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THE IDEALIST

AARON SWARTZ AND THE RISE OF FREE CULTURE ON THE INTERNET

BY JUSTIN PETERS

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Ring in VOL 18 + ISSUE 4

JANUARY 28, 2016 - FEBRUARY 4, 2016 EDITORIAL

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Did you bother listening to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s State of the City address last week?

How about Governor Charlie Baker’s State of the Commonwealth? I didn’t think so.

Lucky for you, we hung around the perimeter of both, rapping with the people moving in and out of these annual festivities, as well as those who were demonstrating. It seems that despite what our elected leaders say from their respective podiums, the actual positions of our state and city all depends on who you ask. And what you ask them.

For those reasons and because it’s our job and mission to eviscerate the status quo, this week both our news hole and Free Radical column by Emily Hopkins look between the lines of Walsh’s claims.

And since we’re on the topic of social justice in the face of corporate bullshit and gentrification, I hope that you enjoy our feature interview with Justin Peters, whose new book on Aaron Swartz, who took his own life three years ago this month, is mandatory reading. To Swartz and everyone else who rejects the lies and half-truths we are regularly served by politicians: We salute you.

CHRIS FARAONE - NEWS + FEATURES EDITOR, DigBoston

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NEWS US

BILL DOWNING

KILL BILL TOKIN TRUTH

Law enforcement cracks down on medical cannabis oils

BY MIKE CRAWFORD @MIKECANNBOSTON The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), Massachusetts State Police, and police departments in Boston, Reading, Woburn, and North Reading are depriving patients of access to lifesaving medicine that Commonwealth voters approved in 2012.

More than three years after a successful statewide vote to allow patients to have medical marijuana, federal and local law enforcement agencies are working together to wage a seemingly reinvigorated war on cannabis patients and providers.

One case in point is Bill Downing, a longtime Bostonarea activist with MassCann/NORML (and occasional contributor to and interview subject for this column), who is facing several misdemeanor complaints filed by Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley in Brighton Municipal Court. Conley also filed a complaint for forfeiture of Downing’s products and for $126,708 that was seized in a raid.

Downing is a married 57-year-old father of two, and has never been charged with a crime in the past. He says that he was helping seriously ill patients, and claims he was being transparent about his intentions. I have known Downing for almost 20 years, and believe this to be true.

We have both heard from the same patients crying for medicine, a regular occurrence with those desperately seeking help for serious illnesses, and who need reliable sources of cannabis. Preferably provided by an expert who can help guide people toward relief.

I’m reminded of a patient named Ken Roberts who passed away in 2012 at the young age of 47. Bill and I 4

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knew him from the MassCann activist email list, where Ken wrote about his troubles finding medicine for his condition. We learned after his death that Ken needed large amounts of the medical grade indica he asked about—a commodity that’s typically in short supply on the black market—for “constant painful torment [that] contributed to his demise,” according to an obituary.

A few days before his magistrate hearing last week, Downing told me in a phone interview, “I will suffer to help these people. How can any of us continue to say no, especially when the means to help are right here? It’s immoral to deny these kids this CBD oil to control their seizures or to deny somebody like Ken Roberts his medical indica. That to me is immoral, criminal. Why did our government torture and deny him relief? I think the DPH and the state are the criminals on this … We passed an initiative three years ago already.”

Downing’s store, CBD Please in Allston, has been the focus of a BPD investigation since 2014. He was not charged at his magistrate hearing, perhaps indicating that arguments made by Downing’s legal representatives resonated. He noted in a follow-up phone call: “The magistrate didn’t seem to have any concern with my legal team bringing up the political nature of my persecution, but on the issue of whether I actually broke the law, it’s unusual to say the least that with all the investigation, undercover buys, the warrant and raid of my business and home, that I was not charged at the hearing. There is the question [of whether] I actually broke a law with my CBD products. These products are not used for their THC content but for CBD benefits, for kids with seizures, not

to get them high. My wholesaler states that these CBD products are legal in all 50 states. I do not believe I broke any laws.”

The magistrate has agreed to read additional written arguments from Downing’s attorneys, Steve Epstein and John Swomley, before ruling on charges. That process should take a few weeks; in the meantime, the court of public opinion should consider that a city with hundreds of unsolved murders is using detectives on a case that stands on such seemingly shaky legal ground—after a victory for medical cannabis at the ballot box in 2012.

It’s important to acknowledge the entire timeline of this story too, starting with the investigation of Downing’s previous venture, Yankee Care Givers. Reading police conducted undercover buys, leading to that business being shut down in June 2014. At one point, Downing’s service was clearly allowed under the 2012 medical marijuana initiative. But the guidelines got murkier after the DPH issued regulations including a 1:1 caregiver-to-patient ratio. Downing contested those regs for months, and continued to have patients file the proper paperwork listing him as their provider.

DPH processors were alerted, over and over again, that Downing had more than one patient. And authorities did nothing. Downing also filed, albeit unsuccessfully, for a court injunction against the state due to their arbitrary regulations. The DPH finally addressed the contention by filing a cease-and-desist order to Yankee Care Givers, which led to Downing consulting his attorneys, and immediately closing his operation. He opened CBD Please in the aftermath.

None of this is mentioned in the complaint for forfeiture filed by the district attorney. Left out was how Downing shut down Yankee Care Givers voluntarily, and that Reading police have not filed charges against him despite conducting an investigation of their own in 2014. The document implies that Yankee Care Givers and CBD Please are one in the same, with a DPH inspection manager stating that CBD Please and Yankee Caregivers are “acting in violation of the Massachusetts Medical Marijuana Regulations.” Needless to say, there’s no evidence presented to support such claims. Downing says it’s especially bizarre since he was only selling CBD-high topical balms, ingestible CBD, and low or no-THC oils that exist in a gray area. The complaint states that lab tests show some of the seized products contained no THC content at all, which makes you wonder if the state plans to raid the hemp oil aisle at Whole Foods next.

For all the THC counting, the police and alphabet soup agencies should acknowledge that patients aren’t seeking CBDs to get stoned, and realize that Downing’s prosecution could set a dangerous precedent. Not to mention that the whole ordeal embarasses the BPD and DA’s office. They’re just repeating history—mimicking former failed attempts to stop the Boston Freedom Rally, to revoke the business licenses of glass artisans, and the list goes on.

Then there’s Downing. “You’re the guy from that big Boston Hempfest,” he recalls a DEA agent saying as storm troopers entered his home. Downing says machine guns were pointed at members of his family, and that he hasn’t been sleeping well since the SWAT raid. “We’re not crazy to resist police,” he says, “just don’t point the guns and involve my family. That’s political … there’s no other reason for it.”

Downing continues: “If the charges don’t get filed, I will be moving to get my product and money back from the police and be back in business serving patients legal CBD products in Massachusetts.”

For the patients he helps, that won’t be soon enough.

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STATE OF THE DEPRAVITY Belated notes on speeches written by operatives paid to make politicians look good

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Few things are less democratic than a state of the city, state, or union address.

They are subjective greatest hits lists for captive audiences, written by people who are paid to make their bosses shine. In Boston, the local press tends to flank municipal decisions without question—moves to attract GE, IndyCar, and the Olympics, for starters—until public opposition mounts. Which last week meant hardly any voices contested Mayor Marty Walsh’s State of the City narrative besides some rants on social media.

Not everyone applauded for the mayor. In front of the entrance to his Symphony Hall event, dozens of parents with children in Boston Public Schools protested impending cuts of programs and potentially entire buildings. Joined by students and teachers from BPS, their signs told the kinds of stories that were left out of the mayor’s speech: STOP SHORT-CHANGING OUR STUDENTS, BUDGET CUTS HURT KIDS, among other placards questioning the mayor’s allegiance to public education.

In his turn, Walsh claimed “the City of Boston is as strong as it has ever been,” citing evidence including nearly 5,000 home units “started,” “1,000 of [which] were affordable homes—a new record.” Plus “3,800 homes completed—another new record,” as well as decreases in violent and property crimes, a drop in unemployment, and “a state-of-the art homeless facility, replacing every shelter bed from Long Island.”

Of course perspective is important—there are ugly sides of nearly all of Walsh’s claimed accomplishments, especially along the broken bridge between Long Island and replacement shelters. So on the day following the Symphony Hall speech, I asked Erin Anderson from Epicenter Community in Dudley Square for a recording of their event titled “Potluck & Politics: The State of the City” (I couldn’t make it in person due to a family engagement). According to Anderson’s co-host, Malia Lazu, the event was for people to “talk about the state of our city—not only the speech that we heard yesterday,” but rather “our thinking.” “If you were to have given a speech,” she asked, “what would you have said?”

The discussion that ensued fell more in line with my own observations—and that of the working people I know and interact with in person and on social media—than anything out of the mayor’s mouth one night before. Individuals representing interests ranging from law enforcement, real estate, and politics, to education, entertainment, and social justice discussed their realities of life in the Hub in 2016, with an emerging picture much less hopeful than that of a booming new bohemian Utopia depicted by Walsh.

“I can look at the mayor’s transcript, and at the ‘entrepreneurial center,’ and at this and that, but at the end of the day that doesn’t affect our merchants as much as housing does,” said Luis Edgardo Cotto, executive director of Egleston Square Main Street. Cotto acknowledged Walsh’s promise to open an Office of Housing Stability, but said people should continue to ask, “What does ‘affordable housing’ mean? The mayor says he put in affordable units, but affordable to you might not be affordable to me.”

Added Greg Ball, editor-in-chief of the Boston-based music and culture site KillerBoomBox (with whom I have collaborated on journalism projects), “The reality is that it’s very difficult to live in this city … The 800 people who come to work at GE headquarters—they’re going to be alright. What’s going to happen to the regular working folks? It’s a concern to me as an entrepreneur because it’s hard for people who are just getting out of college and trying to break in. You can’t do that in a city where the median rent is over $2,000.”

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Police union attorney blames internet

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JUST ANNOUNCED!

Some advice for any lawyers out there: If at all possible, avoid saying publicly that you think it’s perfectly OK for grown police officers to send pictures of their genitals to teenagers. We offer this free tip in hopes that Kenneth Anderson, legal representative for the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association (BPPA), is reading DigBoston.

It may be too late. Last week, in addressing allegations made against Boston Police Department (BPD) officer Edwin Guzman, who is accused of sending ‘harmful’ pictures to a 16-year-old girl on Facebook, Anderson barked to Boston Herald reporter O’Ryan Johnson, “You can’t tell me someone her age has never seen a picture of a penis on the Internet.”

In addition to his role reminding parents in the community, however inadvertently, that they probably shouldn’t let their teens volunteer at car washes for charity, Anderson, according to the January/February 2015 issue of the union’s controversial newsletter, also conducts trainings for BPPA members. Among the topics on which the eloquent attorney guides the men and women who patrol our streets: the legal rights of members, due process, and “firearms discharges.”

We can only imagine the size of the balls on these guys. We’d ask some underage girls around Boston, but they’ve probably been traumatized enough already.

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“I am so proud to announce: we have ended chronic veterans’ homelessness in Boston.”

So said Mayor Marty Walsh in last week’s State of the City address, and in a follow-up tweet copying @WhiteHouse, @FLOTUS, @POTUS, and @ SecretaryCastro for good measure. It’s a bold claim, and one that wasn’t fleshed out in detail in the mayor’s speech. So to clear things up, I took a look at what a so-called “functional end” means in government talk.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) defines a “functional end” as no veterans experiencing chronic homelessness, but with two exceptions: vets who have been offered housing and have yet to accept or enter it, and those who have been offered housing but instead opted for “service-intensive transitional housing.” By the city’s own measure, they’re hitting this mark. When the Boston Homes for the Brave initiative launched in 2014, there were 414 homeless veterans in the Hub. Since then, the program has housed 533 veterans. These counts are nearly impossible to verify—on paper, however, the numbers mean that Boston services at least eclipsed the rate of new vets entering the population.

But to simply state (or, in this case, to declare from the podium at Symphony Hall) that the city has “ended chronic veterans’ homelessness in Boston” doesn’t exactly paint an accurate picture for anyone unfamiliar with technical USICH definitions. Veterans are still entering the homeless population every day, and some homeless veterans, according to the city, have refused housing. And what does it mean that there can be a “functional end” while some vets remain in transitional housing?

“I do think his making the bold claim that they have ‘ended chronic veteran homelessness’ without also mentioning that there are still vets experiencing homelessness and in need of permanent housing, whether intentional or not, creates the misconception that literally all veterans are housed,” says Cassie Hurd of the Boston Homeless Solidarity Committee, an organization that aims to engage and elevate the voices of Boston’s homeless community.

While she can’t speak to the veteran population specifically, Hurd worries that such broad claims could downplay the dire conditions that Boston’s homeless communities face in general. In the throes of another icy winter, for one, there still aren’t enough beds. A representative from the Pine Street Inn recently told WBUR that winter demand was up 20 percent over the past two years, and part of the state and city’s joint relief plan involves shuttling men from one shelter to another to sleep on mats in a lobby.

The issue of homelessness will doubtlessly be tied to the legacy of the mayor’s first years in office, and it’s no surprise that Walsh wants to spin the story. Nevertheless, it will be hard for many Bostonians, especially housing advocates and those on the street, to forget the sudden closing of the Long Island Bridge in the autumn before the ferocious blizzards of 2015. Admission of the problem and the devotion of resources should obviously be applauded. But it’s perhaps too soon to call—or should I say, tweet at—the White House.

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COPYRIGHT, BUT IT FEELS SO WRONG FEATURE

A new book tells the story of Aaron Swartz from the beginning of his struggle—more than 200 years ago

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 Though only 26 years old when he took his own life three years ago this month, Aaron Swartz packed enough ideas into his relatively short life to warrant several biographies and innumerable thought pieces.

He founded Demand Progress to fight absurd internet censorship stunts like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and while a fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption, served as a contributing editor to the esteemed Cambridge-based periodical The Baffler. Perhaps most impressively, Swartz was one of the few people on Earth who understood how Wikipedia works, all in addition to helping start Reddit and Open Library, both massive and metastasizing resources for an information-seeking public.

For Slate contributing editor and Swartz biographer Justin Peters, neither his subject’s spectacular innovative adventures, nor the saga that ensued after Swartz was caught downloading troves of data from the academic

resource service JSTOR (through the MIT network), was enough to convey the story Peters wanted to tell. In his view, the long view presented over 270 pages in The Idealist (Scribner), this struggle began at the dawn of American intellectual property. Centuries before U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz clobbered Swartz with wire-fraud charges that threatened prison time and a potential seven-figure fine, men like Noah Webster (of Webster’s Dictionary fame) fought for the right—copyright, to be specific—to use law as a partition between privilege and access in publishing.

With this crushing research task now behind him, we asked Peters, who splits his time between New York and Boston, about the outcry and reflection that has taken place the World Wide Web over since Swartz’s passing in 2013, and about the generations of ideologues who forged seemingly insurmountable obstacles for any devout free culture idealist.

SO MUCH FOR COPYRIGHT Select excerpts from ‘The Idealist’

PETERS ON THE FATHER OF COPYRIGHT NOAH WEBSTER Even his fiercest foes would have acknowledged his diligence and ambition. By the time he was only twenty-seven years old, Webster had already written and published a series of grammar textbooks and a collection of political essays—an impressive feat in a time when ‘author’ was about as sensible a career ambition as ‘astronaut.’

PETERS ON AARON SWARTZ AND THE JSTOR HACK His actions shouldn’t have surprised anyone. If the city of

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Writers these days move fast, and even though we may drill deep sometimes, as soon as that’s over, we move on to the next story. What’s it like when you get asked to put an extra lens on something?

After spending so much time writing for Slate, churning out like 1,500 words a day—one blog post in the morning, one in the afternoon—when I started writing this book I thought it would be easy and that I could pop it out in three months. It’s not the same thing at all. It really isn’t.

I was so over-confident, thinking framing myself to write about things in the news was like writing a book. It took me like six months to come to my senses and realize this was something I can do on nights and weekends, and once I realized that, I realized that if it was going to be done well, I’d have to really dig into it and not just tell the obvious story of Aaron’s life and death, but really going back to the root causes and the genesis of the laws that killed him.

Cambridge had compiled a yearbook on all its residents, Aaron Swartz would surely have been named Most Likely to Try to Download the Entire JSTOR corpus. Swartz was an ideologue who had spent the past few years not only bulk-downloading large data sets that were inaccessible to the public, but also writing and speaking on the moral necessity of doing so.

ON DIGITAL PARADOXES: Theoretically, computers and the Internet can be used to promote congruence, tolerance, and understanding. In the real world, however, forward progress will always be slowed by social and political friction, often generated by those who do not think these goals represent progress at all. Internet enthusiasts often presume that the network inevitably leads to yes, even though the world has always, always, always been defined by no.

How much of a public domain aficionado were you before all of this?

I knew that public domain existed, but that was where it ended.

In researching the history of copyright, [it was] men—and they almost all were men—who were writing these laws, and there were lawyers, and representatives from big companies and professional groups. They would all sort of spin out the lie that public domain means abandonment, that it was the equivalent of a vacant lot. The if something’s in the public domain, that just means no one cares about it. That the public should want corporations to maintain control over works for 150 years because they care about them—which is complete bullshit.

I don’t find your tone in the book to be very judgmental. You open with the story of Noah Webster, who is sort of the father of American copyright. He’s prolific and hardworking, but also kind of a repulsive character who people don’t like. Is he the villain in this book?

I tried very hard to not tell people what they should believe. My aim was just to lay out the history and the facts of how these laws came together, and once you read that I think it’s easy to draw your own conclusions.

As far as Webster, I found him interesting because he was both a hero and a villain, so to speak. He was one of the first people in post-colonial America to believe that good information being available made the country more free, but then when he realized that freely available information also meant that he wasn’t making much money, then he swung all the way over to the other side. He very much became someone who shifted from a populism to an elitism that pervades all of our copyright laws today.

Is this topic different than a lot of others in that there’s not really a good side and a bad side, but rather a number of sides advocating for different things and for different reasons?

I’ve used words like heroes and villains, but that’s not really accurate. Everyone on every side of every issue thinks they’re doing the best thing for the country—right? To be clear, I wouldn’t have written this book without copyright law, and without the ability to make some money off it. It took me two and a half years. If someone were to tell me to write it and that they weren’t going to pay me, I’d tell them to have someone else write it. I have to pay rent.

At a certain point my book is going to go out of print. I hope not, but the book will go out of print, and then it will just sit.

It will probably be in some public libraries, but all the work that I put into this book will become functionally inaccessible because it’s going to remain under copyright for 70 years until my death. When you go from 14 years to like I said—70 years after I die—who does that serve? It doesn’t really serve authors.

It serves the people who hold the copyrights to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and shit like that.

The level of detail in which you get into some sequences of events in Aaron’s life is remarkable. Was that made easier or more difficult by the amount of blogging and journaling he did? And by the significant amount of media made by and about him?

There was so much material there. On one hand, it’s a biographer’s dream, because you have all this primary source material. On the other hand, you get to the point where you’re relying so much on this material that you’re wondering how reliable it is. This is his side of the story. Is he being a completely unbiased observer of his own life? How much stock should I put in his recollections? Have any of these things I’m reading in 2015 been edited from the past? I had to wrestle with that. I brought in a lot of secondary material and interviews for when I thought it was good to get in another perspective. Look—having too much primary source material is a good problem to have.

There’s a lot in the book about the VC-startup culture in which Aaron spent some time, and which seemed to simultaneously inspire and disgust him. Does it seem that his skepticism is validated?

He was at the beginning of Reddit, and left after about a year because he basically thought it was worthless, that it was never going to do anything, that it wasn’t worth his time. He was very much an absolutist—like if he couldn’t directly look at what he was doing on a day to day basis and see how those actions were helping to improve the world in the way he wanted, then he would look and say, ‘Oh, this is worth nothing.’ I think the truth is probably somewhere more in the middle. Reddit’s a for-profit company, and the people who founded it got rich, but it’s this really cool and interesting conversational ecosystem that has been used to really bring people together for whatever sort of purpose. He wasn’t one for sitting and waiting to change the world by indirect means.

So what do you think he would have been like 100 years ago?

I think he probably would have been an antiwar poet.

In a lot of cases, Boston is a place where people go when they still want to live in a city but want to get out of New York, where they can’t breathe. With Aaron it was the opposite following the indictment—he —he wanted to get away from Cambridge because — of all the heat he felt on him, but wound up hating New York too. Of the many places he lived through the years, were there any where it seemed he felt most comfortable?

Right up until the indictment, he wrote that Cambridge was the only place he had ever felt comfortable in his life. It was a city of books, and ideas, and there was enough quiet to do your work and people to collaborate with there. He really loved Cambridge, and I think it really came as a shock to him when Cambridge let him down. When the indictment came down, and MIT remained silent, and nobody took the time or initiative to really speak out. It kills me—I didn’t know very much about Aaron or the case until after he died. But a lot of people did know about it, and what did they do? The paper that covered that the best was The Tech, the student paper.

As you researched and wrote this book, did you find any signs of intelligent life in the justice system or in any legislative corner which suggests there is a chance that the law may catch up with technology in some way or another?

No. No. Just leave it at no. There are individual legislators, like there always are, who get it. That’s great, hooray, they get it.

Now where are the hundreds of millions of dollars that you need to convince everyone else that these are the laws we need? When Aaron’s Law has come up in the House or the Senate, it’s just died. Congratulations on helping to shut down SOPA, but that’s not a final victory. It’s going to take sustained attention and activism.

Did you have trouble separating the story of Swartz from the story of what he was fighting for?

That’s the main reason why I spent so much time on the history, and why in the chapters that were about Aaron, to go away from him for at least 2,000 words and look at some broader stuff that’s going on out there. The issues Aaron was fighting preceded him, and they’ll succeed him. He’s become a sort of a symbol of these laws, but I hope people will come away from the book thinking it’s more than a sad story.

This is a big story. Aaron has been cast as the hero because the Department of Justice sucks at using the internet, but I bet there are as many people out there who think Ortiz did the right thing, and that laws are laws, and that rules are rules, and that if you break them, there are consequences. There are probably more people who feel that way then who feel the other way. That’s how it has always been, and that’s probably the way that it will always be.

Join Justin Peters and John Summers of The Baffler this Thursday, January 28 at 7pm at Workbar Cambridge for a “free public discussion of Aaron Swartz’s life, ideals, and prosecution.”

Ed. Note: Justin Peters once profiled DigBoston News + Features Editor Chris Faraone for Columbia Journalism Review in 2011. It feels pretentious to mention, but the disclaimer felt necessary.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

‘RIGHT OF PASSAGE We asked the author of The Idealist to explain some of the backroom deals that led to current copyright and intellectual property laws. Trust us— this stuff is sexier than it sounds.

THE INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1891 Peters: “This really gave rise to the modern sort of best-seller publishing industry. It was also the first time that publishers and businesses came together and they knowingly and strategically deployed all this moral language and rhetoric about intellectual property and owners owning their own work. They hammered this across the country in newspaper articles and essays and Sunday sermons for a decade. They enlisted all these famous authors to speak incessantly about the morality of copyright to convince wicked poor Americans—who were benefitting from the widespread availability of cheap literature and sing it to educate themselves—that it was better for them for books to be expensive as opposed to being free.

That put together the game plan of the copyright playbook for the first time, and things haven’t really changed much since then.”

THE COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1976 Peters: “We’re still sort of grappling with the implications of this today. That was the law that said computers are coming, the photocopier is here, and we’re also not quite sure what’s going to come next. So we need to craft this law to be as wide-ranging as possible so that it applies to technologies that aren’t even invented yet. It’s this monstrous long and unparsable law that is so broad and vague that it makes it very hard for new technologies to come around.”

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

11

EATS

COSTELLO’S TAVERN

OLDE MAGOUNʼS SALOON PRESENTS:

Thur 1/28 8PM (Doors at 5:30 PM)

SOUL FOOD Wednesdays 5-11pm February 3rd-24th

PAN FRIED CAT FISH Cornmeal Crust, Spicy Shrimp Remoulade

SMOTHERED PORK CHOPS

Red Eye Gravy, Pork Belly, Pearl Onions

STEWED OXTAILS Local Root Vegetables, Moxie Pan Gravy

CHICKEN & WAFFLES Fried Chicken, Waffles, Rosemary Maple Syrup

COUNTRY STYLE BABY BACK RIBS

Ginger, Garlic Herbs & Spices, Secret Sauce

CHOICE OF 2 W/ ENTRÉE A LA CARTE SIDES - Down Home Potato Salad - Uncle Danny’s Mac & Cheese - Candied Yams w/ Pecans & Pork Candy - Bumpy’s Skillet Cornbread w/ Honey Butter - Braised String Beans w/ Pork Belly & Onions - Collard Greens w/ Smoked Turkey - Black Eyed Peas & Rice

Before placing order, please inform your food server if anyone in your party has a food allergy *consuming raw or undercook meat poultry seafood shellfish & eggs my increase risk of foodborne illness

@MAGOUNSSALOON OLDEMAGOUNSSALOON

518 Medford St. Somerville

magounssaloon.com|617 - 7 76 - 2 6 0 0 12

1.28.16 - 2.4.16

|

DIGBOSTON.COM

The Legends Live On!

A JP Bar That Proves You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover

BY MARC HURWITZ @HIDDENBOSTON

The Allman, Neville, Pitchell, Charles, King Show Fri 1/29 7PM (Doors 5:30 PM)

JOHN CAFFERTY &

THE BEAVER BROWN BAND with CHARLIE FARREN of the Joe Perry Project and Farrenheit Sat 1/30 4PM (Door at 3:30 PM)

Deborah Silverstein and the Erics Sat 1/30 7:30 PM (Doors at 6:00 PM)

Boston Rockabilly

Send Off to Johnny D’s with Sleepy La Beef, Roy Sludge, The Hubcaps, and Juliet & The Lonesome Romeos

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

Although the number has dwindled a good amount over the past decade or so, Boston remains a city with a lot of dive bars. You can often figure out which ones they are from the outside, but sometimes what looks like a dive really isn’t. Take Costello’s Tavern in Jamaica Plain, for example; the storefront of this Centre Street watering hole looks the part in some ways, as it is housed in a squat space with a brick front, has a simple sign above the door that is lit up from above by oldfashioned light, and includes a couple of windows that don’t seem to let a whole lot of light inside the place. But Costello’s is by no means a dive bar, instead being a friendly neighborhood drinking spot that attracts a diverse mix of people and has no real sense of danger to it (which dives often have). The spot also has some very good food, which some say disqualifies it from being a true dive. Whether you consider it a dive bar or not, one thing is for sure—Costello’s is a great place to go to if you like old bars and burgers (more on that in a bit).

Located in the heart of the main commercial strip in JP, Costello’s is one of a few drinking spots in this quirky Boston neighborhood that could be considered by at least some to be a dive bar (Galway Bay, the Jeanie Johnston, the Drinking Fountain, and the Fireside Tavern being a few others), with Costello’s being one of the least divey of the lot. The interior of the place feels a bit like the long-gone Nick’s Beef and Beer House in Cambridge, which was a legendary drinking spot that closed down approximately 15 years ago, and much like that place, eating at the bar seems to be at least as good an option as eating at one of the tables, especially if you’re in a chatty mood and want to trade stories with the bartender.

The mix of booths and high-top tables, dim lighting, old-looking exposed brick, dark woods, and TVs showing the local games gives Costello’s a decidedly bluecollar feel, and while this remains true to an extent, you will also see everyone from artists to college students to young professionals to retired couples here.

Costello’s may look like a place to get a beer and a shot while forgoing a bite to eat, and while this is what some do, the place has some pretty decent takes on pub grub and comfort food. The highlight here is probably the charbroiled burgers, which have been mentioned by some over the years as one of the best bar burgers in the entire city of Boston, and familiar and less-common toppings such as bacon, mushrooms, chili, bleu cheese, salsa, roasted red peppers, guacamole, cheese sauce, jalapenos, and cranberries (for the turkey burger) only add to the goodness of these oversized hunks of meat. For those who are not in the mood for a burger, the pizzas (which lean a bit toward bar-style), hot dogs, steak tips, wings, and reubens are all good options, and the handcut fries are outstanding either as an appetizer or with a sandwich. The beer list at Costello’s will never be mistaken for one at an upscale gastropub or a boutique beer bar, but a few local microbrews are available along with the standard mass-market beers, while the fully stocked bar should satisfy those who are looking for mixed drinks or shots.

For those who like the concept of dive bars but aren’t crazy about the sometimes-scary aspect to them, Costello’s in Jamaica Plain may be a good place to check out. And for those who are burger lovers, this dining and drinking spot definitely needs to be on your short list of places to try. In a neighborhood full of old-Boston restaurants and bars (including the iconic Doyle’s, which isn’t too far away), Costello’s is one of the better ones and one that remains a hidden gem of sorts after many years in business. >> COSTELLO’S TAVERN. 723 CENTRE ST., JAMAICA PLAIN.

THEM

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NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

13

ARTS ENTERTAINMENT

GMILFS ON ICE

14

THU 1.28

FRI 1.29

SAT 1.30

SUN 1.31

TUE 2.2

WED 2.3

Golden Girls Live!

A Drag Parody The Lost Christmas Episode

Donald J. Trump Town Hall in Nashua, NH

Soulelujah!

Critical Breakdown Returns

The Moth @ Laugh Boston

Communion Boston with Allan Rayman, Lolo, Mothers & Animal Flag

What more is there to say… if you love this ’80s sitcom and participating in the dialogue with the cast (“I’m depressed.

I need a cookie.”), and Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia are your idea of a great night out, then this motherfucker is for you!

And, of course, drag, but who doesn’t love drag?

With the original NYC cast performing in Boston, this once-in-a-blue-hairedmoon experience is going to be gone as soon as February pokes its ugly head out of your calendar and January calls it quits.

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered.

But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

-Charles Bukowski

Now in its 13th year (holy shit!), this dance/party/ musical celebration of funkiness keeps right on kicking ass and taking names. Soul, R&B, funk, and all the wax your ear drums can handle make this one of the best nights out for the criminally happy. With a rotating roster of guest DJs as well as the house masters, Claude Money, E. Dorsey, Ty Jesso, John Funke, the Brobots, and PJ Gray, the almost-all-45s night has expanded to include two rooms, Zuzu and Upstairs at the Middle East. Get to it.

There’s a lot of shit going down these days: political, socio-economic, gender equality and identity, drug abuse, violence, you name it. With all of these thoughts and feelings bouncing around our brains, it’s no wonder we need outlets to describe how we’re feeling inside.

But so very few exist. That’s where Critical Breakdown comes in. Socially conscious and incredibly poignant, this all-ages monthly gig brings peace, love, and harmony to uncomfortable trials and tribulations through hip-hop and spoken word poetry, as well as other forms of expressive art. Speak up or lose your right to be heard.

Delivering thoughtful commentary in a meaningful manner with insight and humor, covering a wide range of topics, and all with the bright lights shining down on your chrome-dome in front of a crowd that wants—no, needs—to be entertained, is no easy task.

Welcome, the Moth! Ok, it’s not that bad, and honestly it’s usually a great listen on NPR when it’s replayed on Saturday afternoons.

But then again, so are SpongeBob reruns. Take a leap into the sun and get slightly drunk beforehand in the always-inviting house front room, but don’t be late—you’ll end up with shitty seats.

Communion Music Group was founded in London back in 2006, and since then it’s produced a plethora of shows big and small and now runs a label and publishing company out of NYC as well. The focus is simple: new music with a London sound and vibe but worldly in ambition. The alwaysrelevant and fine folks at Fenway Recordings and Crossroads Presents have teamed up with Communion Music to bring you some of the best new music you’ve never heard of—or if you have, the music you’re dying to finally hear live. So get to it, Boston.

Club Cafe. 209 Columbus Ave., Boston. 8pm/13+/$45+. brownpapertickets.com/ event/2181341

Radisson Hotel Nashua.

11 Tara Blvd., Nashua, NH. 10am/all ages/FREE.

Middle East/Zuzu. 472 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

11pm/21+/$10. zuzudining. com/calendar--tickets.html

Hibernian Hall. 184 Dudley St., Roxbury. Performances 6pm; Open Mic Sign-Up 5:30pm/all ages/FREE.

Laugh Boston. 425 Summer St., Boston. 8pm/18+/$8. laughboston.com

Brighton Music Hall.

158 Brighton Ave., Boston. 7pm/18+/$15. communionmusic.com

1.28.16 - 2.4.16

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DIGBOSTON.COM

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

MUSIC

BIG BANG THEORY

How Casey Desmond formed a band out of live improv sets

MUSIC

MOTHERS MAY I

The subtle charm and rebound cruelty of 2016’s most promising band

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN “Always is a dirty word to say.”

That’s the short bio stamped on Mothers’ Facebook page. At first glance, it seems hesitant, fearful, or doubting.

At second glance, the phrase begins to strengthen. At third glance, it has a melody to it—because it’s coming from the band’s early song “Stairwell Song.”

“It’s talking about not making promises, about never saying ‘always,’ because you really have no idea,” frontwoman Kristine Leschper explains. In her eyes, the word is unfair to say for it carries cruelty, and cruelty is dirtier than any child’s mess imaginable.

Mothers began as Leschper’s own solo adventure in 2013 while she was attending art school. By the time she finished, she began meeting up with other musicians in the city’s tight-knit community—particularly drummer Matthew Anderegg, guitarist Drew Kirby, and bassist Patrick Morales—through organic means. By then, the band’s sound fleshed out to its current state.

Mothers dodges pain by confronting it head-on in its music, never once lowering its head to let cruelty score a jab. It knows how to fight. While the sadness in Leschper’s music is unavoidable (“I’m not sad, but I tend to experience my emotional context so deeply that it can be crippling—sort of like an animal sentinel, a canary in a coal mine.”), it never dominates. Humbleness, in its own ironic way, does instead. At least the lyrics of “Copper Mines” (“What I have to give is small / but at least I can admit it”) acknowledge she’s self-aware. Throughout it all, the Athens, GA, quartet stirs up guitar tones reminiscent of folk acts like Sufjan Stevens or Courtney Barnett. The tempo changes, however, suggest something more mysterious is at work.

“It’s always been an intuitive process,” says Leschper. For her, guitar was a self-taught adventure that carried its own set of catharsis. “I feel like naivete of my instrument has allowed me to be really honest in songwriting, as far as not overthinking it. It’s all about the feeling of it, rather than, say, a formula I was taught.”

The band’s debut LP, When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired, both emulates exhaustion and acts as its remedy. It’s empowering in that sense. Of course, that’s easy to see when the band performs, for live, the record sounds sure-footed and confident.

It’s clear Mothers is tired–from life, from heartbreak, from aging, from death–but still walking. Granted, the four are awake enough to recall their own long distances. “My family used to go on fishing trips out there [in Ontario], in the middle of nowhere, where you have to ride in on a float plane and land on a lake because there are no roads,” Leschper recalls. “There were different lakes, and you would portage between them, hiking and carrying your boat. Sometimes they were huge distances.” Not all walks are exhausting. A routine trek like her walk from home to the farm-to-table restaurant she works in is only three houses down. “My cat follows me over there,” she laughs. “I have to bully him into going home.”

At least a walk, no matter its length, has an end. “Always” keeps its paws off that one. >> ALLAN RAYMAN, MOTHERS, ANIMAL FLAG, LOLO, DJ CARBO. BRIGHTON MUSIC HALL, 158 BRIGHTON AVE., ALLSTON. WED 2.3 7PM/18+/$10.50. CROSSROADSPRESENTS.COM VISIT DIGBOSTON.COM FOR THE EXTENDED INTERVIEW.

MUSIC EVENTS FRI 1.29

FOLK ROCK FOR THE FAMILY WILCO + WILLIAM TYLER

[Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Pl., Boston.

7:30pm/all ages/$40.50. crossroadspresents.com]

16

1.28.16 - 2.4.16

|

FRI 1.29

SAT 1.30

[MIT Kresge Auditorium, 48 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

7pm/all ages/$15. mitbowie.eventbrite.com]

[Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Boston. 8pm/18+/$12. crossroadspresents.com]

DAVID BOWIE ORCHESTRAL TRIBUTE EVAN ZIPORYN + ALLVOLUNTEER ORCHESTRA

DIGBOSTON.COM

TENNESSEE PROGRESSIVES MOON TAXI + THE NEW REVIEW

What came first: the artist or the song? For CMB, it’s the latter.

In 2010, Casey Desmond received an invitation to play an improv synth set at a local music festival. The CMB moniker came later, and then, again but in real form, so did the songs some five years later. She began working through recordings of her live sets from the festival, picking out what could be salvaged, what was catchy, and what carried the spirit of her new band.

Improv sits stoic at its heart. As such, Desmond’s first official EP as CMB, Three Licks, saw her producing the tracks days prior to its EP release show this Wednesday.

Don’t assume the moniker is equally spontaneous.

It’s shorthand for Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang. Scientists only discovered its existence in 1964. “I find that puzzling, that proof of the birth of our universe is staring directly at us, and that few humans are actually aware of it,” Desmond says. “It’s inspired me to a sort of spiritual degree; though I consider myself an atheist, it almost feels godly.” It’s right there in the intro track “Relic Radiation”: “I believe / I believe in what the naked eye won’t see / I believe in what we need machines to perceive.”

Though less commercial than her usual material, Desmond’s work as CMB recalls the experimental electronics of Dan Deacon, Grimes, and Tobacco while adding her own organic directions, mainly through heavy doses of nostalgia. The record comes with its dark corners, too, including a track that sees her work through the death of her best friend.

“I want to go back to the past and feel those feelings again, and the only way to do it is to be together and create new memories,” she explains.

“It’s a bittersweet solution where the cycle never stops. I write about that a lot. When the world was supposed to end back in December of 2012, my friend Andy Devlin wrapped a room of our friends up in neon pink string by dancing around us, pulling us all together in a web. We stayed that way for what seemed like forever, pulling and moving with each other to music as one unit. I’ll never forget that night.” Moments like that, vibrant and hyperemotional, push through her music, even if those specificities aren’t obvious to a listener separated from Desmond’s personal experiences.

“The universe is everything, and we are little pieces of it,” Desmond tacks on with certainty. Let’s take it a little farther. After all, given time, CMB will be more than a little piece of Boston’s universe. Her music pushes you to strive the same. >> CMB, ANDRE OBIN, ST. NOTHING, W00DY. MIDDLE EAST UPSTAIRS, 472 MASS. AVE., CAMBRIDGE. FRI 1.29 8PM/18+/$12. MIDEASTOFFERS.COM

MON 2.1

TUE 2.2

WED 2.3

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge.

7pm/all ages/$13.50. sinclaircambridge.com]

[Royale, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 8pm/18+/$25. royaleboston.com]

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

LOCAL FLAVORS WET + KELSEY LU

COUNTRY BUMP-’IN RYAN BINGHAM + BIRD DOG

CLASSICAL GETS CATTY EMILY WELLS + LORNA DUNE

MOTHERS PHOTO BY KRISTIN KARCH | CMB PHOTO BY MARY LEE DESMOND

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

Boston’s Best Irish Pub

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

THU 1/28 12AM

ALL GOOD

Eastman Garcia & Yvng Pavl BREAKS, HIP HOP, R&B, REGGAE, SOCA, CARIBBEAN, CLASSIC HOUSE, INDIE DANCE

FRI 1/29

LOUIS THE CHILD SOBER ROB SAT 1/30

“ASHES TO ASHES” A “HEROES” DAVID BOWIE TRIBUTE DJ CHRIS EWEN

THU 1/28 - ILLEGALY BLIND PRES.:

NICE GUYS CREATUROS FRI 1/29

CMB EP RELEASE ANDRE OBIN ST. NOTHING, W00DY SAT 1/30

LYRES PAUL COLLINS BEAT THE MODIFIERS SAT 1/30

SOULELUJAH! SUN 1/31

SECRET SPACE THE FLATS MON 2/1

JUPITER RISING DANOOTA TUES 2/2

GLASSES MALONE THU 2/4 - LEEDZ PRESENTS:

STALLEY TORAE

FRI 1/29 10PM

BOOTIE BOSTON

V. SOCIAL

STUDIES Alfredo, Brenden Wesley, Spencer 4 Hire, Jabulani, McFly, Reade Truth, and Alex From Queens HOUSE, DISCO, TECHNO & MASHUPS SAT 1/30 9:30PM

FRESH PRODUCE JeyOne, DJ Knife, Frank White HIP HOP, PARTY JAMS, TRAP, REGGAE THU 2/4 10PM

LEVEL UP J. Will$, Killer Kowalski, Fumesco GOLDEN ERA HIP HOP, TURN UP TRAP, FUTURE BEATS, FEEL-GOOD GROOVES

MONDAYS

TUESDAYS

WEDNESDAYS

MAKKA MONDAY

TWOOSDAY

GEEKS WHO DRINK

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

19+, 8PM DOORS, $5

FEB 9

CROSSWALK ANARCHY, ALLBE

FEB 16

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

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Weekly Dance arty, ouse, Disco, echno, ocal & nternational D ’s 19+, 10PM - 1AM

THURSDAYS

FRIDAYS

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ELEMENTS

PRETTY YOUNG THING

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15+ Years of Resident Drum & Bass Bringing some of the worlds biggest DnB D ’s to Cambridge 19+, 10PM - 2AM

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WWW.PHOENIXLANDINGBAR.COM NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

FILM

RAGING BULLSHIT

On Dirty Grandpa and who’s really to blame for late-period De Niro

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN We’ve come because we want to see Robert De Niro behaving badly. What else would we get? In Dirty Grandpa he plays Dick Kelly, who’s spent his adult life as a faithfully married mechanic for the army. After 15 sexless postmenopausal years, his wife passes away. And now Dick’s primary concern is ensuring that his dick doesn’t meet the same fate. He sets off for Daytona Beach in search of random coeds and “vag-eye-nal sex.” He pronounces that phrase with the iconic De Niro diction: all the vowels dragged out and overemphasized. So the joke is not that this old man is a poon hound—the joke is that this poon hound is being played by Robert De Niro. Good taste is absent from the ensuing journey, thankfully, but wit is also absent. The sights themselves are what’s supposed to be funny—when you’ve got Travis Bickle jerking off to amateur pornography, who needs a punchline? Perhaps the actor found artistic fulfillment in the project, but there’s still a sense of schadenfreude to the whole scenario: We’re here to watch an institution get defaced. This is barely a movie. It’s more like graffiti.

Grandpa, which is directed by Dan Mazer and written

by John Phillips, has a rhythm as old as its star. It plays the “straight man/funny man” buddy-comedy angle, with Dick dragging his grandson Jason (Zac Efron) along on a trip to play his wingman. The only spin Mazer and Phillips put on that subgenre is that Dick gets to be both manic and suave; if this were a Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin movie, he’d be playing both roles. So the only thing that

Zac Efron gets to be is boring. He’s playing the uptightyoung-man archetype: He’s a hottie hiding under a white collar (he handles SEC compliance at a law firm operated by his domineering dad) who’s being weighed down by his engagement ring (his fiancée, played as a parody of shrewish female characters by a game Julianne Hough, demands that Jason work on their wedding plans even through the duration of his own grandmother’s funeral).

So his uptightness is the product of two unfortunate influences—a job and a woman. The subtext, then, is another elderly vestige: “Straight white men just want to have fun, so won’t you please get out of their way?”

We’ve gotten used to that in our post-American Pie world. At some point in the past 30 years, studioproduced screen comedies ceased to care about the lives of women. You could’ve really done this narrative as a Martin and Lewis comedy back in the 1950s—that wasn’t a facetious reference—and whatever role Jayne Mansfield played would’ve been a hell of a lot better than the scraps given to this film’s femmes. As storytelling traditions dictate, the script provides a romantic interest for each of the Kellys. And as the traditions of underwritten Hollywood comedies dictate, the female pair are but projections of their male counterparts’ banal desires: Shadia (Zoey Deutch) is the pixieish naif ready to break Jason of his existential anxieties, and Lenore (Aubrey Plaza) is a freaky nymph who’s more than ready to break Dick from his sexual ones. To the straight man

a Madonna, and to the comic relief a whore—if you’ve come for subversion, you’ve come to the wrong place.

The defense that one could mount would be to position this as a “bad taste” movie. Think John Waters doing Meet the Parents: Could these continued sequences of De Niro’s Dick abusing women (he molests strangers at a golf course), spouting racial slurs (he beats up an entire crew of African-Americans, then befriends them so that he can say “n**ger”), and indulging in standard-issue homophobia (“Holy shit,” he says as one character reveals an effeminate voice, “you’re really gay”) suggest that the film is searching to breach the bounds of what’s publicly acceptable? Perhaps. To offend and affront in 2016 requires something more brazen and provocative than unapologetic instances of racism and sexual abuse— we can get that from our politicians; it no longer even qualifies as satire. And a sex scene where Aubrey Plaza has sex with her bra on isn’t going to engender much pearl-clutching, either. De Niro, for his part, is asked to continually stick his thumb up Zac Efron’s ass. This movie wants to be naughty, but that’s all it’s got: a little poke.

For all the film’s boisterous misbehavior, it hasn’t the gall to break a single narrative expectation. What follows throughout the days in Dayton are a bunch of plot points recycled from the remains of older romantic comedies, with the men telling a few inevitably revealed lies about their past (to the women) and about their present (to the Dad who’s between them), leading inevitably to tearstained revelations and montages set to sad breakup music. The whole of it is filmed in formally anonymous mid-level compositions. They stare at the characters straight on while the actors riff their way through each scene. This is the tradition of the American comedy here in the Apatow era, and it’s why this film requires such a brazenly generic shape—the filmmakers employ talented improvisors, and let them mold each scene themselves.

But actors aren’t writers, and so multiple scenes in the movie feature the same exact jokes: The actors refer to Jason as a “Mitt Romney-style Terminator” in one scene, then as a “cock-blocking Terminator” in another. First he’s Dick’s “lesbian nurse,” then later he’s Dick’s “lesbian daughter.” We could blame De Niro for the existence of such shoddy material, and we have, and we will again. But the problem is what’s on the page—or, rather, what isn’t.

At this point we must invoke another badly behaved senior citizen. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa recently allowed Johnny Knoxville, in his disguise as a fellow horny widowed gentlemen, to travel across the nation in search of his own last ride. You may be sneering, but the Jackass series represents the comedic cinema we need more of: They’re movies born of a truly anarchic nature, beholden to no structural standards of any kind. They establish characters and narrative within their own manic skitto-skit format. Meanwhile Dirty Grandpa follows the rules of Save the Cat screenwriting to the letter. Let’s not lament the fact that Robert De Niro is taking work where he can find it, then—if there’s a tragedy here, it’s that our comedic cinema has nothing better for him to do than make jokes about donkey punches. Dirty Grandpa is hardly a nadir of moviegoing, but it does represent some apotheosis of half-assed improv screen comedy in the 21st century. There are better ways to be a jackass.

>> DIRTY GRANDPA. RATED R. NOW PLAYING EVERYWHERE.

FILM EVENTS THU 1.28

FRI 1.29

[Harvard Film Archive.

24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7pm/R/FREE. 35mm. hcl.harvard.edu/hfa]

[Brattle Theatre.

40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 5:30, 7:30, and 10pm/R/$9-11. Screens through 2.1. See brattlefilm. org for other showtimes.]

FREE TRIBUTE SCREENING: DAVID BOWIE IN NAGISA OSHIMA’S MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE

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MON 2.1

TUE 2.2

WED 2.3

[Harvard Film Archive.

24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7pm/NR/$7-9.

35mm. hcl.harvard.edu/hfa]

[Coolidge Corner Theatre.

290 Harvard St., Brookline.

7pm/PG/$11.25. coolidge.org]

[Coolidge Corner Theatre.

290 Harvard St., Brookline.

7:30pm/PG/$11.25. coolidge.org]

‘INNOCENCE ABROAD’ CONTINUES THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE

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COOLIDGE AWARD-WINNER JANE FONDA IN NINE TO FIVE

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TO DAYS OF INSPIRATION Fiddlehead Theatre celebrates 20 years of Rent

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS How can it be that Rent is 20? It seemed for a while, at least to me, that Mimi Marquez would forever stay 19, dangling off of a fire escape in her blue rubber pants. Jonathan Larson’s landmark, Pulitzer Prize-winning musical redefined musical theater and inspired an entire generation of theatergoers. In celebration of this milestone, Fiddlehead Theatre—for eight performances only—is bringing the East Village to Boston’s Back Bay. Rent is a musical theater phenomenon, the kind that we only see every couple of decades or so. It electrified New York when it opened in 1996, redefining what a musical could be and what a musical’s audience could look like. The cast was also racially diverse, long before “diversity” was a theatrical buzzword. Rent’s influence on the art form is clear, most recently—and notably—in Hamilton, which is experiencing the kind of once-in-a-lifetime success that Rent enjoyed 20 years ago.

“My choreographer and I were both in New York during those years, and it was kind of the musical of the generation. It was on the cover of Time, it was on 60 Minutes; it was a phenomenon,” said Stacey Stephens, Fiddlehead’s associate producing artistic director, who is also directing its production of Rent. “For so many years the Broadway musical was chorus boys and tap shoes. All of the sudden, Rent became something that spoke to a generation in their language and in their music. We all sort of look at is as groundbreaking, and it does become part of one’s life.”

Rent was an extraordinary part of my life, to be sure. I still consider the many hours I spent sitting in the Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street among the happiest of my life; I saw the Broadway production 21 times before I stopped counting. I signed my name to the famed Rent wall, an alley that connected the stage to the house, just opposite Joan Rivers. I even found myself inside of Larson’s former apartment, where, on a cold January evening in 1996, he died suddenly after attending the final dress rehearsal of Rent at the New York Theatre Workshop. Larson never got to experience the astounding success of Rent, and his sudden passing forged an even stronger bond between the show’s original cast members. Their personal connection to both the show and Larson came through in their performances, a feeling of electricity that was never able to be duplicated by any of their many replacements.

For Stephens, his first memory of Rent came when he was on tour with Les Miserables and a friend had gotten a bootleg cassette tape of the entire show.

“We listened to that cassette tape until it about wore out,” he said with a laugh.

“We did AIDS benefits across the country for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and we would use ‘Seasons of Love.’ At that point there were no transcripts to buy, so we listened to it and tried to make out the words,” he recalled. Looking back now, he’s pretty sure they weren’t all correct.

“This is very much going to be the Rent that everybody wants it to be,” he told me. Stephens said that there will certainly be nods to the original but stressed that the production will look and feel slightly different.

“The luxury that directors and producers have of doing a show that has already been done before is that you can look at it with a fresh set of eyes and go, ‘You know what, that part didn’t ever quite sit right,’” Stephens said. “We have the luxury of now, 20 years later, saying that maybe we could fill the story out a little bit more and answer some of those questions.” >> RENT. RUNS 2.5-2.21 AT FIDDLEHEAD THEATRE COMPANY, PERFORMING AT JOHN HANCOCK HALL AT THE BACK BAY EVENTS CENTER, 180 BERKELEY ST., BOSTON. FIDDLEHEADTHEATRE.COM

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SAVAGE LOVE

BACK IN BLACK

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY WHATS4BREAKFAST.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET My wife and I have an amazing relationship. Our sex life is as hot as it can be given a child and two careers. A couple of years ago, I bought her one of those partial-body sex dolls (it has a cock and part of the stomach). We took videos and pictures while using it. Very hot for both of us. We later got a black version of the same toy. (We are white.) Even hotter videos. I have kept the videos in a secure app on my iPad. Over the past year, I have created Photoshop porn of my wife with black men using screenshots from commercial porn. I haven’t shared this with my wife. We never discussed what to do with the videos and pics we made. I assumed she trusted me not to share these images with anyone. (I haven’t and won’t!) Is it okay that I have a porn stash that features my wife? Is it okay that I have a stash of Photoshop porn of my wife fucking black men? Should I share this info—and my fantasies—with her? I’ve always fantasized about her being with a black man, but I’m not sure either of us would truly want that to happen.

Secretly Keeping Encrypted Porn That Isn’t Clearly Allowed Lately You need to speak to your wife about those pics and videos, about the way you’ve manipulated them, and about your fantasies—but that’s a lot to lay on her at once, SKEPTICAL, so take it in stages.

Find a time to ask her about those old pics and videos and whether she wants them discarded or if you can continue to hang on to them. At a different time, bring up your racially charged fantasies and let her know what those partial-body sex dolls were doing for you.

And finally, SKEPTICAL, if she reacts positively to your having held on to the photos and to your fantasies, ask her how she feels about you creating a few images using Photoshop of her hooking up with a black man for fantasy purposes only. It’s a little dishonest—you’re asking for permission to do what you’ve already done—but you’ll know what you need to do if her answer to the Photoshop question is “No, absolutely not!” (To be clear: You’ll need to delete those Photoshopped pics.)

All that said, SKEPTICAL, if the images you’re holding on to—the originals and/or the manipulated ones—could destroy your marriage and/or your wife’s life and/or your wife’s career if they got out (computers can be hacked or stolen, clouds may not be as secure as advertised), don’t wait: Delete all of the images now.

THE STRANGERER

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BOWERY BOSTON

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ROYALE 279 Tremont St. Boston, MA • royaleboston.com/concerts RON POPE + THE NIGHTHAWKS W/ BIRD DOG

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