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CANNABIZ CORNER MEET THE GREENNURSE

FEATURE INTERVIEW

1968 FLASHBACK RYAN H. WALSH ON THE THE LEGENDARY NIGHTS AND ACID DAZE OF ‘ASTRAL WEEKS’

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MAR 08, 2018 - MAR 15, 2018 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 MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan THEATER EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COMEDY EDITOR Dennis Maler STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Patrick Cochran, Mike Crawford, Britni de la Cretaz, Kori Feener, Eoin Higgins, Zack Huffman, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus JohnsonSmith, C. Shardae Jobson, Heather Kapplow, Derek Kouyoumjian, Dan McCarthy, Peter Roberge, Maya Shaffer, Citizen Strain, M.J. Tidwell, Miriam Wasser, Dave Wedge, Baynard Woods INTERNS Kuresse Bolds, Victoria Botana, Rob Katz, Murray, Brynne Quinlan

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ON THE COVER IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE ORIGINAL POSTER FOR THE VAN MORRISON CONTROVERSY’S APPEARANCE AT THE CATACOMBS ON BOYLSTON STREET IN AUGUST 1968. READ ALL ABOUT MORRISON’S TIME IN BOSTON IN THIS WEEK’S FEATURE ON ‘ASTRAL WEEKS.’ ©2018 DIGBOSTON IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION CAN BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. ONE COPY OF DIGBOSTON IS AVAILABLE FREE TO MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

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Dear Reader, What if, after Harvey Weinstein was outed as the extraordinary sleaze that he is, virtually everyone in Greater Boston acted as if sexual harassment was a terrible but foreign concept, posing a threat to those who roam the Hollywood Hills but sparing those on Beacon Hill.

Imagine if the newspapers refused to purge the snakes in our own backyard and if potential local perpetrators were considered heroes despite evidence from elsewhere that suggested otherwise.

I know that I don’t just speak for myself when I say that is how it feels watching from Massachusetts every time that issues around police violence and abuse surface in national headlines. From the spotlight on hostilities in Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, Maryland, to the actions of Black Lives Matter and innumerable offshoots of that movement, there has been ample (not always well-informed, but ample nonetheless) attention on these topics for about three years now; but as Hub crusaders who fight for police accountability will tell you, even when the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC are calling for an end to the demoralizing treatment and harassment of people of color and poor folks of all stripes at the hands of the fuzz, all that most Bostonians with platforms can say is that cops in these parts are some kind of an exception.

It’s more predictable than the political persuasion of a guy with truck nuts on his pickup.

Because this is a big city that operates like Mayberry in many ways, people tend to pat cops on the back a lot. Even in—hell, especially in—the immediate wake of events like the ones that unfolded in Boston over these past couple of weeks, following the taping of a disrespectful white cop, one Zachary Crossen, by a black man who was being vilified for no clear reason. Since that video went viral and hit the national news cycle, it seems like people in these parts fall into two camps—the largely white No shit? side, which refuses to believe such officers are anything but outliers, and the largely black and brown No shit side, without the question mark, that has experienced racial profiling or worse more times than they can possibly recall during their time in Boston.

It isn’t possible for both sides to be right. Those who holler about stop and frisk and other crass oppressive cop behavior are talking about actual events, and just because you may not see such things unfold where you live doesn’t mean these things don’t happen.

Of course not all cops are bad. But the fact that people feel like they have to begin all condemnations of corrupt police with that preamble is a testament to just how many rotten law enforcement officers there are, and to the way that many of them take out their aggression on those who point out the obvious, all evidence of their atrocities be damned. As for the good cops, it’s during trying times like these that we must really wonder who they are and when they plan on standing up. Officer Crossen, who made a jackass of himself in the aforementioned video, has reportedly been involved in the past with an initiative in which the BPD gives ice cream out to young people in black and brown communities. It may be way more comforting to think about police handing out Hoodsie cups than it is to think about them taunting innocent pedestrians, but to focus on the superficial fluff and ignore hideous realities is to pretend that our city’s immune to this eternal universal plague, and it impedes the opportunity to make real changes to the system moving forward.

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

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NEWS+OPINION

MASS GRASS UPDATE NEWS TO US

With regulations for recreational cannabis almost in place, here’s what you need to know

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON

You should know without us whining, especially if you’re a frequent DigBoston reader, that the roll out of recreational cannabis in Mass—much like the introduction of medical marijuana before it—has left much to be desired. From lawmakers running interference on the tax and safety fronts, to delays on delivery and social consumption licenses, some would argue that this all could have been done in a much simpler and faster fashion.

Nonetheless, as the state’s Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) concluded its policy discussions on draft regulations last week (and is meeting twice this week—on Tuesday, to review and discuss the final regulations, and again on Wednesday for the same purpose), we are inching closer toward a recreational cannabis marketplace in Mass with each passing day. As for what that means… at this purgatorial juncture, well, a few things.

Most importantly, there are fairly concrete changes and additions to the regs in place. Nothing is in stone just yet, but there is certainly enough language in play to get a sense of how things will look. For example:

• Cultivation: There will be “a cultivation cap of 100,000 sq. ft. of canopy per licensee, including craft marijuana cooperatives.” Also, the CCC “agreed to reduce the cultivation annual license and application fees for outdoor cultivation by 50%.”

• Secret Shopper Program: “To strengthen compliance measures, [CCC members] agreed to broaden the scope of the previously authorized Secret Shopper Program by explicitly permitting underage identification card checks.”

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• Energy/Environmental Standards: The CCC

“agreed to set energy efficiency standards for indoor cultivation as recommended by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs,” and “agreed to require license renewal applicants to submit documentation, such as a utility bill, that identifies energy and water use.”

• Vendor Training: “Starting July 1, 2019, Marijuana Establishments will send the [CCC] certification that agents have completed a Responsible Vendor Training program provided by a third-party that is accredited by the Commission.”

As you may have read in cannabis headlines statewide this past week, the biggest news has been around the aforementioned delivery and social consumption licenses.

As John Basile of Wicked Local succinctly summarized: The five-member commission voted 4-1 to launch a legal retail marijuana industry on July 1 without licensing delivery services or establishments where people could use marijuana socially, aspects of a new industry that were contemplated in the 2016 ballot law and authorized under the state’s legal marijuana laws.

The commission also agreed that if or when it authorizes delivery and social consumption licenses it will also grant the exclusive rights to those licenses to small businesses, businesses in the CCC’s social equity program, craft cooperatives and certain farmers for a period of time in order to mitigate the effects of the delay in licensing.

In other news, the CCC is in the market for a vendor who can vet all of the applicants who will be lining up for those said licenses to operate a recreational cannabis business, whether on the cultivation, transport,

manufacture, processing, distribution, testing, or sales sides of the industry. From the state’s solicitation of services: It is the objective of the Commission to identify and then engage a consultant for implementation of an investigative program to conduct suitability inquiries of potential Marijuana Establishment agents, licensees, executives and employees. The purpose of the inquiries is to draw to the attention of the Commission any matter which may adversely reflect upon the suitability of the applicant or registrant to obtain, hold or renew a license or registration.

At the time of this writing, the CCC is slated to have final regs done by March 15. From there, so long as there’s no meddling by the executive branch, or even if there is, the commission is expected to begin accepting applications on April 1. It’s unclear who will vet those applications until the contract noted above is fulfilled, but considering the rate at which they’ve moved so far, it’s likely that will be in place soon as well. Or not.

“It’s difficult to generate a workable system with so much pressure from former [cannabis] opponents to apply the brakes,” said Keith Saunders, a longtime Mass cannabis advocate and member of NORML’s national board of directors. “They delayed the process for six months and still claimed they needed more time. Meanwhile, the unregulated cannabis market in Massachusetts is moving along smoothly. The point of [Question 4] was to bring that unregulated market under regulations, but Charlie Baker and the milliondollar lobbyists would rather a hybrid, where medicinal licensees hold a monopoly on distribution, production, and processing—all in the name of what?”

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YOUR MOVE, BOSTON APPARENT HORIZON

Only a massive protest movement can stop government giveaways to megacorps

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

BOSTON WOMEN’S MARCH 2017. PHOTO BY RYAN DORSEY, CC-BY-SA 2.0 GENERIC. Boston politics—in both its state and local variants— seems to consist largely of backroom deals between government officials and major corporations punctuated by rituals of representative democracy that are increasingly put on just for show. Perhaps it has ever been thus. But that doesn’t mean that Bostonians have to like it.

One would be tempted to call this politics incipient fascism were it not all such a desultory affair—unsullied by any ideology other than a very primitive capitalist greed. And in that way, it is reminiscent of current federal politics. The fact that most of the damage is being done by people calling themselves “Democrats” rather than people calling themselves “Republicans” making almost no discernible difference.

Which is why it becomes tiresome to write about. One disgusting display of government servility to corporate power replaces another week by week, month by month. The storyline is always the same. Only the brand names change.

People don’t have good jobs. Or affordable housing.

Or adequate public schools. Or cheap, safe, frequent, and environmentally friendly public transportation. Or a proper healthcare system. Or pensions.

Or sufficient leisure time. Or freedom from several kinds of debt peonage.

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On the ground—physically close to the halls of actual power in the Financial District, Back Bay, and now the Seaport District, but a million miles away in terms of elite awareness—the situation is dire. People don’t have good jobs. Or affordable housing. Or adequate public schools.

Or cheap, safe, frequent, and environmentally friendly public transportation. Or a proper healthcare system.

Or pensions. Or sufficient leisure time. Or freedom from several kinds of debt peonage.

But city and state political leadership have no plans to fix these problems. Because they can’t do so without discomfiting the ascendant rich and powerful. So they squirrel around the edges. They juggle budget lines, and change program names, and reorganize departments, and send out obfuscatory press releases, and do whatever they can do to cover up the fact that they aren’t taxing giant companies and their owners nearly as much as they should be. And in failing to collect sufficient tax revenue, they lack the needed funds to fix the worst damage done by those companies.

Yet they never fail to find millions in ready cash for vast conglomerates like General Electric. And now Amazon. A multibillion dollar trust that did not pay a cent in US income taxes last year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy—and is expecting a one-time $789 million break from thanks to Pres. Donald Trump’s kinder, more corporate-friendly tax plan.

So, sure, I could write another column this week inveighing against Mayor Marty Walsh’s new scheme to dump $5 million in local tax breaks on Amazon in exchange for bringing another 2,000 jobs to the city.

Well, not to the actual city, but to job sites within 25 miles of the city, according to the Boston Globe. And not right away, but by 2025. Maybe. And dumping another $5 million if Amazon brings yet another 2,000 jobs to (Greater) Boston. Not the decent working class jobs that most Bostonians need, of course. Jobs that highly educated people from around the world will come to the area to fill. Exacerbating our housing, transportation, and environmental crises in the process.

And, yes, the proposed $5-10 million is not as much as Walsh arranged to throw at GE—in a deal swiftly running off the rails as that corporate behemoth crashes and burns thanks to the gentle ministrations of its own “activist” investors. But once Gov. Charlie Baker adds state money to the kitty, the new Amazon deal will start to look very similar to the earlier deal. Which he will almost certainly do. Given that he’s so excited for Boston to “win” the far larger “HQ2” boondoggle that he wants to pass a new law that will allow the Commonwealth to shovel truly epic wads of public lucre at the rapacious anti-worker multinational, according to State House News Service.

Yet with such deals becoming so frequent, it really strikes me that writing is never enough to change the politics that allows this kind of backroom deal making by itself—regardless of how boring or exciting it is for me to crank out. After all, providing information to the population at large only goes so far.

Political action is inevitably required. And not just by one journalist. Because stopping the public gravy train for corporations that are also among the biggest donors to state and local politicians’ war chests is going to take truly massive and sustained protest on the part of the people of Boston (and the rest of Massachusetts).

How massive? Well, remember last year’s Women’s March of over 175,000? Or last year’s 40,000-strong march against a few ultra-right weasels? That’s the scale of the street actions that would be required on a regular basis—in tandem with concerted and wellcoordinated lobbying efforts—to not only stop particular giveaways to corporations like GE and Amazon, but to outlaw them. And, for good measure, start criminal proceedings against politicians and corporate leaders that collude to loot the public till.

Who will lead such efforts? Hard to say. But at the end of the day, I think it will be new entrants that will step into the political vacuum I’ve outlined, and directly challenge state and local government deals with major corporations. People like most of my regular audience.

Working people, many without college degrees, that will finally decide that enough is enough. I think that the existing oppositional forces—ranging from the left wing of the Democratic Party through formations like Our Revolution to grassroots activist coalitions like Poor People’s Campaign to rising socialist organizations like Democratic Socialists of America to some of the more enlightened elements of organized labor—will play a role in the necessary popular movement that will emerge. But I suspect that the main energy will not come from those forces, but from new ones. As has been the case with the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements in recent years. The trick will be sustaining early momentum long enough to bring some big corporations down to earth.

And then moving on to tackling the truly terrifying federal corruption.

Until that happens, it’s going to be one sad government giveaway to huge companies after another in Boston. And I’ll do my best to keep you all up to speed on at least the worst of them. But I look forward to the day that I can help chronicle the victory of a powerful movement for social justice. Rather than merely track democracy’s looming demise.

Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

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DIARRHEA DIARIES AND DEAD PUSHERS DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

The dangerous rhetoric and imagery of the “Opioid Crisis”

BY BAYNARD WOODS @BAYNARDWOODS At a White House summit on the “opioid epidemic,” Donald Trump suggested that the death penalty may be appropriate for drug dealers.

“We have pushers and drugs dealers, they are killing hundreds and hundreds of people,” he said “If you shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty. These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people and nothing happens to them.”

Then he went on to say that in countries that have the “the ultimate penalty” for drugs, “they have much less of a drug problem than we do.”

This has been the problem with the rhetoric of the “opioid epidemic” that began when increasing numbers of white people were dying from drugs. “Drug dealers” are an easy rhetorical target, and wretched-looking white kids are the perfect victims.

A couple of days before the conference, Axios reported that Trump often used this rhetoric among family and staff, and you can pretty much imagine how that sounds.

“Put drug dealers up against the Wall and shoot them.”

Like “The Wall,” it’s stupid and simple and perfect for Trump, who has been praising Rodrigo Duterte, whose drug war has killed more than 12,000 people, according to Human Rights Watch. And, of course, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions probably hates weed more than anything—except Trump, who has been calling Sessions “Mr. Magoo.”

But it is no surprise that Trump associates floated the idea of killing drug dealers at this moment. Days before the Axios story, on Feb 22, Time published “The Opioid Diaries,” a prestige photo essay showing a bunch of white people in really bad shape. Its web design and presentation screamed out: IMPORTANT! But what really is important about it? It is so reeaal. But is it important to see “Two women, one of whom goes by Pangea, right, openly using on the street in San Francisco on Jan. 26”? We always love to see the Beautiful People lost, the lost people ugly, the ruined purity of girls who go by Pangea.

Joan Didion probably didn’t start it, but she did it well in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her prose equivalent of 8

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the “Opioid Diaries” about the acid heads in San Francisco in 1967 when the country was starting to freak out about the dangers of LSD. The New Yorker’s Louis Menand echoes popular opinion when he claims that Didion “used a vernacular voice that mimicked the laid-back aimlessness of Haight speech” but, despite Didion’s telegraphically beautiful style, this piece comes across primarily as square and gawkerish. LSD had already been outlawed in California by the time she went to Haight-Ashbury, but federal laws were passed a year later—partly as a result of all of the IMPORTANT stories about the lost acid kids (Didion’s depicts a five-year-old on acid).

So when, in Time’s “Opioid Diaries,” we read about “Gust Andrew Teague II, 42, a deputy sheriff in Montgomery County, Ohio, handcuffing two unidentified men suspected of drug possession in Dayton on June 29, 2017,” we know where all of this realness lands us—in jail.

But addiction is a disease, right? That’s the thing we are all saying now. When we have an outbreak of the stomach flu, do we need graphic pictures of diarrhea to show it?

Do we have IMPORTANT black-and-white photos of people trotting, with clenched cheeks, toward the toilet? The washed-out woman, underwear around her ankles, looking down at her TP, post-wipe? We are all gross when we are sick, so why do we need all the dehumanizing pics?

Someone like Larry Clark, whose photo series “Tulsa” also depicts people using drugs, might in fact have some great shit pics somewhere. But James Nachtwey—the photographer behind “Opioid Diaries”—probably does not.

His photos, certainly unintentionally, turn the users into grotesque victims and their dealers into mass murderers.

So all of this becomes Trump’s justification for floating the idea of killing all of the drug dealers.

But we know that pharmaceutical companies, not Black or Latinx drug gangs, got these middle-class white kids we’re all worried about hooked.

Check out Sam Quinones’ Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic to get a picture of the way pharmaceutical companies and physicians paved the way for black tar heroin to sweep the US. It is crazy. And now more than 60 US cities are suing pharmaceutical

companies over opioid pushing and a number of states have banded together to subpoena more information from them.

Jeff Sessions’ DOJ announced last week that it would file a “statement of interest” in these suits.

“Opioid abuse is driving the deadliest drug crisis in American history. It has cost this nation hundreds of thousands of precious lives. It has strained our public health and law enforcement resources and bankrupted countless families across this country,” the statement read. “President Trump and this administration have made ending this unprecedented crisis a priority, and the Department of Justice is committed to using every lawful tool at our disposal to turn the tide. We will seek to hold accountable those whose illegality has cost us billions of taxpayer dollars.”

Just to step back and spell it out: When it is a big corporation that takes “precious lives,” the recourse is a statement of interest and some lawsuits. But when it is an individual citizen—or even worse, an immigrant—the solution is death. This is the essence of our post-Citizens United world—corporations have all of the privileges of people and none of the responsibilities or consequences.

So even if we don’t, say, execute the CEO of Purdue, could we dissolve the corporation?

Since so many Americans have their retirement and savings in the stock market—staking their futures on the jousting matches of the corporate aristocracy—that will never happen. We are all complicit in the corporate misdeeds, and we don’t want to look too hard at that.

So they’ll be hit with some suits and some fines, but they won’t really do anything to hurt the bottom line.

Meanwhile, even Democrats will get behind this revivified “tough on crime” approach because they don’t personally know any “drug lords,” and so calling for their execution is actually politically safer than calling for harm reduction.

Download the Democracy in Crisis podcast on iTunes or Soundcloud.

NURSE HEADY TALKING JOINTS MEMO

On shift with GreenNurse Sherri Tutkus

“The lost story behind a timeless album—a wandering Irish songwriter named Van Morrison, stuck in a strange town called Boston in 1968…There’s no rock and roll story quite like Astral Weeks.” —ROB SHEFFIELD

BY ALEX BRANDON Sherri Tutkus is a registered nurse, and the founder and director of nursing at the GreenNurse Group, a “home health consulting agency that serves as a liaison between patients and professionals in the medical cannabis community.” They aim to provide “the greatest therapeutic benefit” to all patients but focus on underserved patients, including many in hospice care, as well as the elderly, children, and veterans. We asked Tutkus about her Weymouth-based nonprofit and what it takes to carry out such a bold mission.

What services does your group provide?

Primary care nursing, the nursing process, care plans, and ongoing continuity of care to all of our patients. Basically, our services are patient-focused. We are a multidisciplinary team of health professionals, and we provide … individualized assessments, consultations, and recommendations … care plans with ongoing continuity of care … ongoing education, guidance, support, and experiential learning … access to qualified health providers from various professional backgrounds who understand the value and science of cannabinoid therapeutics.

Prior to founding the GreenNurse Group, you worked as a more traditional nurse for over 20 years at some of Boston’s leading hospitals. How did that experience influence your opinions on incorporating cannabis into treatment?

I have been an RN for over 25 years. I’ve worked in various departments within local hospitals and home settings. I have cared for patients across the spectrum—from pediatrics to geriatrics—providing care on all levels. I have been implementing holistic/ integrative healing modalities within my practice for over 15 years.

As a nurse, my training and professional experience centers on the premise that no patient should have to suffer. In my personal and professional experiences, cannabis helps to manage, reduce, and relieve symptoms of many chronic conditions and disease states. Cannabinoid therapeutics is just another treatment modality that should be on the table for all people in need.

Why is access to safe and legal cannabis important to you personally?

Because I am also a patient. Patients that are immunocompromised require products that are tested. It is important that patients know if there are any contaminants in their product. Heavy metals, pesticides, yeast, mold, and bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella are just a few of the contaminants that could worsen an immunocompromised patient’sAstralWeeks_DIG-Boston-ad.indd condition.

How do your patients acquire their cannabis? I would imagine those in hospice have difficulty navigating the current medical cannabis process on their own.

We do not sell or distribute cannabis. Our patients acquire cannabis through the [registered medical dispensary] and their delivery services. There are online stores that provide high-quality full-spectrum CBD oil and other legal products where they do not need a medical card to make purchases. Some patients grow their own and make their own medicine. We do not police how they access their medicine, but we do teach them the importance of knowing where their medicine comes from, how it is manufactured or processed, and we strongly recommend that all of our patients use tested products to ensure safety and to reduce serious risks associated with consumption of contaminated products.

Have you witnessed firsthand instances in which cannabis helped people where conventional medicine could not?

I have. I am one of those patients where the medical system failed me. I was able to bridge that gap from what I was not receiving from traditional medicine with cannabis.

I was able to nurse myself to a better state of health and also wean myself off of medicines that were making me sicker.

The federal government is certainly behind the times in considering cannabis to be a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use.” For which conditions have you found cannabis to provide medical benefit and how much can it help?

Cannabis has helped every single patient that I’ve encountered as a green nurse.

I have found that cannabis works regardless of severity of my patient’s symptoms.

Cannabis is documented to reduce or relieve symptoms of over 100 chronic conditions and disease states. Pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, nausea, and post-traumatic stress are just a few of the symptoms I have seen cannabinoid therapeutics reduce and relieve greatly.

For those considering cannabis medically, what resources are there locally for them to find more information?

[They] can access a plethora of resources and information in our members lounge on greennursegroup.com. We also offer a patient handbook, which is downloadable and printable. And of course, our qualified health provider team is available to answer questions and provide guidance in navigating the cannabis space via phone calls, texts, emails, and messages during business hours.

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CURL TO ACTION SPORTS FEATURE

The legacy of Massachusetts curling clubs and the making of a Paralympian

BY BRITNI DE LA CRETAZ “I can make you a Paralympian in a year.”

Those were some of the first words Tony Colacchio ever said to Steve Emt. Colacchio, a wheelchair curling instructor, had seen Emt effortlessly rolling himself up a hill in Woods Hole, and then spent 45 minutes walking around trying to locate him. It was 2012, and the 48-year-old Emt was visiting the cape from Hebron, Connecticut. He wasn’t sure if Colacchio was serious, but the former University of Connecticut basketball player was intrigued.

“I was interested,” Emt recalls. “Then he asked if I’d ever curled, and I said, ‘What’s that?’”

It’s a question many people would ask, as awareness of the quirky sport tends to peak every four years during the Winter Olympics but then fades away soon after. During this year’s Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the sport has won over celebrities, including Mr. T, while curling fans gave Kirstie Alley a piece of their mind after she tweeted that the sport was “boring.” Most notably, the United States’ men’s curling team shocked everyone when they won a gold medal for the first time ever.

---///--After becoming paralyzed following a car accident in 1995, Emt tried wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis, and raced in the New York Marathon in 2010. He was looking for a sport that he could fall in love with, so 10

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when Colacchio approached him outside Pie in the Sky bakery that day, it seemed fated. “[Curling] basically filled that void because I’m very competitive in everything I do,” he says, “I need to complete.”

It took five years, not one, but Colacchio made good on his promise—Emt is a member of the 2018 US Paralympic wheelchair curling team (Colacchio is the associate national coach). Of course, it was Emt who put the effort into a sport that was a natural fit for him, training at the Cape Cod Curling Club with Colacchio and closer to home at the Norfolk Curling Club in Connecticut.

“It’s a very cerebral game,” says Emt, who also works as a seventh-grade math teacher. Many refer to the sport as “chess on ice” because of the level of strategy involved.

“You always have to be thinking, ‘If I make that shot, what will that do for the other team?’” says Colacchio, who bears a slight resemblance to Al Pacino. “You always have to be a couple shots ahead in your head.”

Meghan Lino, Emt’s Paralympic teammate, says that strategy drew her to the game too. “You see it on TV and you’re like, ‘Oh they’re just throwing rocks,’ but that’s not it at all,” Lino says. “You have so much strategy, whether you’re trying to get points or you’re ahead and you’re trying to prevent the other team from getting points.” The 33-year-old from East Falmouth says she never considered herself an athlete before she started curling in 2008, after attending a charity event with a friend at the Cape Cod

Curling Club. It was there that she met Colacchio.

“If you are willing to put the time and effort in, I’ll help you practice and train, and I’ll make you into a Paralympian,” she says he told her. Like Emt, Lino was skeptical. “I was like, ‘I don’t know about that, but let’s go, let’s try it.” Again, Colacchio was true to his word. In addition to competing in Pyeongchang, South Korea, this month, Lino was a member of the 2014 Paralympic wheelchair curling team in Sochi, Russia. The team came in fifth.

Teams from 12 countries will compete in wheelchair curling in Pyeongchang beginning March 9. “I’m more nervous this time around even though I know somewhat what to expect,” says Lino. “We want gold this year. Of course every team that goes out there wants to win and expects to win, but we’re tired of coming in less than fourth so now, we just want to come back with a medal.”

---///--Curling gets its name from the way the 42-pound stones move as they slide across the sheet, which is what the playing surface is called. The surface of curling ice is prepared by spraying droplets of hot water onto the sheet, which quickly freeze and create pebbles, little raised dots that cover the ice. The pebbled sheet allows the stone to more easily glide on the ice, but it is also responsible for creating patterns that affect how the stones move across

PHOTO BY BRYNNE QUINLAN

the surface. The textured surface creates a surprising sensation when you drag a stone along the ice; where instinct and visual cues would indicate that objects glide smoothly, the stone instead feels more like a car driving on a dirt road. It rumbles.

The pebbling also means that the surface of the ice is constantly changing, different from one day to the next.

“The ice is talking to you, it’s telling you what it’s doing tonight,” Colacchio explains. “You have to be able to listen.”

The rules generally follow that teams of two or four athletes take turns throwing the curling stone. The objective is to get your team’s stone closest to the button, which is essentially the center of a bullseye. Each game consists of eight ends, which are like innings in baseball, and each player throws two stones per end. Only one team will score per end.

The able-bodied version of curling is made famous by its intense and vocal sweepers, who frantically sweep the ice in front of a stone after it’s thrown to help control the direction and speed of the stone while their teammates yell, “Sweep!” As a result, people don’t think of it as a wheelchair sport. That was the case for Lino. Before her friend encouraged her to attend the event where she first tried it, Lino says, “I had no idea curling was a wheelchair sport.”

Curling has only been a Paralympic event since 2006, and the wheelchair version of the sport doesn’t have sweepers at all. Also absent is the kneeling slide and release that able-bodied players use. Instead, players use a delivery stick—a pole that fits over the handle of the stone—to release the stone from a stationary position.

A teammate sits directly behind the player throwing the stone to hold their wheelchair in place and prevent it from sliding backwards.

Because sweepers can help stones travel farther and help steer the direction of the stone, the absence of this position in wheelchair curling means that the players have to be more accurate with their shots. The other big difference is that, while able-bodied curling has men’s, women’s, and mixed doubles, wheelchair curling teams are always mixed gender.

Club, the Petersham Curling Club, and Curling Club of the Berkshires in Lenox Dale. There’s even one on Nantucket.

But all this interest is relatively recent. Five of the clubs were formed in 2016 or 2017.

The game of curling as we know it today was developed by the Scots sometime in the 17th century. By the mid-1800s, the rules of play had been formalized at the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, known as the “mother club” to curlers around the world. The game was originally played outside on natural ice, but thanks to climate change, the warming climate means that Scotland’s lochs rarely freeze any longer.

Records of Boston-area curling matches date back to 1835. The outdoor ponds in the Boston Public Garden, Spot Pond, Fresh Pond, Chandler’s Pond, and Franklin Field all hosted regular curling matches when the bodies of water had frozen over. The game’s early players faced harsh conditions.

According to Elmer Osgood Capper’s 1968 book The History of Curling at the Country Club, records from the early 20th century include notes like, “Skip [team captain] fell through the ice today but was rescued,” or “Thermometer at zero and a gale was blowing. Skip lost an ear.”

It was Boston that introduced a massive change to the sport of curling on Jan 18, 1911. At the old Boston Arena on St. Botolph Street, a curling match was played on artificial ice that had been made and prepared just for curling for the first time in the world. After the arena burned in 1918, a dedicated curling facility was built two years later, and it is considered the first of its kind, writes Cappers.

The Country Club in Brookline played a major role in helping foster interest in curling in the US. Women came later to the game, as the harsh outdoor conditions it was played in were often considered too rugged for women.

Women’s curling in Boston grabbed a foothold in 1937, almost 40 years after the sport first gained interest in the region.

Switzerland and Sweden spearheaded the game of wheelchair curling, first introducing it to the world at the 2000 World Handi Ski Championship in Crans Montana, Switzerland. According to the World Curling Federation, the sport is now played in 25 countries.

In Massachusetts, some of the older clubs—including the largest in the state, Broomstones Curling Club, founded in 1968—cannot accommodate wheelchair users.

But in many of the newer clubs, wheelchair users play alongside able-bodied players in leagues. Marlborough Curling Club, Blackstone Valley Curling Club, and Curling Club of the Berkshires are all accessible and welcome new participants who may have an interest in wheelchair curling.

---///--In Steriti Memorial Rink in the North End, people in the frigid arena can be heard enthusiastically yelling, “Sweep! Sweep!” Approximately 30 people, many intrigued by the fringe sport they’ve been watching on TV at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, have come to try it for themselves. The late-February event’s title is selfexplanatory: Learn to Curl.

In the corner of the rink, Colacchio is speaking to a group of wheelchair users who have circled up for his

---///--Despite the fact that not a lot of people in the US seem to know much about curling, there are at least nine curling clubs around Mass. They include the previously mentioned Cape Cod Curling Club in Falmouth, the South Shore Curling Club in Bridgewater, the North End Curling Club in Boston, Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland, Blackstone Valley Curling Club in Hopedale, Marlborough Curling

HISTORIC BOSTON CURLING PICS BY LESLIE JONES VIA BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, LESLIE JONES COLLECTION

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PowerPoint presentation. He’s printed slides—32 in all—for everyone and is going into serious detail about the sport they are about to play. Colacchio is wearing a navy blue down jacket with the letters “USA” emblazoned in red on the back; Lino wears a matching one. Her wheelchair is red, white, and blue with the words “Team USA” on the spokes.

Colacchio tells the group that the two are heading to Pyeongchang early the next morning.

“Wheelchair curling is in its infancy, but it’s growing,” Colacchio tells the seven eager attendees. “To get a group this size five years ago would never have happened.” He estimates that there are only 50 to 60 wheelchair curlers in the country, so to see this group plus the four athletes he’s brought to help him with instruction is a big deal.

“Don’t get discouraged if your stones only go halfway or a third of the way down the sheet tonight,” Colacchio reassures his charges for the evening before they roll onto the ice and begin to play. “It’s a game of finesse, not strength. You just have to be able to master the speed of the ice for any given night.”

With that, they’re ready to give it a try. The event is hosted by the North End Curling Club, which formed in November 2017. Paul Aronofsky, vice president of the NECC, says that as soon as they found out Steriti Rink was accessible, there was no question that they were going to have an event for wheelchair users. He’d seen the sport played at Blackstone Valley Curling Club. “It’s something a lot of people don’t really know exists or don’t know [is] an option, so I really wanted to do something in the Boston area to provide that experience for people,” he says.

Paul Sousa drove up from Brockton with his wife, Jane, to learn how to wheelchair curl. Jane is a member of two curling clubs, the South Shore Curling Club and Broomstones. It’s a hobby that takes up most of her time.

“I never see her,” Paul laughs. He says he wants to be able

PHOTO BY BRYNNE QUINLAN

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to share the game with Jane, but the South Shore club doesn’t have any other members who use chairs, and the thought of being alone on the ice is intimidating.

Ths Sousas had driven to the cape last year to watch a wheelchair curling bonspiel (tournament), where they met Colacchio. So when they heard he’d be in Boston with Lino hosting an accessible Learn to Curl, the couple made the trip. Over the course of the two hours he HISTORIC BOSTON CURLING PICS BY LESLIE JONES VIA BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, spends on the ice, LESLIE JONES COLLECTION Paul’s feel for the stick and release get better and he makes several “I’ve always wanted to try curling but haven’t had impressive shots. By the end of the night, he jokes that he’ll the opportunity,” Clark says. He’s no stranger to sports on now be able to beat his wife at her own game. His eyes are ice—Clark was a member of the 1998 US Paralympic Sledge bright, sparkling with a new enthusiasm for the game.

Hockey team that competed in Nagano, Japan.

It’s clear that the accessible event is filling several gaps.

Colacchio, always in recruitment mode, perks up at this One participant drove three hours from Vermont to attend, piece of information. while another, Ed Clark, came down from Windham, New “I can make you a Paralympian again, you know. Just Hampshire. think about it.”

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ASTRAL WORKS BOOKS

Ryan H. Walsh hunts down old Bosstown Sound in astronomically kickass Mass rock throwback

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 Forty years from now, I like to think that some young nerdy-ass nostalgia monger will reach out to me wanting to ask a couple of questions about Ryan H. Walsh. The inquirer will likely be reporting for a book about the Boston music scene circa 2008, and someone will have told them to hit me up because Walsh wrote some of the beloved songs for his band Hallelujah the Hills at the lunch spot where I worked in the aughts. I’ll invite the interviewer over to my nursing home to smoke a joint, and tell them all about when I was making sandwiches for Walsh. For an encore, I’ll gush all about the part of his career when he was calling sources and compiling his own critical arcane Hub rock history.

The year was 2014, and the songwriter and budding author was sitting on several longtime curiosities about his favorite album of all time, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, which, as legend had it, but few details were available regarding, was unceremoniously written in the time the famously elusive artist lived in Cambridge. With encouragement from editors at Boston magazine, Walsh unearthed previously hidden gems galore about that fascination for the 2015 feature “Astral Sojourn,” billed as “the untold story of how Van Morrison fled recordindustry thugs, hid out in Boston, and wrote one of rock’s greatest albums.”

From the popularity of that spelunking mission, a book deal came into the picture, leading Walsh to seriously consider what tangential yarns were worth unraveling at length, and to navigate the intersections. The resulting new book, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, goes leagues beyond extended album review fanboy territory and illustrates in full kaleidoscopic fashion a post-folk avant-garde rock scene that was expressly centered around the Greater Boston region, but which resonated far and wide for decades after. The characters who surface and in many cases have their stars align along the way 14

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are some of the most stunning influential personalities of their whole generation—from Peter Wolf to Andy Warhol to less frequently acknowledged icons like Hub nightlife honcho Don Law—and Walsh connects the dots to reconstruct a time when they were all within a few degrees of separation, if not crashing in the same apartment as each other. As the author told me over beers, “Imagine seeing Fleetwood Mac on the third floor of a South End apartment building. What the fuck!?!”

and sometimes I was a pawn in like a 50-year-old band grudge. Which was sweet, because I know where they’re coming from, I know what it’s like to have a band grudge.

But very few people said no or ignored me. [Doug Yule] from the original Velvet Underground initially said yes and then ghosted me, [music producer Alan Lorber] was pretty hostile from email one and never spoke with me. … Most interviews and photos, though, people have been sitting on this shit for years and were happy to share.

[Music writer and magazine editor Robert] Somma socialized with the [Velvet Underground] whenever they performed in Boston, often joining them afterward at the Cambridge apartment of Ed Hood. The star of Warhol’s 1965 film My Hustler, Hood was a balding, intellectual, entertainingly bitchy man who was taking a stab at an English degree at Harvard. The gatherings contained the feeling of a transcendental Salon—“seances,” Somma calls them. … Over Chinese food, [Lou] Reed would hold court and rave about the theosophist Alice Bailey; Hood would balance a cocktail on his head and recite the opening of Paradise Lost. -R.H. Walsh, Astral Weeks

After interviewing Walsh for nearly two hours at the Green Street Grill in Central Square, just blocks away from where Van Morrison put pen to pad and feverishly sweated over demos that would later on evolve into his mysterious classic, I couldn’t decide whether to publish an excerpt from Astral Weeks, run parts of our interview verbatim, or write my own reflection of his dutifully executed project. So in the spirit of the era that he mined to build his time machine, I hastily threw all of the above onto the page together in a single tapestry that I hope in its own way reflects the chaotic but incredibly inspired year in question.

CF: If you walked down the street in Central Square 50 years ago, would it look like a freak show? Was there some kind of open revolution going on?

RHW: In [some of the research materials for Astral Weeks], there is a lot of footage of Harvard Square, and it’s a mix.

CF: Were most of the people you interviewed referrals from other people you spoke with? Are a lot of these people still in touch with one another?

RHW: Most people were really thankful and grateful that I was doing this. I had a long list after my initial research, but that grew, and here’s the other thing—some of these people still have grudges against one another,

It’s no coincidence that Lyman’s acid evangelism took root in Boston, the true birthplace of American hallucinogenic culture. -R.H. Walsh, Astral Weeks Nearly every page in Astral Weeks might lead a reader in 2018 to ask, What the fuck was in the water back then?

But there is a simple and obvious answer to that question throughout Walsh’s book—LSD. The hallucinogenic trials of the likes of Richard Alpert, Andrew Weil, and Timothy Leary are woven right into the backdrop, all the way down to the juicy prehistoric campus politics around such experimentation. But the most intense trips come when Walsh explores the Fort Hill Community compound in

Roxbury, where musician turned embattled movement leader Mel Lyman made enemies and headlines as a prolific polygamist publisher of the alternative newspaper Avatar. You’ll have to flip through Astral Weeks for all the dirt on Lyman and Fort Hill, but his massive footprint, even among the much better-known exalted giants who roamed Boston at the time, is a testament to his enormous impact in the moment.

spent in Boston and Cambridge been examined like this until you came along?

RHW: It’s easy to think that his time here was insignificant. He’s certainly not going to tell you that it was [significant]. … The truth is I am not a fanatic about his life, or even his whole career. Just one five-year period with a focus on like eight months. … Both music-wise and storywise, I find it really weird how unremarked on this all was.

CF: What were your rules in writing the book for what to include?

RHW: A major part of the story had to happen in 1968 in Boston, and if it was somehow related to Mel [Lyman] or Van [Morrison], that bumped it up.

CF: Is there anyone who listens to Hallelujah the Hills and hears a lot of Van Morrison influences?

RHW: I don’t think it comes through there. Anyone can make the case I guess, but I just don’t have that kind of voice to croon and jazz it up. It’s my favorite album, but I love a lot of music, and the music I make is more noisy, punky, anthemic.

CF: So after all this, what are your prevailing thoughts on Van, the man himself?

RHW: Van Morrison can’t take full credit for Astral Weeks—it’s such a collaborative thing. I think this drives him insane. It was a slow burner. It took years, but then it kept selling and selling and selling. So finally around 2009, he decided to reclaim it. …

Lewis [Merenstein], the producer [of Astral Weeks], in [our] interview outside of a coffee shop in Manhattan, said, “Van is a beautiful poet, he has no right to be this mad.” …

No matter what, if you write that [Astral Weeks] was about [something in particular], [Morrison] will reject it. It’s a good cat-and-mouse game. …

I literally spoke with everyone alive who was involved with the album—except Van. I would talk to Van in a heartbeat, but he’d probably just scream at me. …

The book is about a lot more than Astral Weeks, but it also has a lot more about that album than any other book ever will.

CF: Are Van and Mel of equal importance here?

RHW: I think they’re the two main characters of the book, and this is how I see it: They were on the same [record] label, they lived a mile away from each other, they both had a really important year in ’68, and they were both searching for something spiritual through music. I thought that I could tell the larger story on two tracks. …

Everyone I spoke to [about Lyman] was either like, “That guy is so charismatic,” or, “What a fucking fraud.” It was right down the middle. It was enough of both perspectives that [I came to understand] that he was a pretty divisive figure in Boston who was then totally forgotten.

By February 1968, everyone under thirty in Boston had an opinion on [the “Bosstown Sound” phenomenon that had big imprints signing Hub-based psychedelic rock acts willy-nilly]. The Boston Globe tirelessly covered the topic, noting gamely if stiffly, “What has happened is a ‘pop’ explosion with our beloved old Beantown square in the middle.” More bands were forming practically overnight: Puff, Quill, Ill Wind, the Improper Bostonians, the Apple Pie Motherhood Band, Eden’s Children, Phluph, A Warm Puppy, Bead Game, Bo Grumpus, Listening, Butter …” -R.H. Walsh, Astral Weeks CF: Being in and around the Boston music scene yourself all these years later, what’s the closest thing you’ve seen to the artificial hype that was built around the so-called Bosstown Sound?

RHW: The reason [Hallelujah the Hills] were signed was because cool blogs wrote about us. Suddenly I was dealing with four labels that wanted to put out our first album. I understood the kids in that story because I was in a similar

position, only theirs was amplified. Guys were standing on corners in Boston [in 1968] asking people things like, “Hey kid, you know bands?”

CF: What came of all the Bosstown Sound bands all these years later? How much had you heard of Orpheus or Ultimate Spinach before getting into this?

RHW: None of it. … MGM lost big time with what they spent on marketing versus sales. But the kids, they were pure. A couple of those bands, if they were just left alone to incubate, they could have been great. Every one of those albums has one or two songs that are worthwhile.

The Fort Hill Community … wanted to keep Club 47 alive.

They threw a benefit concert on March 24, 1968, but instead of music, they played tapes of Lyman talking. The audience felt tricked. When Avatar editor John Wilton showed up, he saw that “total insanity had erupted, beginning with Eben [Given] breaking up furniture and ending with a free for all on stage.” A huge brawl ensued. People sobbed uncontrollably. It was Mel Lyman’s birthday. -R.H. Walsh, Astral Weeks CF: So did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish?

RHW: Once I immersed myself, I did feel a continuity. I could see how the past connected to what I’ve been doing here, music-wise, creativity-wise.

Here’s the deal—when we started the book, me and the editor were saying the best-case scenario was to hear those [lost] Van [Morrison] tapes [from Boston], and to figure out what happened to Mel. And both of those things happened.

A Warner Bros. archivist let me hear an outtake from the album, the first [recording of] Astral Weeks, and that’s where Van is singing about Cambridgeport. It’s all in the epilogue.

Morrison was still riding the buzz of “Brown Eyed Girl,” but he certainly wasn’t a household name. His adopted hometown didn’t pay him special attention. “I remember one gig at the Boston Tea Party,” Sheldon said, “but we had no drummer.” With Van and the bass player, Tom Kielbania, they drove by Berklee School of Music and “saw this guy on the sidewalk. Tom said, ‘Hey, it’s Joe. Joe, do you want to play drums?’ This is the kind of level that things were happening at then.” -R.H. Walsh, Astral Weeks Indeed they were. In another chapter, Mark Frechette, a gorgeous lost soul searching for the meaning of life, is discovered by a Hollywood producer on the street in Roxbury and tapped to play the lead in the anticipated debut American film by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. If that sounds absurd, or unbelievable, then brace yourself for Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground holding a residency in the South End—where a teenage Jonathan Richman often hung out backstage—all as the Boston Strangler ran amok and the most intriguing new voice in music jammed with his own ragtag band, the Van Morrison Controversy, nearby on Boylston Street.

CF: Do you pine for venues like the legendary Boston Tea Party? Or are you just fine with the venues that we have these days?

RHW: I’ll put it this way—I would have loved to go and check that out. It sounds just amazing. I love Great Scott, but this seems like something else.

CF: For someone like Van Morrison, whose every move and lyric fans obsess over, why hadn’t the time that he

AUTHOR RYAN H. WALSH POSES WITH ‘ASTRAL WEEKS’ PRODUCER LEWIS MERENSTEIN AFTER THE LATTER’S FINAL INTERVIEW

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KAL MARKS MUSIC

Why Boston’s darkest band is looking on the bright side

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Kal Marks are loud. If you don’t know this from listening to their records, you know it from their live shows—even if you’re just passing by the venue. Their massive wall of rock shakes the air inside the venue and seeps outside, creating a menacing, yet inviting, hook that lures you in. Their recent developments let you suspend the disbelief that the Allston trio are brooding pessimists, though. If anything, they’re realists, and the sunny sound that peeks into the corners of their newest album, Universal Care, makes that clear from the get-go. Kal Marks are changing, and they sound comfortable in that change than fans would expect.

On a personal level, it’s to be expected. Singer and guitarist Carl Shane came to terms with his political stances over the last two years, primarily in regards to when and where he doubles down on his lessons or keeps them at bay. Drummer Alex Audette spent time in and out of the hospital over seven months, the sterile confines prompting a newfound appreciation for drumming as a form of healing. Bassist Mike Geacone learned to set his perfectionist tendencies aside, learning to experiment with ease to open the context of the band’s music and their dynamic at large. Together, the trio became both tighter and looser, and that structure lets their trademark sound of death buried in dirt blossom with flowers for the first time.

Universal Care is a high mark in Kal Marks’ career because of how the band welcomes change with excitement and inventiveness. The album bursts with bright guitar tones, slick bass lines, and varied drumming that doesn’t slam as hard as possible at every given chance.

The band is still loud. It’s just that their heaviness creeps up on you now. When they take the stage, all three members look like scrawny nerds or people who hunch over their instruments, trying to perfect a difficult chord. Every drum teacher Audette had told him he played way too loud.

Those things were obvious on albums like 2013’s Life Is Murder and 2016’s Life Is Alright, Everybody Dies. But while all of this sounds potentially obnoxious, Kal Marks funnel it into a thrilling release, and on Universal Care it feels not like a blaring statement, but a levee breaking from the tension built up behind it.

“We make music that doesn’t come with a brochure, and this one feels like that to the max,” says Shane. “We always get compared to Pile, who are amazing, but I don’t want to be compared to Pile. We get compared to Krill too who, aside from my voice, we sound absolutely nothing alike. We sound like Slayer compared to them. I want to get away from those tags. It would be nice for people to view us as individuals, and in a way making this felt like an obvious statement of such.”

The goal was to make a more colorful, vibrant record, and Kal Marks made that happen. On “Grand Mal,” Geacone used a delay pedal to manipulate his sound.

During the title track, bells fade in with a Christmas feel.

“Afterlife” makes brief use of an organ. Congas appear during the album opener. Throughout it all, Audette plays with glockenspiel, tambourines, shakers, and more.

Utilizing studio time to experiment with instruments paid off. The proof is in Shane using pedal autotune in “Reprise”

on his voice, which listeners can feel but struggle to point at because of how masterfully it’s paired with his normal voice. “The biggest change was taking our time with stuff,” says Geacone. “It gave us time to experiment and toy with items in the studio environment.”

The band has Miranda Serra G, who mixed and recorded the record at Mad Oak Studios, to thank for much of it. In the spring of 2016, she approached the trio and asked if she could record their next album. At the time, they had no material, but Shane quickly drafted new material when the tour wrapped. When they contacted her months later, Serra G was still eager to record. By the time they finally entered the studio, she encouraged the band to try new things, set up instruments they side-eyed, and went so far as to let them use a vintage Mellotron—an electromechanical, polyphonic tape keyboard that replays prerecorded sounds.

“We didn’t think it would be functional, honestly,” Audette says of the Mellotron. “That was a night where we got so excited and knew we would be staying late. If you get a chance to use an original Mellotron from 1972 or whenever that was made, use it. It’s the coolest thing.”

“When you’re an engineer, you usually have to work on what’s handed down to you, regardless if you like it or not,” says Shane. “There’s projects with rich yuppies who view music as their side project. When she approached us, I think it’s because she was interested in our sound and how heavy it is. She had a vision of sorts, and I think she helped us shape it.”

Yet Kal Marks couldn’t shake their shadowed core if they tried. Shane’s lyrics offer a sobering side to the album, whether he’s screaming about global warming or toasting heaven, because of the pain he went through over the last two years. Two of Shane’s good friends died from drug overdoses. One burned in a fire.

On top of that, everyone was depressed. “This is back in 2016, too,” he says with a laugh. “They thought 2016 was the worst year ever—which I knew then, and we all know now, isn’t true—and were crushed to the point of overdrinking. In a way, I felt myself pushing back. I didn’t want to be fucking bummed out. I didn’t want to lose.”

Shane vividly recounts a phone

call with his mother, a graduate of the naval academy and veteran, who still works as a nurse. During it, he said he wished he could “make music that would make people feel good.” Universal Care didn’t turn out that way exactly, as a lot of the record is grim and the band’s music will always rep that, but he wanted to write a song essentially saying, “Hey, let’s give life a shot.” So he did.

“Everything seems pretty fucked up, but I want to give a shit. I want to give life a try. If you live your life depressed and sink into your bed, you’re still living. You’re just living shittily,” says Shane. “My mom is very caring, but she’s also very tough. It’s an interesting duality that she has cemented in my head. Being in that profession, you have to be tough enough to see people die all the time. My friends dying still affects me—it hurts, a lot—but after the fifth semi-close acquaintance lost, that pain turns into a toughness.”

Now that the album is out, Kal Marks just want the album to offer help to those who need it. The band doesn’t want to be cheerleaders. They just want to encourage listeners, and by taking a realistic approach to the throes of life, Kal Marks made songs that sound honest and promising no matter how dark their instrumental parts get. That’s where the experimentation comes into play, and it’s why Universal Care feels like both the happiest Kal Marks has ever been and the most honest in their portrayal of life.

“Music is too much fun to do one thing,” Shane says in summation. “It really is a playground, and we’ve finally climbed in to goof around. Why not put a heavy, sludge riff to a Stevie Wonder vibe on drums? I don’t understand why musicians would be afraid of that, and I’m glad we aren’t anymore.”

>> KAL MARKS, NICE GUYS, BAT HOUSE, FURANIMAL. SAT 3.10. MASSASOIT ELKS LODGE, 55 BISHOP ALLEN DR., CAMBRIDGE. 8PM/ALL AGES/$12. FACEBOOK.COM/KALMARKS

MUSIC EVENTS THU 03.08

POLITICAL POST-ROCK FROM THE SHADOWS GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR + TASHI DORJI

[Sanders Theater, 45 Quincy St., Cambridge.

7pm/all ages/$21.50. harvard.edu]

16

03.08.18 - 03.15.18 |

THU 03.08

SOCIAL ACTIVIST RHYTHM-ROOTED DANCE TUNE-YARDS + XENIA RUBINOS

[Royale, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 8pm/18+/$28. royaleboston.com]

DIGBOSTON.COM

THU 03.08

YOU’RE NOT HARDCORE UNLESS YOU LIVE HARDCORE FUTURA + EXIT ORDER + SAVAGEHEADS + CLASS ACTION

[O’Brien’s Pub, 3 Harvard Ave., Allston. 8pm/21+/$8. obrienspubboston.com]

FRI 03.09

REYKJAVIK CALLING JFDR + STURLA ATLAS + AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER

[Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm. Ave., Allston. 7pm/18+/free. crossroadspresents.com]

SAT 03.10

ALLSTON ROCK MEETS SUFFRAGETTE CITY CARISSA JOHNSON + THE ORGAN BEATS + LADY PILLS + WATTS

[Great Scott, 1222 Comm.

Ave., Allston. 9pm/21+/$10. greatscottboston.com]

WED 03.14

SOLO IN THE ROUND JON BATISTE

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge.

9:30pm/all ages/$25. sinclaircambridge.com]

PILE

WHEEL OF TUNES

Revered rock band talks dance moves and golden retrievers

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

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

upcoming shows

At the top of Boston’s current rock roster is a band called Pile—or at least all of their fans, in-state and out, would claim that’s where they fall in our city’s musical hierarchy.

The four-piece got their start over a decade ago and have since cultivated a dedicated following for their asymmetrical, vivid, bursting style of rock that occasionally ventures into folk, post-hardcore, and guitar solo bliss.

Their most recent album, 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose, has frontman Rick Maguire’s most lyrically ambiguous lines yet—so much so that he often views the songs through a different lens as time progresses. That shift gives Maguire room to modify his delivery of a line and, with it, keep the emotion behind it relatively strong. Yet according to him, many fans read into the lyrics and the overarching backstory of Hairshirt, whittling his solo trip to a house in Georgia as if he banished himself to a cabin with no social contact.

While people are busy reading into that album, Maguire has been silently working on a brand-new one—and he’s testing out songs from it on this upcoming tour.

“What I said about writing an album in the cabin definitely happened this past winter as I finished and recorded an entire album,” says Maguire. “It’s an album of demos, but it’s fleshed out and I feel pretty confident because there’s a hard copy. They’re songs that will eventually appear on a Pile record, but it needs sussing out details of how it will be presented, recorded, or performed. Usually the first couple weeks I’m down there by myself and nothing happens. Then all of a sudden, I don’t know what it was, but it started working. I went down on New Year’s Eve and stayed until Feb 5. I’ve had guests there in the past because it’s a pretty dreamy situation. But it was a nice experiment to see how I would do with five weeks of undirected solitude. It turns out it was great—and that’s a bit scary, because if I know I can go on indefinitely without seeing people, then I won’t go out.”

We interviewed Rick Maguire for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask musicians questions inspired by their song titles. Unlike A Hairshirt of Purpose, the answers shed specifics on what it’s like inside the frontman’s brain—a perfect introduction before he plays solo at the Sinclair this Thursday.

1. “Worms” How would you describe your dancing abilities?

Oh wow. I like dancing, it’s fun, and it’s good for you in a lot of ways. I’m very bad at it, though at some point I had some confidence in my dancing—so much so that I threw a dance party at my house. Then, several days [later], a friend of mine said, “You know, it’s so cool that you don’t care how stupid you look when you dance.” It was meant to be a genuine compliment. So that did it: Any self-confidence I had was immediately shot. That would’ve been a year and a half ago. Still fresh in my mind [laughs].

2. “Hissing for Peace” Where was the last rally you attended?

I guess it was the Women’s March in Atlanta. That was actually when I was in the cabin the first time by myself. It’s two hours outside of Atlanta. I made the trip down and marched. I didn’t know anybody, and it was cool to walk around. I saw John Lewis speak.

I don’t know the city of Atlanta at all, so I was really just following along and hoping I didn’t get lost.

3. “Rope’s Length” What advice would you give someone who’s looking to remove a person from their life but is struggling to do so?

I’m a bad person to ask. Not reaching out is pretty helpful. If you really want to find other things to focus on, find things that interest you and you’re excited about that don’t involve that person. That can be helpful. Distance and time naturally separate people, even people who like hanging out, so use those to do the opposite.

MARCH 7

MARCH 8

Richard Shindell

the experts

MARCH 9 - 11

MARCH 13 - 14

Kristin Hersh & Tanya Donelly

Altan

MARCH 12

MARCH 16

The Dustbowl Revival W/ Opener TOWN MEETING

Dietrich Strause & The Blue Ribbons

MARCH 17

MARCH 18

the Irish Comedy Tour

w/ Opener Charlie Worsham

MARCH 19 - 20

MARCH 20

Lee Ann Womack

Joshua Radin Casey Abrams LIVE MUSIC • PRIVATE EVENTS 3/08

Grant-Lee Phillips, Will Dailey

Singer-songwriter (formerly of Grant Lee Buffalo)

MARCH 22

MARCH 23

Riders In The Sky

OldJack

special events

3/12

Toddlerbilly Takeover Children’s dance + sing-along

stump trivia

3/12

Spectramotiv, Sophia Belle

every monday at 7pm

3.10 City Winery & Improv Asylum Whose Wine Is It Anyway?

Avant-punk 3/13

3.11 Fred Taylor’s Sunday Jazz Brunch Buffet

Metal Yoga with Black Widow Yoga Yoga, doom & heavy metal

3.21 City Winery & american airlines

greek wine dinner

BOOK YOUR NEXT EVENT WITH US

3/14

Clan of Xymox, Stoneburner

Legendary innovators of darkwave

156 Highland Ave • Somerville, MA 617-285-0167 oncesomerville.com a @oncesomerville b/ONCEsomerville

email eventsboston@citywinery.com for more info

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

FIND THE REMAINING TRACKS FROM NINA’S PIECE AT DIGBOSTON.COM NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

IMAGES OF DEPARTURE FILM

Examining behavior—tender and toxic—in Phantom Thread

BY HANNAH KINNEY-KOBRE @HANNAH_BLOOMS

In Louise Glück’s poem “The Garden,” we are shown an image of tenderness: Look at her, touching his cheek to make a truce, her fingers cool with spring rain; in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus— even here, even at the beginning of love her hand leaving his face makes an image of departure.

The first half presents a simple enough image—a woman touching her lover’s cheek—and yet the following stanza complicates the image and turns it into a moment of loss––it is “an image of departure.” We become aware of the image of tenderness as a transient moment—its tenderness stitched through with the inevitability of its ending. Yet it is images like this one that love is built on—imagined or real, long gone or just present. They stick in our minds like amber, crystallizing impulse into intent, glance into attention. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a film about how these moments are the foundation of love—and about the lengths we will go to in order to fix them in place.

We find these moments in the beginning of every relationship, and in Phantom Thread the relationship is between finicky mama’s boy of a fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (the name played wonderfully straight by Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma, a waitress turned Woodcock muse (newfound wonder Vicky Krieps). Their initial meeting is painterly in both its composition and its observance of gesture; Alma serves him tea with a characteristically high pour, and Reynolds looks up at her as both are framed by the window behind them. The camera drifts away in that moment, suggesting a concession of sorts—the frame seems to know the two are bound together by a strange

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tension. And this strange tension reverberates throughout their first date; the two eat dinner side by side, framed in a neat two-shot that doesn’t suggest intimacy so much as create the potential for it. That potential is fulfilled when Reynolds uses his napkin to wipe the lipstick off Alma’s lips—a startlingly out of place first date move if there’s ever been one. The film documents this in a series of extreme close-ups, turning each fragment of the image into a prized possession: Reynolds’ fingers dipping the napkin into the glass, Alma’s red-cheeked face, the light playing across Reynolds’s cheekbones. It speaks to the kind of careful attention present in the eidetic details of Glück’s poem.

And this attentiveness recurs in a later silent scene of the two sitting across from each other—Alma in a bright red dress, looking at Reynolds, who quietly returns the gesture.

Alma leans back in her chair and states, “If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.”

In a relationship so based in the aesthetic, her statement becomes a kind of bet. Many critiques of the film have identified Reynolds as being a surrogate for director Paul Thomas Anderson, but few have pinned the role of director on Alma—neglecting the possibility that she understands the power of images and narrative more than Reynolds. This is best demonstrated by a fashion show sequence where Alma works as one among a group of models showing off Woodcock’s latest efforts: Alma is pushed out the door and down the hall, with the camera following her from behind as she slowly spins around for the eyes of the audience. The film suddenly cuts to Reynolds, mid-dressing a model, spinning on his heel and pressing his eye against the peephole at the door—then suddenly cuts back to Alma, whom the camera now seems to follow from Woodcock’s perspective. She smiles, playfully moving side to side as she walks backward, knowing exactly who her singular audience is. We see her consciously act for his attention. And the camera is intent, following her as if she controlled it and remaining close to

her in a way that Reynolds’s fixed eye cannot.

But attention fades, shifts, never stays fixed. At the start of the film, Reynolds splits up with a young woman who tells him, desperately, “There’s nothing I can say to get your attention aimed back at me, is there?” But Alma is not willing to be cast aside—she is not passive, and she is not just there to be observed. All of us spend our lives chasing after and trying to reclaim images of tenderness––but the way Alma does this is so out of left field as to be radical. To get into the specifics of the film’s plot, and its later stages: She makes Reynolds ill with the assistance of toxic mushrooms, which are carefully portioned out to render him “helpless” and “tender” (Alma’s own words). In many interviews, Anderson has said the idea came to him while he was ill and was being cared for by partner Maya Rudolph: “Oh, she is looking at me with such care and tenderness,” he told Rolling Stone, “wouldn’t it suit her to keep me sick in this state?” And it does suit Alma. Reynolds’ subsequent vulnerability makes him her ideal audience, turning him into a person willing to be worked upon and taken care of. She draws the blinds closed in his sickroom, removes her shoes; the space becomes dark, and the light warm but steadier, not flickering like the firelight of their first date. Alma’s dress is red––but darker now than when she first remarked on her talent for staring contests. As she walks into the room to check on him, Reynolds is in the midst of a fever dream, envisioning his long-dead and much-beloved mother––a mother he spoke of to Alma on their first date, and whose photo he persists in carrying around. Yet her ghostly figure comes as a shock here. The film cuts from Reynolds’s observing face to Alma, the camera following her like Reynolds’s eyes as she walks across the room, his mother staring out from the background. Within that camera movement, his mother disappears, and all that remains is an image of care so intent that it breaks your heart.

In that instant, that instant of vulnerability produced

by Alma’s cunning, the past ––Reynolds’s love for his mother, their intense first date––and present unite. And so a new whole is formed. We cannot stop images from disappearing, or the frame from moving by, and neither can Alma. But we are capable of slowing things down, of allowing ourselves to be made bare and open by another; and to, just for a moment, see the gestures or glances that brought us to that person to begin with. The past shines through the present moment, and an image of tenderness informed by both of these things comes into being. These images might be images of departure, yes––but if we will them to be born, their arrival is just as sure too, their return as certain as their leaving. For Alma, the certainty of their return is matched by the certainty of her own intractable will. And lucky for most of us, the mushrooms are not entirely necessary.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

DRILLING DOWN TV + RADIO

Digging on Oak Island with WAAF host Matty Blake

BY STANLEY BRUNO

I produce The Matty & Nick Show on WAAF, hosted by Matty Blake and Nick Stevens on weekday afternoons. It’s been more than a year since they started, and the whole time I’ve been curious about Matty’s other life as a TV host. I knew that he’s a Massachusetts native and that he moved to New York City for 15 years to pursue comedy and acting, and he has appeared on screen with icons like John Goodman and Sean Penn, but still there’s more. So with his new special, Drilling Down: The Curse of Oak Island, airing this month on the History Channel, I asked Matty all about his gig in which his team searches for treasure on an island up in Nova Scotia.

After 15 years in New York City, how does it feel to be back home with your own show?

It’s another example of how crazy the career I chose can be. I never expected to be back home in Boston doing radio at this point in my career. But someone once said to me, “You ride the horse in the direction that it’s running.” I’ve always tried to follow that advice.

Did you come back specifically to host this afternoon radio show, or had you planned on coming back regardless?

I had planned on coming back anyway. I had gotten to a point in my career where it didn’t really matter where I lived. Also, I think the industry has changed a bit. Before, you didn’t necessarily have to have a home recording studio to land voice-over work. Then it became that if you didn’t have a home studio, they wouldn’t even read you for work because they didn’t want to pay for the studio time.

20

I remember I was so amazed by it, I got my mother to buy me Treasure Island, and she would read it to me every night.

I forgot about that, though, until Oak Island came back into my life much later.

What exactly is Oak Island, and how did you become involved in the show?

Oak Island is a real-life treasure hunt. It’s an island off the coast of Nova Scotia that for over 220 years people have been trying to figure out what’s buried there. Somebody, at some point, spent a great deal of effort to bury “something” deep underground. It was then concealed with a system of booby-trapped, chambered vaults. People have died looking for whatever it is that’s down there. I became involved because now there is a television show on History Channel that follows the current group of treasure hunters, Rick and Marty Lagina and their team. They decided to do a companion show for Curse of Oak Island, which is called Drilling Down, and I’m the host of that show. I auditioned and got the job.

The show is called Curse Of Oak Island. What is this curse? Is it real?

Nobody is quite sure where this idea of a curse came from. It seems to be some sort of oral tradition passed down by generations. The curse says that seven people must die before the island reveals its secrets. It’s not something that I give much credence to. There’s enough high strangeness and paranormal things going on at Oak Island, but the curse is not something I spend a lot of time thinking about when I’m there. That being said, if there was a place that would have a curse, it would be Oak Island.

What do you think it will take to make The Matty & Nick Show successful in a market as competitive as Boston?

We’re in a tough spot. This market has been fed a steady diet of straight sports talk largely done by beat writers and ex-players that they put on air. That’s what has dominated thus far, and Nick and I will never win that game because that’s not what we are. We both love sports, but we have built our careers outside of that world and have many varied interests. So we’ll just continue being true to who we are and hope that enough like-minded people get what we’re doing and want to join along for a fun ride home.

One of the complaints about reality television is that it’s not really reality. With Curse Of Oak Island, is what you see what you get?

I can tell you that everything you see on the show is absolutely real. The team at Prometheus who produce the show have so much integrity. And so do the Lagina brothers. They didn’t want cameras in the first place. They’d be hunting whether there were cameras or not. In fact they were hunting before the cameras came, and if the cameras left, they’d still be hunting. I’ve watched them film: What you see is what you get.

Had you ever heard about Oak Island and the mystery surrounding it before you became involved with the show?

I had a book as a kid, I think it was called Strange Mysteries From Around the World. There was a chapter about a mysterious island off Nova Scotia called Oak Island.

What are some of the discoveries that have been made on the island?

Years and years ago, they found a piece of parchment paper and little gold flakes on a drill bit over 100 feet down.

That begs the question, Why are there pieces of parchment paper with some sort of writing on it over 100 feet down? To

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DIGBOSTON.COM

me that was very compelling. And as the hunt progressed, the brothers have found little things here and there that beg a lot of strange questions. But I think these past two seasons, seasons four and five, they have found things that absolutely, in my estimation, prove that “something” happened on Oak Island many years ago that we aren’t able to explain yet. They dug out an area called Smith’s Cove and found a man-made French drain system. Now why would people, a very long time ago, be building a French drain system on what is essentially a man-made beach? This season they found human bones that are very old, and what we think to be of Middle Eastern descent.

What is that doing over 100 feet down in a chambered vault?

A lead cross was also found this season, which seems to be medieval. This might point to a Templar connection.

There are different theories on Oak Island. Along the way, searchers have found things that fit almost every theory.

So when people ask me what I think it is, be it pirates, Templars, British military, I usually just respond with “yes.”

Because I think we are finding evidence that it may be all of those things. Someone a long time ago hid something there, and then that island got the reputation of being a good place to hide things. And I think different people have been hiding things there for a long time.

Have you had any what you believe were paranormal experiences on the island?

I think anyone who spends a significant time on Oak Island will experience things that even if you don’t want to call them paranormal, you’d at least have to call them unexplainable. Strange things happen on Oak Island, and they happen all the time. Now maybe these things can be explained by some sort of magnetic shift or some anomalous, scientifically explained feature of this particular part of Nova Scotia. Either way, it’s fair to say that this is a place where the unexplainable constantly happens.

I personally have experienced what I believe to be paranormal occurrences on the island. And you look at someone like star of the show Dave Blankenship, and he’s one of the most practical guys you’ll ever meet. A real straight shooter. He admitted to me on season one of Drilling Down that he saw what he believed to be a ball of fire floating right off the island over the water. He described it as almost a UFO sighting, where he saw this thing almost hovering above the water and then taking off at a rapid speed. There are people who report seeing a black mass, and also people who will never go back on the island again because of what they experienced. Even Marty Lagina, one of the treasure-hunting brothers, reported to me that he got so spooked on the island one night that he immediately got into his truck and took off. He told me that whatever it was, it “made him feel unsafe.” Marty is one of the biggest skeptics I know. When he tells me something like that, I don’t take it lightly. So I do believe the island has some paranormal aspects to it. But I don’t think this is a paranormal show. This is a show about family, faith, and discovery. It’s a treasure-hunting show. It’s even about technology. How they dig, using construction equipment and so on. There’s a lot to Curse Of Oak Island that makes it very interesting and compelling.

Will there be a season six?

I can neither confirm nor deny; however, I will say this: Every year I have worked on the show, I have privately said to the people around me that they might not come back for another season. After this last season, with the introduction of Gary Drayton, who’s made significant amount [of] finds on the island, it’s like a lightning rod has gone off and they continue to keep making all kinds of discoveries. I would be absolutely shocked if there wasn’t a season six. If I could find the treasure on Oak Island, I would make a bet with it that there would be another season.

Matty Blake hosts The Matty & Nick Show alongside Nick Stevens, which airs weekdays from 3 pm to 7 pm on WAAF. Matty’s one-hour Drilling Down special airs Tuesday, March 13, on the History Channel.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

PORN FAVES

SAVAGE LOVE

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

I have a deepthroating fetish. All the porn I watch is nothing but rough, sloppy blowjobs. I would love nothing more than to watch this kind of porn with my boyfriend, so we can add it the bedroom excitement, but I’m embarrassed to share this as a straight female. How do I go about sharing a fetish I have? Do I tell him over a candlelit dinner? Do I just turn some deepthroating porn on and see what happens?

Help!

Deepthroat Queen There’s never really a bad time to tell someone they won the lottery, DQ. Over a candlelit dinner, pop in some porn, send him a singing telegram—however you decide to tell him, DQ, the odds that he’ll react negatively are pretty low. Of course, watching someone deep throat and doing it yourself are two different things, DQ. You won’t be able to go from disclosing your kink to realizing it during that candlelit dinner. Take it slow, maybe watch a few how-to videos in addition to the porn, find the positions and angles that work for you, etc., and work your way up to taking him all the way down.

I’m a 32-year-old male. I recently met a hot older woman, age 46, who has told me she finds me equally hot. I’ve always preferred older women. I just love their confidence and their comfort in their own skin. They’re just so much sexier than my age cohorts. The problem is that I take a serious interest in feminism. I think I do pretty well with the overt stuff: I don’t mansplain, I call out peers who ignore sexism, and I don’t objectify women, even when I do find them attractive. (Small steps, but steps nonetheless.) But when I see this woman and we flirt like mad, my brain just shuts off and all I can think about is her hot bod and the many hours I want to spend with it. However, I worry that she’s spent her whole life relying on her looks to gain validation from men, and that my brain-dead, loins-alive attraction is only perpetuating her objectification. Is that so? Or am I just overthinking things?

Man, I Love Feminism At the risk of dansplaining…

The problem with objectification is when the person doing the objectifying isn’t capable of simultaneously seeing the object of their affections as a three-dimensional human being with desires, fears, and agency of their own. Technically, MILF, we are all objects—“a material thing that can be seen and touched”—but unlike, say, Fleshlights or vibrators, we feel joy and pain and have wants and needs. You can’t help being drawn to this woman’s externals; there’s a huge visual component to human attraction and, as your thing for older women demonstrates, there isn’t one universal standard of beauty. So long as you’re can objectify someone while at the same time appreciating their full humanity—so long as you can walk that walk and chew that gum—you don’t have to feel like a bad feminist for objectifying someone. (Particularly when that someone is clearly objectifying you!)

On the Lovecast—Finally! Porn that makes consent SEXY: savagelovecast.com.

COMEDY EVENTS THU 03.08

STAND UP @ THE GREEN ROOM

Featuring: Jack Burke, Srilatha Rajamani, Eric Taylor, Katie McCarthy, Emily Ruskowski, & Dan Crohn.

Hosted by Gloria Rose and Carolyn Riley

62 BOW ST., SOMERVILLE | 8PM | FREE THU 03.08 - SAT 03.10

MICHAEL YO @ LAUGH BOSTON

Michael Yo is a Stand-up Comedian, Actor, and TV Host known for his work on E!’s Chelsea Lately, is a regular on The Talk, The Wendy Williams Show and The Today Show. This self-proclaimed “Half-Black Brother with a Korean Mother” has also appeared on E! News, Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami and his own show, Yo on E!. Michael is currently a co-host on CBS’s The Insider.

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8 & 10PM | $20-$25 FRI 03.09 - SAT 03.10

GIGGLES COMEDY CLUB @ PRINCE PIZZERIA

Featuring: Lenny Clarke, Dave Russo, & Greg Howell.

517 BROADWAY (RTE 1) SAUGUS | 8:30PM | $20 FRI 03.09

MARCH COMEDY MADNESS @ LAUGH BOSTON

Featuring: Don Zollo, Chris Thomas, Deadair Dennis Maler, Caitlin Reese, Aaron ‘Tiny’ Smith, Valeria Dikovitskaya, Hannah Widener, Kyle McNally, Corey Manning, Joe Kozlowsky, Carolyn Riley, Stirling Smith, Jeremiah BohanBroderick, Brandon Vallee, Elisha Siegel, & Joe Buckley.

Hosted by Josh Filipowski

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 10PM | $15-$20 SAT 03.10

BOSTON COMEDY CHICKS @ DOYLE’S

Featuring: Lauren Hope Krass, Pamela Ross, Marie Forster, Liam McGurk, & Kindra Lansburg.

Hosted by Nonye Brown-West

3484 WASHINGTON ST., JP | 8PM | $12 SUN 03.11

LIQUID COURAGE COMEDY @ SLUMBREW

Featuring: Ryan Donahue, Kwasi Mensah, David Thomas, Ellen Sugarman, Joe Kozlowski, Jimmy Cash.

Hosted by Shea Spillane

15 WARD ST., SOMERVILLE | 8PM | $5 SUN 03.11

DEMETRI MARTIN @ THE WILBUR

Demetri Martin rose to relative obscurity when he started doing stand-up comedy in New York City at the end of the 20th Century. Later he became a writer at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and then a regular performer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Martin has appeared in movies as an actor, most recently in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion and most lengthily in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock.

246 TREMONT ST., BOSTON | 7:30 & 10PM | $39.50 MON 03.12

HELLO BEAUTIFUL/HIYA HANDSOME @ MAGGY’S LOUNGE Featuring: Christa Weiss, Denise Morin, Penny Oswin, Lauren Kirby, & Srilath Rajamani Hosted by Mindy Mazur

609 WASHINGTON ST., QUINCY | 8PM | FREE TUE 03.13

COMEDY STORM @ THUNDER ROAD

Featuring: Alex Giampapa, Ben Quick, Paul Roseberry, & more.

379 SOMERVILLE AVE., SOMERVILLE | 7PM | $5 WED 03.14

8 O’CLOCK @ 730 @ 730 TAVERN, KITCHEN & PATIO Hosted by Rob Crean & Liam McGurk

730 MASS AVE., CAMBRIDGE | 8PM | FREE savagelovecast.com 22

03.08.18 - 03.15.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

Lineup & shows to change without notice. For more shows & info visit BostonComedyShows.com

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

HEADLINING THIS WEEK!

Michael Yo

Chelsea Lately, E! News Thursday - Saturday

COMING SOON Luis Chataing

Special Engagement: Sun, Mar 11

Adam Ray

Spy, The Heat, Ghostbusters Mar 15-17

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Chris Franjola

Netflix, Chelsea Lately Mar 22-24

Kurt Braunohler

Netflix’s Lady Dynamite, Comedy Central Mar 30+31

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Jimmy O. Yang

HBO’s Silicon Valley Special Engagement: Sun, Apr 8

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

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23

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Hours of Operation Sun: 11AM - 4PM Mon: 9AM - 7PM Tues: 11AM - 8:30PM Wed: 9 AM - 7PM Thu: 11 AM - 8:30PM Fri: 9 AM - 7PM Sat: 11 AM - 8:30PM

Revolutionary Clinics

FREE ON-SITE

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I-93

Sullivan Sq. (Orange Line + Buses)

/RevClinics

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