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VOL 18 + ISSUE 1

JANUARY 7, 2016 - JANUARY 14, 2016 EDITORIAL

DEAR READER

EDITOR + PUBLISHER Jeff lawrence

Print is dead, unless you’re a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Boston Globe. In that case, it’s very much alive and well… and reason enough to get out of bed at 2 am and hand-insert the Sunday edition because the owner John Henry royally fucked up the transition to a new distribution service and couldn’t be bothered to get his wrinkled ass out of bed and bundle the stacks himself. In case you’re not following me because you accidentally uninstalled Twitter on your phone, here’s the skinny: The Boston Globe’s management and owner decided to bleed a few nickels out of the locally employed contractors who distribute the printed version by hiring a company out of California who seemingly didn’t know the difference between shit and Shinola. Enter the first week of distribution services, and you have a clusterfuck well beyond the green monster. Now, almost a week in, the best part about this debacle is that they have zero solutions for a zero sum problem and there’s zero word from the Zero Owner. High five! You’re screwed.

The fact that Globe is falling apart while it rebuilds is impressive and unfathomably sad all in one breath.

When Hiawatha Bray has to slum the floors of Henry’s fulfillment center making “No comment” statements to NECN while he stuffs Walmart circulars into the Help Wanted section no one reads, you know you’re headed in the wrong direction.

With that said, we’ve got a GREAT issue here that’s distributed in print by a GREAT distribution company and contains GREAT content. We’re also online. And on Twitter and Facebook. And Instagram, I think, and maybe… Periscope now too?! We’re everywhere. Check it.

NEWS + FEATURES EDITOR Chris Faraone ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran ASSOCIATE FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan ASSOCIATE ARTS EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COPY EDITOR Mitchell Dewar CONTRIBUTORS Nate Boroyan, Renan Fontes, Bill Hayduke, Emily Hopkins, Micaela Kimball, Dave Wedge INTERN Oliver Bok, Mary Kate McGrath

DESIGN CREATIVE DIRECTOR Tak Toyoshima COMICS Tim Chamberlain Brian Connolly Pat Falco Patt Kelley INTERN Chesley Chapman

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BUSINESS ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Marc Shepard SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER Jesse Weiss 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

Grab your feels because Emo Night is on featuring cover guy Luke O’Neil. Read all about it on page 16. ©2016 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.

JEFF LAWRENCE - PUBLISHER + EDITOR, DigBoston

DIGTIONARY

Yallqueda

noun 1. A person or group of persons who occupy federal land and/or federal buildings in order to make a political stand against the federal government, but in doing so mimic the anti-American tactics of terrorist organizations like ISIS that threaten to disrupt our American way of life and end up becoming a joke that everyone laughs at while shaking their heads.

See also douchebag and terrorist.

OH, CRUEL WORLD Dear Globe Reporters, Watching you boast about delivering your paper last weekend was about the most sickening thing imaginable.

It’s like if the people who have to serve you snobs your lunch in the Morrissey Boulevard dining room every day went on strike, and you all had a big old kitchen party wearing hairnets and pretending you are low-wage cooks. Are you going to keep delivering the paper if you have to? Or were you just pathetic tourists on a one-day jaunt? Please go back to pretending that you cover the city, and call it a day.

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NEWS US MANCHESTER EXCITED NEWS TO US

Scouting for some epic First In The Nation Primary coverage

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 It must really drive folks in the Midwest, South, and everyplace else outside New England insane that we get to host the most despicable and critical political event of the quadrennial cycle. As anyone who’s ever ventured beyond Red Sox Nation knows, we’re loathed as much as we are loved. Whatever the case, from now until the first-in-the-nation festivities in early February, I’ll be keeping close tabs on New Hampshire along with former DigBoston Editor Dan McCarthy and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

Enough about our plans for next month though. In the meantime, we hurdled up I-93 last weekend to survey the political landscape on the eve of this historic centennial New Hampshire Primary—and it was hardly a surprise to find a city full of people who are mightily enthusiastic about shouting their opinions on the upcoming hysteria into your personal space.

Since you can’t drive for more than a minute around Manchester at this time of year without having your political bell rung, we were greeted off a highway exit by an LED sign accusing the state’s own Republican US Senator Kelly Ayotte of protecting heroin dealers. A couple hundred yards away I spied a small cascade of placards advertising a site called wethefans2016.com. I pop the URL into Google, only to discover that I’m too late to vote in a contest for the local minor league baseball team, the Manchester Fisher Cats, in which participants were asked to choose between a Democratic donkey and a Republican elephant to adorn the team’s hats for the 2016 season opener. Take it as a harbinger of things to come or as meaningless promotional hogwash, but the latter won with 53 percent of the popular vote.

Our first stop was the Wild Rover, an iconic political haunt where I once saw a bartender force a bathtub-sized shot of bourbon on former Connecticut Senator and 2004 Presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman, who begrudgingly slugged it in one giant and uncomfortable swoosh to quell a mob of cheering fans. I learned everything I ever need to know about primary politics that day—namely, that pols will do virtually anything to place first in New Hampshire, where a baby’s first words are often, “I still haven’t decided yet.”

The instinct of a lot of Granite Staters I have 4

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interviewed since my first trip up to Manch 12 years ago is to initially deny that they have any interest whatsoever in the polls. Or as Oliver, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran who I met at the Rover, explained, “God bless America, but fuck the assholes who run it.” On the day before his 70th birthday (full disclosure: I bought him a celebratory beer), he exemplified the sort of anti-partisan fire that ignites the body politic above the Merrimack every four years.

“I don’t give a fuck about any of it,” Oliver claimed at the beginning of our conversation. “I have my service disability—even though it took me 30 years to get it—so it’s not like they can take anything away from me at this point. I have a home for me and my cat, a TV, a stereo …

They’re all crooks anyway—it doesn’t matter who you vote for.”

After claiming a lack of interest in politics, within sips and seconds Oliver began naming the candidates and, along with another Rover regular approximately 10 years his junior, proceeded to analyze their positives and negatives as I scribbled and quibbled. An amalgam of their observations and of those who drifted in and out of our benevolent scrum: “The biggest thing stopping Hillary from winning is Bill.” Rather than the typical sexist arguments against Mrs. Clinton, these guys went on to eviscerate Bubba, whose degenerate tendencies they don’t want anywhere near the White House again.

The biggest thing hurting Bernie Sanders is that he’s from Vermont. This wasn’t something said to me directly, but some side comments from Oliver gave me the impression that a neighbor state rivalry may be a factor, however minimal.

“That Marco Rubio seems alright. And Ted Cruz too.”

Parroting some national talking heads, there was prevalent thought among my entirely unscientific barside sample that either of these two congressmen may end up on the ticket in some way or another.

And then there is The Donald who—you guessed it— dominates political discussion in the Granite State, as

he does virtually everywhere else. Oliver said he fears a Trump presidency, as did the thirtysomething college professors sitting beside us at the next bar we crashed. All of them, however, said they know more than a few fellow voters who appreciate Trump’s pledge to make sure New Hampshire keeps its first-in-the-nation status. I went and found the specific promise to which they’re referring, and it’s from a rally the well-coiffed candidate held at Pennichuck Middle School in Nashua on December 28.

Always the crowd-pleaser, he promised: New Hampshire will always maintain its place if I win.

OK? Just so you understand. It’s a big movement. There’s a big movement to put you at the back of the pack, or the middle of the pack, so it would no longer be the same thing. You’ll never see me again, but you will see me, because I have so many friends. But there’s a big movement to put New Hampshire way back. I don’t know why—is it retribution? Is it [that] they don’t want it? They don’t like it? I mean, because you have a lot of power, you have a lot of power.

Trump went on to imply that undocumented immigrants—“illegals,” as his crowd labels them—have a proclivity to rape, then proceeded to stroke the barrels of gun owners by assuring they could easily stop terrorists, and to claim that he will no longer eat Oreos since Nabisco is moving a factory to Mexico. It’s enough to make your average journalist or fact-checker who’s taking any of this seriously go mad. Which is all the more reason that while the others report on the horse race, we plan to cover the stalls.

This is a preview of “Manchester Divided,” an upcoming project for which the Dig is teaming with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism to provide unconventional coverage of the New Hampshire Primary.

Stay tuned to DigBoston.com for more dispatches, and watch for an announcement next week from BINJ about its political hip-hop show on Friday, February 5 at the Shaskeen Pub in Manchester with Granite State and Akrobatik.

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TOKIN TRUTH

THE SUN STRIKES AGAIN Look who isn’t helping patients in Mass

BY MIKE CRAWFORD @MIKECANNBOSTON Brace yourself for last week’s “Who’s prescribing marijuana?” by Todd Feathers in the Lowell Sun. It’s a pathetic slanted story posing as a fair and balanced piece, a medical marijuana article with no patients, reefer madness front and center.

Leading the charge this time is Dr. Dennis Dimitri, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), who questions whether doctors in the Bay State recommending cannabis have bonafide relationships with patients.

The article singles out Dr. John Nadolny of Canna Care Docs who, according to the Department of Public Health, certified the most patients in Mass from October 2014 to October 2015. In short, the article calls out a “niche industry” of compassionate doctors who have filled a void in the Commonwealth. “It does seem,” claimed Dimitri, “that these clinics exist for one reason and one reason only.”

It’s the same old boilerplate BS from the Sun, a paint-by-numbers corporate media hit piece. They grabbed some quotes from the top reefer mad chain doctors, who in turn complained that marijuana as medicine is too complicated.

The same docs often say pot is addictive, and campaigned against successful ballot initiatives in 2008 and 2012. Now they’re the voices of reason? It’s almost as if the Sun editors think people lack a short-term memory, and can’t recall that the people of Mass voted in favor of the non-toxic, non-addictive medicine.

Let’s dig deeper—into a state of affairs in which only a couple dozen doctors write the majority of recommendations for cannabis in the Commonwealth. As a cardcarrying patient who received my recommendation from Dr. Nadolny, I have a different take. My examination with Canna Care was thorough and highly educational. It lasted over an hour, and the doctor even spent additional time addressing a health concern unrelated to marijuana—the fact that I am still using tobacco. Unlike physicians who give patients less than 10 minutes, Dr. Nadolny connected with me, and even offered a personal story about his own past nicotine use. The whole experience was nothing like my past appointments with corporate chain physicians who have offered me pill prescriptions for pain.

I should mention that my own recommendation from Canna Care was freeof-charge, and that the docs sponsor my WEMF Radio show, “The Young Jurks.” If the Sun asked, they would have learned that Canna Care has already given away more than $200,000 in evaluations, and that they offer patients with severe debilitating conditions services at free or reduced rates. Their policy is that “no patient should face criminal prosecution for their choice of natural medicine because of an inability to pay,” and they also offer discounts to veterans.

This gets to the real story on medical marijuana. Medicine as we know it is broken. Costs are through the roof, and doctors spend less and less time with patients. Dr. Jordan Tishler of Inhale MD Medical Consulting in Cambridge shines more light on matters: “The reason that most primary care docs haven’t done the [certification] is that their institutions won’t allow them to certify anyway.

Also, since so few physicians know anything about [marijuana] to begin with, it’s outside their comfort zone. In general, when I speak to groups at the major institutions, which I do a lot, the reception is great, eager and interested, very rarely oppositional.”

Tishler continues: “There’s a lot more going on than trying to block access.

Medicine is a troubled system in general, docs don’t have time to do all that’s required of them as it is. [Medical marijuana] is only a minor footnote in that problem. That level of specialized knowledge and the time it takes to really care for a [medical marijuana] patient is why I and a few others, like Dr. Uma Dhanabalan, do what we do.”

According to Tishler, articles like the hit piece in the Sun imply “that the law is too liberal and that the government should be more involved in regulating patient-doctor relationships and restricting the judgement of physicians.”

Meanwhile, “the judgement of physicians in this matter is exactly what makes the [Massachusetts] law flexible and helpful to patients, and a model for the nation. The implication that pain, insomnia, and anxiety are not appropriate for physicians to treat with [medical marijuana] misses both the spirit and the science of Cannabis therapeutics.”

If honchos with the MMS were actually interested in curbing the opiate crisis, they would be recommending that all doctors become certified and educated on medical marijuana as a first response for pain. Instead, they discourage the use of cannabis, a less harmful alternative to opiate pain pills. Instead of advocating for patients, MMS goes after MDs who are actually helping patients.

Gutless, and all overlooked, unreported by the Sun.

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APPARENT HORIZON

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY Greater Boston’s white communities need to support #BlackLivesMatter

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

The #BlackLivesMatter movement is hitting the streets again in a renewed wave of protests for racial justice around Boston and America. Not that it has ever really stopped since Trayvon Martin was gunned down in 2013—as fresh injustices against Black people continue week after week, day after day. The latest being the unconscionable acquittal of the white cop who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice in cold blood for playing with a pellet gun in an “open carry” state. #BLM is an impressive and necessary political phenomenon, led here as elsewhere by young Black activists. Which is as it should be. And there are significant numbers of allies from other communities—including white activists who have learned enough about the profoundly racist history of this country to be inspired to take action as well.

But there aren’t enough white allies. Not by a long shot. Especially in a tremendously segregated region like the Greater Boston area.

And that is by design. The segregation of Black people from white people was the result of a series of racist housing policies starting after the Civil War that culminated in Black people being packed into redlined neighborhoods in cities like Boston—and stopped from moving into most suburbs post-WWII until the Civil Rights Movement forced some improvements.

People in the predominantly white neighborhoods, cities, and towns are currently free to ignore #BlackLivesMatter. As long as that is the case, there can be no real justice for Black people in America. Because white people who are able to live apart from Black people will likely never confront the monstrous truths that #BLM—the new Civil Rights Movement—is exposing.

This situation will only change if the #BlackLivesMatter movement comes to them. Directly. In person. Every damned day from now until justice is won. And that cannot happen unless white allies step up in every white enclave. Beacon Hill. Back Bay. Hingham. Newton. Needham. Winchester. Stoneham. Reading. Danvers. Marblehead.

Any local can come up with a much longer list in their sleep.

Walk around these white areas and look for a #BlackLivesMatter or a #JusticeforTamir sign. You will see few—and those mainly outside some progressive houses of worship.

So here’s what has to happen to start to make things right. White people living in predominantly white communities have to start getting a lot more #BlackLivesMatter signs up. Then, when you all hear about major #BLM actions, spread the word to your friends and family. Go to the actions. Watch. Listen. Learn. Go back to your community. Find other local allies and call solidarity protests and vigils in public places. Organize community forums on the core #BLM issues. Always invite #BLM organizers to speak. Be respectful. Build political alliances. Figure out where to go from there.

This is how Americans can change a racist power structure that produces white cops who can cut down a Black child in a hail of bullets without so much as a warning. By tearing it up at the roots, one neighborhood at a time.

Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director.

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COPYRIGHT 2015 JASON PRAMAS. LICENSED FOR USE BY THE BOSTON INSTITUTE FOR NONPROFIT JOURNALISM AND MEDIA OUTLETS IN ITS NETWORK.

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

While the Boston Globe is a regular disgrace around these parts, last weekend the lowly sheet showed just how ignorant things get when editors run wire copy about shit happening thousands of miles away. It’s hard to stomach considering the hostility the Globe has toward activists at home, but following the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge out west, editors actually ran the headline, “Peaceful protest followed by Oregon wildlife refuge action.”

That appears to be the original Associated Press headline, traces of which remain in the Globe’s URL for the story.

Other bigs including ABC used the same naive marquee, only to switch to the more politically correct likes of “Militia Members Occupy US Building in Oregon After Protest” after being understandably trolled by people saying the obvious: that their coverage would have sounded slightly different if, say, Black Lives Matter protesters took over the State House with rifles.

Like ABC and others who were shamed, the Globe appears to have scrubbed their original ridiculous header and in their case replaced the benevolent marauders posturing with “Armed militia members occupy US building in Oregon.” Finally, we’re getting closer to the truth.

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DETROIT ROCK CITY

With an armed militia making headlines in the Wild West, an East Coast writer recalls his journey through the culture and mountains keeping America’s attention

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 One year ago this week, I published the first installment in an online series called “Oregon Tale,” in which I traveled to the Pacific Northwest—twice—to explore the kind of story that a reporter comes across once in a career. If they’re lucky. From evictions, to SWAT teams, to environmental pilfering, to activism, to crooked cops and judges—it’s all in there.

In the past few days, since armed militiamen occupied the federal Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside the town of Burns, Oregon, my series has found a whole new audience and second life. This excites me for two reasons— most importantly, the families at the center of “Oregon Tale” are still fighting for their freedom and property, while also my work may help the public understand what’s happening near Burns, which is about 200 miles east of the valley to which I made two reporting trips.

The following is excerpted from the second chapter, “Your Tax Dollars At Work.” Give it a read—better yet, check out the whole series online at Medium.com/Oregon-Tale—and you’ve a better shot at understanding how the standoff at the wildlife reserve may not be what it seems to be. Indeed, nothing in any neck of the Oregon woods ever is …

There are red, white, and predictable pockets across America where the population is a microcosmic doppelganger of our nation, from polarized political extremes to the quieter moderate middle. Some locales, like tony SoCal and the monied metropolitan suburbs, are conservative-heavy, while communities of color swing left, but as voting social organisms, they tend to behave as expected.

Josephine County in Oregon, population 83,000, is not one of those places.

A national Gallup poll in 2013 showed a record-high 42 percent of participants identifying as independents.

In that sense, they’re catching up to the people of Grants Pass, which, according to Oregon historian Percy T. Booth, “from its earliest pioneer days was founded by conservative, yet progressive, citizens.” Here atop the California border, wedged between cascading mountains, the full ideological spectrum appears to haunt each individual. There are bawdy fourth-generation loggers who crusade for food justice, and gun-toting Bay Area expats who grow pot but abandoned standard hippie values between the Kennedy and King assassinations.

There are several ways to climb into Grants Pass, each with unique charm. You can drive in from the beach, take a bumpy ride under the dizzying canopy enclosing the Redwood National Park. Or come up through the Golden State to experience a different swath of the KlamathSiskiyou, an ecological Xanadu akin to no other in the world. A half-hour due east is Medford, in neighboring Jackson County, the closest city and only media hub within 100 miles. With a population of approximately 75,000, Medford has a dinky commercial airstrip, but the puddle jumps from larger airports are costly, and so I fly into Portland before shooting south in a rental.

As a political junkie I’m elated to be traveling to 10

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Josephine during the heated 2014 sheriff’s race, and in the middle of the third citizen campaign in the past three years to push for a tax levy to fund safety measures. As a kicker, there’s also a ballot referendum in play that would “prohibit any person, corporation, or entity from propagating, raising, or growing genetically engineered plants.” Before I enter that scrum though, I’ve some journeying to do, and so I map out a route that curves south toward the yuppie tourism haven of Bend, then jackknifes west past the vineyards of Applegate Valley.

In my planning process I have contacted friends, environmental experts, and acquaintances from Oregon and the Northwest, asking about people, politics, and the lay of the land. Their advice varies — I’ve heard everything from “Skip Crater Lake unless you want to meet a bunch of other tourist assholes like you” to “Don’t tell anybody you’re a vegetarian, and be sure to gorge like a barbarian at Taylor’s in Cave Junction.” But if they’ve all consistently said one thing, it’s that I need to survey details outside larger cities and suburbs, Taylor’s pepper jerky and all.

AROUND BEND

A sign near a state construction site between highway exits declares, “Your Tax Dollars at Work.” A half-hour away, a banner hung outside a truck stop pleads, “Shop Oregon. No Sales Tax.” I think I get the message.

About an hour farther east, the Old Mill District of Bend is inviting, even exciting enough to make a city dog like me wistfully consider life there, something I have never done with anything but horror in places this size back east. A friend of a friend drives us past a couple of popular breweries and describes the city as a sporty hipster boomtown between the indie Mecca of Portland and Grants Pass. We wind around some foothills and through a couple of converted mill yards until we arrive at the Crux Fermentation Project, a futuristic and sustainable suds oasis with locally sourced fixings.

By now I’ve stopped trying to imagine what will come next. I drive by hillbilly fellowship churches with parking lots packed for weeknight services, then a country row of outdoor wine bars in Sisters, which looks almost like a Hollywood façade. I stop briefly for a snack and find myself among vacationing business types in unscuffed boots sitting with natives in overalls and cowboy hats. Down the road, a convenience store has something for all of them, and the kids too: “GUNS AMMO LIQUOR BEER WINE.” Twenty years ago, it was common to pass 40-foot flatbeds stacked with neat piles of stripped trees on these roads. But with substantially decreased access to federal forests and “old-growth” reserves, the latter a timberland term for larger and more valuable trees, I see only two such rigs over the course of a six-hour drive. Poverty abounds. Entering Jackson County, the final stretch before crossing into Josephine, there is trailer park after trailer

PHOTOS BY CHRIS FARAONE

OREGON TALE FEATURE

I steer off the interstate and onto narrow roads, and within minutes I’m ascending toward peaks that seemed impossible to reach from just a few miles away.

Staggering American grace at every angle: ponderosa pines jammed deep into the mountains like javelins hurled down from the sky, lava stones and fine red sand along the roadside juxtaposed with snowy mountains in the distance.

From baby trees planted in neat rows to miles of nylon webs shielding motorists from loose rocks, someone cares about this place.

While hurtling south I imagine the laborers who tamed this wilderness, and I stop at a few pull-offs that explain their efforts on plaques fixed to viewing decks. On a detour over the Detroit Dam, due southeast of the state capital of Salem, a sign acknowledges the Army Corps of Engineers behind the flowing reservoir. Completed in 1953, the facility supplies 10 nearby cities, and standing on a walkway hundreds of feet over the nine-mile lake, I gaze into a green and blue oblivion with sheer amazement at how workers hammered roads into the ancient earth around me.

Before moving on I pit stop in an outhouse that smells like old diarrhea. Reflections of the magical treeline outside are still burned into my corneas as I squint and squirt, but upon opening my eyes I notice that an amateur graffiti artist tagged the wall over the urinal, preemptively pissing on my gratitude for government: “Left Wing = Suck the working man dry of his $.”

park, after a trailer parked in the middle of nowhere.

I’m in desperate need of gas, and after sweating for 15 miles I finally see what appears to be some assistance. But upon closer inspection, it’s just a couple of emaciated tweakers toying with corroded pickups in what seems to be a sketchy former service station.

Not far after, I see the sign that I’ve been waiting for: “Welcome to Josephine County.”

A ROGUE RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

Though Josephine is the sole county in Oregon named for a woman, 19th-century treasure hunter Virginia Josephine Rollins, the mascot for the seat of Grants Pass is an 18-foot-tall fiberglass caveman. Perched on the edge of town, the Neanderthal serves as a rallying point for locals who for decades have dressed like The Flintstones on special occasions to boost local business.

The weather here is famously pleasant, with cool nights in the summer and hardly more than a chill through most of the winter. To remind folks of this atmospheric perk, a signature marquee above the Grants Pass shopping district boasts the regional motto: “It’s The Climate!”

Temp is the only constant; otherwise, the aptly named Rogue Valley is rife with paradoxes steeper than the surrounding mountain peaks.

On a morning cruise around the perimeter of Josephine, I pull over on the side of a deserted federal access road and lose myself in the black and white abyss before me. Disasters have begotten avalanches of ashes where illustrious evergreens once stood, and the scene looks like a charcoal painting. In 2003, a pair of simultaneous forest fires married on the crest of three adjoining mountains here, resulting in a blaze that raged for longer than a month, ravaged in excess of 90,000 acres, and cost roughly $38 million to quell. Such destruction only compounds the diminished state of natural resources in Oregon, where there are remnants of a once-thriving timber industry around every bend.

A sign by the bucolic gorge outside of town holds that the trees along the banks of the Rogue must be “rugged individuals” to “survive harsh conditions.” And not unlike the Douglas firs that cling to fractured rocks, the residents who’ve weathered economic slumps seem firm and strong. The metaphor sounds awfully folklorish, but it begins to explain the healthy business district I discover to a lot of surprise after reading about so much doom.

There’s something dainty about Grants Pass, though with a chill holistic West Coast vibe.

Contradiction is a natural occurrence here, one of many byproducts of various cultures clashing with capitalism and each other for centuries. Josephine has plenty of religion. At the same time many are obsessed with sightings of the supernatural and Bigfoot, the latter of which surfaced every couple of years until camera phones became ubiquitous. Downtown there are head shops near Christian supply stores, and a Doomsday survivalist emporium beside a beer boutique that sells growlers.

At a dive with shaded windows by my motel, a bartender says wealthier residents, mostly transplants in pastel golf shirts from Cali, live in the Highland Street area overlooking the main drag. One migration tied to opportunities in the healthcare and retail sectors, which account for the most jobs in post-timber Josephine, spiked in the mid-2000s, around the time Fortune named Grants Pass an ideal place to retire. The magazine’s praise rang like a real estate listing: A mild climate and one of the lowest wind velocities in the nation, fishing that has attracted the likes of John Wayne and George H.W. Bush, whitewater rafting on the Rogue River, and a new hospital with an adjacent cancer center.

I’m looking around every boulder for signs of foul activity fit for a troubled county. Peering in from outside, Josephine is best known for stories about its inability to aid 9–1–1 callers, and for cuts in rural patrols that have left places like Slate Creek, where Tom Roach and his longtime partner Melinda Starba were evicted from their home, with no police coverage on weekends and even

many hours during the week. There have also been token shockers, like the thief who was found hiding out in a shed near a grade school not long ago. Though the perp was in possession of a stolen rifle, there were no jail cells to accommodate him.

Critics of the county government allege that Sheriff Gil Gilbertson has inflated crime rates in order to nudge voters toward passing a tax increase for safety services.

Violent crimes, they note, have hovered in place, though property crimes have indeed skyrocketed since 2012.

Whether real or embellished, the predicament is one Gilbertson plays up to local press, giving comments like “Our county has become a magnet for criminal activity.”

After his deputies neglected to respond to family calls to check on an alone 73-year-old womanwho was later found dead, the sheriff told reporters: “Had I had a dispatcher on, there would have been an immediate response.” It mirrored a general warning he gave to the public months earlier: If you face a potentially volatile situation … You may want to consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.

As one indicator of the truth between fact and exaggeration, a 2013 survey by the Oregon Values and Beliefs Project found that more residents of Southern Oregon are worried about crime than are worried about jobs. It’s a somewhat telling number in a region that includes the statistically depressed likes of Josephine, where the unemployment rate, depending on the study, was somewhere between 11.2 and 13.8 percent during the last comprehensive counts in the aughts, before the clearcutting of services. The most recent U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, compiling data from 2009 to 2013, puts employment of 18- to 34-yearolds in Josephine at just 53.3 percent, more than 10 points behind Oregon and the nation as a whole.

Stats withstanding, cutesy Grants Pass is a throwback drag with mom-and-pop and antique shops on one end and big box stores on the other. In addition to typical dining options such as Applebee’s, there are also enough ethnic joints to keep tourists from San Francisco and Seattle stuffed; on day two, I have some of the tastiest Thai soup I’ve ever slurped. Even as this corner of Oregon sees timber subsidies slide, core businesses hold on. The bridal store fills nearly an entire block, with a scene out of a homecoming-themed wedding comedy playing out in the windows. For balance, there’s also a pawn shop stocked with fired guns and dented laptops, a military recruitment complex, sleazy motor inns galore, and more than half a dozen head and vape shops. Yin and yang for blocks — according to a woman at the Chamber of Commerce greeting hut, the most popular athletic pastimes are game hunting and Frisbee golf.

Grants Pass still has music stores, plus other Old-World staples that have largely disappeared from similarly NEWS TO US

sized American cities. On my second morning here, I’m browsing in an independent bookshop when a jock on the radio interrupts the music to report that nearby Hidden Valley High School is on lockdown. I ask the clerk if she heard what I heard. She didn’t, but doesn’t seem to be surprised either. However common such threats are to natives though, it sounds like news to me, and so I race to the scene.

Motoring south toward Hidden Valley I pass Lincoln Savage Middle School, where an uninvited guest once held a class of sixth-graders hostage at gunpoint. That situation, back in 1995, was defused by a wrestling coach who disarmed the madman. Today’s potential danger is a scraggly 14-year-old who, by the time I arrive, is handcuffed with his head down at the foot of the school’s driveway, his greasy mop and soiled T-shirt pressed against a sheriff’s cruiser. Turns out he only had a knife.

Just another weekday.

I snap some pics and retreat before the deputies can approach my rental, as I still have quite a bit of research left to do, and can’t risk being exposed yet. Nevertheless, on the return ride I get an earful from Sheriff Gilbertson, who is in the fight of his political career with Dave Daniel,

a Grants Pass city cop and former Oregon State Police trooper. Digging through the sheriff’s campaign filings before flying to Oregon hadn’t led me to expect this kind of media blitz from Gilbertson, since the sheriff had submitted a certificate pledging to raise and spend less than $3,000 on the election. But here he is, pitching me in a commercial on a Top 40 station while I’m heading to the motel.

I will protect your constitutional rights … I will continue my passion to protect our citizens and our community, against any threat, foreign or domestic, and I adamantly commit to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The juvenile pen in Grants Pass was shuttered in 2012. So after cuffing the blade-wielding delinquent at Hidden Valley, Gilbertson has no choice but to lock him up in neighboring Jackson County. With Josephine’s major crimes unit closed and more than half the staffers purged at headquarters, it’s become a trope among gadflies, from political committee meetings to Facebook groups, that the only functions left for Gilbertson are issuing handgun licenses and running foreclosure auctions.

It’s a sentiment shared by members of the North Valley Community Watch, whose full-page ad I see in the Grants Pass Daily Courier back at my preferred dive bar later in the week. The jaded former county cops who got the ax and citizens comprising the group are claiming the “need for new leadership in the sheriff’s office.”

Gilbertson, they say, “retaliates against citizens.”

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

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HONEST PINT

KILLING ACBF

OLDE MAGOUNʼS SALOON PRESENTS:

BeerAdvocate goes it alone, announces Microbrew Invitational

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1/7 Defeated Sanity(Germany) +Iniquitous Deeds(CA)+more 1/12 Simpsons Trivia Night- Free to play!

1/14 Resonance - down tempo dance night 1/16 12pm Punk Rock Aerobics w/ brunch 11am - 4pm 1/18 Slow Coyote (American Folk musician and poet) 1/25 The Splinters (Bluegrass/Folk/Americana) 1/23/16 The Vikings are coming… back!

Ten courses of opulent feasting Live ancient music performances Advance ticketing at cuisineenlocale.com

Presented by Cuisine en Locale www.enlocale.com 617-285-0167 CURRENTLY BOOKING HOLIDAY CATERING & PARTIES

Tucked into the distraction of the holiday season in late December, BeerAdvocate (BA), the popular beer sniffer website and co-founder of the American Craft Beer Festival (ACBF), sent out a press release that effectively killed that event and ushered in a new one, the BeerAdvocate Microbrew Invitational.

Billed as a throwback to its roots, the June 3-4, 2016, fest will only include brewers that meet the microbrewery definition, which is to say that they produce less than 15,000 barrels per year. In addition, all of the hand-picked invited microbreweries will be required to brew one beer that will premiere at the Invitational. While noble in its talking points, this announcement has quite a few local breweries, larger ones in particular, scratching their heads; what does this mean for them, and what the hell happened to the American Craft Beer Festival?

For starters, the ACBF was not wholly owned nor solely operated by brothers Jason and Todd Alstrom, the co-founders of BeerAdvocate. It was co-owned by Harpoon Brewery, which also functioned as the co-sponsor and logistical distribution partner of many of the beers and breweries that were at the ACBF but that did not have an existing distributor relationship in Massachusetts, a legal requirement otherwise.

Since its inception, the partnership seemed to have worked well—BA focused on the beers and volunteers, Harpoon handled logistics and the financials—and this allowed the festival to become the largest craft beer gathering on the East Coast within its first few years. With 5,000 attendees at each of the three sessions, the event was definitely a huge success, and culturally speaking it was a home run, bringing some of the best beers and craft consumers from around the country into Boston. So why kill it?

That’s a complicated question, creating even more questions than answers. Did it get too big too fast? Did the partners have a falling out? To say Harpoon doesn’t meet the new standards their new festival requires would be an understatement, so it’s clear they will not be part of it. As of press time, there is no official comment from BeerAdvocate, and the posts online have been vague at best; consumers seem to be curious if not a little confused by the announcement, based on limited comments among online threads. I did have a chance to speak to a few people at Harpoon however, and Fitz Granger, Asst VP Marketing at Harpoon Brewery, did offer me the following comment that seems to sum up what I heard.

“We loved the ACBF and we will miss it. It has been a pleasure welcoming great brewers from all over the country to our backyard. However after 8 years of producing the festival together, Jason and Todd had new thoughts on what a beer festival could be and wanted to move on. While it is sad to see the ACBF go, we look forward to what’s to come. It has been a great partnership and we have no doubt that we’ll continue to partner with them down the road.”

I also had a chance to speak with brewers and others working within the local craft beer industry, and almost all of them are not happy with the decision and don’t understand why it was made, some even accusing Jason and Todd of now thumbing their noses at the very brewers who helped them build their mini craft beer empire.

As one brewer told me off the record—and for good reason, given the history of BA trolling and blackballing of brands that has taken place in the past—“If it wasn’t for us, there wouldn’t be a BeerAdvocate today. We’re not Budweiser and to make it sound like we’re somehow hurting the craft beer industry, or are no longer relevant because our brands have grown and become successful, is absurd.”

In the end, it sounds like BA drove the decision, and this may be a logical move on their part as the craft beer industry grows up and evolves, or it may be the beginning of the end of the website’s relevance among the very brewers and consumers who made it what it is today. Time will tell either way.

“While it is sad to see the ACBF go, we look forward to what’s to come.”

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NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

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ARTS ENTERTAINMENT

MEN IN BLACK 4 WILL FEATURE THE TRIPPIEST SOUNDTRACK FROM INFECTED MUSHROOM. NO? WAIT, IS THAT THE GUY FROM THAT TATTOO SHOP REALITY SHOW?

14

WED 1.6

THURS 1.7

FRI 1.8

FRI 1.8

SAT 1.9

SAT 1.9

SOUP Features at HOPE Inc Open Mic

Infected Mushroom

Disgraced

What Would You Do? An Egleston/JP Arts Networking Nite

Cambridge Winter Farmers Market Opening Day!

Namaste Saturday with Sara DiVello

It’s a congregation of poets and spoken word artists at the Society of Urban Poetry’s very first open mic of 2016. Mosey your way on down to the Dudley Cafe right across from the Dudley T Station and indulge in the works of your neighbor. From 8 to 9:30, you’ll get the chance to listen to local artists like yourself present their work, or maybe even read something of your own if you have the courage.

After that, though, the stage turns to SOUP in a feature that’ll tackle identity, ethnicity, faith, and much more.

If the terms “psytrance,” “electronica,” and “glitch hop” mean anything to you, then man oh man, do I have a treat for you.

Coming straight out of Israel, Amit Duvdevani and Erez Eisen are ready to infect your mind at the House of Blues. The Infected Mushroom duo uses a whole lot of instruments and some pretty mean synthesizers, so it’s bound to be one hell of a musically charged night.

Opening night is always exciting, especially when the topic’s racial profiling and a post-September 11th America. Yup, this is very heavy play. But it’s a good one. Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced is one of those rare one-acts that feels full length while tackling the intense subjects we try so often to avoid. It’s an eye-opening experience whose subject matter is only elevated by the sheer quality of writing. Mixed with the Huntington’s solid track record, Disgraced will be anything but.

It’s a very rare thing to see an empty building with empty space offered to the public. The owners of the former Jackson Glass building are offering up the space to the Jamaica Plain community until the fated development plan is formed. It’s a networking event unlike any other.

Gather in the freshly abandoned building and discuss the future with free food and drinks. Make sure to speak your mind and share your ideas; you might just convince the right person what to do with the space.

With the advent of the 5th Annual Cambridge Winter Farmers Market, 2016 may finally begin. That’s right, these first eight days have just been a taste of what’s to come. “What is to come?” you may be asking yourself. Well, fresh food and produce, drinks, live music, and some cool art projects hosted by the Riverside Gallery, of course!

Bring your kids, bring your significant other, maybe even bring your grandma.

You’re never too old to eat healthy.

If you’ve ever wanted to do yoga in the Museum of Fine Arts, your wish is about to come true. Yoga teacher Sara DiVello is leading a class right in the MFA’s Shapiro Family Courtyard. Bring your mat and start your weekend off right. Once the session is over, venture forth into the exhibits and experience the MFA in a new light.

You’ll feel so refreshed, you’ll be able to take in the serenity of a near-empty museum at its fullest.

Dudley Cafe. 15 Warren St., Roxbury. 8-10:30pm/21+/ FREE. soupboston.com

House of Blues Boston.

15 Lansdowne St., Boston.

7pm-Midnight/21+/$22-35. facebook.com/ events/126748437688006

Huntington Theatre Company.

264 Huntington Ave., Boston. 8-10pm/18+/$20$75. facebook.com/ events/521787981310691

Jackson Glass.

3195 Washington St., Jamaica Plain. 5-8pm/all ages/FREE.facebook.com/ events/1650090475279453

Cambridge Community Center. 5 Callender St., Cambridge. 10am-2pm/all ages/FREE. facebook.com/ events/551489635018374

Museum of Fine Arts.

465 Huntington Ave., Boston. 6:30-10am/all ages/$25. facebook.com/ events/576312039185873

1.7.16 - 1.14.16

|

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NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

MUSIC

MUSIC

Underrated venues to keep your eye on

Why emo nostalgia shows are more than just fun

THE SEVEN SEES

DEJA ENTENDU

Tired of the same venues? Us too. Sometimes you need a break from the regular backdrop, even if they’re dishing up some of the best shows in Boston. Say hello to seven hidden and not-so-hidden spots in the city that deserve to have you standing in their audience. Then, when you go back to the usual venues like House of Blues or the Sinclair, they will be just as exciting as you remembered they were (though the pesky poles in the Paradise will never, ever go away).

WHAT: Coolidge Corner Theatre WHERE: 290 Harvard St., Brookline WHY GO: Once every blue moon, Coolidge lets a band take over the main screening room instead of showing a big flick on screen. It’s more surreal than Luis Bunuel.

Because really, nothing beats seeing a band from the comfort of 1930s velvet seats, a bucket of popcorn in hand, while a smoke machine fills the room with wispy clouds.

PAST PERFORMERS: Sunn O))), Ted Leo, Will Oldham

WHAT: Waterworks Museum WHERE: 2450 Beacon St., Chestnut Hill WHY GO: The first metro water system in the United States also hosts secret electronic, classical, and experimental shows. It doesn’t often throw shows, so set a reminder to check the calendar each month. It’s real-life steampunk hidden away in the quiet throws of Brookline.

PAST PERFORMERS: Mark Fell, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Lichens), Lawrence English

WHAT: First Church in Cambridge Congregational WHERE: 11 Garden St., Cambridge WHY GO: There ain’t no saint like a free-wheelin’ folk fella. While we aren’t suggesting you switch religions, we do urge you to stake out a spot in a pew for the fantastic live sets that take place here.

You’ll exit the church with a clean conscience and happy ears.

PAST PERFORMERS: Mark Kozelek, Ben Sollee, Mother Falcon

WHAT: Institute of Contemporary Art WHERE: 100 Northern Ave., Boston WHY GO: The only thing more modern than the ICA’s art is the bands it books. It’s easy to forget about its lineups since the building is off the beaten path, but the museum’s booking agent draws in everyone from experimental rock and provocative electronica to platinum pop, all of which are worth venturing over the water for.

PAST PERFORMERS: Lucius, How to Dress Well, Son Lux

WHAT: Out of the Blue Too Art Gallery & More WHERE: 541 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge WHY GO: If you need to get your creative juices flowing, swing by any show at this art gallery.

The range of rising local acts that play here amplify their sounds off bizarre paintings and flashing sculptures. It’s the type of environment that transports you to another planet.

PAST PERFORMERS: Pile, Anjimile, Palm

WHAT: Museum of Fine Arts WHERE: 465 Huntington Ave., Boston WHY GO: Stadium-like seating and gorgeous artwork make the Museum of Fine Arts’ shows something of a wonder. Look back at its catalogue to see a list of giants who played here when they were still young, like Joanna Newsom and the Books, and accept the fact that half of the audience was (and always will be) graying folks with membership cards.

PAST PERFORMERS: Angel Olsen, Spoon, The Mountain Goats

WHAT: Charlie’s Kitchen WHERE: 10 Eliot St., Cambridge WHY GO: Like we need to give you another reason to go here. Throw back a draft beer and bring your burger to the front row while small touring acts and local giants rip through rock and folk alike. Bonus: You can watch the audience as well as the band, thanks to the giant mirror wall behind the “stage.”

PAST PERFORMERS: Guerilla Toss, Lushes, Kal Marks

MUSIC EVENTS THU 1.7

FRI 1.8

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

[The Middle East Upstairs, 472 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

6:30pm/all ages/$10. mideastoffers.com]

INSTRU-METAL RUSSIAN CIRCLES + CLOAKROOM + WILDHONEY

16

1.7.16 - 1.14.16

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ROCKIN’ IN THE DAYTIME STEREOWOLF + JARED SALVATORE + HANNAH LIWERANT

DIGBOSTON.COM

SAT 1.9

OVER THE BORDER NOISE ROCK METZ + BULLY + SO PITTED

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 8pm/18+/$17. sinclaircambridge.com]

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Emo isn’t just a comeback kid. It’s music meant to stay that’s proven its place decades down the road.

Emo Night, the recurring night of emo music at the Sinclair, sees Texas Mike and Luke O’Neil bring a spotlight to the genre. With pop punk heavy hitters and post-hardcore deep cuts from the ’90s onwards, it’s a series that draws a massive crowd every single night.

Yet while it grows in popularity, some question what the point of it all is, especially when, theoretically, it’s emotional music best listened to at home.

Let’s get things straight: There’s comfort in solidarity when misfits come together. No matter how it’s defined, emo is pop for people who frown on the bus ride home, place love (and its loss) at the top of life’s totem pole, and never stopped wearing black T-shirts. So when jammed in a room with their favorite songs on blast, emo kids relive the pain of past days and hilarity of overdramatics with a learned confidence that their emotions are justified. Or, sometimes, they just find fun in nostalgia.

Emo music repeats itself, even in other forms. It’s a term loose enough to include Blink-182, American Football, Taking Back Sunday, Sum 41, Sunny Day Real Estate, Fall Out Boy, and beyond, getting purists angry over the “true” definition of the phrase, but still clearcut enough to describe music that straddles a line between heartfelt outpourings and bitter stomping.

Brand New’s (arguably) most popular album, Deja Entendu, mocks itself and its listeners with its literal translation of “already heard,” or, “Yeah, dude, we know lashing out over a broken heart isn’t new.” Yet the band’s songs always bear repeating. The emotion pouring out of its lyrics and guitar lines sting with the freshness of an open wound. It’s relatable. It was then and it still is now.

So go sing your heart out to Pinkerton covers this time, but realize the difference between then and now is how you’ve come to terms with your emotional self– and why embracing that’s so important.

>> EMO NIGHT W/ TIRED OF SEX, WHITE BELTS, LUKE O’NEIL, AND TEXAS MIKE. THE SINCLAIR, 52 CHURCH ST., CAMBRIDGE. WED 1.13. 8PM/21+/$3.

SINCLAIRCAMBRIDGE.COM

MON 1.11

TUE 1.12

WED 1.13

[Charlie’s Kitchen, 10 Eliot St., Cambridge.

9pm/21+/$5. mideastoffers. com]

[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 9pm/18+/$8. greatscottboston.com]

[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 9pm/18+/$8. greatscottboston.com]

FEMME FATALE PUPPY PROBLEMS + CANDY MIAMI + BIRTHING HIPS

EXPERIMENTAL FOLK SALTY GREYHOUND + JACK ROMANOV + BAY FACTION + THE LASZLOS

COURTERS RECORD RELEASE HEX PARTY + ZIP-TIE HANDCUFFS + COURTERS + SALEM WOLVES

WATERWORKS PHOTO BY TRIG PHOTOGRAPHY | DEJA ENTENDU ARTWORK BY BRAND NEW

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

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FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

FILM

NEON NOIR

On the Brattle’s 16-film program of ’80s and ’90s crime movies

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN What’s the difference between the femme fatales of the 1940s and their counterparts from the ’80s and ’90s?

Here are three, for starters: fluorescent lighting, lowhanging earrings, and high-waisted underwear. Visitors to the Brattle Theatre will get to study the rest of the changes this week, when the Cambridge moviehouse plays the next stage of its ambitious “History of Noir” series. This 16-film program within a program, entitled “Sex & Death & Venetian Blinds: Neo-Noir of the 1980s & 90s,” brings that history up to the era of Reagan and Clinton. And it’s not just the fashions that have changed—so has the frankness. The ’40s brought with them a code of conduct. But in these movies, we get to see the stains on the blouses.

Those stains have always been there, of course, even when we couldn’t see them. The standards and hallmarks of noir, as exhibited in these movies, have barely changed: There’s a hapless male hero walking his way through a labyrinth of conflicting ideologies and politics (usually he’s a private detective) and a dangerous woman (usually she’s rich) who leads that man down a path of selfdestruction (usually she leads him penis-first). Normally there’s a second woman as well (the madonna to the other one’s whore) and a cop (corrupt or otherwise) who tries to put all the aforementioned pieces together.

The directors of these 16 films subvert genre standards, play with gender roles, and rewrite standard cinematic depictions of race—but all of them use noir as a way to explore their bleakest concepts and darkest predilections. Originally born out of postwar angst and paranoia, the noir became a place for men to consider their scariest social anxieties. The protagonists of these movies are undone, more often than not, by two of life’s necessities: finances and fucking.

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

directed by Carl Franklin (screens Thu 1.14) “Property owner, eh?” Someone is mouthing off to Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, which is nothing new, given that he’s a black man living an upwardly mobile life in the 1940s. As played by Denzel Washington in this private-eye potboiler, he’s the African-American Philip Marlowe, keeping his cool even when it’d be smarter not to. Once he gets involved in the case of a mixed-race runaway, Easy gets snuck up the bellboy’s entrance into all the swankiest hotel rooms, with high society representatives offering him relatively paltry sums (a few hundred here, another thousand there) to risk his life on their behalves. The black man’s status as America’s hired help becomes all the more obvious while Rawlins works on a cause he barely cares about. And so a quiet fury slowly builds inside this WWII veteran. Franklin’s film is directed with a plain eye, but it seems to see everything—take note of the way we get to watch as Washington alters Rawlins’ diction, using

HARD EIGHT

THE HOT SPOT

THE UNDERNEATH

his “safe voice” whenever he needs to manipulate his way into controlling a conversation with a white man. One last note, unrelated to the rest: Devil in the Blue Dress features one of the great noir one-liners—“If you didn’t want him kill’t, then why did you leave him with me?”

HARD EIGHT

directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (screens Mon 1.11.)

The neon palette of these movies, from the sports-bar future of Blade Runner to the ice-blue suburbia of Thief (both screen on 1.8), seems to be borrowed from Las Vegas. So it’s fitting that Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut feature—a three-hander about a Nevada gambler (Philip Baker Hall) who takes in a young runaway (John C. Reilly) and his prostitute bride (Gwyneth Paltrow)—reveals itself as the gem of the whole program. Anderson’s controlled compositions and rhythmed editing imbues the film with a lifelong card player’s unflappable calm. That gets shaken up by the ransom plot that rushes into the second half of the movie, which arrives with the fury of an unchained handheld camera. It’s all played in a minor key, but an almost Biblical tone eventually piles up on top of all the cards and cocktails, loading the film’s few violent moments with the gravity of original sin.. Listen closely during a diner scene where Hall decides to risk his own well-being for the sake of this clan he’s created: That’s “Silent Night” you’re hearing.

THE HOT SPOT

directed by Dennis Hopper (screens Tue 1.12.)

The tradition of the “erotic thriller”—back when most of them featured Michael Douglas—runs across the history of film noir like an intersection. And The Hot Spot, along with Body Heat (screens 1.6), lies at the fork of that road. Don Johnson is sleepwalking his way through a dusty Texas town, only bothering to wake up when he runs into one of two women: Dolly (Virginia Madsen), who’s married to his boss, or Gloria (Jennifer Connelly), who works across the street. So Johnson’s half-hearted bank robber comes up with a scheme to run away with

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

his ideal, all while he simultaneously plays mistress to Madsen’s blonde-haired man-eater. Hopper’s direction hews closer to coherency than you might expect, but he finds a delirious sexual energy in the machinations of his characters. Gloria’s got unblemished skin that can’t help but shine against the rough-hewn textures of the dry desert town. But Dolly, always in a state of seductive undress, has a demeanor that befits the setting much better: She’s perpetually overheated.

THE UNDERNEATH

directed by Steven Soderbergh (screens Mon 1.11.)

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” Johnson sputters during one of The Hot Spot’s many love scenes.

That may as well be the motto for this whole program.

The men in these movies seem to be damned by their very existence—doomed by the ambitions and desires they were born with. They get caught up in schemes bigger than their eyes can see. And for Soderbergh, one of our far-left commercial filmmakers, there are few schemes as scary as a day job. Michael (Peter Gallagher) is trying to leave his past as a gambling addict behind, so he takes a job working as the driver of an armored car. Take three guesses as to how that turns out badly. Soderbergh, looking forward to his own later works—like The Limey and Haywire—uses color tints and canted angles to keep his audience halfway-oriented, while he swaps his way through three or four separate timelines. They allow him to explore a toxic relationship shared between Michael and an old flame while it’s at many different stages— during the throes of his addiction, through the monotony of his life in recovery, and through the hell that follows the film’s central heist. But that timeline also allows Soderbergh to get at one of the eternal truths of film noir: The protagonists are always two steps behind everyone else, no matter what it is that’s holding them back. There’s a scene where Michael visits a rock club, and we catch a glimpse of the word that gets stamped on his hand as he walks in: “Sucker.”

>> SEX & DEATH & VENETIAN BLINDS: NEO-NOIR OF THE 1980S & 90S. BRATTLE THEATRE. WED 1.6—THU 1.14. 40 BRATTLE ST., CAMBRIDGE. SEE BRATTLEFILM.ORG FOR FILM LISTINGS AND SHOWTIMES.

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[Museum of Fine Arts. 465 Huntington Ave., Boston.

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Midnight/R/$11.25. 35mm. coolidge.org]

[Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 12:30, 5, and 9:30pm/$9-11. brattlefilm. org]

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ARTS

BLUSHING VIOLET

SpeakEasy Stage revisits Violet for its silver anniversary

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The 25th anniversary celebration for SpeakEasy Stage continues as it revisits Violet, a musical that producing artistic director Paul Daigneault first staged for SpeakEasy roughly 16 years ago. This isn’t just another production of Violet, though: Keeping in line with the theater’ss mission of presenting Boston premieres, it is the revised, streamlined 2014 Broadway revival version of the show that will be seen in Boston for the first time.

Based on Doris Betts’ short story The Ugliest Pilgrim, Violet is the story of a young woman (yes, called Violet) who, as a child, suffered an accident at the hand of her father that left her with a debilitating scar on her face. She thinks that her last chance at a normal life might be an evangelical faith healer that she saw on TV, so she sets out on a journey by bus from North Carolina to Tulsa in hopes that he can heal her scar. And, just maybe, one day she’ll be pretty enough for someone to fall in love with her.

With a stirring, memorable score by Jeanine Tesori (who won a Tony Award last year for Fun Home) and a gentle, incisive book by Brian Crawley, Violet first premiered Off-Broadway in 1997. Although it only ran for a month, the show quickly picked up leagues of fans and lived on in the form of a cast album. Only a few years later, SpeakEasy presented Violet to Boston audiences for the very first time.

In 2013, Encores! presented a one-night-only concert version of the show that ended up being the catalyst for the revival. Violet was a show that Tesori and Crawley had been eager to revisit for a while, though neither had any idea that the Encores! concert would be the entry point for the 2014 Broadway revival, which starred Sutton Foster and earned unanimously positive reviews.

Just as Tesori and Crawley revisited their show about 15 years after the original production, so too is Daigneault, who says that he chose Violet as a way to honor where SpeakEasy has come from and how far they’ve come. But revisiting a show with 15 years under your belt is bound to be slightly different. If age doesn’t necessarily guarantee wisdom, it does promise some experience.

Speaking of himself and Tesori, Crawley said: “We had kids, we raised them, we had families. The heart of what’s going on with Violet is what she’s dealing with between herself and her father. We were very much seeing everything through Violet’s eyes when we wrote it at first, because we were her age. We now have the perspective of seeing things through the eyes of the older characters as well. It’s an interesting way to look at it.”

“Just being older, I get the things that life throws are you more,” said Daigneault. “The triumphs and the struggles and the times when you feel that despair and darkness are taking over, or that there are too many roadblocks for you to be successful. Since I’ve lived longer, I find that I can bring that to the work.

Also, I understand the idea of faith a lot more.”

“We’re all on our own personal pilgrimages to find healing,” said Daigneault.

“The scars can be physical, but most of them are metaphorical or internal. I think that Violet herself represents that in all people.” >> VIOLET. RUNS 1.9-2.6 AT SPEAKEASY STAGE COMPANY AT THE BCA, 527 TREMONT ST., BOSTON.SPEAKEASYSTAGE.COM/VIOLET

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SAVAGE LOVE

PHONES & BONES

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY WHATS4BREAKFAST.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET I’m a 45-year-old straight male. Politically and socially, I consider myself an ardent feminist.

There is nothing I enjoy more than giving a woman an orgasm or two. I’m very GGG and will cheerfully do whatever it takes. Fingers, tongue, cock, vibrator—I’m in. If it takes a long time, so much the better. I’m okay with all of that. Now and again, though, I really like a quickie, a good old-fashioned “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!” The only ladies I’ve found willing to engage in those cock-centric acts are sex workers. I’m okay with that, too. But the last time I paid for it, with a woman I had patronized before, I was just about to slip my cock in doggy-style when her phone rang. It was in reach, and she picked it up! I hesitated, but she didn’t pull away, and in fact pushed back a bit while she answered. I figured this was what I came for, so I proceeded.

Her cavalier attitude toward being fucked from behind while having a trivial phone conversation wound up being a huge turn-on for me. By the time she finished her 20-second call, I was finished as well. I hadn’t come that quickly since I was a teen. She laughed that she should take calls more often. What kind of beast am I that I really enjoyed such utter indifference? Does this reveal some dark secret deep in my psyche? How can that mesh with my otherwise feminist views?

Premature Ejaculation Needs Some Introspective View Examined First, PENSIVE, “enjoys giving women orgasms” sets the bar for “ardent feminist” just a bit low. So here’s hoping your feminism involves more than penetrating a willing partner with your fingers, tongue, cock, and whatever vibrators happen to be lying around. Because if your feminism doesn’t include support for pro-choice policies and candidates, regular donations to Planned Parenthood, backing equal pay for equal work, speaking up when other men say shitty/rapey/dehumanizing things about women (particularly when there isn’t a woman in the room whose pussy you want to lick until you come, because feminism!)—and more—then you’re not a feminist, ardent or otherwise.

Moving on… Why did it turn you on when the sex worker took a call during your session?

Because it did. Turn-ons are subjective and mysterious. People who are curious about their turn-ons have to start with “this turns me on” and work backward from there. And to figure out why a particular fabric/adornment/ attitude/scenario arouses us, we use the only tools available to us—guesswork and selfserving rationalizations—to invent a backstory that makes some sort of logical sense, and then we apply it to something (kinks, turn-ons, orgasms) that really defies logic.

So, PENSIVE, if I were to hazard some guesswork on your behalf, I’d probably go with this: Being treated with passive contempt by someone that you are supposed to be wielding power over (the woman you’re fucking, a sex worker you’ve hired)—being subtly humiliated and mildly degraded by that woman—taps a vein of eroticized self-hatred that makes you come quickly and come hard.

And while that’s wonderful for you, PENSIVE, it isn’t proof you’re a feminist.

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