his Lego. He had curly brown hair and a round face, a smudge of food on his chin. Something about his roaming gaze troubled Melissa until she realized—he couldn’t see her. As the two of them sat, she watched him, unsure whether to speak. He ignored her absolutely. The longer he did so, the more she felt exposed.

When Claudine returned she slipped a flimsy floral dress over Melissa’s shoulders. “Voilá.”

They ate cheese and bread, thin stringy ham, grated carrot, endives. They talked about bees, about life in Boston and life there, about the children, Jean’s blindness, work, the house.

“So you ‘ave nice man at ‘ome?”

Melissa shook her head. “My friends are all married though, having babies. Even my little sister. I don’t think I can stand another wedding.”

“But always there are men at weddings, no?” Claudine winked and for a dizzy moment Melissa felt that she would tell this woman everything—how her husband had kissed the artless tattoo on her hip as if it were a graze on a child’s palm, how he had torn down her bikini top and clawed at her breasts, how he had growled French filth into her ear—she would blurt it all out and this woman would only shrug and wink.

When Vincent came home just after four, Melissa saw him flinch. Claudine introduced her and explained about the bees. He laughed uncertainly. “Your leg is feel better?”

She felt her eyes widen. “Oh!” She dared not glance at Claudine but was sure she detected a pause in her movements, perhaps a slight frown. Vincent’s face warped into a weak, fearful grin. “Much better,” she said, “thanks.”

“You will stay for dinner?” he said quickly.

She declined. In English, Claudine asked him to walk Melissa back and check the place for bees, and after a pause in which she saw his mind working he picked up Jean and with the boy in one arm ushered her out the door.

“You don’t have to do this,” she muttered, two paces behind.

“No problem!” His voice was unrecognizable. “Jean is fight the bees, eh Jean?”

The child only blinked, head lolling drowsily. They passed under the washing line where the sofa blanket still swung in the breeze. At the far side of the porch, he stopped. “D’accord! No bees ‘ere eh Jean? Pas de mauvaises abeilles?”

She stepped into the house through the open glass doors and turned to face the two of them. Vincent’s eyes betrayed some kind of plea. The child hung in his left arm, glazed eyes flickering.

“I need to give you this dress,” she said quietly.

Frowning, he swallowed, his voice low now too. “Dress?”

“Your wife’s dress.”

“Ah.” His mouth sounded dry. “OK.” He was diminishing, there in front of her. His helpless gaze streamed into her, seeming to lift, to fill her up.

Slowly, eyes still locked on his, she pulled the dress up over her head and held it bunched in her hand. Standing in her bikini she saw the gaze drift down. She reached behind to unfasten the clasp, tilting her shoulders so the straps slid down and the top dropped silently. The faintest nod. With the child looking through her into the dark room behind, she tugged the bottoms down to the tiles, flicked them away and straightened. Breeze on her skin, holding out the dress, waiting for him to take it.

Vincent raised his free arm, reached for her breast.

Stepping back, she watched his head drop, fought to steady her hand. She held out the dress and closed her eyes, hoping when she opened them to find herself alone.

Ben Hinshaw used to be a Londoner but now calls California home. Find him online at benhinshaw.com Ben Hinshaw used to be a Londoner but now calls California home. Find him online at benhinshaw.com

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DEPT. COMMERCE DRINKS

JAVA SCRIPT

Surveying the coffee situation at the new Bee’s Knees Supply Co. in Allston

EATS

SOUTH LAND

Stop what you’re doing and go to The Frogmore now

BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF When opening a new restaurant in a highly congested landscape of ever-growing fantastic, unique chef-driven neighborhood eateries, confirmation that you’re doing something right can come in various forms.

Sometimes it’s a string of thanks and congratulations from diners. Other times it’s a shining Yelp review. But it’s when your dishes make diners longing for the food they grew up on well up in tears while eating that just speaks for itself.

And that’s what’s already happened at The Frogmore, Jamaica Plain’s latest opening in the former Centre St Sanctuary space (which closed earlier in 2015 after the brutal and relentless winter that was), courtesy of the crew that brought you Fairsted Kitchen in Brookline. And chef Jason Alvus says that’s all part of the plan.

“Andrew [Foster] and Steve [Bowman] have always tried to be a neighborhood restaurant first,” he says. “I live a block away from here. I love the area. This is what we’re trying to do, be a neighborhood restaurant to hit everyone on every level. We had a guy in [recently] from Charleston, who said, ‘Thank you, you saved a plane ride home for my anniversary.’

Had a woman come in and get emotional [too].”

Focusing on the food of “the lowlands” of South Carolina and the surrounding coastal region, Alvus says his long familial lineage in the southern foothills of South Carolina is the engine behind such tear-inducing menu items, which, when boiled down to their essential core, are in his words, “A lot of old, old shit.” And that’s not bragging.

“These are my grandmother’s pickled peaches—South Carolina state, blue-ribbon-winning pickled peaches,” he says while pointing to the pork chops. “They’re just really good.” He then notes the thin-cut meat with a smile. “I wanted to hold true to what I grew up with, and this is what I grew up with … They know this is the food I love and am passionate about.”

The soft-shelled crab and house-made Andouille sausage in the Frogmore Stew alone would be worth the trip, but if you need a little gentle coaxing, let the Lowcountry Board with pickled shrimp (“We’re working on getting fresh Florida gulf shrimp regularly,” says Alvus), ham hock rillettes, smoked oysters, and house-made field pickles seal the deal. And the produce will be mixed source. In one case it may be fresh okra from their Brookline, or crabs and seafood from Louisiana.

“When I can source things local, I will,” says Alvus. “But I won’t for the sake of sourcing local.”

Walking into the space feels a bit like entering what one could imagine is an overblown version of some grammammy’s enclave. Left over from Centre St Sanctuary are the church pews and gorgeous central bar made from old church doors and lined with ornate stained cathedral glass. (“The place had great bones,” says Foster.) But the walls are a mishmash of found hangables, lighting fixtures, random paintings and pictures with that kitschy sweet-scary vibe, and pineapple wallpaper. Which both Alvus and Foster say was a special point they intended to make.

“Pineapples historically were the ultimate representation of hospitality down South, because pineapple came from a very specific place. So to be able to go to a cocktail party and show up with a pineapple … everyone did this. It was just the ultimate gesture,” says Alvus. “You’d put it in the centerpiece of the table then eat it for dessert. We embrace tongue-incheek when we can, because it’s fun, and you gotta have fun at the end of the day.”

“The more you can eliminate the artificial the better,” adds Foster. “Making a place feel like a real home and embedding yourself into a community, you get to have that familiar experience you may have lost when you left home.” >> THE FROGMORE. NOW OPEN. 365 CENTRE ST., JAMAICA PLAIN. 857-203-9462. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT THEFROGMORE.COM 14

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To the anti-Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donutsis-not-good-coffee armies, the just-opened Allston location of Bee’s Knees Supply Co. brings good news: It’s open. And it’s the fully realized vision of owner Jason Owen’s nod to the coffeeshops of his native south.

“We celebrate the small makers here, [and] I think there’s an art to roasting coffee just like there is to making cheese or brewing beer,” says Owens, an admitted coffee super fan, who says his upbringing in Nashville—home to celebrated serious coffee bar Barista Parlour X Golden Sound, opened by a high school friend of Owens’ in partnership with members of the Black Keys—has fueled his fire for getting the coffee bar at Bee’s Knees off the ground.

“Boston is becoming more of a coffee culture town, so I wanted to create an environment that’s unpretentious, but with a sophisticated approach to serving coffee.”

Bee’s Knees is already working with different rotating roasters doing small batch stuff and novel things within the coffee scene, and Owens says one of the key things of the 20-seat coffee bar (yes, they also serve a killer grilled cheese) is the staff on hand to talk about the coffees, educate people, and become a true neighborhood joint unabashedly about appreciating well-made stuff.

The Allston location is the first spot in the Hub to feature Portland, Oregon, darlings Stumptown Nitro Cold Brew coffee on draft, which settles in the cup like a pint of Guinness constructing itself in creamy layers. “Now it’s just about keeping it in stock,” laughs Owens. They’re featuring Verve roasters out of California and Supersonic out of Seattle right now with more featured roasters to come (see: Four Barrel).

Besides regular cups of joe, there are mocktails using Stumptown Nitro layered with fresh local almond milk (“The real stuff,” says Owens) and some Luxardo cherry for a concentrated caffeine treat. The bar also offers siphon coffee using Japanese technology (by way of sixth grade chemistry, basically) where you brew coffee in a triple-filtered glass pot heated by a butane burner and stir several times though the process for a lighter and more nuanced flavor.

“You go into a lot of serious coffee shops and you may feel overwhelmed, or not know what to get or what to do; we just don’t want to have that kind of environment here,” says Owens.

“We don’t want people to feel intimidated by us having coffees they have never heard of or methods that they haven’t seen before, and for us it’s about giving something new to people, and hopefully ourselves.” >> BEE’S KNEES SUPPLY CO. NOW OPEN. 1314 COMM AVE., ALLSTON. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT BEESKNEESSUPPLY.COM

PHOTOS BY DAN MCCARTHY

BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF

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HONEST PINT

DRUNK HISTORY

A Q&A with the Mass-raised authors behind The Comic Book Story of Beer

BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF When you think about it, a graphic novel about the history of beer in all its forms is long overdue.

That’s why author Jonathan Hennessey, a Framingham-raised illustrator who went from working on Hollywood films (see: Rushmore) to comics, teamed up with childhood friend and Cape Cod-grown brewer Mike Smith after he led Hennessey on a tour of Mayflower Brewing in Plymouth during his time there.

Hennessey became enraptured by Smith’s beer history knowledge and acute storytelling abilities, involving all manner of beer trivia, factoids, and a deep understanding of beer’s place in the story of human civilization. He thought, “We have a graphic novel here.”

Beer and comics feel very compatible as a topic and a teaching tool.

JH: I would say that beer has always been the drink of the people, in most times of the world and most places of the world, and visual storytelling, be it medieval tapestries and down to cave paintings, has always been the art form of the people. So the drink and the art form of the people have just been waiting to be introduced, and this book puts the two of them together.

Mike, how did you get into beer?

MS: I had an appreciation for beer and had a science background, and got into homebrewing in [the] early ’90s when information was still hard to find on it.

This was the early days of craft beer. But everything kind of clicked. Beer doesn’t come from a store; it comes from human beings making it, so I just really started exploring different kinds of beers, which led to an apprenticeship at a brewpub in Austin [and later] a job cleaning kegs in Harpoon in Boston after moving back home. I became one of the lead brewers there and moved on to Mayflower Brewing in Plymouth, where Jonathan came in for a tour of the brewery, and that’s the spark that led to this book.

Jonathan, what were your first thoughts when you began considering this as a graphic history book?

JH: I loved the idea that someone could take something as common and beloved as beer and, for the reluctant learner of history, use that as a portal in to appreciate the full story of where beer comes from, what it’s done for humanity, where it’s going, and get this great sense of our place in the world through that.

What’s something you learned about beer from researching and publishing this project?

JH: I had a little of a sense of how old beer was, but not how ancient it is. Its development in trade has really given a lot to loosen the chokehold that the elites have always had on the common people. In medieval times, the nobility and the Church had a chokehold on the potential of the average human being. You couldn’t sell things one place to another because there would be charges and tolls for bridges, roads, etc. And very early on, it was a fact that when beer was developed enough with [the] introduction of hops, when you could actually sell it somewhere and not just drink it where it was made, there was a group of Germanic businessman who asserted [the] control of trade, took to the seas to bring beer and other products all over every ports where they could reach, and that began to upset the power structure that had held people down for millennia and led to progressive[ness] and liberalism that literally informed the French and American revolution, and the strength and freedom a person has today in their ability to harness their full potential.

MS: One of the ways I like to talk about it is, the story of beer and the story of civilization are completely intertwined from the very very beginning; two sides of the same story. One of the oldest samples of writing in the world is actually a beer recipe. And now the history of beer is getting repeated with all these new breweries pushing the boundaries with what beer is right now.

Beer is freedom. You heard it here, folks. >> THE COMIC BOOK STORY OF BEER. NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER AT THECOMICBOOKSTORYOFBEER.COM 16

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Certified Beer Sniffers 9 2 H A M P S HIR E S T, CA M B R ID G E, M A | 6 1 7-2 5 0 - 8 4 5 4 | L O R D H O B O.C O M

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THU 8.13

FRI 8.14

SAT 8.15

MON 8.17

WED 8.19

Alterna-Tease Neo Burlesque Fest

Zahili Gonzalez Zamora Project at ICA

Feminist Fiber Art Exhibit Opening

Tax-Free Weekend at JRA Cycles

The Dude Imbibes Party

Grog Games

There are times in life when enough is enough, you’ve had it with everything, and the only answer is attending one or both days of a twoday burlesque festival in Cambridge. If such a time has befallen you, don’t sweat it; just head to Oberon on Thursday and Friday. There’ll be burlesque dancers from all over doing their thing, and on day two there will be awards. Expect “best pasties.” Or maybe don’t.

With all the talk about Cuban-American relations softening and a renewed interest in the cultural musings of our longboycotted country to the south, it seems fitting that the ICA is hosting the Zahili Gonzalez Project on Thursday. The current Berklee student (who arrived there after 15 years of professional experience) and Cuban-forged pianist/ singer/composer will be performing her blend of plucky jazz and salsa in the seaport just for you. Be sure to say thanks.

Ever wonder what a DIY exhibit exclusively featuring the fiber-based artwork (see: crochet vaginas) from women or female-identifying artists from Mass to Greece and Turkey being displayed in multiple venues across Somerville looks like? Well, wonder no more, now that the Feminist Fiber Art show kicks off Friday, with beers at the Aeronaut locale, and live music from Feral Jenny and others at the Armory.

Feminist art: 1. Donald Trump: 0.

It’s been a good summer for biking. Hot days, citywide events, and that one day last month when you successfully jumped over 15 Chevys on your racing bike (okay, that last one didn’t happen).

In any case, as it’s “taxfree” weekend this weekend, hit JRA Cycles in Medford and land an additional 10-60 percent off all your cycling-related accoutrements to your heart’s content. No, they don’t sell stronger legs.

Sure, The Big Lebowski has inspired legions of fans to gather in random spots to throw themed parties, and has for some time since the cult film went officially cult. And here’s one more: Head to Cambridge on Monday in your best robe, Dude sweaters, or general slacker outfit, and there are rewards for best costume, rounds of bowling, a screening of the film, and other surprises all night long with the party. Spoiler alert: Jeff Bridges won’t be there. Most likely.

Grogs. You love them. You covet them. You drink them whenever possible. Wait, that’s not right—you don’t even know what a grog is.

As such, you can hit the Grog Games rum-soaked event at the Seaport Hotel on Wednesday as rockstar rum-running bartenders from the likes of Casa B, BackBar, Moonshine 152, and Kirkland Tap & Trotter face off with their best rum-fueled grogs with you voting for the winner.

Mm. Rum.

Oberon. 2 Arrow St., Cambridge. 617-496-8004.

8.13 and 8.14 8pm/$15-$20 americanrepertorytheater. org

ICA. 100 Northern Ave., Boston. 6pm/all ages/FREE. berklee.edu/event/zahiligonzalez-zamora-project-0

Washington St. Art Center, Aeronaut Brewing Co., and Arts at the Armory in Somerville. 5-10:30pm/18+/ cash bar with ID. feministfiberart.com

JRA Cycles. 229 Salem St., Medford. 718-391-3636. jracycles.com/tax-free-sale

Lanes & Games. 195 Concord Turnpike, Cambridge. 617-8765533. 7:30pm/21+/$50. lanesandgames.com

Seaport Hotel. 200 Seaport Blvd., Boston.

6-8pm/21+/$25. seaportboston.com

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PHOTO BY ÝRÚRARÍ

I’M SURE PEOPLE ON THE TRAIN WERE WONDERING WHAT SHE WAS KNITTING.

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MUSIC

WHAT A PILL

The Britpop dance party returns

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

PUNK’S PUNKS TURN 25 Fat Wreck Chords’ legacy and how to make it as a band

BY SCOTT MURRY @HOTDOGTACO When a record label is born, it often quickly dies. Bands suck, or people just don’t know they exist. Few make it past year one. Born out of a gritty, hardcore punk scene, Fat Wreck Chords is now boozing in its 25th year. In 1990, “Fat” Mike Burkett and then-wife Erin began the label while wrapping up college.

NOFX had released two records on Epitaph Records by this point. While Fat’s initial releases were NOFX oddities, I figured the label began to nab bands that Epitaph mastermind Brett Gurewitz wasn’t into. On a recent phoner with Mike, he clarified, “No Use for a Name were on Epitaph for a second, but Brett didn’t get along with the bass player. I was already friends with them so that worked out. But I wasn’t trying to do that. I saw bands on tour and met people on the road. I saw an opportunity—a good time to start a record label.”

This was before Offspring, Green Day, and Rancid exploded everywhere, or Al Gore built the Internet. Spreading the punk gospel was much more organic. “NOFX went to South America for the first time; we had no distribution there, and they didn’t have Internet. There were so many people at the show, we thought, ‘How the fuck did this happen?’ Just word of mouth.” Mike said, waxing nostalgic, “When I used to go to record shops with friends, [we’d each] buy five 7”s—and then tape everybody’s. It was fun to share. What really started Fat Wreck Chords’ success is I took Fat Music for Fat People (compilation cd) on tour with NOFX, and gave out 1,000 a night.”

Fat continues to release new bands that fit into the fold. This keeps the label fresh and the punk scene interesting.

“What we look for is different than what other labels look for: bands that are cool, good, drunks … And drug users.

People that want to do this for fun. If we sign good bands, the label will be around and people will trust us.” But with social media making it possible for any turd with a laptop to thrive, it seems difficult to stand out. Mike’s advice?

“You need to be a good live band, and be fun. Any band can make a decent record, but if you suck live—no one’s gonna like ya.” >> FAT WRECKED FOR 25 YEARS. NOFX W/ LAGWAGON, STRUNG OUT, MASKED INTRUDER, BAD COP/BAD COP, AND MORE. HOUSE OF BLUES BOSTON, 15 LANSDOWNE ST., BOSTON. 888.693.2583. WED 8.12. 2PM/ALL AGES/$40-$70.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT HOUSEOFBLUES.COM/BOSTON

MUSIC EVENTS THU 8.13

THU 8.13

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 8pm/18+/$25. sinclaircambridge.com]

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

FOLK ROCK WITH SOUL DELTA SPIRIT + FRIENDS

20

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CHIPPER INDIE ROCK NE-HI + STURGEON

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FRI 8.14

HARDCORE HIP-HOP NON PHIXION + RITE HOOK

[Middle East Downstairs, 480 Mass Ave., Cambridge.

8pm/18+/$18. mideastoffers.com]

FRI 8.14

DOUBLE BUBBLE POP LUCIUS

[Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave., Boston, 6:30pm/all ages/$25. icaboston.org]

>> THE PILL. GREAT SCOTT, 1222 COMMONWEALTH AVE., ALLSTON. 617.566.9014. FRI 8.14 - SAT 8.15. 9PM/21+/$15.

GREATSCOTTBOSTON.COM.

SAT 8.15

SUN 8.16

[Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston.

12pm/all ages/$15. crossroadspresents.com]

[Royale, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 6:30pm/all ages/$16. royaleboston.com]

TEEN ROCK MEETS FEMINISM GIRLS ROCK CAMPAIGN BOSTON 2015

BRITISH POST-HARDCORE PUNKS BASEMENT + ADVENTURES + LVL UP + PALEHOUND

FAT MIKE PHOTO BY ALAN SNODGRASS

MUSIC

The Pill may have said its farewells, but someone found another bottle and it’s ready to get poppin’.

DJs Ken and Jen Sullivan decided to throw a new dance party called “The Pill back in 1997.”

Gathering the best of Britpop, indie rock, and guitar-driven music, the two held dance nights at the Upstairs Lounge, a long-since closed dive bar, to spin songs for hopeful expats. Three years later, Michael Marotta moved to Boston and soon befriended the duo, eventually joining their ranks as their third DJ. As the years passed, the Pill moved to the Paradise Lounge, the Milky Way, the Echo Lounge, and, at long last, Great Scott, its longtime home until they closed shop in 2013.

“The kids don’t listen to Britpop the way they used to—plus we were a little burnt out, so we stopped doing it every Friday night,” explains Marotta. “But we missed it too much, so we had to bring it back. Plus it’s the 20th anniversary of Blur’s ‘Country House’ and Oasis’ ‘Roll With It,’ so we used that as an excuse to get the band back together and have another party.”

No dance night epitomizes the indie dance party of the 2000s so succinctly, partly because of its lack of dramatics. “The people who come want to get drunk and dance and listen to ‘Common People’ and ‘Beautiful Ones’ and make out with someone in a corner,” says Marotta. “We never had a photographer lurking around. We weren’t looking to throw that kind of event. These aren’t people who rush to their computer the next morning, like, ‘Look at us from the night before! Look at how cool we were and emaciated!’ What went down at the Pill stayed there, and people appreciate that.”

Getting a chance to relive that night can’t be passed up, although the future may hold more opportunities. “We’re reenergized,” says Marotta.

“And I think this may become a yearly thing.”

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6PM - 11:30PM

TUESDAYS

WEDNESDAYS

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FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

FILM

RICK OF TIME

Meryl Streep + Diablo Cody + Jonathan Demme = This

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

DRAMA, COMEDY, MARTIAL ARTS ACTION ... IS THERE ANYTHING SHE CAN’T DO?

CHECK OUT LAST WEEK’S SUBSCRIBER DEALS GIVEAWAY! TOKIO HOTEL @ PARADISE ROCK CLUB

GIVEAWAY! DELTA SPIRIT @ THE SINCLAIR

COLIN JOST @ LAUGH BOSTON

SPANISH TAPAS @ OLDE MAGOUNS SALOON

As Ricki Randazzo, the leader of a never-was bar band called the Flash, Meryl Streep bounces her way through an off-key cover of “American Girl”—not with grace or precision, but with the reckless abandon of a buzzed sorority pledge riding a mechanical bull. Her eyes are red enough that we know she must have taken a puff alongside each beer before stepping on stage. And her outfit— bedazzled blue vest, a side-parted streak of plaits, and enough eyeshadow to supply a gentleman’s club—is glam rock by way of goodwill. It all adds up to an observation rarely made about roles played by Streep: Ricki looks old.

You can see the remnants of every line she’s blown in the wrinkled crevices of her face. And that weariness is essential to Ricki and the Flash, the latest film written

by Diablo Cody, who’s been documenting generation gaps in farcical comedies since Juno. Ricki left her moneyed husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and three teenaged kids back when. She’s only returning home now because daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer) has emerged from her own divorce with suicidal tendencies pronounced.

And thus the would-be arena rocker gets to become reacquainted with the gang, including sons Adam (Nick Westray), who’s openly gay—to Ricki’s apparent chagrin—and Josh (Sebastian Stan), who’s engaged to Emily (Hailey Gates.)

That latter pair is outwardly eco-friendly, the type to distribute birdseed in lieu of rice at their wedding. So Cody’s script is mining laughs from the faux-pas traded between 20-somethings who care about going green and a child of the ‘60s who’d rather be smoking it. If the film had been directed by Any Old Hack, this review would end right there. But the director is Jonathan Demme, whose greatest films are marked by the rich emotional depths he affords to even his slightest characters. There are touches here, like Ricki’s decidedly conservative leanings, that’d look as cheap as a bad Lifetime movie if handled by a lesser hand.

The accomplishment of Demme’s Ricki is that it’s got a nuance that those cable networks would trip over themselves trying to cut out.

The script sometimes spells out its ideas in a font as sloppy as Ricki’s makeup.

There’s a fascistic manager at the Whole Foods knockoff where she works whose obsessively smiley visage is meant to be a reminder of the prepackaged culture she wanted to escape. Instead he’s just an inhuman target born of a writer who got stuck on caps lock. And yet the interplay between Demme’s camera and his actor’s faces creates a deep end among the shallow waters. When Pete sees Ricki RICK OF TIME continued on pg. 24

FILM EVENTS FRI 8.14

DOUGLAS SIRK’S MUCH-BELOVED MELODRAMA

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NOW

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22

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IMITATION OF LIFE

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

Screens 8.14-8.16 @ 2, 4:30, and 7pm, and on 8.17 @ 7pm/NR/$9-11. brattlefilm.org]

GEORGE ROMERO’S ORIGINAL ZOMBIE EPIC

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

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

9:30pm/NR/$9-11. brattlefilm.org]

MON 8.17

WED 8.19

TOO MANY HUSBANDS

CONVOY and THE KILLER ELITE

THE BRATTLE’S SCREWBALL SUMMER CONTINUES

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

Also screens 8.18. 3 and 5pm/NR/$9-11. 35mm. brattlefilm.org]

IT ABIDES.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI

[Coolidge Corner.

290 Harvard St., Brookline.

7pm/R/$11.25. 35mm. coolidge.org]

TWO BY SAM PECKINPAH

[Somerville Theatre.

55 Davis Sq., Somerville.

8pm/PG/$10. 35mm. somervilletheatreonline. com/somerville-theatre] THU 8.20

STONED TEENS DOUBLE FEATURE

DAZED AND CONFUSED and FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH

[Capitol Theatre. 204 Mass. Ave., Arlington. 7:30pm/R/$10. feitheatres.com/capitoltheatre]

Celebrating 50+ Years!

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Fridays:

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60 Rowes Wharf, Boston, MA 02110 Tickets: 617.934.2610 or 888.503.5659

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23

RICK OF TIME continued from pg. 22 stepping out of a cab, it’s a beautiful adaptation of one of the great Salinger lines: “He tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.” Demme draws all that with no flashbacks, backstory, or interior monologue—just a roll-up of the camera, timed perfectly to capture the shifting expression in one man’s eyes.

It’s the kind of moment you leave the movie remembering: It doesn’t advance the plot, but it does expand the margins. Ricki is full of them; it stretches beyond the frame. There’s the shade we see her throwing at the decorations Pete’s second wife (Audra McDonald) has adorned their kitchen with. There’s the way she and her boyfriend Greg (Rick Springfield) have to slip off their old-folks glasses before sharing a bedside kiss. Demme gives us three exterior shots of Pete’s massive home, then sets the “Wedding Day” title card (it’s Josh and Emily’s) outside a Mobil and a cheap motel. That’s how far Ricki remains—financially and personally, because the two are often intertwined—from her former nuclear family. He cuts deeper into his characters with establishing shots than most filmmakers do with whole scenes.

Demme’s best film, Melvin and Howard, was also a slightly screwball farce about the troubled intersection between the stagnant rich and the tragically ambitious poor. He thrives on the dialectic charge provided by opposing viewpoints: right vs left, white vs black, young vs old, “American Girl” vs “Bad Romance.” There’s one sequence where Ricki, who would’ve been at the age Julie is now during the Reaganized ’80s, tries to energize her daughter by taking her out for an expensive manicure—the price of which does nothing to impress or relax her millennial kin, much to Ricki’s disappointment. It’s what might be called a throwaway scene, and yet the socioeconomic implications left behind by the encounter are something you could spend the rest of the movie’s running time sorting out.

All the identities and beliefs crash up against each other perpetually, like waves onto the shore, until a truly empathetic worldview emerges in their wake: one that sees social progress and interpersonal understanding occurring only after one understands their own history—be it personal, familial, or national. Even Ricki’s righty leanings get their own causeand-effect explanation by way of another heartbreaking throwaway, which quietly reveals the formative moment of the character’s preteen years. “Meryl Streep goes old” is just a marketable setup. In caring about how she got there, Cody and Demme’s Ricki finds profound levels of hope—including some that the American commercial filmmaking industry can still produce works greater than the sum of their poster designs. >> RICKI AND THE FLASH. RATED PG-13. NOW PLAYING. EXPANDING TO WIDER RELEASE FRI 8.14.

FILM

CAR WATT-AGE

Cinematic pleasures wrought by blind structure

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Most narrative films fit into one of two categories: There are movies that foreshadow, and there are movies that don’t. The recently released Big Game, for instance, fits into the former category: An Eastern European preteen who couldn’t lift a bow rescued a crash-landed POTUS during a ritual hunt; no points for guessing what weapon he was using by film’s end.

Cop Car is another genre movie populated by preteens: Harrison and Travis are walking the open plains, with the spiky Travis leading the more hesitant Harrison in a curse-word sing-a-long. Director Jon Watts only foreshadows one single thing about the following 86 minutes: One of these kids is going to say, “Oh, f***.”

The leadup to that exclamation starts when they steal the eponymous vehicle— conspicuously empty—off a dirt road. Then we swap perspectives and timelines, meeting the crooked cop (Kevin Bacon) dumb enough to leave it there. Then back to the boys, joyriding and making “Mario Kart” jokes. Then to a pearl-clutching grandma they almost run down.

Then to the mysterious stranger (Shea Whigham) they find lying in the trunk. And then the bullets start flying—from one perspective to another, in every damn direction.

It’s not a closed loop like Big Game—where setups and payoffs circle like race cars—but an evolving entity, with each point of view introduced enlarging the boiling pot until it swallows these boys whole. The influences, then, are the pop art Eastwood westerns directed by Sergio Leone, who also shunned foreshadowing and delighted in introducing jarringly unexpected elements with every edit. Watts’ film, shot with the same dusty palette and in the same super-wide aspect ratio, doesn’t hide its lineage. And it can’t help but appear a trifle compared to those masterpieces of genre goofiness. Yet the pleasures wrought by the blind structure—like the very unexpected return of one of those aforementioned players—delight in a way that all those other knockoffs fail to achieve.

It doesn’t matter if the shot misses its mark by a bit. You still didn’t see it coming. >> COP CAR. RATED R. COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE. 290 HARVARD AVE., BROOKLINE. LIMITED ENGAGEMENT, INCLUDING MIDNIGHT SHOWS, BEGINS FRI 8.14.

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FILM SHORTS BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN ANT-MAN So far as we can tell, all Marvel superheroes have the same damn ability: They fly into the air and punch people really hard. So bully for AntMan (title role played by Paul Rudd), if only for its scale—the strongest moments of this action-heist-comedy involve toys, insects, and a keychain.

The sequel setups (endless nods to a second insect superhero we never see) and extraneous world-building (Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, arrives for a throwdown) feel as factory-produced as ever. But at least there’s something new on this joint’s dollar menu.

THE END OF THE TOUR David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) interviews David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) right after Infinite Jest is published—meaning Lipsky has to unravel the impenetrable mystique while Wallace works to protect it.

One beautiful moment ensues: They go to see Broken Arrow, and a single composition 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 is.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE We see schoolchildren in Indonesia being taught that the mass killing of “communists” in the mid-’60s was a necessary act for a democratic nation.

And then we see those same kids playing in a ball pit: two methods of socialization, linked by cinema. Each edit in director Joshua Oppenheimer’s latest documentary—where Adi, whose brother was a victim of the genocide, confronts some of the surviving perpetrators—creates such a dialogue. His unwavering gaze in the face of these sociopaths produces a moral justification for the entire art form: Evil cannot always be comprehended, but it can be filmed, and it can be seen.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE —ROGUE NATION Nothing in Rogue Nation works except for Tom Cruise—but oh, how he works.

There’s an opera house shootout where he’s rappelling through everything (across moving light fixtures, into back rooms and onto the sets of the stage), and what sells it is his sheer exasperation: He’s one of the only action stars whose facial expressions are calculated to reveal that he can sweat, too. Cruise isn’t the sort of action star we believe can actually save the world. But in scenes like that, he provides a more moderate salvation: His charisma can still save otherwise forgettable action movies.

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 in the way the emotions’ bodies are rounded off into amorphous blobs of energy rather than structured by hard lines.

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

SOUTHPAW A schlocky boxing noir, released in the wrong millennium. Southpaw even indulges the cinematic politics of eras past: The women are saints to be sacrificed or prizes to be won over, while people of color are either murderous villains or stoic symbols of street-tough authenticity. And Jake Gyllenhaal, as the eponymous pugilist, loses himself searching for his place in the boxing-movie tradition: the lanky thrusts of his arms, the Brandoesque mumble, the unrestrained screams peppering each scene—is this a performance, or is it Raging Bull cosplay?

IRRATIONAL MAN A sexually frustrated passiveaggressive pseudo-intellectual college professor (Joaquin Phoenix) mopes around while trying to sleep with the sprightliest of his students (Emma Stone) in what appears to be a curiously antiseptic romcom.

Then, with almost no dramatic justification, the professor attempts to commit the perfect murder.

And that transgression produces a creative spark that sex never provided, though the film—unlike the character—has no idea what to do with it. (Slapstick intrudes, but only intermittently.) We end with a reminder that we live in a Godless universe with no order. Irrational Man is a film by Woody Allen.

TRAINWRECK To complain about a conservative streak in a female-led Hollywood movie that features its heroine monologuing about her strategy for getting guys to go down on her is to miss the forest for the bushes. But here we are talking about it: Amy Schumer’s feature (she writes and stars, Judd Apatow directs) sells out its own filthiness to end on Middle America-approved romantic-comedy cliches. When they happen, they’re so deliriously unreal that they may qualify as half-assed parody. But whatever the intention, it’s conventional narrative and combative content battering up against one another—and if you leave disappointed, it’s because the former won out.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

25

THEATER

ON GARLAND

An exclusive interview with Club Cafe’s Judy Garland

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

Thursday AUGUST 13th 8:00 PM

NIGHT

Comedians: Derek Furtado, Zenobia Del Mar, Jeff Smith, Pamela Anne, Adam Deangelo, Kevin Doug Fitzgerald, Ethan Diamond, Mike Fahey, Nick Bradley, Michael Fournier, Alex Courtis, Mike Settlow NO COVER | 21+ Friday AUGUST 14th 9:30 PM

PVRPLE

DJs: Princess Cut, Knife, Amadeezy + DJ Bird upstairs Genres: Dirty South, Crunk, Trap, Trill, Chopped N Screwed, Dipset | $5 before 11 pm $10 after | 21+

Wednesday August 19th 8PM

ALEX MEIXNER BAND + BRITT CONORS & THE BOURBON RENEWAL (Polka / Roots)

Tuesday August 25th 8PM THIS YEAR’S MODEL: AN ALL FEMME TRIBUTE TO

ELVIS COSTELLO ON HIS BIRTHDAY Wed 9/16 7:30PM

YOUNG DUBLINERS (Celtic Rock)

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

DJs: Leah V, Bianca Oblivion and more TBA Genres: Hip Hop, Trap, Reggae & Party Jams | Cover: $10 | 21+

Thur 8/13 8PM

LOVE LOVE + KRIS RODGERS AUTUMN HOLLOW (Alt. Americana) Fri 8/14 7:30PM

GHOST TOWN BLUES BAND (Funk/Rock/Blues) Fri 8/14 10PM We Dig Free Fridays:

Tuesday AUGUST 18th 6:00 PM

GAME NIGHT No Cover | Downstairs 18+ until 10 PM

SIRSY + LIVE NUDE GIRLS (Indie Rock) - Free Sat 8/15 7PM

BOSTON BLUES SOCIETY PRESENTS: BLUES IN SCHOOLS (Blues) Wed 8/19 8PM

ALEX MEIXNER BAND BRITT CONNORS & THE BOURBON RENEWAL (Jazz/Folk/Fusion) Thu 8/20 7PM

THE PRETENTIOUS FOOLS + MEI OHARA (Rock) Fri 8/21 7PM

JAREKUS SINGLETON (Rock/Soul/Blues) Fri 8/21 10PM

THE UPPER CRUST w/ Special Guests THE CYCLONES (Rocque & Roll)

17 Holland St., Davis Sq. Somerville (617) 776-2004 Directly on T Red Line at Davis 26

08.12.15 - 08.19.15

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DIGBOSTON.COM

You’re famously absent from social media.

That’s right.

How do you live without any of that?

Well, my producers occasionally get me to do that, so I have done little things for them here and there on Facebook and that. Liza still hasn’t taught me how to Twitter. They give me the gadgets, but they don’t teach me how to use them. No, I maintain my privacy but I still work, my producers have kept me working. I’ve done concerts, but smaller concerts. I’m not playing Carnegie Hall, I’m playing Club Café.

You must have an endless number of offers that come in all the time, yet you’ve chosen to stick to smaller, more intimate concerts.

There’s more of a marriage between me and the audience because I get to perform on a more personal level, and I like that anyway, you know?

You were good friends with JFK. What was he like?

Marvelous gentlemen and I think one of the most important presidents that we’ve had. A dear friend of mine … I campaigned for him.

Saturday AUGUST 15th 9:30 PM

KOMBAT

In celebration of the 47th anniversary of her historic Boston Common concert, Judy Garland sits down to discuss politics, staying relevant, and why she’s chosen to settle in Boston. Thanks to the sensational Peter Mac, Judy has returned to Boston for a series of intimate concerts at Club Café.

Have you and Hillary had discussions?

I’d totally campaign for Mrs. Clinton. Sing for her any day.

What do you make of Donald Trump?

It’s absolutely laughable. Donald Tru—I mean first of all, people always ask if I watched his show, The Apprentice; some fat, balding man sitting behind a big desk saying, “You’re fired”—that’s not television, that was my life!

What is your goal here with Boston audiences?

I want people to be happy, you know? I was born to do that … to entertain and take people’s minds off their troubles for a little while if I can. And I have great respect for anyone that will sit in an uncomfortable seat and pay good money to listen to me sing, but that’s just my goal … if you’re happy at the end of the evening and maybe feel a little bit better about yourself, then I’ve done my job.

And people realize that if I can do this, you can do this. We’re all in this together.

We’re all just people.

For how much longer are you ours?

Well, I know that I’ve been invited to continue through the fall. I’m not doing that one alone, ’cause at my age, you know … I just can’t do it alone anymore, so I think I’m going to get some of my old-fashioned Hollywood gal pals to join me throughout September and October. Bette Davis has expressed interest in showing up … Mae West … Tallulah Bankhead … even my little girl Liza is going to stop by one or two nights. Maybe one way or another we will do a duet with each other. You never know. Stranger things have happened. I’m looking forward to that. Maybe even doing a Christmas show here, that’s also been bandied about.

Right now, I’m enjoying Judy and the Songs That Got Away.

Boston’s lucky to have you.

Well I’m absolutely blessed to be here and be able to talk to you and to perform for smiling faces who get me! You weren’t even an idea when I was in my heyday, so, you’re at least third or fourth generation. It’s marvelous. You can be young and beautiful and have good taste, and I appreciate that. >> FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT THEJUDYGARLANDSHOW.COM

PHOTO BY TESS BRADY

COMEDY

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

27

ARTS

JOHN HODGMAN

On pocasts, vacationing, and Boston comedy’s rough edge

BY DAN MCCARTHY @ACUTALPROOF

A surprising level of anti-celebrity is attached to the Brookline-grown author, actor, musician, and podcaster John Hodgman, known for everything from his mustachioed appearances on The Daily Show to his embodiment of the “PC” psyche to Justin Long’s “Mac” in the Apple ads of yesteryear.

In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, Hodgman enjoys professional respect and hipster approval all at once, and he returns to the Wilbur Theatre in October to bring his brand of delightfully nerdy observational humor and absurdist comedy to his hometown.

I caught up with him to talk podcasts, contemplating death, and why Philadelphia being called “The City of Brotherly Love” is a comedic misnomer.

Boston comedy: Go. Boston Comedy always had a fairly rough edge even in the performers. Bill Burr and Louie (C.K.) are truth tellers. Yet I come from a slightly different vein of Bostonian culture, which was the weird kid who dressed like Doctor Who and watched public TV and rushed home from high school to listen to NPR. So my comedy as I developed it in New York was more in an absurdist vein. That’s what put me on The Daily Show as the resident expert, the kind of person that would say with a straight face that Franklin Roosevelt had a hook for a hand but you never noticed it because it’s shaped like a wheelchair. Now when I go out into the rest of the world there are profound differences. In Minnesota nobody laughs as they’re so busy politely listening to what I have to say. And in Philly … they’re really drunk. Boston may pride itself on its no-BS attitude and toughness, but in Philly I’ve never done a show where there was not one ruinously drunken person who decided he also needed to be on stage.

Explains the grim Philly fate of the hitchBOT last week.

“The City of Brotherly Love” is one of the most profoundly comedic misnomers. It’s really the city of “stay away from me.” Stay away from me, robot.

Most “Boston” story of yours?

The last time I was at the Wilbur. Marty Walsh was running for mayor and had also co-sponsored a bill to make “Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman as the official rock song of the Commonwealth. I was supporting this effort casually online, and was contacted by … Walsh’s people asking [me] to come to the show. I asked, “Will he sing ‘Roadrunner?’” They said no, but “he’ll count it off for you.” So he got on stage and counted it off, and I sang “Roadrunner” on the ukulele, and I remember the moment when the now mayor looked out at the crowd and said onstage, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, I don’t think there’s a single Boston voter here.

[You’re] all from Brookline and Cambridge, aren’t you?” The house came down.

What do you like more: touring or podcasting?

I love them all. The podcast is a wonderful opportunity to talk to people all over the country and learn and hear about their lives and their insane theories as to why a machine gun should be considered a robot, or why it’s okay to eat out of the garbage in Canada. People have a lot of strong opinions they bring to my podcast, Judge John Hodgman, that they don’t really think about until they say [them] out loud on a podcast to me, and I get to tell them they’re wrong while wearing underwear and sometimes nothing more. >> JOHN HODGMAN. PLAYS THE WILBUR 9.12. FOR TICKETS AND MORE INFORMATION, VISIT THEWILBUR.COM. VISIT DIGBOSTON.COM FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW. 28

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PHOTO BY BEX FINCH

I was listening to a recent podcast and you mentioned you were “hiding” in New England. Why are you hiding?

I’ve been going to Maine, which is the place in the world that my wife loves more than any other place or person. So I have to go.

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE DEFINITELY SLOWER THAN THEY APPEAR.

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NOTHING MATTRESS

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BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE I lost my dad young and I had a bunch of issues growing up.

I’m probably gay, I love the idea of light bondage, and I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. I feel like I’ve been on a self-discovery thing over the past year and have caught tidbits that bothered me. I have depression/anxiety and the old “abandonment complex,” and I’m still insecure about a lot of this. Is it reasonable to blame psychological trauma for my sexuality—the possibly gay thing and the kinks?

Troubled Over Yearnings The inclination to blame your sexuality and kinks on your loss is understandable, TOY, but it’s not reasonable. (Sorry about your dad, kiddo.) Because when you think about it—when you apply reason—you quickly come to this: There are lots of gay men out there who are into bondage who didn’t lose their dads at a young age, who don’t suffer from depression or anxiety, who don’t have abandonment issues, and whose childhoods were comparatively issue-free. It’s natural to wonder how you got to be kinky, TOY, but kinks are pretty random and pretty inexplicable.

Your advice to UGH last week was fine in general—he’s the frustrated man whose wife isn’t interested in sex—and a 30

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pretty solid rehash of your standard advice for people trapped in sexless marriages. But I’m writing because you missed something that may have been key: “Currently, she can last having sex for nearly half an hour before feeling exhausted and stopping, regardless of me reaching orgasm or not.” Two things: (1) Half an hour of PIV sex when you’re not feeling it would take a vat of lube and probably still be painful. (2) His wife lies there getting the inside of her vagina sanded off by Jackhammer McGee here and then has the nerve to ask him to stop when it’s too much “regardless” of HIS orgasm?!?

What about her orgasm? What about her delicate vaginal tissue getting torn up? Not that he will magically consider her pleasure if he’s blind to her comfort and general well-being, but it might help him put his marriage in perspective.

Engaged Reader Represents Thanks for your e-mail, ERR, and I really should’ve spotted that.

We all have our blind spots, and this is definitely one of mine: When someone says they were having sex for half an hour, I don’t think of 30 minutes of PIV/PIB, as I don’t define “sex” as “penetrative vaginal or anal intercourse.” My working definition of sex includes mutual masturbation, oral, fantasy play, and PIV/PIB. So when someone says, “My partner can only last having sex for half an hour,” I imagine half an hour of oral and mutual masturbation and penetration all jumbled together. I need to bear in mind that not all of my readers define sex the same way I do—indeed, far too many people believe penetration is sex and vice versa. Thanks for the reminder, ERR.

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