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NABBING BAD GUYS

PATIENT DISTRO PROTESTS NOTES MEDICAL WEED WOES FILM

YOUR GUIDE FOR 2017

PATERSON + JULIETA

THEATER

HAND TO GOD

COLUMN

APPARENT HORIZON ROOTS OF OUR OPIATE CRISIS

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ROLLING STONED

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WITH JOHNNY HICKEY

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GRUB

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MALDEN

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ARE COMMUNITY POLICE GROUPS USELESS? DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

MCCONNELLWANTS TOPLUS: KILL YOU MBTUBER KICKASS LOCAL IMAGINING PUBLIC LONG LIVE THE KING! TRANSIT

RIDE-SHARING

ATTN: NAZIS, WHITE SUPREMACISTS, FASCISTS, NATIONALISTS, STEVE BANNON, RIGHT-WING TROLLS, TRUMP SUPPORTERS, RACISTS, BIGOTS, GAME SEPARATISTS, OVER YAWKEY AND ALL OF YOUR PATHETIC FRIENDS. ERASING FROM HUB HISTORY NEWS

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DEPT.

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DOWN TO THE WIRE

ARTS

A HARD LOOK AT OUR CRUMBLING T

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TRENDS

LUCKY NUMBER 51

AGRICULTURAL HOPES + HURDLES

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GUY DELISLE

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PIPELINE NIGHTMARE

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IFFBOSTON

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ONLINE

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KIT KAT HOORAY

INVISIBLE ABROAD FRACTURES SNAPPING BACK

THEATER

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CLOWN COMMITTEE

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NEWS TO US

MARCH ON BOSTON

THE TRUTH ABOUT DRIVING HIGH

PROPS FOR STELLA’S

EDGY CHRISTIAN PUPPETRY

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PROTEST RECAP

CANNABIS

ABOUT THAT REWRITTEN WEED LAW

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

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OFF TO THE RACES INTRODUCING: THE BRAWL FOR CITY HALL

DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

DISPATCH FROM INSIDE A CONFLICT OF INTEREST

JUSTIN CLANCY MORE THAN JUST RECOVERY RAP

US: TRUMP’S KILL SPEECH

GTFO!

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SAVAGE LOVE

- SINCERELY, BOSTON

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THE SAFDIE BROTHERS GOOD TIMES WITH

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THE POSSIBILITARIANS

THE INDIE HEROES

SPECIAL: #FIGHTSUPREMACY

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY

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SOMERVILLE POLITICS JOE ENDORSES A VOLCANO?

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SCHUTZ AT THE ICA PLUS A FUNKY KITTEN EXCLUSIVE

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POLITICS

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WELCOME BACK

1ST IN 10

SOMERVILLE BYO MAYORAL HARD RACE COVER: TACO RUN

EXCERPT

THE ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE BOOK

A POT BROWNIE EXCLUSIVE

DIGBOSTON.COM 12.21.17 - 12.28.17

ARTS+MUSIC

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

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SHELL

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TRUMP’S CRIMINAL POSSE

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INTERNATIONAL

HAITIANS FLEE FOR CANADA

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A NON-FICTION INVENTION

THE LABOR CANDIDATE

DEMOCRACIES IN CRISIS

DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

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LADIESCON SUPERBLOGGERS RETURN IRL

TRUMP’S UMBRELLA MEN

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WARHOL CAPOTE BRAWL FOR CITY HALL

BOSTON MAYORAL RACE + ALLSTON-BRIGHTON TERMS OF SERVICE

INDUSTRY BRUNCH INSIDE THE INSIDER’S RETREAT

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MILLYZ GOES ABROAD PLUS YOUR

BMA NOM GUIDE

DROPKICKS AND PUNCHES KEN CASEY ON HIS NEXT BIG FIGHT NEWS FEATURE

BATTLE OF FORT HILL

NOT YOUR TYPICAL GENTRIFICATION STORY

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SLAINE+TERM FUZZTIVAL = ANTI-HERO INDIE GEM GOES MUSIC

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A+E

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FOUR-DAY TWO TO ON FUTURE FEST GROW HOME IS WHERE THE THEATER: EVITA SO WHITE CANNABIS

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PUBLIC SERVICE DENOUNCEMENT WHO SPOKE OUT AGAINST

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NEWS+OPINION

GAY BOWL DISPATCH THIS FLAG IS WORTH SALUTING COVER: AMAZON IN MASS

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BPS

ADVANCED (PRODUCT) BRICKLAYER PLACEMENT BILL A WORKING CLASS HERO FILM

HALLOWEEN HORROR SHOW FULCI, ROMERO & MORE NEWS+OPINION

TOXIC SOMERVILLE PLUS CORPORATE WELFARE ON FAN PIER

VERIZON IN OUR SCHOOLS

THEATER

‘SOUVENIR’ AT LYRIC STAGE SOCIALITE SOPRANO SPLENDOR

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BUMPING INCLUSION TRUMP FUSION A KALEIDOSCOPIC BADASS PROTEST SONGS LINEUP AND THEN SOME SPECIAL FEATURE

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BEFORE PRO SPORTS

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‘SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT’ THIS AIN’T NORMAL

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YOUTH VIOLENCE

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BENJAMIN BOOKER

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MASS MELTDOWN

FROM GATEHOUSE TO THE STATE HOUSE

2

12.21.17 - 12.28.17 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

BOWERY BOSTON WWW.BOWERYBOSTON.COM VOL 19 + ISSUE51

DEC 21, 2017 - DEC 28, 2017 BUSINESS PUBLISHER Marc Sneider ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone John Loftus Jason Pramas SALES MANAGER Marc Sneider FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com BUSINESS MANAGER John Loftus

EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Chris Faraone EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Pramas MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Dewar ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran ASSOCIATE FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan ASSOCIATE ARTS EDITOR Christopher Ehlers STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Patrick Cochran, Mike Crawford, Kori Feener, George Hassett, Zack Huffman, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus Johnson-Smith, Micaela Kimball, Derek Kouyoumjian, Dan McCarthy, Adam Sennott, Maya Shaffer, Citizen Strain, M.J. Tidwell, Tre Timbers, Baynard Woods INTERNS Kuresse Bolds, Olivia Falcigno

DESIGN DESIGNER Don Kuss COMICS Tim Chamberlain Pat Falco Patt Kelley DigBoston, PO Box 51960 Boston, MA 02205 Phone 617.426.8942 digboston.com

ON THE COVER 2017 SAW A LOT OF HARD HITTING REPORTING ALONG WITH A GREAT YEAR IN THE ARTS. FIND ALL OF THAT AND MORE AT DIGBOSTON.COM

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THE YEAR IN HATING YOUR YEAR-END LISTS

Dear Reader, The next couple of weeks, in this publication and in virtually every other outlet as well, will yield an endless flurry of year-end lists. Some will be interesting, a lot will be informative, and more than anything else, they will all be seriously subjective.

Or even downright wrong, depending who you ask.

As I wrote on Twitter last week, “If there was more integrity in media, year-end Best Of... lists would be Our Favorite... lists. For example, Our Favorite New Restaurants of 2017 instead of The Best New Restaurants, which is pretty darn presumptuous, even obnoxious.”

I love year-end lists, especially arcane ones. My favorite of all time was “The Year in Nicolas Cage” by my former Boston Phoenix colleague Eugenia Williamson, while my personal tradition is to round up all the things that have been banned across the country over the past year. What I really can’t stand, however, are compendiums that serve no purpose beyond getting a click for some meaningless site or another, helping temporarily fatten the latest LA- or NY-based “it” pub pumping thousands into social media and pennies into editorial. Keep a lookout for these clowns between now and the end of the year; they’ll be the ones trying to tell you that the best appliances or whatever the fuck else of 2017 all just happen to be made by their sponsors.

Look, we’re going to feature a few of these rundowns and lists in the Dig too. We’re even starting this week with a spread by our talented music photographer Tim Bugbee, who pulled out his best shots of the year from venues all around the region for a special feature. But here’s the thing, here’s what I’m trying to say—we aren’t out here claiming that they are the best concert pics of the year or anything else. They’re awesome photos, and I would put them up against anyone else’s, but unless somebody went through every last image snapped at every concert that’s happened since January, they couldn’t possibly make such a superlative determination. It’s purely speculation.

Hear me out—I think it’s great that there are so many available options so as to render it truly impossible to ascertain in any meaningful way which creatives should be touted above and beyond their contemporaries. Even though the less enlightened fools among us—especially out in the ’burbs—still worship mainstream garbage, from their music to their movie tastes, thanks to open distribution and platforms that make rare and independent material much easier to access than back the ’90s, way more people have incorporated dignified eclectic sights and sounds into their daily diet. If you don’t believe me, just ask any 10 people under 30 years old who their favorite musicians are, and watch them each give a different response.

Some people still worship gods like Taylor Swift and Jay Z, but in a day and age when random podcasts sell out major theaters, there’s very little, entertainmentwise, for those of us who eschew mass market nonsense to whine about.

With that said, if someone’s year-end list has the generic likes of a Taylor Swift on it, I at least hope you realize that they are an amateur critic at best, probably know nothing about the innumerable local and underground artists who deserve such acclaim, and aren’t worthy of the time you took to click their link.

CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Need more Dig? Sign up for the Daily Dig @ tiny.cc/DailyDig

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J RODDY WALSTON AND THE BUSINESS

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Tickets for Royale, The Sinclair, and Great Scott can be purchased online at AXS.COM or by phone at 855-482-2090. No fee tickets available at The Sinclair box office Wednesdays - Saturdays 12:00 - 7:00PM FOR MORE INFORMATION AND A COMPLETE LIST OF SHOWS, VISIT BOWERYBOSTON.COM NEWS TO US

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NEWS+OPINION MACRO AGGRESSIONS NEWS TO US

Trump flags and right-wing memes line walls at Boston company, workers be damned

BY EOIN HIGGINS @EOINHIGGINS_ Incendiary Pepe the Frog memes, printed out and hung around the office. A Trump 2020 flag covering a large portion of the workspace floor. An image of Bernie Sanders with the word “Cuck” printed over his chest.

These are some examples of the environment inside of home security firm SimpliSafe’s shipping warehouse in Charlestown. Photos provided to the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) show a workspace rife with hard-right propaganda. And former workers at the facility say that their attempts to alert management to the problem went unanswered at best—and intentionally ignored at worst.

“It was an unbelievably toxic environment,” former SimpliSafe employee Drew Purvis said. “The memes and other things posted around the office were intended specifically to get a rise out of people who didn’t share those views, and it worked really well on me.”

SimpliSafe provides customers with a do-it-yourself security system that consumers can set up for themselves in their homes. The product is made in China and packaged at facilities like the one in Charlestown. The company was selected by the online consumer guide CNET for its Editor’s Pick for Best Home Security System in 2014.

Andrew Jeromski, who left the warehouse in March

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after working with the company at the facility for three years, told BINJ that the workspace was full of hostility to those with liberal views.

Two managers in particular, he said, were the aggressors. It’s an account confirmed by Purvis. Purvis, who worked with Jeromski at the Charlestown space, told BINJ that the two supervisors “were openly racist and extremely hostile to anyone who didn’t share their views.”

BINJ was able to confirm the identities of the managers but will not share that information publicly due to concerns for the safety of our sources.

One of the supervisors has now been promoted, Jeromski said, to a higher management position at the company’s fulfillment facility in Braintree. That doesn’t bode well for anyone working under the supervisor who might have different opinions on politics—because the reaction is likely to be antagonistic.

“He just wanted to make people very angry,” Jeromski said.

It worked. And for June Politano, the harassment reached extreme levels—to the point that she says she felt unsafe. Politano, who worked at the Charlestown facility from January 2015 to March of last year, told BINJ that the constant use of white nationalist memes around the office disturbed her and made her feel unsafe in the office—so much so that she went to management to complain.

“I arrived to work early one day and saw that on my supervisor’s desk was a printout with 50-plus copies of the Pepe the frog meme holding a smoking gun that read ‘Goodnight Left Side,’” Politano said.

The next day, one of the printouts was taped outside of her supervisor’s work area. When Politano brought the racist iconography to the head manager’s attention, she said, he played dumb.

“In general, your employer can ask you to remove political signage from your work area (unless it’s somehow related to your job),” said Adam Bojak, a New York-based attorney who responded to an open solicitation for lawyers familiar with this issue.

“If the signage is related to forming a union, that sort of

political speech would be protected.”

Bojak told BINJ the enforcement of that right by employers isn’t exercised on a regular basis—especially not when the views expressed by workers reflect those of the employer. As far as any controversial opinions, he added, those would likely be frowned upon, if only because of the potential for interfering with efficiency.

In Politano’s case, she said further attempts to bring the rightwing propaganda to SimpliSafe’s attention only resulted in more harassment. That’s a theme that BINJ heard from each of the former facility employees. Attempts to find a solution with help from company superiors proved fruitless.

“The corporate end of the company just could not have cared less about what went on over there, and they took it as license to do whatever they wanted,” Purvis said.

All that happened, according to Purvis, was that the situation became more and more uncomfortable—the workplace was out of control.

“The more I tried to get a resolution from management the worse it got,” said Purvis.

SimpliSafe told BINJ through Boston public relations firm ML Strategies that the company takes action when workers have complaints. The statement, authored by ML Senior Vice President of Strategic Communications Nancy Sterling, did not address any of the specific complaints from the Charlestown warehouse.

“When an employee raises a concern, or if a particular situation needs to be addressed, the company responds in accordance with our policies to maintain a collaborative and tolerant workplace,” Sterling’s statement read.

BINJ reported in November on the struggle, being waged by SimpliSafe’s call center workers in the company’s downtown Boston offices, for a resolution to a number of issues ranging from bedbugs to racist abuse.

Three of those workers—Lauren Galloway, Abraham Zamcheck, and Ryan Costello—formed a solidarity organization called United SimpliSafe Workers to address the problems at the call center. And their complaints sound similar to those of Purvis and Jeromski: a racially toxic work environment and a lack of support from management.

According to a United SimpliSafe spokesperson, supervisors at the call center are majority white and treat their subordinates of color with dismissive and abusive language. In one instance, a white supervisor allegedly said to a majority black and Latin team, “I’m like a slavemaster and you’re my slaves.” When this incident was related to the company’s human resources department, United SimpliSafe said, it was chalked up to a misunderstanding and no discipline was administered to the offending party.

“When we receive complaints, they are immediately investigated and, without going into details of personnel matters, SimpliSafe takes prompt and appropriate action,” said SimpliSafe spokesperson Melina Engel, referring to the complaints in the call center. “Employees have numerous mechanisms to report issues, including direct supervisors and managerial supervisors on the call

“The more I tried to get a resolution from management the worse it got,”

center floor, as well as human resources and senior management all of whom are in the same building.”

One place where the company did take action in the call center was in the group chat for workers to troubleshoot and occasionally joke around. Once the election was in full swing, said Zamcheck, rules came down from management that people could no longer talk about Donald Trump in the chat.

“We were not allowed to put the Trump name in there,” Zamcheck said. “People would often make jokes and stuff.”

Many of the company’s advertisements run on right-wing radio, said Zamcheck, so SimpliSafe wanted to avoid any joking around at the then-candidate’s expense.

SimpliSafe ads run on Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Dave Ramsey, and the shows of other notable hard-right personalities and shock jocks.

“Their entire business model is built on encouraging and then profiting from the wave of fear and anxiety overwhelming the country,” Purvis said.

SimpliSafe did not respond to questions about the specifics of policies around the nature of political speech at the company. But at the Charlestown warehouse, it was clear that certain views weren’t going to be tolerated.

“Anyone who openly disagreed was a target,” Jeromski said. “If they found out you were opposed to Trump, you might find a Pepe on your desk.”

Politano told BINJ that she was so disgusted with the perpetuation of white nationalist agitprop in the workplace and the inability of management to do anything about the problem that she took matters into her own hands, tearing up printouts of Pepe and taking down Trump signs. She did it, Politano said, because she was aware of the message that was being sent. “I know what it means, and it was completely unacceptable,” Politano said.

There’s a difference between political speech and threatening iconography, according to Bojak. “The Pepe frog has obvious connotations and links to the alt-right/white supremacy groups,” he told BINJ, adding that while printing the image out might be interpreted as simply an attempt to get a rise out of people, the specific meaning of Pepe in the white nationalist movement could create a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity that rises above issues of free speech in the workplace.

“They are absolutely creating a workplace in which people from numerous marginalized groups would not feel welcome, or even safe,” Bojak explained. “The person supervising that employee should be taking action as soon as possible.”

In her statement on behalf of SimpliSafe, Sterling told BINJ that the company has employees from a number of backgrounds. “SimpliSafe has a diverse workforce who carry wide-ranging points of view on numerous topics, including politics,” Sterling said.

Wide-ranging is one thing, harassment is another. According to Jeromski, the conservative politics in the warehouse didn’t stop with posters and memes. “It wasn’t just signage,” he said. “It was the culture there.”

Jeromski described a workplace where people of color didn’t advance and the white managerial class maintained white hegemony in professional and social settings. Nonwhite workers wouldn’t receive recognition for their work, Jeromski said, and were frequently passed over for less experienced white workers. And nobody would talk to them.

The language used around the warehouse, said Jeromski, was racially explosive—though the slurs were kept to small groups.

“In private settings, I heard two or three people use that kind of language,” said Jeromski, who confirmed that the two managers at the warehouse were two of the people in question.

It doesn’t seem like those being antagonized at SimpliSafe shipping and fulfillment centers have much recourse. If, as the company said through its spokesperson, policies are continuing in place as they have in the past, then chances of potential positive resolutions are minimal.

“I complained all the time” about the behavior, Jeromski said. “Management made noise about doing something, but they did nothing.”

The same thing happened to Politano. Before leaving, she said she tried again to address the issues surrounding her supervisors’ work areas. And again, she said, nothing happened.

“I told our manager, ‘Hey, your employee [the one that had the Trump flag] has a bunch of offensive stuff up displaying at his desk and a Trump sticker facing the front window of the building,’” Politano said. “And again the manager played dumb.”

That could be ineptitude. But Purvis took a cynical view of the situation.

According to the former employee, maybe the problem isn’t that racialized abuse is something that the company can’t handle, or ignores.

“Maybe it’s systemic throughout the company,” Purvis said.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

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RACE TO NOWHERE NEWS TO US

Walsh dodges tough questions at racism summit On Saturday, the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Racial Equity hosted the 2nd Annual Boston Talks About Racism at Northeastern University. A continuation of last year’s discussion on the city’s race issues, the event was guided

by Dr. Atyia Martin, the Hub’s chief resilience officer, and featured an audience Q&A period with Mayor Marty Walsh, plus breakout sessions led by moderators.

Martin, who has helped lead the city’s “resilience strategy focused on addressing racial equity,” said during the event that it is everyone’s responsibility to tackle racism in Boston.

“When we think about the relationship of resilience to the policies and practices and our own roles as individuals and organizations, the idea here is that we take responsibility,” she told the packed crowd of more than 800 people. “We take responsibility for the fact that we’re a part of building resilience in the city, but also the actions that we take can also detract from that resilience.”

Martin continued: “That also means we take responsibility for how we confront racism, not just outside ourselves but inside of ourselves. Because we are all struggling with these issues, whether we are a person of color or whether we are white.”

Specific issues were addressed. During the Q&A, Walsh sparred with audience members who questioned his effectiveness and suggested that the Walsh administration has taken actions that hurt communities of color. For starters, one audience member asked why the conversation was held in a university auditorium and not in communities of color. She added that some people of color may not have heard about the event. In response, Walsh said the talks don’t necessarily need to be held in Dorchester, Mattapan, or Roxbury.

“The conversations have to happen in other neighborhoods in the city of Boston,” Walsh said. “The conversation on race has to be understood across the board.”

McKersin Previlus, a professional dancer and community organizer who lives in Roxbury, said that he views these talks suspiciously. The Walsh administration, he says, shows little interest in investing in communities of color.

“They [the Walsh administration] have all the power,” Previlus said. “That’s why when they have talks about racism, I see it as a complete fraud. It’s just a fake

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presentation to get you to shut up for a little bit until things happen again… The black community, the Asian community, the Latino community, we speak on these issues all the time. We invite white folks to speak with us about these issues. The city knows nothing new.”

A Mattapan resident asked, “Why is the city of Boston balancing the BPS transportation deficit on the backs of single black mothers and four-year-olds?” Her question referred to the Boston School Committee’s recent vote for later start times (for older students) and earlier start times (for elementary school students), a decision opposed by many parents and the Boston Branch of the NAACP. While those groups argue that the changes will harm families of color, Walsh defended the decision, saying that studies show later start times work for high school students.

But to Yvette Modestin, founder and executive director of racial and social justice organization Encuentro Diaspora Afro, this decision was unconscionable.

“For a city with income that people are making with two or three jobs, their kids are coming out at 2 o’clock and they’re getting off at 5 o’clock and where they’re going to put them?” Modestin said. “Now you’re telling them to give up their second job to pick up your child because someone didn’t think this through?”

Modestin, who participated in the process that yielded the city’s resilience strategy, pointed at the problem of citing studies instead of listening of voices of color. “The report was great because it brought folks into the same room, but even in that room, people were trying to dismiss people’s reality based on what they’ve studied,” Modestin said.

“Unless you are black in America today … you cannot tell me you studied it better than I’m living it.”

Another point of contention brought up during the event was the construction of the Seaport District. An audience member asked, “In regards to the Seaport, there were billions of dollars poured into the Seaport. How did the African-American community prosper from that?”

Walsh responded, “The Seaport’s a whole different situation. A lot of the development is private.” The mayor then shifted to address the need for more developers of color.

For the majority of the event, Walsh chose to focus on microaggressions, emphasizing the importance of having dialogues so that people of all races understand the day-to-

day challenges people of color face.

“This is about the city having a dialogue on race and racism and finally addressing the issue of race and racism,” Walsh said. “What we have to do is to understand how do we work to deal with the issue so when a black man or a black woman or a Latino man or Latino woman is walking down the street, they don’t feel they are being looked at.

When a person walks into a store to buy a shirt or pair of pants, they are not being followed around, because when I walk into a store I don’t get followed around.”

Wendell Joseph, city of Cambridge municipal planner living in Roxbury, said the dialogue failed to grasp the urgency of the predicament that many in the room face every day.

“A conversation is great, a dialogue is great, but there’s a sense of urgency, and until that is recognized by everyone, we’ll keep having these conversations and feel good about ourselves,” Joseph said. “But there’s a sense of urgency.

Time’s running out.”

Previlus said that systemic racism is far more difficult to discuss. As a result, it is oftentimes avoided. “Fixing the problem takes more work,” he said. “[When] people in power have to start making things fair to others, they feel like they’re being attacked. Equality in their eyes is not equality, it’s oppression to them.”

Modestin said the talks are nevertheless a step forward, but they are futile if subsequent actions aren’t taken.

“We haven’t seen a shift in resources to community organizations,” she added. “I haven’t seen a shift in addressing the issues. I haven’t seen an action that really addresses the disparity, which means making our schools more equitable, better transportation in our neighborhoods, lowering the rent, addressing developers who are coming in and moving people out … Unless the city is ready to have these dialogues and put these into concrete action, we’re going to be talking, talking, talking, and getting nothing done.” “[The Walsh administration] think they are the ones that should be leading the conversation?” Previlus said. “All they need to do is to show up to our communities where we are having these conversations. And then learn and implement what we ask for and talk about.”

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BY OLIVIA DENG @OLIVIADENG1

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ON

OST E IN B

MAD

ON MAKERSPACES AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY APPARENT HORIZON

Making can be cool, but conscious making is cooler

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS For many of us living in and around Boston in recent years, it has become common to see lots of communications from makerspaces around holiday time. Which is totally understandable. Such creative centers produce neat things year-round, so it’s only natural that their members would turn to producing gifts like busy elves (and holding workshops about how to produce gifts like… um… smart busy elves) as fall turns to winter.

However, if you’re someone who thinks critically about social institutions and their interaction with technology, then you might join me in feeling some concern about the trajectory of these spaces. Which boils down to this: Do makers and the makerspaces they found think about why they make, and for whom they make? Obviously, it varies from maker to maker and space to space, but my observation has been that the maker movement could do much better on that front. So I thought I would run through some of my apprehensions on that theme and make some suggestions for reform. In the spirit of holiday giving and all that.

There’s no question that makerspaces have been a boon to society in many different ways. Described by the Somerville nonprofit makerspace Artisan’s Asylum as “community centers with tools,” these logical outgrowths of the hacker and DIY cultures—and the older crafter culture, amateur radio culture, and cultures around magazines like Popular Electronics and Popular Mechanics—have grown to become a significant social force in the last decade. Particularly in places like the Boston area that have lots of colleges producing lots of engineers, scientists, and artists.

But it’s important to remember that—as with science, technology, and art in general—there is a problem with pushing “making” in the abstract without thinking about its social and political consequences. Because tools and techniques may be inherently neutral, but people and the institutions we create are not.

Including makerspaces. So it’s worth being aware that, according to PandoDaily, in early 2012 O’Reilly Media’s MAKE division —publisher of Make magazine, 8

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perhaps the best known popularizer of the maker movement—announced that it had won a grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in the agency’s Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (or MENTOR) program. The money was to be used to start 1,000 makerspaces in high schools around the country.

Now DARPA may be best known as the super clever agency that brought us the Internet. But it worked on that project in part—protestations from its fans and allies taken as given—to help solve the insoluble problem of how to keep America’s military, research, and control centers in communication with each other after an all-out nuclear war. And somehow help our government survive the unsurvivable.

It is also the super clever agency that has brought us an array of very nasty war machines in the last six decades.

Notably, according to Air & Space magazine, the Predator drones that have killed hundreds of innocent people around the world—including many children—in recent years at the behest of presidents from Bush to Obama to Trump. Because they’re just not as accurate as our military and political leaders would have us believe. And because those leaders don’t really care about what they call “collateral damage” when they’re prosecuting what human rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights claim are extralegal assassination campaigns.

As it turned out, the DARPA MENTOR high school program never really got off the ground because it lost its budget in President Obama’s big “Sequestration” budget cut of March 2013. And it’s certainly worth mentioning that the program sparked protests from within the maker community.

But DARPA continues to participate in a variety of science and technology events aimed at high school kids—notably the young robotics crowd that overlaps with makerspaces.

And DARPA is also aiming events squarely at makerspaces… and some makerspaces are definitely

participating. For example, according to the DARPA website, this November the agency held the DARPA Bay Area Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest at NASA Ames Conference Center in Moffett Field, California. The relevant webpage explains that “Teams from across the country will come together to explore the cyber-physical interplay of SDR and unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, during the Hackfest.”

“Unmanned aerial vehicles” is another term for drones.

Two of the eight teams invited to participate along with teams from military contractors like Raytheon were the Fat Cat Flyers from Fat Cat Fab Lab, a volunteer-run makerspace in New York City, and Team Fly-by-SDR from Hacker DoJo, a nonprofit community of hackers and startups in Silicon Valley… which is also a makerspace.

Whatever you in the viewing audience think about the Pentagon in particular and the American military in general, we can all agree that there are moral, ethical, social, and political questions that must be asked in a democratic society about the intersection of maker culture and makerspaces with those institutions.

For that reason, I think it’s critical that makerspaces raise and address such questions on an ongoing basis.

That they maintain a scrupulous policy of transparency regarding who they work with and why. And that they hold classes and public forums on the moral, ethical, social and political dimensions of why makers make and for whom they make. Something you really don’t see much of at makerspaces at present. But should.

Anyhow, I’m keen to engage with the maker community on this topic and flesh these ideas out more.

Folks interested in discussing the issues I’m raising at more length can drop me a line at execeditor@digboston.com.

A shorter version of this column was originally written for the Beyond Boston regional news digest show—co-produced by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and several area public access television stations.

LAW & ORDER: DUMB-DUMB DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

Jeff Sessions goes after the wrong gang

BY BAYNARD WOODS @BAYNARDWOODS Jefferson Beauregard Sessions came to Baltimore on the day that Democrat Doug Jones took the attorney general’s former Alabama Senate seat in a special election victory over accused pedophile and hardcore theocratic anticonstitutionalist Roy Moore. Much of the country felt relief that Alabama did not elect a man who had been banned from an Alabama shopping mall back in the ’80s to the US Senate.

Still, more than 60 percent of white people in Alabama did vote for Moore, again proving that if you are racist enough in some parts of America almost nothing else matters.

Trump tried to cast Moore’s defeat as a personal vindication; he had endorsed Luther Strange during the primary. But Sessions must have been more uncomfortable than normal—and not only because he was in a majority black city.

When asked if he had voted, Sessions flashing his elfin grin and said he had but he would respect the “sanctity” of the secret ballot. Steve Bannon, who brought Sessions into the Trump orbit, had used all his Breitbart-ian propaganda for Moore and gotten stomped. So now he was recalibrating.

A year ago, it was impossible to imagine that Alabama would end up with a Democratic senator in Sessions’ seat.

“Judge Moore has never been, really, an economics guy,” Bannon told Newsweek following Moore’s defeat, and wished for a candidate like Sessions where “immigration and trade would’ve been at the top of the agenda.”

In Baltimore, Sessions followed the Bannon script and stirred up fear of immigrants and minorities. He was talking about the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and immigration, going back to his own most deeply held convictions of the danger of immigration.

Someone in the DOJ must have thought Baltimore would be the perfect venue for this message.

“Over the last two years, this city in particular has experienced violence like we haven’t seen in nearly a quarter of a century,” he said. “Baltimore has a higher murder rate and a higher violent crime rate than Chicago

with less than a quarter of the population, if you can believe it.”

There is virtually no MS-13 presence in Baltimore.

Sessions did not mention that eight members of an elite police task force here have been indicted by the Feds for racketeering and a series of other crimes—robbing civilians, planting drugs, stealing drugs and having them sold in Philadelphia by a local cop. A detective, Sean Suiter, was murdered on Nov 15, and it later came out that he was scheduled to testify against those officers the very next day.

Not exactly a good place for your law-and-order speech.

The “strong and motivated policing” he called for was what allowed the Gun Trace Task Force to be out of control in the first place. And to make it worse, Baltimore’s police commissioner asked the FBI to take over the case more than a week earlier and never got an answer. But when Sessions was asked about the FBI taking over the case by a local reporter, Sessions seemed largely unaware of the case and spoke in platitudes about cooperation.

Sessions partially blamed immigrants for Baltimore’s crime, but he also wanted to blame those who protested the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

“Bad things start happening, and you can trace the surge in violence in this city to the riots and some of the reactions that occurred afterwards,” Sessions said.

Baltimore was a bad spot for Sessions because it also reminds people that he had to recuse himself from the Russia investigation for lying under oath. That investigation is now handled by Rod Rosenstein, who used to be US attorney in Baltimore and is now Sessions’ number two at the DOJ. Rosenstein was to testify about the investigation before the House the next day.

“I’m appropriately exercising my oversight responsibilities. So I can assure you that the special counsel is conducting himself consistently with our understanding about the scope of his investigation,” Rosenstein said.

The far right are enraged because they think Mueller and his team are politically biased and are demanding that Rosenstein fire Mueller. Last month, Republicans said NEWS TO US

that firing Mueller was the only way to prevent a coup. And messages between two FBI agents, one of whom was on Mueller’s team, have given fuel to that fire.

The texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, it turns out, were released to a “select group” of reporters, who came to the DOJ offices to see them on Dec 12—before members of Congress got them.

Strzok said that the Republican party ought to “pull their head out of their ass” and called Trump an idiot. Strzok was fired for this. But the far right is capitalizing on it. A Bannon-affiliated super PAC is buying ads in local cable markets calling for Mueller to be fired. Right-wing pundits are calling for a purge in the FBI. This is dangerous shit, for sure. But it’s crazy to act like our law enforcement offices all around this country aren’t politicized. It’s just that they’re usually right-leaning. At the same moment Sessions was speaking, the first six of 193 people who will ultimately face trial as a result of four broken windows on Inauguration Day were sitting a courtroom being prosecuted by his DOJ. And testimony showed that they had a clear political bias against anarchists and for Trump.

But the same armchair #Resistance that has ignored the trampling of the rights of citizens and journalists in this case are getting ready for a mobilization if Mueller is fired.

The danger is that they will be willing to embrace the kind of tough-on-crime mass incarceration policies of a Sessions DOJ if it helps save Mueller, whom they see as the last hope.

As Sessions slithered away, looking simultaneously delighted and nervous, like a school boy at a strip club, his red cheeks glowing beneath his white hair, it was clear, once again, that we are in hell.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network.

Email baynard@therealnews.com, @baynardwoods on Twitter. Check out the Democracy in Crisis podcast on Soundcloud and iTunes.

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THE GENTRIFICATION OF WEED OP-ED

Or the year I ditched my Mass medical marijuana card

BY D-TENSION Have you ever wanted something so badly that you say something ridiculous like “I’d do anything for tickets to Hamilton?” I am starting to feel that I am guilty of this when it comes to medical cannabis.

I have performed at the Freedom Rally, I’ve helped raise money, and I have used my voice as a radio personality and hip-hop artist to spotlight the need for weed as a medicine.

Other than common sense and experience, my motivation for doing what I could to help the cause came years ago when my friend Kevin Stevenson of Boston band the Shods was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I watched helplessly as this wretched disease robbed him of his ability to play guitar on a level that rivaled literally anyone else’s mastery of the instrument. It made me angry and it made me sad and, ironically, the thing that made me angriest was how Kev’s medication, the very thing that is supposed to make him feel better, made him feel worse.

The one thing that made Kev feel better was, golly, who would have thought, marijuana. My activism for legalized medical cannabis was born from that experience recognizing the plant’s ability to help people. Like others, I’ve read that chemotherapy patients can regain their appetites with weed, but nothing makes more of an impact than seeing it with your own eyes.

More than a decade later, it finally happened: Massachusetts joined the 21st century and made this medication available to those who need it. When I started taking up this cause, the general public wasn’t aware of oils, tincture, edibles, or CBD. As research and the industry itself evolved, America finally got on board, and it was what I wanted, so I was happy. I should have read the fine print.

---///--I tried pot once in high school, but that was a disaster. I had been raised in a heavily religious (read: literal bible cult) home and was told that smoking pot allows Satan to control your mind and body. I tried it anyway and the moment it hit me, I felt my eyes getting heavy and my bible cult brain couldn’t handle it. I thought Satan had taken control of me.

I ended up calling a drug intervention hotline. When they asked me what drug I had taken and I said, “I smoked half a joint,” they laughed at me but also gave me expert advice: order a pizza and try to relax, it’ll pass. I did as I was told, but not before I made them promise not to trace the call or phone my mother.

She never found out, and the pizza made Satan go away.

I started using marijuana, for real this time, in college when I was nearly 21 years old. I had left the cult and was ready to challenge all that I knew. I had made some new friends and didn’t want them to think I wasn’t cool, so I said the most uncool thing ever. When the joint made its way to me, my friend Eric said, “Oh, he doesn’t smoke,” but I interrupted with, “No, no, I take pot!”

All these years later, I am glad I took the pot. For the 20 years leading up to that day I had debilitating insomnia. I watched Johnny Carson and David Letterman every night starting at age 10, because I couldn’t sleep. I would show up to school in a daze. This lead to me skipping so I could sleep, which lead to Mrs. Keely kicking me out of Lowell High School when my unexcused absences had totaled 72 days.

She thought I was a fuckup, but I was really just tired. After

Which caused me to ask: Hooray for legalization? Or hooray for education?

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declaring that I “take pot,” I had an incredible night of sleep.

So I started taking the pot every night. It was a godsend that the cult never delivered.

The only real problems I had with weed: A—Finding a way to buy it, and B—Not knowing that sativa wouldn’t put me to sleep like indica did. Needless to say, the shady dudes I was copping from couldn’t tell me what I was buying. Back then weed had two names: brown and kind bud.

Now that it’s been legalized, I can buy a specific strain to meet my specific medical needs. The black market has become smarter, so even the shady guys can tell me what I’m buying. Which caused me to ask: Hooray for legalization? Or hooray for education?

A few months later, I was speaking to a hip-hop artist I know in Boston. He had just served a five-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute marijuana. In this case, the cops used the old tactic where they didn’t bust him for the pound he had. They busted him for the most money he could have theoretically made from that pound. A pound is roughly $3,500. But if you break that into 25 grams, then the “street value” (a term that is almost always a lie) is nearly

---///--As soon as cannabis was legalized, I put the wheels in motion to get myself on “the program.” I hate that expression, as it reminds me of methadone, but whatever, I wanted to be able to sleep and use my medicine legally.

Applying for my medical card was my first whiff of the scam that I have come to call the gentrification of marijuana.

I asked my primary care doctor, to whom I tell everything, if he could get me on the program, so to speak. He said, “No.” He said he wanted me to have access, but that his practice isn’t allowed to prescribe me pot. I had to see a specialist. He recommended a doctor to me. We’ll call him Dr. Bud. Dr. Bud is a nice guy, but he’s out of his fucking mind. The first thing that happened at my appointment, which lasted about two hours, was Dr. Bud showing me his dog and the tricks she can do. He said to the dog, “It’s the FBI,” and the dog played dead. He said, “Who wants a pot brownie?” and the dog woke up and begged. This went on for nearly half an hour.

During the actual consultation that determined if I qualify for medical weed, Dr. Bud didn’t ask many questions.

He just talked a lot. He told me that if he were a good doctor, he’d have another specialty. Very reassuring. He told me that “it’s all bullshit,” and said he was concerned about my weight. Finally, a real medical thing to say. Then he told me that the best way to lose weight is to go on an all-potato diet. Don’t count calories, don’t eat low carb, just eat as many potatoes as you want. After a while, all I could hear when he opened his mouth was the sound of a duck quacking. But hey, I got my medical card. All it cost me was… five hundred motherfucking dollars! Plus twice a year I have to give Dr. Bud another $200 to renew. Then I had to pay the state fee. Keep in mind, none of this is covered by insurance.

The card costs more than the weed!

---///--Just as my experience with Kevin moved me to fight the good fight, the post-legalization world in which we live has awakened me to some realities that are harshing my mellow, man.

I recently ran into the wife of a friend of mine. I asked how he was, and she told me that he had only three years left to serve in prison for growing marijuana. But wait, I thought, not only is medical marijuana legal, but now recreational use is too. It’s even legal to grow weed in your home these days.

over $11,000!

These two friends of mine look an awful lot like everyone I bought weed from before it was legal. Why are they doing time when what they do isn’t even illegal now? Why are people still in prison for selling or possessing weed? Only a government could get away with that.

Now that it’s legal, the folks at the weed spot—er, the dispensary—don’t look anything like the guys I used to buy weed from. They’re nice enough, but most aren’t the people who have driven the industry for the last hundred years. These are not the people who took the risks of getting arrested, ripped off, and robbed. These are nice suburban folks whose parents must be very disappointed in them.

But that’s cool. People who look like them smoke weed too. I guess this should have all been obvious to me, but I was too busy celebrating. The real winners, of course, are increasingly corporations. The dispensary that I was going to is run by a dude whose money comes from Goldman Sachs.

A guy who is proud to report that he has never smoked pot.

---///--Even as activists and the state Cannabis Control Commission, in the fine-tuning of the Commonwealth’s recreational guidelines, appear to be making some inroads for those who were screwed by the War on Drugs, it’s still pretty clear to me that I am a fool for continuing to pay for this medical card. All I’m doing is overpaying for weed in order to line the pockets of investment bankers. I am also paying Dr. Bud to be a shitty doctor.

Full recreational legalization is coming in the new year. I know how to make my own oil, tincture, and edibles. I don’t need these fucking people. The black market is cheaper and smarter, and the black market puts the money in the hands of black and brown people. Real money, not some paltry paycheck.

I will no longer participate in the gentrification of weed after my card expires in February, and I apologize for wanting something so badly that it took me so long to see what was going on. I just wanted a good night’s sleep, man.

ALLSTON: 180 Harvard Av.• 617 -779-7901 (Green Line @ Harvard) SOMERVILLE: 238 Elm St.• 617 (Red Line @ Davis Square) -629-5383 BUFFALOEXCHANGE.COM •

LIVE MUSIC • LOCAVORE MENU PRIVATE EVENTS 12/21

Cuéntame Project Fundraiser

With The Dutch Tulips, Big Jon and the Mattress Factory, & DJ Seekay 12/23

7th Annual Christmas with The Stampede Feat. The Rupert Selection.

Fire In the Field & Radium Girls 12/26

Motörhead Metal Tuesday

Celebrating the life of Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister 12/29

LemmyFest 3 with Ironfisted, The Scrooges, & The Damnedsels A portion of the proceeds to go to the Ronnie James Dio Cancer Fund 1/4

ON3

Feat. Rothstein, Jymmy Kafka, Peter James, Tea Marr & Olivia Doh

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THE YEAR(S) IN CASEY OVERPASS REPLACEMENT PICS FEATURE

Like you need a bunch of photos to remind you about this disaster

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON

When it comes to the Forest Hills neck of Jamaica Plain, there are two kinds of Bostonians: those who regularly have to navigate around the area, and who spend several hours a week cursing those responsible for the eternal inconvenience that’s the morphing of the Casey Overpass into a “multimodal at-grade roadway,” and those who haven’t gone anywhere near JP since the construction began. Not even to see our friends and families.

Considering that planning for the Casey Arborway Project started in 2011, and that it was supposed to be completed by November 2016, there’s no doubt that a full investigation of spending and (the lack of) progress is warranted—even after all the bike lanes and facades are finished, and everyone forgets about the nightmarish pollution and traffic that locals endured.

In the meantime, with another year of congestion and fumes behind us, we dipped into our thickening folder of Forest Hills images, and also pulled a couple of ringers from Instagram. Check digboston.com and @digstagramboston on Instagram for all of the images.

2 0 1 5

2016

2017

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BMW of Cambridge 1098 Massachusetts Ave Arlington, MA 02476-4328 781-648-1300 www.greaterbostonmotorsports.com

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Happy Holidays from

| RESTAURANT | INTIMATE CONCERT VENUE | | URBAN WINERY | PRIVATE EVENT SPACE |

upcoming shows

12.31 LOS LOBOS | 2 SPECIAL NYE SHOWS!

12.21

THE ALTERNATE ROUTES & NICK FRADIANI

12.22

MASTERS OF THE TELECASTER

FT. GE SMITH, JIM WEIDER AND JON HERINGTON

12.23 TWISTED PINE

12.27

QUINN SULLIVAN

HOLIDAY SHOW

12.28

12.29

FREDDY JONES BAND

GIRLS, GUNS & GLORY

W/ THE RATIONALES

W/ THE MALLETT BROTHERS

1.1

1.4

DAMN THE TORPEDOES TOM PETTY TRIBUTE

WHO’S BAD

THE ULTIMATE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIBUTE BAND

1.6

1.6

MAGIC DICK (J. GEILS BAND) WASABASSCO BURLESQUE & SHUN NG

&

12.24

christmas eve

chinese buffet 1.16

Ridge wine dinner 1.17 City Winery and Diageo Present

Botanical Gin Lab

email eventsboston@citywinery.com for more info email eventsboston@citywinery.com for more info

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Seasoned San Fran tattooer sets up shop in Brighton

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 In 12 years of getting tattooed in this town, my go-to artist, the standout talent Brian Hemming, has moved his workbench twice.

The first time, my heart sank after calling his old shop and learning that he’d left; I had made the mistake once before of having someone else ink me, and after Hemming fixed the mess that hack made, I decided to stay faithful to him forever after. Luckily I later found him at a shop in Allston and proceeded to have Hemming sporadically tattoo me in the years that followed.

So it felt rather odd to be under another artist’s needle in his presence recently, almost like cheating on your partner with them right there in the room. It was all good, though, since the tattooer in question was Erik Rieth, one of the owners of the legendary Seventh Son Tattoo in San Francisco, who recently recruited an all-star squad, including Hemming, to open his new shop Ghost in the Machine Tattoo in Brighton.

Naturally, I needled Rieth with questions while I was in surgery.

Where were you before moving to Boston?

I was in San Francisco at a shop called Seventh Son Tattoo in the South Market neighborhood for eight years. My wife and I are both from the East Coast originally, so California wasn’t going to be forever. Even when I was opening that shop, I knew that at some point I was going to be leaving. We both wanted to wind up in New England for various reasons, and so here we are.

What year did you start?

June of 1992 … The proper way to start tattooing is to serve an apprenticeship. I did not. I was what we call a scratcher. I started out of my mom’s garage in New Jersey. Not proud, but then I worked out of my apartment in Philadelphia for a while when I was going to school out there. Mostly on close friends and family, so I get to see the shit I did on them on a regular basis. I’ve tried to correct mistakes over the years, but mostly it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. So basically I started the wrong way, but I jumped at a chance to work at a professional shop as soon as I could. Literally the day after I graduated from college I went full time, and I’ve been tattooing ever since.

I’m not sponsored by Mountain Dew either.

We can talk about the TV shows, but there’s really no point. They make me embarrassed to be a tattooer.

Where is tattoo culture at this juncture?

To be honest with you, there’s too many tattooers. There’s a lot of us. But it’s a doubleedged sword right now because there is a ton of talent coming in too. Younger people who just started doing tattoos and are amazing after just a couple of years, and that should always be welcome to the betterment of the art. The bar keeps getting raised, but there is definitely a lot more interest now than there has been.

Were you ever a show tattooer?

No. [He holds up a decal of his making that reads “Resist the Corporate Hijacking of Tattoo Culture.”] I made these stickers as a direct response to that kind of inquiry. I’m not sponsored by Mountain Dew either. We can talk about the TV shows, but there’s really no point. They make me embarrassed to be a tattooer.

Was your plan to move here from San Francisco and open a shop as soon as possible?

When I first moved out [of San Francisco], I was completely burnt out being a shop owner. I was over it. We were busy, there were eight of us, with pretty much everyone tattooing all day. It was a successful shop. But when the time came to leave, it was time.

I traveled between shops for a while, just kind of working out of my pelican case … At first, it was liberating—I went from an entire shop to a little case. But after a little while, I wanted to go back to being a shop owner. Being a tattooer for this long, it ended up being the next step …

It was a challenge in a lot of different ways. I really didn’t know too many people here, I didn’t know too many tattooers, I wasn’t connected professionally. I think that I got lucky early on: I worked at a few really good shops, I met really good people.

What was the vision for this shop?

I only wanted to hire the best. There is no one who is here just to fill a seat. In a business like this it takes time. There are a lot of tattoo shops—if you’re going for the long game, most of your business over time is going to come from word of mouth. So you just have to do consistently good work.

This is the culmination of 25 years of me tattooing—of me as an artist, as a businessperson.

I want it to feel like it’s home, and I wanted it to feel as much like home for the guys who I hired. I want to put out quality tattoos. I want it to be, and I think we are well on our way to being, one of the best shops in Boston.

80 beverly st. at one canal, Boston Ma 02114 (617) 933-8047 |www.citywinery.com/boston

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Ghost in the Machine Tattoo is located at 571a Washington St. in Brighton. More info at ghostinthemachinetattoo.com

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OUR YEAR IN AWESOME MUSIC PICS MUSIC

Classic shots, from Boston Calling to the DCU Center PHOTOS BY TIM BUGBEE @TINNITUS_PHOTO

Danny Brown at Boston Calling

Converge at Boston Calling

Cage The Elephant at Boston Calling

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St. Vincent at House of Blues

Metallica at Gillette Stadium

Day GreenCenter at DCU

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Red Ho at T t Chi D G li Pe ard ppe en rs

R o g e r W a t e r s at TD Garden

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CAPTION: CARMEN PAPALIA, STILL FROM MOBILITY DEVICE, 2013, VIDEO, COURTESY OF GALLERY 344

GALLERY REVIEWS VISUAL ARTS

BY DAVID CURCIO AND FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH

Drawn from Nature & on Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane—Cape Ann Museum The Cape Ann Museum holds the largest collection of paintings by the great 19th-century maritime painter Fitz Henry Lane, whose works in oils are among some of the most profound images to emerge from the artists’ haven that was Gloucester.

Translating Lane’s hazy skies and crisp, exacting vessels to lithography is less of a leap than one might think, with infinite approaches available to the medium ranging from the finest of lines to charcoal blacks and tonal washes.

No drawing process carries the same sensuality as that of making marks on a lithographic stone. The exhibition imparts the exacting nature of Lane’s technique, as he worked in tandem with pressmen who helped him build color through overlaps, achieving almost fathomless delicacy in inking his streaked clouds and agitated seas.

Those unfamiliar with the how—or more importantly the why—of lithography will gain understanding in the pairing of the prints with Lane’s oils.

Show runs until 3.4.18. Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester. capeannmuseum.org —David Curcio

Carmen Papalia: Open Access: Practicing Accessibility Together—Gallery 344, City Hall Annex, Cambridge Carmen Papalia is blind, and his art has himsetting up public scenarios—duly recorded—in which he makes adventuresome changes to his usual habits of navigation.

Two videos by the artist are on display at Gallery 344.

In one he trades his red-tipped cane for a megaphone, announcing to anyone nearby that he needs help getting across a street. It doesn’t work out so well.

In the other video he has exchanged his cane for a high school marching band, instructed to play various tunes depending on whether the way is clear or blocked, level or uneven. He is able to enter a bodega and order a soda, accompanied by tubas and cymbals.

Papalia plays it for laughs, but the piece has genuine vulnerability in it, and not just in the respect that he might fall down a curb. A poem printed on the wall and floor divides the gallery, noting “your palms / hold reference / to gates / to walls and woodgrain.” It testifies to experiences seen by unusual means, but thorough ones.

Show runs until 12.29.17. Gallery 344, City Hall Annex, 344 Broadway, Second Floor, Cambridge. cambridgema.gov/arts/ publicart/gallery344 —Franklin Einspruch

Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style—Peabody Essex Museum Some people want to make art. Some people want tobe artists. As desires, they overlap. As ambitions, they diverge.

Georgia O’Keefe labored at self-presentation. Her partership with Alfred Stieglitz no doubt prompted that. So did a deliberate artistic mien. Art, Image, Style puts plenty of paintings on display, but sharp clothing, much of which the artist sewed, upstages them. Numerous photographs of O’Keefe, taken by Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Arnold Newman, and others, reinforce the impetus to look at her rather than her art, or rather, to look at her and her partScandinavian, part-Asian design predilections staged at her home in the desert Southwest as a work of art in itself.

Arguably it was, but this treatment reveals her as a clotheshorse whose talent for submitting to the camera exceeded that of mastering the brush. The several paintings that don’t feel bedeviled by problems of color, composition, or rendering come as a relief, as the rest of them puncture the O’Keefe icon.

Show runs until 4.1.18. Peabody Essex Museum, 61 Essex Street, Salem. pem.org —Franklin Einspruch

>> THESE SHORTS ARE BEING SIMULTANEOUSLY PUBLISHED AT DELICIOUS LINE, DELICIOUSLINE.ORG. FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH IS THE EDITOR IN CHIEF OF DELICIOUS LINE. DAVID CURCIO IS AN ARTIST WHO LIVES AND WORKS IN WATERTOWN, MA. HIS WORK CAN BE VIEWED AT DAVIDCURCIO.COM

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SAVAGE LOVE

LOVING LESBIANS

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

I am a 22-year-old Italian man, 100 percent straight, sensitive and sporty. I have been reading Savage Love for years in Internazionale. I have one question for you: Why do I always fall in love with lesbians? Why do I instantly fall in love with girls who have that something more in their eyes?

Something melancholy and perhaps insecure? Girls whom I’d rather protect and embrace than take to bed? The last three girls who fit this description all turned out to be lesbians. The last girl with whom this happened told me it was my “Red Cross” mind-set that made me fall in love with girls who are insecure/sad/melancholy, so I have a sort of selection bias that excludes most straight girls I meet. I do not believe this, because the world is full of straight girls who need saving. So why then, Dan? WHY? I have a girlfriend. I truly love her. Since September, we have been living in two different cities because she went away to study. I am afraid that one day she is going to tell me she’s gay too. She always talks with me about a new super-cute female friend. Is she a lesbian? I have recently met another girl, super empathetic. She is gay, and I knew it after an all-night conversation in my car listening to Cigarettes After Sex. Why do I always fall in love with gay girls? Can I love two people at the same time? This is the fourth time that this has happened. Is my girlfriend gay? Why do I find lesbians so attractive? I’m freaking.

Increasingly Tormented About Lesbian Yearnings There’s a lot going on in your letter, ITALY, so I’m going to take your questions one at a time…

1. Maybe you always fall in love with lesbians or maybe this was a series of coincidences—by pure chance you fell for more than one woman who turned out to be a lesbian—and, hey, since you’re probably going to love a few more women over the course of your life, ITALY, that “always” seems a bit premature. It’s also possible you find women with a certain degree of masculine energy and/or swagger attractive, and women with that swagger are somewhat likelier to be lesbians, slightly upping your chances of falling in love with four girls-who-turned-out-to-be-lesbians in a row.

2. Women—straight or bi or lesbian—don’t need “saving.”

They need respect, they need to be taken seriously, they need bodily autonomy, and they need loving partners and political allies.

3. Your girlfriend may be a lesbian—anyone could in these highly fluid days, even me. But if your girlfriend isn’t straight, ITALY, she’s likelier to be bisexual, seeing as there are roughly three times as many bi women as there are lesbian women.

4. It’s entirely possible to love more than one person at a time. Just as we are capable of loving more than one parent, child, sibling, friend, and television show at a time (you know I love you both equally, Lady Dynamite and The Crown), we can love more than one romantic partner at a time. But we’re told that romantic love is a zero-sum game so often—if someone wins, someone else loses—it has become a selffulfilling/relationship-destroying prophecy.

5. Maybe it’s not an accident that you keep falling for lesbians. There are lots of straight men out there who have a thing for dykes. It’s entirely possible that you aren’t worried your girlfriend is a lesbian, ITALY, but secretly hoping she is.

Good luck!

Give the gift of the magnum Savage Lovecast at savagelovecast.com!

COMEDY EVENTS THU 12.21

PARTY CRUISE-MAS @ ARTS AT THE ARMORY

Featuring: Ken Reid, Srilatha Rajamani, Alan Richardson, Alana Parkinson, & Jake McDowell Hosted by Nick Ortolani & Katie McCarthy

191 HIGHLAND AVE., SOMERVILLE | 7:30PM | FREE THU 12.21

HEADLINERS IN THE SQUARE @ JOHN HARVARD’S

Featuring: Corey Rodrigues with Miguel Perez, Josh Filipowski, Tim King, Tom Kelly, Shyam Subramanian, & Andrew Della Volpe

33 DUNSTER ST., CAMBRIDGE | 9PM | FREE THU 12.21 - SAT 12.23

THE BEST OF LAUGH BOSTON

Featuring - Jim Colliton with Sean Sullivan & Chris Pennie Hosted by Nick Chambers

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8PM & 10PM | $20 FRI 12.22

THE COMEDY STUDIO

Featuring: Todd Clay, Mike Dorval, Brian Gordon, Jiayong Li, Kwasi Mensah, Al Park, & Giulia Rozzi Hosted by Rick Jenkins

1238 MASS AVE., CAMBRIDGE | 8PM | $15 FRI 12.22

HOSTEL FEST 3 @ HI BOSTON HOSTEL

Featuring: Liam Bowen, Angela Sawyer, Trent Wells, Lisa Lang, Brian Higginbottom, Parvo Fernández, Nonye BrownWest., & Zachary Fisher Hosted by Michael Stewart

19 STUART ST., BOSTON | 8PM | FREE FRI 12.22 - SAT 12.23

TOM DUSTIN @ NICK’S COMEDY STOP

Tom won “The Comedy Network” comedy competition, Comedy Central named featured him in “Up Next”. He’s been a part of the Boston Comedy Festival & perform about 30 weeks per year on the road, working at comedy clubs across the country.

246 TREMONT ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $20 SAT 12.23

COMEDY 2 THE CLUB @ GEM

Featuring: Josh Filipowski, Shyam Subramanian, Tim King, Tom Kelly, Andrew Della Volpe & more Hosted by Jeremiah Bohan Broderick

42 PROVINCE ST., BOSTON | 9PM | $10 SUN 12.24

HIDEOUT COMEDY @ THE HIDEOUT IN FANEUIL HALL Hosted by Dylan Krasinski & Sam Ike

4 S. MARKET ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $10 TUE 12.27

JELLY: WOMEN IN COMEDY NIGHT @ IMPROVBOSTON Featuring: Phoebe Angle, Reece Cotton, Tricia Auld, & Matt Kona

40 PROSPECT ST., CAMBRIDGE | 9:30PM | $10 WED 12.28

ARTISANAL COMEDY @ DORCHESTER BREWING COMPANY

Featuring: Guitler Raphael, Dana J. Bein, Shyam Subramanian, Duval Culpepper, Brett Johnson, Katie Que, & Ellen Sugarman Hosted by Bethany Van Delft

1250 MASS AVE., DORCHESTER | 8PM | $5 SUGG. DON.

MORE LISTINGS AT BOSTONCOMEDYSHOWS.COM savagelovecast.com 22

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WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

HEADLINING THIS WEEK!

The Best of Laugh Boston Jim Colliton, Sean Sullivan, Chris Pennie + more Thursday - Saturday

COMING SOON Sam Morril

Comedy Central, Last Comic Standing Dec 29-31 (New Year’s Eve!)

Jon Stetson

America’s Master Mentalist Special Engagement: Sat, Dec 30

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Tone Bell

Netflix, Comedy Central’s The Half Hour Jan 4-6

Annie Lederman

MTV, E!, Comedy Central Jan 11-13 OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Jimmy Plunkett Special Engagement: Sat, Jan 13

617.72.LAUGH | laughboston.com 425 Summer Street at the Westin Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District NEWS TO US

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