DigBoston 5.17.18

DIGBOSTON.COM 05.17.18 - 05.24.18

COVER: LOCAL MUSIC

LIVE, LOUD, AND CLEAR PLUS OUR FRESHMAN 15 FEATURE

TERRESTRIAL EXTRAS UNDERGROUND AIRPLAY IN BOSTON

TRANSIT

HUBWAY EXPANSION BETWEEN A DOCK AND A HARD PLACE

2

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

BOWERY BOSTON WWW.BOWERYBOSTON.COM VOL 20 + ISSUE20

MAY 17, 2018 - MAY 24, 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

DESIGN DESIGNER Don Kuss COMICS Tim Chamberlain, Pat Falco Patt Kelley, Cagen Luse DigBoston Phone 617.426.8942 digboston.com

ON THE COVER PHOTO OF HONEYSUCKLE COURTESY OF HONEYSUCKLE. READ ABOUT THEM AND EVERYTHING ELSE HOT IN BOSTON MUSIC IN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC SECTION.

©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.

For show announcements, giveaways, contests, and more, follow us on:

ROYALE

A MESSAGE TO MEDIUM

There are times when I feel it is best to keep our readers in the dark about the struggles we face in this business. The news that we produce is already a lot to digest, and asking people to fathom the hardships we endure in making journalism can be burdensome.

Still, there are times when I have no choice whatsoever.

This is one of them. As those who pay attention to my Twitter feed may have seen this past week, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), which my team launched in 2016 to boost critical reporting in this and several other outlets, was dealt a damaging blow. The blogging platform Medium, where we post most of our content (often shortly after it initially publishes in places like the Dig), suddenly and without notice cancelled our entire membership program. This was an important grassroots funding well for us; since our administrators don’t take salaries, the hundreds we collected every month and thousands every year paid for multiple projects.

Again, I hope this isn’t TMI for the average dedicated Dig reader. Nevertheless, those who choose to stay informed should understand how in addition to financial strains and the resulting brain drains broken budgets have led to across our industry, journalistic entities— particularly independent ones like Dig and BINJ—are also often at the mercy of technocrats and new media gurus. As my partner in these efforts Jason Pramas and I have opined about at length in recent months, Facebook is a huge part of the problem. But Zuckerberg is not alone in wielding major influence on journalism without understand what us actual journos are going through.

Following a tweetstorm I began on Monday afternoon, Medium claimed that it sent me an email one week before cancelling all memberships, informing us that the platform was making yet another pivot and doing away with programs like ours. I never saw said correspondence, and I do not believe they sent it, but that’s entirely beyond the point. Whether one week or even an entire month, it is unacceptable—especially for a well-funded site run by a blabbermouth billionaire—to use small orgs like ours in its experiment, then to disregard us like some worthless afterthought. (On Friday, a Medium spokesperson issued a general apology to the affected publishers, and said they would be reimbursing four months’ worth of subscription dollars.)

We were one of more than 20 publications that Medium pulled the plug on last week. Thankfully, media writers and critics covered the fallout, and I was able to throw deserved shade on Medium. But had executive decision makers there made a legitimate effort to reach out and rap—to my crew and all of the others—we would have happily explained it all. Which could have been a free invaluable focus group for Medium and prevented loudmouth nuts like me from making such a stink about it.

There have been many lessons learned this past week. Some have been demoralizing, but it can’t murder our spirit. I’m already working on a list of things that journalists and publishers should ask innovation partners before jumping into bed with them, and I’ll be using it as we communicate with several companies and individuals who have reached out to help us since news of this mess got out. Thanks to them, and to all the new and longtime donors who have stepped up to put fuel in our tank. If we had to rely on the so-called disruptors of contemporary media to power our mission, I have little doubt that local journalism, already the forgotten or at best patronized class of the dwindling reporting masses, would be disrupted into an oblivion in no time.

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

279 Tremont St. Boston, MA royaleboston.com/concerts

W/ STAR ROVER

W/ GOAT GIRL

TUE. MAY 22

WED. MAY 23

FRI. JUNE 8

SAT. JUNE 16

RAPHAEL SAADIQ

W/ THE HOTELIER, WAR ON WOMEN (SUNDAY) W/ KEVIN DEVINE & THE GODDAMN BAND, TRAPPER SCHOEPP (MONDAY)

6/26, 6/27, 6/29, & 6/30 SOLD OUT!

SUN. JUNE 17

SUN. & MON. JULY 1 & 2

WED. JULY 25

THU. JULY 26

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

MON. OCTOBER 8

THU. OCTOBER 18

MT. JOY TUE. JULY 31

WED. SEPTEMBER 26

52 Church St., Cambridge, MA sinclaircambridge.com SOLO TOUR

W/ THE NEW MOTIF

W/ ADIRA AMRAM AND THE EXPERIENCE, DJ JESTER

W/ LILLY HIATT

W/ VAN WILLIAM

THIS FRI! MAY 18

THIS SAT! MAY 19

MON. MAY 21

TUE. MAY 22

MATT COSTA W/ ELIZABETH &

CRUMB W/ PET FOX

THE CATAPULT

FEAT.

RELOCATED FROM GREAT SCOTT!

GZA

WED. MAY 23

THU. MAY 24

THU. MAY 31

TUE. JUNE 5

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE FRI 6/1 AT NOON!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

MADAILA / BELLA’S BARTOK

W/ CHERRY POOLS

W/ NEIL FRANCES

SAT. AUGUST 11

THU. AUGUST 16

FRI. AUGUST 24

MON. SEPTEMBER 10

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

WED. SEPTEMBER 19

FRI. SEPTEMBER 21

TUE. OCTOBER 23

TUE. NOVEMBER 6

W/ TANCRED

W/ BETA RADIO

w/ Abi Reimold

1222 Comm. Ave. Allston, MA

THIS THURSDAY! MAY 17

THIS SUNDAY! MAY 20

MONDAY, MAY 21

ON SALE NOW!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT NOON!

THURSDAY, JULY 12

THURSDAY, JULY 26

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE NOW!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11

greatscottboston.com

FRIDAYS AT 7PM!

‘s S GA E TH

W/ CHASTITY

jeremy zucker MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24

≠ 5/19 PILLORIAN ≠ 5/20 THE CRANK-TONES ≠ 5/22 SUUNS ≠ 5/23 MAINLAND ≠ 5/24 SIDEKICKS ≠ 5/29 POST ANIMAL ≠ 5/30 SELF DEFENSE FAMILY / SANNHET ≠ 5/31 BAT FANGS ≠ 6/1 THE OFFSEASON ≠ 6/2 AWAIT RESCUE ≠ 6/3 HORSE JUMPER OF LOVE

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

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

3

NEWS+OPINION

BIKE CARING NEWS TO US

Hubway’s low-income program goes regional, but infrastructure’s still behind the curve

BY ROB KATZ As the bike-sharing industry becomes a multibilliondollar race across the country, cycling options for Bostonians are getting more affordable and more competitive.

In Boston, Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville, Hubway reigns due to exclusive contracts with those cities. The publicly owned and privately operated service, which was recently renamed Blue Bikes as part of a partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, has attempted to increase accessibility with a series of equity opportunities. Among them is a new regional income-based eligibility program made available early February. It’s offered to individuals who own SNAP/EBT cards, or are enrolled in other assistance programs or otherwise meet income requirements.

While the service offers $8 24-hour passes and $15 three-day passes, its primary subscription is a $99 annual pass. The low-income program halves this cost with a $50 annual membership as well as $5 monthly memberships.

While trips over 30 minutes are surcharged on the traditional plans, the new program also offers up to 60 minutes of travel before charges are accrued. EBT card holders may sign up online, while individuals who have documented income eligibility or are on assistance programs may enroll at one of several guided enrollment locations.

“We have been working with our partners in other municipalities to develop a seamless regional system for folks who have a lower income,” Stefanie Seskin, the active transportation director for the Boston Transportation Department, said.

Boston has offered a discounted membership for city residents since shortly after Hubway’s 2011 launch, with more than 800 income-eligible members from the city alone entering into the regional system, according to 4

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

Seskin. “One of our goals with having a regional program was to really expand that number,” the director added.

“We know that the folks who signed up through the income-eligible program are on the whole more diverse than the folks signing up for bike share in our regular program. More people of color, more women.”

Seskin also noted that the majority of these riders use the service at least once or twice a month, with some using it daily.

Becca Wolfson, executive director of Boston Cyclists Union, said the new program would also offer a way in for riders without bank cards.

“Back when [Hubway] started in 2011, there was a lot of concern about how it could also be a resource for the unbanked because you needed a credit card to sign up, and that’s a barrier to a lot of low-income folks,” Wolfson said. “The city of Boston has been working really hard to find a way to break down those barriers.”

Opening up bike sharing as a public transportation option for lower-income residents could lend a wide variety of residents a fast and efficient alternative. Steven Miller, a member of the LivableStreets Alliance board of directors, said it’s nothing new for bikes to serve as crucial transportation utilities in metro areas.

“We tend to underestimate the number of lowincome people who are already riding bikes,” Miller said.

“People from Latin America, people from Asia are both coming from places where bike riding is a social norm not confined to children. There are a lot of people going to and from third-shift jobs when the MBTA doesn’t run, [such as] people in the hotel and restaurant business who are low-wage. All these people have a much higher use of bicycles for transportation than the public perception usually notices.”

Wolfson also said that readily accessible bikes would

particularly benefit late-night employees, such as those working for restaurants and health providers, who may not have access to a car or are constrained by evening bus schedules. She pointed to studies showing that people in lower-income neighborhoods travel 20 to 40 minutes longer to work on average than people in more affluent places.

“If you have access to a bike, you can shave 20 to 40 minutes off of a trip easily rather than take a bus to a bus and wait,” Wolfson said. She stressed the versatility of bike sharing in multimodal transportation, as riders could take their bus or commuter rail to a bike hub and vice versa.

“You can easily ride a bike and get pretty much anywhere faster.”

---///--For public bike sharing to become

“Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan have the worst infrastructure and the most speeding and lack of bike lanes, let alone protected bike lanes, but unfortunately we feel that the city is lagging behind, period,”

a truly dependable transportation solution for regular commuters, Motivate, the firm that manages Hubway’s implementation, will have to continue addressing issues of bicycle and dock availability that plagued Hubway’s rollout. In a 2016 Dig article on the matter, outages at that time had particularly impacted stations outside of downtown, like in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Charlestown, and Somerville. In October of that year alone, there were 14,887 instances of full or empty stations across Hubway’s 185 docks.

“When you have a transportation that works, you need it to be reliable,” Wolfson said. The cyclists union director said that bike sharing needs to be an integral part of state and city plans to cut down transportation emissions. “Just as the Red Line is in the paper every day for having trains that are overfull and trains that are breaking down and people don’t have a reliable commute time, [full or empty Hubway stations are] absolutely a problem.

“It’s a stated goal of the city of Boston,” she said. “They want to reach 10 to 20 percent modeshare by 2030, and we’re at about 2.5 percent now. If reliability isn’t there, people won’t choose it.”

“I know in the past there was some difficulty always making sure there were enough bikes in all the places people wanted to use them,” Miller of LivableStreets Alliance said.

“But I know that Hubway has recently renegotiated its contract with Motivate so that Motivate has much better alignment of their financial incentives with making sure that everybody has access to bikes where and when they need it. And I think that will help improve if not eliminate some of those past problems.”

As a result of the new long-term contract between the multiple participating cities, Motivate, and Blue Cross Blue Shield, more than 100 new stations will be added to the 180-station and 1,600-bike system by the end of 2019, bringing the network to 3,000 bikes. Additionally, while Cambridge had been the only municipality that kept the majority of stations open through the cold months, this past winter saw “almost all” stations open and operational in Boston, Brookline, and Somerville along with Cambridge.

Seskin, the acting transit director in Boston, said the city’s undergoing “the biggest investment in bike share” in history, including during Hubway’s launch. She also said an upcoming expansion of service into Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roslindale will significantly help lower-income residents. As for the roads between the bike docks…

Wolfson expressed disappointment that Hubway’s increasing reach is not accompanied with an expansion of facilities for bikes and other related improvement needs.

“Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan have the worst infrastructure and the most speeding and lack of bike lanes, let alone protected bike lanes, but unfortunately we feel that the city is lagging behind, period,” Wolfson said. “The entire city needs much more of an investment in bike infrastructure and a much more rapid implementation.”

“They’re not funding it at the rate they should be, and it’s not going to be implemented at the rate that it should be,” Wolfson continued. “There’s a disconnect in the mayor saying, ‘I want Boston to be the best place for biking in the country’—and that’s really paying lip service—and not showing us through his actions and through rapidly implementing projects that we believe should be much easier than they’re proving to be if there was political will and a desire to actually get things done.”

Hi, we’re Starry, your soon-to-be favorite new internet service.

Lightning-fast internet.

No bundles or tricks.

Just $50 a month.

Learn more at

---///--Boston’s suburbs, meanwhile, will soon be host to thousands of new dockless bikes.

As private bike-sharing companies have proliferated, riding a multibillion dollar wave of venture capital, vendors LimeBike and Spin have been selected by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council to operate in 15 municipalities including Arlington, Chelsea, and Waltham, according to the Boston Globe. As well, Beijing-based bicycle giant ofo has launched services in Worcester, Chelsea, and Malden.

Hubway will continue to hold the exclusive rights to bike sharing in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville until at least 2022. A stark difference in focus has already become apparent between Hubway and its private competition, similar to that between public transportation and Uber.

“There is a huge benefit from having something as a public program because that means it’s going to be shaped by the full equity agenda of the public sector,” Miller said.

“On the other hand, it has to move slower and satisfy a broad range of interests. The private companies are more nimble, but they ultimately don’t serve anything except the profit motive of their owners.”

For now, these firms will be able to leverage a large degree of capital as they test the potential of bike sharing across the Commonwealth. According to startup database Crunchbase, ofo has raised $2.2 billion in funding since its founding in April 2014, while LimeBike has raised $132 million since January 2017 and Spin has raised $8 million since November 2016.

Despite their sudden wealth, Miller expects private firms to offer little in the way of the accessibility and equity opportunities that Boston has introduced through Hubway.

“The dockless [privately run] programs are not going to put money or energy or staff into training low-income people, reaching out to low-income people, or helping work with kids, much less giving people ownership of their bikes,” Miller said. “In the beginning, this is not going to be noticeable because they’re going to start by being really cheap as they fight for market share.

“In the long run, however, their profit-seeking requirements are going to force them to pull back from any population from whom they cannot secure sufficient profit—and we all know who that’s going to be.”

starry.com/digboston18

Celebrate the arrival of Spring 2018 with four of Boston’s best DJs!

J��� 7 DJ Matheus H���� + R�B Pre-Pride party with vogue dancers J��� 14 DJ Nomadik of Soulkore Productions, R�����, S���, Sista Dee of Dis N Dat Band and D�������� the House of Nahdra J��� 21 DJ Papadon H�� H�� + R�B J��� 28 Adam Gibbons of Uhuru Afrika with A��� H���� Sidy Maiga on percussion and Goddess Raven Winter

ALL EVENTS ARE 4��-7��

W������ ���������� • F��� � ���� �� ��� ������ R������ P����, 1155 T������ S�, B����� I���: N�������������������.��� • 617-373-2555 NEWS TO US Dig Boston Block Party ad.indd 1

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

5 5/14/18 9:48 AM

MEDIUM WELL EDITORIAL

Democracy requires public control of social media giants

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

In this edition of DigBoston, our Editor-in-Chief Chris Faraone has already written at some length about how Medium—which is essentially a glorified blog farm with a puzzlingly opaque social media component—screwed our nonprofit, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), a few days back by precipitously terminating the paid subscriptions of dozens of our monthly supporters on the platform.

After we questioned the company’s action, a lowlevel flunky claimed we had been given a whole entire week’s advance notice in an email that we subsequently explained we never received. After we very publicly cried bloody murder, and got our plight written up in Nieman Lab and Columbia Journalism Review, Medium leadership offered us, and a number of other small publishers, four months of the income we would have made had they not kicked us to the digital curb.

There are many problems with the way events transpired, but the worst one is the fact that mere mortals such as ourselves do not control our presences on corporate social media bigs in any way, shape, or form.

The billionaires that own them—that became rich by creating “walled gardens” under their micromanagement and have stubbornly resisted the creation of public and nonprofit social media alternatives—are the only people that could reasonably be said to control them.

Even though many of them have built their fortunes on technology originally created by publicly funded basic scientific research that they were allowed to essentially steal. Not dissimilar from leaders of the former Soviet Union that were allowed to privatize once-public industries and become billionaires themselves. Distorting the politics of various successor states toward oligarchy in the process.

And, under today’s robber baron capitalism, billionaires of any provenance are extremely difficult to bring to heel with any kind of public regulation or 6

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

taxation. Let alone criminal charges.

Medium is hardly the worst, or anywhere near the largest, of the social media scofflaws in question. Its founder, Ev Williams, seems to be a thoughtful and genial enough fellow for someone in his position.

But, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said: “Let me tell you about the very rich.

They are different from you and me. … Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.

They are different.”

Truer words were never spoken. Especially when it comes to a person who has used his power and privilege to change the business model of Medium—a corporation that’s been valued in the hundreds of millions—on more than one occasion.

So, BINJ and the other affected publishers are the latest victims of the caprices of a billionaire.

Who ironically wants to help improve media with the selfsame company that just made life more difficult for a group of struggling media outlets.

It is precisely for this reason that both the nonprofit side (BINJ) and for-profit side (DigBoston) of this operation that I half-jokingly call the “Greater BINJ-DigBoston Mediaplex” are working to help build alternatives to corporate social media. As we announced in an editorial a couple months ago.

We believe that digital media can only move forward by returning to the most promising visionary thinking of the earliest internet pioneers. Including the idea that only a decentralized communication network can be truly democratic. And that the ethos of democracy must be baked so deeply into its architecture that it can never be displaced.

Our enterprise can only play a small part in this “strategic retreat.” But we are pursuing that initiative with vigor. Both by moves we are making to change how BINJ and DigBoston use the internet and by trying to organize our peers in the news industry to change our collective digital lot for the better.

The former effort involves transitioning away from Facebook—which we adjudge to be the worst of the social media giants—and toward first Twitter then other more democratic social media as it emerges. The latter effort—to which we’re dedicating a small conference this weekend—involves helping construct the democratic social media alternatives we hope to ultimately focus on.

But even if such voluntarist endeavors succeed in scaling up to control some reasonable percentage of the relevant markets, they will not stop huge social media corporations and the billionaires that control them from continuing to have far more political, economic, and social power than is healthy for a democratic society.

So what will stop them? Not breaking them up into

smaller companies. As economist Gar Alperovitz points out in his book, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, old-fashioned trust busting always ends up with the smaller companies reforming into new giants. Thanks largely to “regulatory capture”: Big corporations colonizing regulatory agencies with insiders and then doing what they want—as we’ve seen most clearly of late with former telecom exec Ajit Pai getting the top seat at the FCC, then killing net neutrality.

Which way forward then? Alperowitz says that even the libertarian economists of the Chicago school—most famously Milton Friedman—identified the futility of breaking up huge companies. Leading Friedman’s mentor Henry C. Simons to quip, “Every industry should be effectively competitive or socialized.” Failing to do so, he and other Chicago economists thought, would lead to an ongoing series of societal crises. Which would certainly include the new kinds of crises that corporate social media has sparked. Notably “surveillance capitalism” where consumers’ every move is being monitored and thought anticipated in the service of maximizing profit in ways never before seen. With all the resulting negative outcomes—like social media addiction and political chaos—externalized to a failing democratic system largely controlled by an ever-shrinking number of multinationals and financial concerns.

And how best to socialize corporate social media?

Alperowitz suggests turning the companies controlling the commanding heights of any sector of the economy into public utilities. So it must go with major social media companies. They must be converted into a heavily regulated and government-managed utility in such a way as to maximize democratic decentralized digital communication and provide it as cheaply as possible for the good of all. While, I would add, activists on the ground continue to develop a constellation of independent social media projects run by nonprofits, cooperatives, and social benefit corporations around the new governmentfunded network to allow for maximum information and technological diversity—and keep a future public social media utility honest.

Some kind of national security state panopticon is not what we’re aiming for here. Rather, the new utility could be run by elected regional boards with mandated seats for key community constituencies and space for lots of meaningful grassroots input.

Doing all that—plus related work to socialize telecoms and cable companies—will take a massive protest movement. Like most everything that involves uprooting entrenched institutions and replacing them with new, more popular institutions. And that movement will have to be international. It’s the only way to go. Because social media corporations are multinational, and most governments—corporate-dominated as they are—won’t do the job on their own. Not without a protracted struggle.

Going forward, DigBoston (and BINJ) will be looking to ally with good organizations willing to fight hard on these issues. And we’ll be sure to let readers know which groups we think are doing the best work as they emerge on the political stage.

So, stay tuned to these pages. We’ll be doing our damnedest to guide you through what is sure to be a wild ride.

Jason Pramas is the executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston, and the network director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM

The case of Soto points toward a grim future for press freedom

BY BAYNARD WOODS @BAYNARDWOODS

Emilio Gutierrez Soto had to flee Mexico a decade ago to seek asylum in the United States because people there took his journalism too seriously. He may get sent back because an American judge does not take it seriously enough.

In 2005, on page 10 of El Diario, a Juarez daily, Gutierrez published a story with the

headline “Military personnel rob hotel in Palomas.”

“Six members of the Army, and one civilian who have been positively identified, robbed the guests at a motel in this town on Friday night, taking from them their money, jewelry, and other personal belongings,” the story read, in the translation of Molly Molloy. “The robbers then fled, but not before threatening their victims with death.

Yesterday, the victims gave up their right to file formal complaints about the events to denounce the crimes against them, facing the possibility that the threats they had received would be carried out.”

Gutierrez later told Charles Bowden, a great chronicler of the border, that army officials were pissed about his story and summoned him to a hotel in the center of the town of Ascension, near Chihuahua Ciudad. He was told, “If you don’t come, we’ll come looking for you at home or wherever you are.”

When he got to the hotel, he was surrounded by soldiers. “You have no sources for that information,” the general said. He asked Gutierrez why he didn’t ever write about the narcotraficantes. Gutierrez confessed that he was frightened of them.

“You should fear us for we fuck the fucking drug traffickers, you son of a whore,” a general said.

Gutierrez knew they were serious. In April 2007, he shared a byline with a reporter named Armando Rodriguez. The story was about a third reporter, Saul Noe Martinez Ortega, who “was found wrapped in a blanket and appeared to have been dead for several days, possibly after his kidnapping.”

Molloy added a brutal translator’s note: “Armando Rodriguez was a well-known crime reporter for El Diario de Juárez. He was shot to death at point blank range on his way to work in Ciudad Juarez on November 13, 2008.”

Rodriguez had been threatened, but ignored the threats.

“I can’t live in my house like a prisoner,” he told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“I refuse to live in fear.”

Armando Rodriguez was gunned down in his driveway, with his 8-year-old daughter in the back seat.

Gutierrez left for the United States a few months earlier, in June 2008.

“He received a death threat, and he fled rather than waiting around,” Molloy said when I called her up to talk about Gutierrez. “Emilio is seen as in less danger because he is still alive.”

Molloy hit on the insane logic of the infernal machine that governs the asylum process.

Gutierrez and his son were separated and held in custody for seven months. Shortly after Obama took office, they were freed. Although Obama was often called the deporter in chief by immigration activists, Gutierrez attributed his release to the American president.

When he was finally released, Gutierrez and his son went to live in Las Cruces, in the house of some friends. Bowden had also recently moved to Las Cruces to live with Molloy, who is a border and Latin American specialist at the New Mexico State University Library.

Bowden published Gutierrez’s story in Mother Jones, but Gutierrez himself had a hard time figuring out what to do. Like so many immigrants, he had to piece together a living working in landscaping and food service as his request for asylum dragged on. The request was finally denied last December, and Gutierrez and his son Oscar were locked up once again.

Among the reasons that Judge Robert S. Hough gave for denying his request for asylum was a claim that Gutierrez wasn’t really a journalist.

“He didn’t really believe that Emilio was a journalist because he didn’t produce many articles he had written,” Molloy said, noting that Gutierrez’s house had been ransacked before he left. Nevertheless, she compiled well over 100 stories bearing his byline—and translated a few of them.

Still, Gutierrez and his son were put in a van and driven toward the border—and what he thinks would be certain death. A last-minute stay halted the van and bought Gutierrez a little more time and another shot at asylum. The Association of Alternative Newsmedia, the National Press Club, and other journalistic organizations have come out in support of Gutierrez.

But the Trump administration’s deep hostility to those seeking asylum from Mexico, along with his hatred of the press, does not bode well for him.

Baynard Woods is a reporter and editor at the Real News Network. Twitter @ baynardwoods; email baynard@therealnews.com.

Consult: VISHNU Located in

Cell

DORCHESTER /

617-982-4291 JAMAICA PLAIN NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

7

TALKING JOINTS MEMO

CONSUMER REPORTS: FLOWER POWER CBD COFFEE Strong and even better when brewed stronger

BY MIKE THE HOUSE HUSBAND

Recently, after a long day at NECANN Boston, I was hungry and tired when we headed across the street for some eats at the post-event industry party. Sitting with colleagues from Suite Leaf, I overheard a gentleman yell, “I love Death Wish Coffee, that jacket is sweet.” (Yes, I was rocking my Death Wish denim.)

I turned around and introduced myself as Mike the House Husband, and then things got weird. For a moment, it seemed the noise around the room got quiet as he spoke the words, “No way, I am the House Guru!” The gentleman I’d met was Leighton Knowles of the New York-based Flower Power Coffee Co. I told him I review coffee, he sent me some product, and here we are several weeks later.

Since Flower Power only currently comes preground in small packages, at this point I can only judge based on its flavor profile and effect, not bean quality (though whole beans are coming soon). Upon opening the package, I was greeted with a robust earthy aroma with slight hints of sweetness. The label says it makes 36 ounces, or three cups, so for review purposes I wanted to be accurate and measured the water to a perfect amount. I then let the coffee brew in the press and preheated my mug up with the leftover water, always key steps to a solid cup.

At first sip, Flower Power has a rather complex and robust flavor with a smooth finish, something like fresh coconut oil. It’s from a Jamaican blue mountain-style bean, with a dark, dark brown color resembling a cocoa bean. For a preground coffee it presses well, and after only sips I can feel the CBD doing its thing (I purposely did not take the 50-milligram CBD pills I take daily so that I could get the full effect). I felt alert and focused, as I should, but not as caffeinated as I’d be off such a high quality bean.

Finally, I added my secret weapon, some green lean tincture from the Coloradobased Excelsior Extracts (full disclosure: It was grown exclusively with Suite Leaf vegan plant nutrients). With the magic combination of 2 ml of THC to 1 ml of CBD, I measured out the proper dosage then refilled my half-full cup with more joe.

With the added tincture, you notice a different sweetness immediately. Otherwise the flavor profile stayed the same, and it was exactly what I’m always looking for: coffee that works wonders on its own, but that can be kicked into full medical gear with the appropriate tincture.

Overall, I give this coffee 4.25 out of five cups on my scale. Strong points are its CBD dosage for the price, the available selection of blends, and ease of brewing. A whole bean may receive a five out of five when it finally comes on the market, but for now, the coffee is available online and in shops across the US. Stay tuned for my next adventure, which will feature the best cappuccino in America. Well, at least I think it’s the best.

8

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

9

SHOW ‘EM WHATCHA GOT FEATURE

The Massachusetts Hip Hop Roadshow: Saturday, May 19

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON | RESEARCH BY THE MASSACHUSETTS HIP-HOP ARCHIVE Cindy Diggs, known as Mother Hip Hop to multiple generations of Boston musicians and peace activists, has been rounding up the breakers, graffiti artists, MCs, and DJs on social media. Plus the producers, promoters, and everyone else who has contributed to the Hub’s rich hiphop history. The public invite she’s been pushing on behalf of UMass Boston’s Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive, along with other heroes of the Boston rap scene like Rob Stull, a graffiti legend with a pedigree that includes membership in the multifaceted original school crew AWOL, simply reads, “Show ’Em Whatcha Got.” “The archive is a reality in the making,” says Stull, “and long overdue for Boston.”

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in partnership with the Boston Public Library, the UMass-hosted project has planned a series of monthly meetups and discussions to rekindle energy among those who form the foundation of New England hip-hop. That in addition to the years volunteers, spurred by the personal collection and efforts of UMass professor Pacey Foster, have spent parsing and converting countless recordings and documents for organized keeping. Now, the scrapbook party rockers are asking heads in their network and whoever else is in possession of relevant goods to bring items to be digitally archived, so that all eras and elements of the culture can be represented and catalogued for future generations—for research purposes, sure, but primarily so that their contributions can be scanned in stone.

“The archive … sets a true timeline on hip-hop in Massachusetts and lets the artists speak,” says Tony Rhome, a member of the Almighty RSO. Rhome, whose group was among an exalted few to rep Mass on the national rap map in the ’90s, says this effort equals something tantamount to eternal props, as artifacts will be easily discoverable “even in the future when the artists won’t be here to speak for themselves.”

For Saturday’s “Show ’Em” festivities, organizers are asking people to bring three things that speak to their role in Boston hip-hop, then or now. Think photos, flyers, and preferably items that are small, flat, and easy to process (long-form media like video and audio will be after the event by appointment). The event isn’t simply for 10

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

artists—it’s for fans, promoters, DJs, and anybody else who, in addition to having their objects scanned for posterity, wants to give their personal account of why those items are important to them in an archival video. Up to this point, Foster says, the collection is predominately audio, featuring dozens of unique, ultra-rare (and streamable) Boston rap demo tapes from the ’80s; with this effort, the idea is to add color and visuals to the unique and growing collection.

“This archive … secures for us a sure place in history,” says MC and spoken word artist Lisa Lee, an active member of the Massachusetts hip-hop scene for 40 years. A twotime Boston Music Award winner, Lee will contribute a recording of the “Big Dig Rock,” a track commissioned by the city during the track’s namesake infrastructure overhaul. Adds Lee: “This will empower … generations that follow to express themselves, without hesitation, through hip-hop.”

Recalling his coming of age in Greater Boston, Stull salutes his peers from the first hip-hop generation and calls them “contributors to the culture of the city.” The UMass archive, he says, cements “our story and our history, in our own words, with the opportunity and the platform to tell it and have it documented for future generations.”

Bring whatcha got to the Massachusetts Hip Hop Roadshow on Sat, May 19 at Boston Public Library (main branch), lower level, from 11am to 4pm. Learn more about the archive and the event at facebook.com/ masshiphoparchive.

SELECT ITEMS ALREADY IN THE COLLECTION GURU/Gang-Starr Posse early demo tapes

In 1986, just before Roxbury native GURU (aka MC Keithy E) moved to Brooklyn and started working with DJ Premier, the future legend was still producing homemade demo tapes with his local partners DJ 1-2-B-Down (Mikey Dee) and beatboxer Damo D under the Gang-Starr name.

These early demo tapes were sent in to DJ Magnus Johnstone for the Lecco’s Lemma show and were donated to the archive. They contain an early version of Gang-Starr’s

first 12” release, “The Lesson,” as well as many unreleased recordings. According to Mike Dee, there were only three original copies of the tape (informally titled Introducing Mc Keithy E of Gang-Starr).

Original Source Magazines

Before it moved to New York and became the definitive hip-hop publication that it remains to this day, the Source began as a photocopied newsletter produced and distributed by David Mays and Jon Schecter out of their dormitory at Harvard University where they were students.

Donated by Foster from his personal collection, the archive has three of these extremely rare publications from the fall of 1988 and spring 1989.

Dance Slam Video

In the summer of 1989, Tony Rose, a well-known local producer and engineer who played a central role in Boston’s black music revival in the late ’70s, produced 10 episodes of a dance and music video show called Dance Slam. Hosted by Mike Shannon, this show was a local version of the popular teen dance show genre and featured local youth dancing to rap and urban hits as well as short segments of music videos. The MHHA has one DVD of this show donated by Tony Rose in 2018.

Edo G Tour Videos

Edo G is one of the best recognized and most respected of all the hip-hop artists to come out of Boston. A longtime supporter of the archive, Edo’s early demo tapes appeared in the Lecco’s Lemma collection under the name FTI Crew, and he used one of the pictures from the Lecco’s Lemma collection (in which he appears as a jubilant teen) as the cover for his 2011 album A Face in the Crowd. In 2017, when he was working on a documentary and needed his private collection of tour videos digitized, the archive stepped in and helped. In return, Edo has donated all 12 of these personal videos of his tours throughout the 2000s to the archive. While not yet public, these tapes contain countless hours of never-before-seen performances and backstage footage of one of Boston’s most legendary MCs.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

11

BOSTON’S HIDDEN DIAL FEATURE

An insider’s tour of the Hub’s college and community radio stations

BY STEPHEN PROVIZER Radio, that strange, dusty object in the corner with the little dials, used to be the place to discover music. Many a night was spent huddled under the covers with a clandestine radio, listening for a local DJ to spin the latest tunes. But more and more, this role has been ceded to YouTube and streaming services. At this point, most people are guided by algorithms.

It’s tough to bond with an algorithm, so I’m here to remind that the radio dial in Boston still offers a cornucopia of sounds known and unknown, music that is often deftly curated by musically obsessed volunteer disc jockeys at college stations. With the possible exception of the Bay Area, we have the best and most unique radio dial in the country.

Of course, we have the “normal” radio. Like everywhere else in the US, there are mega commercial rock, country, sports talk, oldies and “urban” format stations with big signals—and lots of ads. You see their billboards on the highway and vans with their logos splashed on them at concert and sporting events. These are, each and every one, part of enormous corporations, which own thousands of stations across the country.

But there’s a whole lot to explore between the commercial behemoths.

NPR We also have three National Public Radio (NPR) affiliates. These stations—WBUR, WGBH, and WUMB— generate local programming and play some of the same national programming. WBUR has been all-news for many years; when the station went professional in the 1970s, Boston University students who wanted to make radio went to WTBU. This is a “carrier current” station, which means it can be received in BU buildings that are equipped to get the signal via phone or power lines. Many college stations started as unlicensed carrier current stations.

WBUR, at 12,000w, has a strong Boston signal and uses 12

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

several satellite stations to reach much of eastern Mass.

WGBH, which is also a major player in television, used to have a lot more music—jazz and classical—which it reduced or eliminated in the past few years. Local jazz fans launched several protests outside the station but failed to influence the programming, which is now largely news and public affairs. WGBH has a 100,000w broadcast signal and a huge coverage area.

WUMB, on the campus of UMass Boston, is also an NPR affiliate and plays largely acoustic blues, folk, roots, and some ’60s music, including national programs from NPR. As with WBUR, WUMB was initially a college station that was “professionalized” (that word again), but unlike Boston University, UMass does not provide an on-campus radio alternative for students. WUMB has a small signal, but uses “repeaters”—relay stations, essentially—to carry its signal to other areas.

HOW COLLEGE RADIO WORKS Now for the tasty stuff—the college stations. Here’s how they work: the studios are located on the campus of a college, which holds the license and pays most of the freight. Stations have a faculty advisor and a board of directors. With one exception, WERS at Emerson, the stations are actually run by students, who fill the administrative positions. Minimally, there is a station manager, program director, and music director, and possibly operations and publicity directors.

Each station makes a policy about how it will choose people to be on the air—what percentage will be students and what percentage will be community members. These stations know that without at least some community people to carry on during semester breaks and in the summer, the station won’t be able to go on the air. The Federal Communications Commission doesn’t like it when licensed stations aren’t on the air.

Unlike the big “single format” commercial stations, all

of these stations are “multiformat.” Programs can switch dramatically from one hour to the next. Having run several stations like that, I can tell you that the challenge is getting listeners to tune in at the right time. Few people’s ears can make the adjustment from Metallica to Mel Torme.

STATION IDENTIFICATION I’ll start at the lowest-numbered station, which sometimes calls itself the “leftmost station on the dial”— WMBR, the MIT station. Interestingly, the call letters used to be WTBS (“Technology Broadcasting System”).

Sound familiar? Yes, you may know it better as Turner Broadcasting. Turner wanted the call letters and got them for a $50,000 “donation” to the station in 1979.

I’d say that WMBR has the most substantial and consistent community component at a college station in the city. There are a number of nonstudents who have been at WMBR for decades, some doing radical political programming, others rockabilly, African, new classical, rock, and soul. Its roster of jazz programmers is unmatched. If these musical areas are to your taste, you won’t find any group of DJs who know more about the music. Sporadically, MIT types come up with interesting science programming.

Next up the dial is WERS. This station, attached to Emerson College, is the most “professionalized” non-NPR college station. My own taste runs to less mainstream music and, in general, to a bit more chaos than WERS, which, a few years ago, instituted the kind of structure you see at pro commercial stations. It says it is “studentrun and professionally managed.” So, you are unlikely to hear the gaffes and meanderings of hosts on other college stations, which may be to the good or charmless, depending on your perspective. In any case, WERS receives an enormous amount of music and staff members work a lot of contemporary/alternative/rock into the schedule.

It actually shows up on the Arbitron radio ratings, which is pretty unheard-of for a college station. At night it does

reggae and hip-hop, and every year it does a week of extensive live music broadcasts from the studio.

Next on the dial comes WZBC. People who listen to ZBC say it does have a character of its own. The station’s reputation rests on the pillars of electronica, rock, and music that has no commercial potential. Apart from rock, you are likely to hear psychedelia, noise, sound collages, trance, and other off musical brands. The station also runs Democracy Now! and has a very long-running lefty political show called Sounds of Dissent. (Full disclosure: I’ve had a jazz show on this station for the last 7 years.)

Then we have WMFO, broadcasting at Tufts University. Through the years, I’ve heard more stories about the goings-on here than any other station. It calls itself “freeform” radio and lives up to it. In 1970, the station was closed down by the FCC because some folks attached an antenna system to a T track, allowing the signal to travel many more miles than it was supposed to. In my listening, I’ve heard a quality of the Wild West in the programs that can be inspiring or infuriating. The schedule is really too eclectic to try and describe. I heartily recommend checking out its schedule to see what might work for you. The signal is just 125 watts and directional, so you may have to stream.

Next up the dial is WHRB, the Harvard station, one of the oldest college stations in the US. It too started as a carrier current station in 1940 and acquired a commercial radio license in 1957, which is the reason the station operates in this part of the dial, away from the noncommercial part of the FM band (88.1-91.9). You will hear some advertising, mostly for arts events, but the spots are produced at a level that would be laughed out of any commercial station. On the other hand, WHRB has possibly the longest and most consistent programming blocks of any college station. Jazz is on 5 am-1 pm on weekdays and is followed by classical music from 1-10 pm. Some of the hosts are very knowledgeable and some can’t pronounce names. Blues and “hillbilly” shows have aired on the weekend for decades. Be on the lookout for the “orgies,” which happen twice a year during exam periods. You might hear a week’s worth of Berlioz or John Coltrane.

The last college station I’ll cover is WBRS, Brandeis radio. Like WHRB, it was grandfathered into this part of the dial from 91.7, where it began. The signal is small (25w) and spotty in Boston, so this is another station to access by stream. It has an eclectic range of shows, covering any genre you’re likely to dream up. The community component is not that large at this station, and students do most of the DJing. However, some community shows featuring jazz, world, Jewish, and folk have been on for many years. WBRS is co-producer of Springfest, a large concert on the campus.

LPFM Boston has two low-power FM (LPFM) stations. The LPFM service was started in 2000, the result of a groundswell of grassroots support (galvanized by pirate radio activity) and an FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, who was sympathetic to the idea. Things got off to a rocky start when Congress—pushed by the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio—contravened FCC recommendations and greatly restricted the possible number of LPFM licenses. In 2010, Congress finally agreed to expand the number of LPFM stations.

WZMR is the low-power FM station run by Zumix Radio. Zumix is a center of youth activity in East Boston. It began as a place that taught music to kids and expanded to music technology, then to radio. Kids and adults are trained to get on the air and on how to do journalism. This represents genuine localism in radio, and you will hear interviews and stories by youth and eclectic music programs. There’s some great R&B, jazz, and blues.

Another disclosure: I started Zumix radio as an unlicensed station in 2005 and left before it became licensed.

102.9 FM is an LPFM license held by the city of Boston. Air time is shared between Boston Neighborhood Network (WBCA from 6 pm to 2 am), Lasell College (WLAS from 10 am to 6 pm), and Global Ministries (WBPG from 2 to 10 am). The BNN programming is mostly the audio of video run on BNN, which has a number of local talk shows, Neighborhood Network News, music shows (hip hop, rock, electronica, folk, blues, Spanish), and Democracy Now! (also on WZBC during the day). WLAS is free-form, with mixed music that seems to lean toward the pop end and sports. WBPG is Boston Praise Radio, the home of Pastor Bruce Wall who hosts programs out of Codman Square.

COLLEGE WMBR 88.1 FM 617-253-8810 WERS 88.9 FM 617-482-8890 WZBC 90.3 FM 617-552-4686 WMFO 91.5 FM 855-915-9636 WHRB 95.3 FM 617-495-9472 WBRS 100.1 FM 781-736-4785

LPFM WZMR 94.9 FM 617-568-9777 WBCA 102.9 FM 617-708-3200 WLAS 102.9 617-243-2464 WBPG 102.9 617-282-0685

UNLICENSED RADIO Finally, on the unlicensed front, the Boston area has always been a center of so-called pirate radio activity. This movement had two heights of public notoriety: in the mid-’90s, when my station Radio Free Allston (as well as Radio Free Cambridge, which was associated with the Zeitgeist Gallery) was closed by the FCC, then a few years ago, when TOUCH FM in Roxbury was put out of the terrestrial radio business. (Big City, a longtime reggae and neighborhood staple in Dorchester, was shuttered by federal officials in March). One lesson learned through it all: FM will get you busted a lot faster than being on AM, which is kind of the dial that time forgot—hence, a good place for pirates to settle.

There is activity scattered around the AM dial, with the most intense activity on the part of the AM band that was opened up in 1990. The “expanded band” goes from 1605 to 1705 kHz. Pirates come and go on FM but usually don’t last very long. Range of the stations is generally pretty small and most are located in Dorchester and Mattapan in Boston proper, or north of the city in Lynn and Revere. Check it out and listen. You’re guaranteed to run across the bold kind of radio that Haitians and Latinos put out. For some communities, these frequencies serve as a primary source of news, and the only kind of local information people can get in their native languages.

You can get all these stations via streaming at their websites, but I suggest unearthing that old radio and giving it a try. For a simple piece of technology, it’s pretty amazing. You don’t need to pay for 5G or an internet connection; just plug it into the wall and settle in for some serious surprises.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

13

TERMS OF SERVICE

THE BITTERER THE BETTER

Fernet Branca: It’s not just for industry heads anymore

BY HALEY HAMILTON @SAUCYLIT

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

Boston’s Best Irish Pub

MONDAYS

WEDNESDAYS

THURSDAYS

MAKKA MONDAY

GEEKS WHO DRINK

ELEMENTS

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

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

RE:SET

WEDNESDAYS

Weekly Dance Party, House, Disco, Techno, Local & International DJ’s 19+, 10PM - 1AM

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

FRIDAYS

SATURDAYS

PRETTY YOUNG THING

BOOM BOOM ROOM

80’s Old School & Top 40 Dance hits 21+, 10PM - 2AM

80’s, 90’s, 00’s One Hit Wonders 21+, 10PM - 2AM

THE BEST ENTERTAINMENT IN CAMBRIDGE 7 DAYS A WEEK!

1/2 PRICED APPS DAILY 5 - 7PM WATCH EVERY SOCCER GAME! VOTED BOSTON’S BEST SOCCER BAR ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE

Saturdays & Sundays Every Game shown live in HD on 12 Massive TVs. We Show All European Soccer including Champions League, Europa League, German, French, Italian & Spanish Leagues.

CHECK OUT ALL PHOENIX LANDING NIGHTLY EVENTS AT:

WWW.PHOENIXLANDINGBAR.COM

14

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

“Oh my god, what was that?”

“Ah! It burns!”

“It’s so minty, and… something…”

These are some common responses to someone taking their first shot of Fernet Branca, an Italian digestif with longstanding cult status among American bartenders. At 80 proof and with free bottles built into every case purchased, Fernet, as it’s most often called and ordered as, is a kick-in-the-face shot that costs a bar very little to pour.

It helps that it’s a, let’s just say, acquired taste.

And now through May 27 you have a rare opportunity to acquire not just a taste for Fernet, but to learn all the unique ways this peculiarly flavored spirit can be used in cocktails. This week, the Great Bitter Bar pops up at Eataly at the Prudential Center and features five cocktails with Fernet Branca to (re)introduce people to the intricacies of the digestif.

“It’s a very interesting time for spirits right now,” said Fratelli Branca portfolio manager Peter Gugni. “We’re seeing a lot of boutique spirits coming into the mainstream market, and one of the most popular categories is amari.”

Amari, plural of amaro, or bitter in Italian, are herbal liqueurs traditionally consumed after dinner in Italy, and Italians have been making and drinking them for years. (Fernet Branca, for example, has been produced in Milan since 1845.) All of them are very different from each other; Montenegro, for one, is fairly sweet with notes of orange, while Santa Maria al Monte is full of cinnamon and clove. Yet they all fall under the same category of spirit.

“What makes amari so cool and unique is that if you look at other spirits, vodka say, or even bourbon, if I put it in a cocktail you probably can’t tell me which one I put in there,” Gugni said.

With amari, you always know.

“There’s so many different botanicals and styles of amari, so while they’re all the same family, they’re all very distinct.”

For bartenders, Fernet Branca is one of the trickiest spirits to play with in cocktails: A little bit goes a very long way, and it’s easy to overpower a drink with even a quarter ounce too much. So, while I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about Mario Batali (thanks for that cinnamon roll recipe as apology for sexual assault, dude), I’m excited about the Great Bitter Bar from a professional standpoint, as well as what it’s doing to educate people about a class of spirits that the average drinker may not know a whole lot about. It’s going to be a rare event, one for booze geeks and casual drinkers alike: You’ll have the opportunity to try this spirit in multiple combinations—neat, on the rocks, in a variety of cocktails—and then, because Eataly is the monstrous and overwhelming Italian emporium it is, you can do something you can’t do in bars or liquor stores.

“You can try a spirit, you can try a cocktail featuring that spirit, and then, if you find something you like, you can take a short walk across the hall and buy that spirit you just tried and you enjoy,” Gugni said. “The only way you’re going to be able to figure out which amari you love, what they pair with, is if you go out and experience them.”

And everyone ought to experience Fernet. At least once.

Who knows, you might even like it.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

THE FRESHMAN 15 MUSIC

Rising local artists to keep your eyes on

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

There’s a newfound excitement and genuine eagerness that comes with starting school as a freshman. While the following artists certainly aren’t at the beginning stages of learning how to make music, they are at the early stages of their artist careers—and we can’t wait to see how they flourish.

The following list is a who’s who of rising musical acts in the Boston scene. To highlight the true small artists of the city, the acts chosen have only released songs or EPs since forming. Those in DigBoston’s end of the year lists aren’t included. Those who have released an album aren’t included. Those who have been profiled aren’t included.

Instead, the following acts are pure rising talent, and we’re holding out for them to have their blow-up moments real soon.

BANANA Record label Anxiety Pop is slowly becoming the Flying Nun Records of Boston. Its newest release is Die Alone pt. 2, the newest EP by rising trio Banana. While their songs fluctuate between yappy indie rock and sludge pop, Banana’s most dependable quality is the rawness, a trait that the band embraces openly to give their songs personality. If you need to air off your chest like you’re listening to Nirvana in middle school again except way cooler, this is the band to listen to.

BOSTON CREAM After steadily releasing four singles since 2016, Boston Cream finally has an EP to show for their work.

The five-piece indie punk band—comprised of Melanie

an enjoyable one surfaces. If you’re lucky, it will be half as enduring as Dim’s two EPs. New England’s finest purveyors of sludge, doom, and death metal remain one of its most hidden to casual listeners, despite cultivating a small following in Europe. Don’t worry; none of the heaviness will bore you to death. Music Man and Sunn amp worshippers, this one’s for you.

ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL It’s been four years of Elizabeth Colour Wheel making a name for itself, and yet technically the doom-lovin’ shoegaze band still falls in this category. Three EPs, a few singles, and dozens of shows later, the band celebrated its first label release this year thanks to Midnight Werewolf, who released Queen Tired. With harrowing, intense vocals, creeping bass, and thrashing drums, the EP delivers on everything the band is known for: a loud, distorted, bewitching experience. It’s time the Elizabeth Colour Wheel hype finally crosses over to the mainstream so the Allston act can get the extensive fandom and critical praise it deserves.

FAWN Though the music is totally bare-boned, there’s a big anticipatory feeling lurking behind the music of Fawn. The folk rock project of Anne Malin Ringwalt and Will Johnson is an outlet for self-described “metastasis, meta-stasis, and meditation.” Their songs deliver on that. Just like Angel Olsen lets her wavering words hang in the air, all powerful delivery and deeply felt emotion, Ringwalt’s voice will haunt you on jaunty and slow burning songs alike. With two standalone singles and a 2016 EP called Neither Dog Nor Car, the latter recorded by Medford artist Elio DeLuca, Fawn is shaping up to be a haunting listen that will make you stand still no matter where it is you hear its music.

(CLOCKWISE STARTING TOP-LEFT) ANSON RAP$, PHOTO COURTESY OF ANSON; BANANA, PHOTO COURTESY OF BANANA; GRACE GIVERTZ, PHOTO COURTESY OF GRACE GIVERTZ; AUBREY HADDARD, PHOTO COURTESY OF AUBREY HADDARD; LUNGLUST, PHOTO COURTESY OF LUNGLUST; TUFT, PHOTO COURTESY OF TUFT ANSON RAP$ The reason it’s so quiet right now is because ANSON RAP$ is about to create a storm—despite having no mixtape or EP to his name. Born and raised in Boston, Anson Frazier is a local through and through, which puts him in the perfect spot to push his rap to the next level of Boston’s artistic and visual standards. His big single “MVMNT” lays the foundation for the type of flow to expect from ANSON RAP$. His cameos with Avenue and Treva Holmes show whose radars he’s on. Best of all, he rubs elbows with artists like Oompa, Dutch ReBelle, and Billy Dean Thomas, establishing himself as a community member who’s plotting a big surprise.

Bernier, Ryan Connelly, Peach S. Goodrich, Joe Marrett, and Nicholas Ward—has a flair for the disco era, and they let its influence show in creative ways on Mine: shaker flourishes, synth runs, and reverb-dipped vocals. It’s all the fun of a basement show without the inescapable sweat. They deliver on the city moniker, too, with odes to college outfits, Boston humidity, and the Mass Ave bridge. It’s a certified tasty listen, but that much is a given, right?

DIM Metal is one of the most tawdry genres, if only because of how many musicians pick it up without doing any of its subgenres justice. For every 10 tacky records you find,

AUBREY HADDARD Sometimes all it takes is a voice. Singer-songwriter Aubrey Haddard has been slowly building up her sound, but her voice has been a fame-fitting shoe-in ever since she dropped her first and only EP, Adult Lullabies, back in 2016.

TUE 05.22

WED 05.23

WED 05.23

[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston.

8:30pm/18+/$14. greatscottboston.com]

[Royale, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 7pm/18+/$18. royaleboston.com]

[First Church Somerville, 89 College Ave., Somerville.

8pm/all ages/$12. brownpapertickets.com]

MUSIC EVENTS SAT 05.19

SUN 05.20

TUE 05.22

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge.

7:30pm/18+/$20. sinclaircambridge.com]

[Middlesex Lounge, 315 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. 5pm/21+/$15. middlesexlounge.us]

[Blue Hills Bank Pavilion, 290 Northern Ave., Boston. 7pm/all ages/$72. bostonpavilion.com]

VINYL VAUDEVILLE FLOOR KIDS GAME KID KOALA + ADIRA AMRAM AND THE EXPERIENCE + DJ JESTER

16

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

GERMANY’S MINIMALIST TECHNO TAKES ACID HELENA HAUFF + OBJEKT + AARON J

DIGBOSTON.COM

GRACE GIVERTZ Take one look at Grace Givertz and you would never know what’s coming. The indie folk singersongwriter is a tour de force musician. On her only EP, last year’s The Light, she flexes her verbal wit while juggling guitar, banjo, ukulele, harmonica, and foot tambourine. So when she name-drops global warminginduced sweat and openly sobbing in the same breath with a cheeky joy, hearty harmonica breezing in its wake, the only real option is to smile at how much she packs into a tiny punch of a song. Give her a stage and the crowds will come in no time.

UNFRIENDLY REMINDER OF RAP TOUR BIG SEAN + PLAYBOI CARTI + SHY GLIZZY + GASHI

TELL ME HOW IT FELT, AVANT-ROCK STYLE SUUNS + FACS

ALMOST HAD TO START AN INDIE ROCK FIGHT PARQUET COURTS + GOAT GIRL

SOLO LIFE AFTER CAN AND TENTH PLANET MALCOLM MOONEY + HERBCRAFT

MUSIC

LOUD AND CLEAR

Boston musicians take over the live stage Armed with an acoustic guitar and a soulful spirit, Haddard rocks the chill acoustic vibes of Corinne Bailey Rae with the casually enormous lungs of Lianne La Havas.

She resurfaced this year with lively single “I Should Know Better.” As she belts through a chorus about oncoming jadedness, the energy of a proper band behind her, we can’t help but wait around for more.

I WISH I COULD SKATEBOARD Boston has emo bands, but good luck finding a well-recorded one. Please make way for I Wish I Could Skateboard, one of the only new bands who waves emo and pop punk flags without getting caught up in their own image. The four-piece sees guitarist and vocalist Patrick McPherson, bassist Hannah Fletcher, guitarist James Alvarado, and drummer Brandon Hall split their time between Boston and Tyler, Texas they’ve been able to release two EPs: 2014’s I Appreciate Your Lack of Confidence and 2017’s Alternative Lifestyle. Every title reads like a joke, and yet the band sounds like a serious colleague of Glocca Morra, Tigers Jaw, or Joyce Manor.

INNOCENT Please keep your two-minute hardcore songs as far away as possible. Once you’ve done that, let a band like Innocent show you how straightforward hardcore punk should be. With a short demo tape and the four-song Power Is Violence EP, the four-piece churns out aggressive, rapid-fire, and uncorrupted punk that dabbles in D-beat. Samantha yells her vocals with an occasional shriek, registering them so high that it’s hard to pick out exactly what’s being said. By the time one minutelong song ends, another starts, and all you can do is live in the feeling she and her bandmates kick up. As with anything on the Side Two record label, it’s a promising band that doesn’t overcomplicate things. Just look at their sole two Bandcamp tags: “Punk,” “Boston.”

KÁRMÁN VOH Boston listeners who like their indie rock with a side of weird offness will be happy to know a band like Kármán Voh lives in their backyard. The Jamaica Plain musical project of Pasha Koskins merges shoegaze, pop, muted electronica, and post-punk in a perfectly produced bubble. The final product sounds like the more stunning and elegant songs in Deerhunter’s catalog or B-sides to Thom Yorke’s The Eraser—massive comparisons, and yet they’re incredibly apt. With only this year’s If Only Apart EP and a nine-song release from last year in the act’s catalog, Kármán Voh is primed for a big breakout once more soon-to-be fans discover its out there.

MMPH The world of experimental electronics can be sorted into three categories: uptempo, bizarre, or meditative. While it’s tempting to place mmph in the latter category, the Seoul-born, Boston-based producer manages to dance between all three. At just 24 years old, Sae Heum Han found a way to merge classical training and sound design. His debut EP, Dear God, skates beautifully through ambient, noise, and avant-techno, reminding us how nice it is to hear an experimental electric act that forgoes the genre’s stereotypes without actively trying to avoid them.

NECK Focus leads to fruition, especially when determination enters the equation.

Last fall, experimental duo Neck arrived on the scene as a live act and quickly got to work creating a proper studio effort. Hand It Over, the resulting debut EP, is a surprisingly patient listen. Singer and guitarist Kira McSpice and bassist Bailey Hein roll forward in a slow daze, letting synths and Omnichord echo around them with levity despite addressing loaded topics like mental health. If it took the duo several months to create a mesmerizing EP, then who knows what the two will roll out in a year’s time.

OZLO The hardest part of making intricate music is making it sound easy. With only two EPs to its name, alt math rock trio ozlo has already figured out how to do that.

Guitarist and vocalist Jess Schmid, bassist and vocalist Tallie Hausser, and drummer Joren Carlson balance heavy, roving instrumentation with alluring straightforward vocals. The way their dueling guitars knot themselves and then unknot themselves is addicting, the type of complicated math rock that still wants unfamiliar listeners to follow along. Listen to this year’s Sorry Charlie EP to try to figure out how the three make it work.

TUFT The perfect comedown music takes its form in slowcore, a genre that’s as obvious as the title implies. Tuft, the solo project of Jessica Hesse, is a vaguely selfdeprecating outlet for sad, jangly guitar and half-whispered ruminations. Tuft uses that musical style to make her sole EP, Whoever Gets You in the End, a personable expression of unhurried self-examination in the vein of Bedhead and Pedro the Lion. In other words, when you want to fall asleep but know you won’t anytime soon, this is what you should put on.

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

If you want to understand Boston’s local music, then you’ve got to see our city’s musicians perform live. Take out your calendar and grab a pen. These are five shows you shouldn’t miss this week, each geared toward showing you a different side of what the Boston music scene has to offer, from rock to rap to old-school folk. Don’t worry about price points either; not a single show crosses the $15 mark. Hell, some are even free. So get outside and get to know what our local musicians are brewing. Just don’t forget earplugs.

JULIE RHODES, CARISSA JOHNSON AND THE CURE-ALLS, AUBREY HADDARD ONCE SOMERVILLE @ 8 PM FRI, MAY 18 $12, 18+ If Boston followed Kathleen Hanna’s advice and all the women really did go to the front of the stage, then it wouldn’t look much different than it already does now. Our music scene continues to flourish thanks to hundreds of female and nonbinary artists, each churning out their own style and voice. Spend Friday night with some of our current favorites. Julie Rhodes has an award-winning blues and soul voice that will make your hairs stand up. Carissa Johnson can shred, as evidence by her taking the grand prize (and title!) at last year’s Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble competition. New to the scene is Aubrey Haddard, an indie soul pop singer who recalls some of radio’s brightest and happiest-sounding artists. For $12, this show is more than a steal.

YANI BATTEAU & THE STYLES, BROOK BATTEAU LILYPAD INMAN @ 5:30 PM SAT, MAY 19 $12, ALL AGES The influx of students in Boston is a product of dozens of colleges rooted in the city.

Look closer, though, and a handful of long-term residents will rise from the 20-something crowd, people who’ve learned how to get by here long enough to create art at their own pace. Yani Batteau is one of those musicians. Bringing the traditional folk, Appalachian music, and vintage country music back into style, she sings with an unbothered voice, picking at her banjo in the traditional claw hammer style. It’s a soothing sound and one that often gets overlooked. She and Brook Batteau perform before Saturday’s sunset, leaving you with plenty of time for your normal Saturday night activities.

VAPORS OF MORPHINE ATWOOD’S TAVERN @ 10 PM SAT, MAY 19 $8, 21+ Right on the cusp of 1990, one of Boston’s most influential bands, though never quite a household name, formed: Morphine. Led by Mark Sandman, Dana Colley, and Jerome Deupree, the Cambridge alt-rock act challenged the genre to get a little weirder and sparser, bringing blues and jazz techniques into the mix while Sandman sang with a deep, lackadaisical drawl. When Sandman died from a heart attack in 1999, it seemed like that was it for the band — until they formed a new, essentially tribute, act called Vapors of Morphine with guitarist Jeremy Lyons 10 years later. The band takes the stage this Saturday evening to what will be a dedicated and zoned-in room at Atwood’s Tavern.

HONEYSUCKLE, DIETRICH STRAUSE & THE BLUE RIBBONS, OOMPA LIZARD LOUNGE @ 7 PM TUE, MAY 22 FREE, 21+ Boston Calling Music Festival may grab the big names from a sea of international artists, but this Tuesday night show celebrating what the local scene has to offer is a festival all its own. Head over to Cambridge to celebrate Local Calling, an event where homegrown talent can blossom and anyone is allowed to listen in. One of our favorite Americana acts, Honeysuckle, will perform their blend of traditional and modern folk with a roots influence. Dietrich Strause and the Blue Ribbons will work their way through melodic jazz rock, twisting songs with a pop flair. Best of all, Roxbury’s own poet and rapper Oompa, the face of our most recent music cover story, will be there to spread truths about what it’s like losing family and growing up queer, black, and orphaned. Plus, the festival is offering attendees a chance to win two passes to Boston Calling as part of a raffle prize event. And if all of that wasn’t enough, did we mention it’s free?

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

THEATER REVIEW PERFORMING ARTS

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

ZEITGEIST STAGE COMPANY’S PRODUCTION OF LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! PHOTO BY RICHARD HALL/SILVERLINE IMAGES.

A TERRIFIC LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! AT ZEITGEIST STAGE

LIVE MUSIC • PRIVATE EVENTS 5/17

Tsunami Bomb, Diablogato, & Senior Discount Punk rock 5/18

Julie Rhodes, Carissa Johnson and the Cure-Alls, & Aubrey Haddard Powerhouse vocalist 5/19

Kingsley Flood, Glenn Yoder & the Western States, & Andrea Gillis Indie rock 5/20

Erin Harpe & the Delta Swingers, The Claudettes, & The Wrong Shapes Delta blues 5/21

Lou Barlow SOLD OUT

Alternative singer-songwriter

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

18

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

There’s no getting around the fact that Love! Valour! Compassion! Terrence McNally’s 1994 Tony-winning dramedy, is beginning to show its age.

It was the talk of the town 24 years ago when it opened at the Manhattan Theater Club and promptly made the leap to Broadway. Although Angels in America had already made waves (it closed just three months prior to Love! Valour! Compassion!’s opening on Broadway), it was still a relatively taboo thing for such an overtly gay play to become both a critical smash and a hit at the box office. (The far less successful film adaptation would come two years later.)

And even if the play no longer feels like it crackles with modern urgency and that it doesn’t totally speak to—forgive me—the zeitgeist of this very moment the way that it did 24 years ago, Love! Valour! Compassion! remains a treasured contemporary work that is being given a worthy and totally absorbing revival at Zeitgeist Stage.

Set in 1994 at a semi-upstate New York country home, each act of the play takes place over three consecutive holiday weekends: Memorial Day, July Fourth, and Labor Day. The house belongs to Gregory (a genuine David Anderson), who is a choreographer nearing the end of his dancing career. His boyfriend of four years, Bobby, played with great gentility by Cody Sloan, is blind and is significantly younger than Gregory.

Also joining them are Perry and Arthur (played with sincerity by Joey C. Pelletier and Keith Foster), longtime boyfriends who hold good regular jobs and whose long-term relationship and reliable jobs set them apart from their other friends.

Many of the evening’s laughs—and there are many—belong to Buzz (an exquisitely funny Jeremy Johnson), a musical theater queen with a capital “Q” who claims to have been conceived after a performance of Wildcat, a notorious Broadway flop that marked Lucille Ball’s only Broadway appearance. But for all of his flamboyance, his shiny exterior begins to show some cracks as Buzz, who is HIV-positive, worries about when his time will come and who will be by his side when it does. (Thankfully, being HIV-positive is no longer a death sentence, and this is just one of the things that makes the play feel dated.)

Seeming to not quite gel with the rest of the group is John, a pompous Brit still bitter from his failed musical, and his new lover, Ramon (Michael J. Blunt), whose lasciviousness becomes a problem over the course of the summer. John’s brother, James (also HIV-positive), arrives later in the summer and quickly forms a bond with Buzz.

Brooks Reeves, giving one of the best performances of the year, plays both John and James. (I dare you not to shed a tear during his third-act monologue.)

The play unfolds with the nonchalance of a long summer weekend (or, in this case, three of them) and is a rich study not only of friendship and love but of the cruelty of time and how—sickness or not—time rarely leaves any fruit on the tree.

Love! Valour! Compassion! suffers a bit from too much sentimentality— sentimentality that Miller’s production does not completely mitigate, though it can hardly be faulted for it. There is a great deal of heart that radiates from Miller’s affectionate revival and from the terrific ensemble of actors that make Love! Valour!

Compassion! one of my favorite productions of the year.

LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! THROUGH 5.19 AT ZEITGEIST STAGE, 539 TREMONT ST., BOSTON. ZEITGEISTSTAGE.COM

GALLERY REVIEWS VISUAL ARTS

“A

POIGNANT AND WELL-TOLD LOVE STORY.” THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Three shows at the Davis Museum

John Carroll Lynch

BY FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH

and

Matt Bomer Maura Tierney

Fragment: A Museum’s Midcentury Legacy The concept of Fragment is to give a loving, one-room exhibition to specimens donated to the Davis in the name of scholarly and aesthetic interest despite the fact that they had been broken off of something else, or something had been broken off of them. Absent sufficient context, commentary is cut short. The viewer is forced to look and wonder. This is a delight.

Fragment features a high-relief stone Gautama from the third-century Kushan Dynasty, which was philosophically Greek, linguistically Iranian, and religiously Buddhist. The sculpture makes felt all three cultures. A chunk of marble depicting three toes and a bit of instep to hold them together, from the fourth century BCE, is executed with delicacy that inspires fantasies about the rest of the Hellenistic masterpiece. Nothing but an eye-catching abstraction of folds remains of a little clay Tanagra figure from the same time. Worn heads from medieval France to ancient Mexico mug at us from across history, connecting.

Show runs until 5.26. Steven Zevitas Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., #47, Boston. stevenzevitasgallery.com

DANVERS AMC Loews EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT STARTS FRIDAY Liberty Tree Mall 20 amctheatres.com

CHECK DIRECTORIES FOR SHOWTIMES NO PASSES ACCEPTED

DigBoston

digboston.com WEDNESDAY 05/16 2 COL. (4.62”) X 2” ALL.ANYTHI.0516.BWD

#1

/weeklydig

@digboston

TM

@digstagram

Artists Take Action! Recent Acquisitions from the Davis Artists Take Action further confirms my impression that with the exception of examples in contemporary comics, political art in a graphic mode has been all but killed off by simpleminded outrage. Sue Coe has produced much better work than her 2017 linocut in which the bellowing visage of Donald Trump blocks out the sun as Klansmen and a Nazi maraud innocents on the ground. The title, Total Eclipse of Rationality, is scrawled across the top, in case the image itself is too subtle.

Shepard Fairey’s kohl-eyed beauty wearing a hijab made from an American flag is typical of his overstyled sterility. It is political art attempted, ridiculously, on the template of Patrick Nagel.

Works from 50 years ago fare better, particularly Ron Borowski’s humane photograph of a black man with stars and stripes grease-painted on half of his face.

The choice of a model resembling the recently assassinated Martin Luther King was deliberate. It hails from a time when complexity was still possible.

Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography 1895-1925 This thorough exhibition of Clarence White and associated figures handsomely displays seminal photographic works. While his sense of invention was confined largely to technical matters, White was a master of them, with due influence.

His is an unusual case of a politically progressive, aesthetically conservative artist. He produced a series of portraits of early American socialists that were informed, like the rest of his work, by tonalism. Thus a 1909 palladium print shows Rose Pastor Stokes in a flowing dress on the shoreline, standing in profile with her mouth agape and her hair blown back, as if she has just wandered out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration.

Lacking a single modernist bone in his body and felled by a heart attack at 54, it was left to his reverent students to unmoor from Thomas Dewing and Utamaro and chase down the inherent possibilities of the medium. A striking still life of cheese and crackers from 1922 by Paul Outerbridge indicates what was to come.

Fragment and Artists shows run until 6.10. White show runs until 6.3. Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley. wellesley.edu/davismuseum

These shorts are being simultaneously published at Delicious Line, deliciousline.org.

Franklin Einspruch is the editor-in-chief of Delicious Line.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

IFFB 2018 LAST REPORT: FAVE(S) OF THE FEST FILM

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

IMAGE COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Of the films I saw at this year’s truly invigorating iteration of the Independent Film Festival Boston, five stand out above the rest and keep returning to interrupt my thoughts. Of those five, one is a film that I wrote about in a prior report (Stephen Maing’s Crime + Punishment [2018]), another is a short film that a Dig colleague wrote about in a separate report (Andrew James’ Community Patrol [2018]), and two others are films that we’ll feature in future issues (Paul Schrader’s First Reformed [2018] and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace [2018]—we’ll be publishing interviews with the directors of each, starting with the former next week). Which leaves one as yet undiscussed…

SUPPORT THE GIRLS, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski Something of a “shift film”: It begins with credits laid over shots of Texas highways (a commute), then charts the workday at an independently operated faux-Hooters restaurant from open until close (followed by a coda).

The credit sequence itself preps you for the graceful whiplashes of Bujalski’s cinema—the titles play over upbeat country pop until the film smash-cuts to a person in a parking lot crying helplessly in their car. That is Lisa 20

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

(Regina Hall), general manager at Double Whammies, who maintains a legitimately humanitarian streak in operating this not-quite-humanitarian business (her characterization borders on the Capraesque); the film’s other characters include Danyelle (Shayna McHayle), her second in command, who on this day is accompanied by her preteen son (home sick from school); Maci (Haley Lu Richardson), an archetypal source-of-unendingoptimism type (she tends bar and serves tables, and has the disposition for it); Jennelle (Dylan Gelula), who gets hired right as the day begins (in part because Lisa can tell it’s going to be a stressful one); Bobo (Lea DeLaria), a regular customer who hits on the servers from dusk until dawn (but also serves as an unofficial bouncer whenever necessary); and Cubby (James Le Gros), the owner of the business, who’s been considering the prospect of firing Lisa and who uses all the happenings of this particular shift—which include low-stakes happenings like a failed robbery, an unlawful car wash, a few brief scuffles, and a cable outage—as justification toward revisiting that possibility. Support the Girls is not exactly what you’d call a realistic film. More accurate to call it a commercial American ensemble comedy, and one directed in a manner that recalls the “classical” form of that genre. Yet

it nonetheless gives emphatic dramatic attention to the circumstances, textures, and minutiae inherent to actually working in a public-facing American business in the 21st century—it considers that subject within contexts including gender, race, and class, but also in purely experiential terms—the film attaches real tension to, say, the prospect of being put on hold during an important call when you also need to be out on the floor managing five other different tasks.

That’s all to say that Support the Girls is “about many things”—it’s about the durational qualities of full-time employment in the service industry, it’s about racial dynamics in the American workplace, it’s about the energy of a business managed by a woman contrasted against the energy of a business managed by a man, it’s about the psychosexual landscape of places where sexuality is both commodified and rigorously controlled, it’s about a group of working-class women just trying to make it through one day in the 2010s—and also to say that, for the most part, in my estimation, it “gets it right”.

But this subtextual description also undersells the surface of the film, which is so delicately and elegantly tuned on a moment-by-moment basis: Credit goes to Bujalski’s exceptional screenwriting, which continues to match keenly observed verbal tics up with dialogue that’s truly fucking funny (“I love being professional,” via Jennelle, trying to get the job, “that’s always, like, huge for me”), but credit also to his actors, particularly Hall and McHayle, who orchestrate and execute those whiplash turns with performances that shift even quicker than the script (the film’s most ostensibly comedic moment pointedly turned sour by the way that Hall reacts to it—and you might find yourself processing the implications of that moment long afterward).

What’s happening throughout it all is this push-pull, this beautiful teetering: the film rocking between its engagement with the recognizable and its flirtations with the fantastical, with the ecstatically literary, with the blazingly cinematic. At one point the most banal space in the movie—the nondescript brown-painted backside of the restaurant—is brightened up by an entirely unexpected explosion of confetti and streamers—a jubilant intrusion of the cinematic unreal on a space one might’ve already processed as being utterly grounded (the incongruity of the moment plays like a mission statement). As for the men in the film, they’re little more than blank walls themselves—with a couple exceptions, they’re presented as figures of grotesquerie, bringing nothing to the film’s spaces but violence and conflict (it doesn’t seem accidental that the climactic “set piece” involves a professional fight being televised above the bar). Yet Bujalski’s cinematic treatment of the movie’s women, in telling contrast, is humane to an extent that’s affecting in and of itself. With just a dolly movement, he takes an act as simple as a restaurant manager checking in on one last table on the way out the door and instills the gesture with a real sense of dignity. It finds the grace of the everyday, the workaday, without ever stepping outside its genre. I thought about Ernst Lubitsch and The Shop Around the Corner [1940], and I thought about Jonathan Demme and Swing Shift [1984] and Melvin and Howard [1980], and of two phrases that Pauline Kael once wrote in reference to the latter: first, “what might have happened if Jean Renoir had directed a comedy script by Preston Sturges,” and second, “an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination.”

Support the Girls will be released theatrically on Aug 24 and will be available on VOD four days later.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

SAVAGE LOVE

COMEDY EVENTS

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

THU 05.17

IN NEED OF DICK TRICKS Savage Love Live at Denver’s Oriental Theater last week was epic. I fielded sex questions in front of a sold-out crowd, singer-songwriter Rachel Lark performed amazing news songs, comedian Elise Kerns absolutely killed it, and Tye—a token straight guy plucked at random from the audience—joined us onstage and gave some pretty great sex advice! We couldn’t get to all the audience questions during the show, so I’m going to race through as many unanswered questions as I can in this week’s column…

You’ve famously said, “Oral comes standard.” How long before anal comes standard?

How does a week from next Tuesday grab you?

I enjoyed a great sex life with many kinky adventures until my husband died suddenly two years ago. I have insurance $$$ and a house to sell and a dream of using the proceeds to become a sexpositive therapist. Crazy idea? Or something the world needs more of?

Judging by how many people tell me they’re having a hard time finding sex-positive, kink-positive, open-positive, and poly-positive therapists, I would definitely file “sex-positive therapist” under “world needs more of.” Chase that dream!

What resources are available—which do you recommend—to share with my male partner so he can improve (learn) oral sex? (Girl oral sex!)

Two more book recommendations: The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus: How to Go Down on a Woman and Give Her Exquisite Pleasure by Violet Blue and She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman by Ian Kerner.

How do you prioritize sex with your partner when life gets so busy and masturbation is so much easier? My fiancé is down for quickies sometimes but not always.

Forgive my tautology, but you prioritize sex by prioritizing sex.

Scheduled sex can be awesome sex—and when you’re truly pressed for time, you can always masturbate together.

DON’T TELL BOSTON

South End Soccer is a youth soccer league that provides free programs to over 1,200 Boston youth annually. We work to bring together our diverse community through soccer, and break the barriers of economics and logistics that hinder urban youth playing sports. We strive to have youth and families of all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds thus connecting neighbors in a way that rarely happens today. Because of the generosity of our 60+ volunteer coaches, board of directors, community partners and sponsors, we are able to give inner city youth the opportunity to play and engender a love for the world’s most popular sport.

Don’t Tell Comedy is a secret comedy show that hosts some of the best and brightest comedians in the United States. This time around we will be in Boston, MA in the South End neighborhood. Purchase a ticket and the exact location will be emailed to you by our event coordinator the day of the show. To purchase tickets you can go to our website: http://www.donttellcomedy.com.

SOUTH END| 7:30PM | $20-$30 THU 05.17 - SAT 5.19

SEAN PATTON @ LAUGH BOSTON

Sean Patton is a comedian based in Los Angeles and New York, by way of New Orleans. He’s performed on Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Conan. 2013 also marked the release of his Comedy Central Half Hour. He’s been on @midnight and was on the second seasons of The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail and This Is Not Happening, Showtime’s Live from SXSW and TruTv’s Comedy Knockout, As for acting, He’s appeared on IFC’S Maron, Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer and TruTV’s Those who can’t.

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8PM & 10PM | $25-$29 SAT 05.19

BOSTON COMICS @ CENTER FOR ARTS NATICK

Featuring: Kenny Rogerson, Mike Koutroubis, & Jeff Koen.

14 SUMMER ST., NATICK | 8PM | $20

How do I come out to my family as a stripper? I’ve been dancing for more than two years and don’t plan to stop. Some of my family members are biased against sex workers, but I’m tired of keeping up the facade (I told them I’m a bartender).

SUN 05.20

It’s a catch-22: People are afraid to come out to their closedminded families as queer or poly or sex workers or atheists, but closed-minded families typically don’t open their minds until after their queer or poly or sex working or nonbelieving kids come out to them. To open their minds, you’ll have to risk blowing them first. Tell them your truth and stand your ground.

ALLSTON | 7:30PM | $20-$30

I keep having sex dreams about Kanye West. What does that mean?

You’re Mike Pence.

On the Lovecast, A study of lethal asphyxiation. Spoiler: Don’t do it. savagelovecast.com.

COMEDY NIGHT @ TAVOLO

Featuring: Laura Severse, Arty Przychodzki, Wes Hazard, & Dan Boulger.

Hosted by Ellen Sugarman & Brett Johnson

MON 05.21

FREE COMEDY @ CITYSIDE

Featuring: Martin Urbano & more.

Hosted by Sam Ike and Anjan Biswas

1960 BEACON ST., BRIGHTON | 8:30PM | FREE TUE 05.22

BEER ME! FREE COMEDY @ WINTER HILL BREWERY

Featuring: Kylie Alexander, Ryan Chani, Carolyn Riley, Alvin David, & Graig Murphy.

Hosted by Peter Martin

328 BROADWAY, SOMERVILLE | 9PM | FREE WED 05.23

8 O’CLOCK AT 730 @ 730 TAVERN, KITCHEN & PATIO

Featuring: Ellen Sugarmen, Shawn Carter, Pete Andrews, Laura Severse, James Creelman, & Al Park.

Hosted by Rob Crean & Liam McGurk

730 MASS AVE., CAMBRIDGE | 8PM | FREE

Lineup & shows to change without notice. For more shows & info visit BostonComedyShows.com savagelovecast.com 22

05.17.18 - 05.24.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

This product contains zero THC

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Gregory Csikos, CPA csikoscpa.com TAXATION ACCOUNTING PLANNING

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

I’m a Boston-based CPA here to provide a full spectrum of accounting and tax services to meet the needs of individuals, small businesses, start-ups, and non-profit organizations. My clients get more than an experienced and dedicated accountant, they get a problem solver. I thrive on breaking down complex issues into practical steps, allowing you to focus your energies on what matters most to you.

From helping you keep accurate books to the filing of your tax returns, I handle the numbers while you focus on handling your life. ​Call to find

out more at 857.636.1694 NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23

Providing the

$200

highest-quality

DISCOUNT

medical marijuana

For New Customers

products and the

CALL OR VISIT US

very best in

ONLINE FOR DETAILS

customer care to the

617-213-6006

Greater Boston area

revolutionaryclinics.org

FLOWER INFUSED CONCENTRATES NON-MEDICATED ACCESSORIES Do Something Revolutionary

Come Join Us!

67 Broadway Somerville, MA 02145 617.213.6006

revolutionaryclinics.org Free patient education, materials, consultation and regular patient events!

Learn more:

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

Revolutionary Clinics

FREE ON-SITE

PARKING

I-93

Sullivan Sq. (Orange Line + Buses)

/RevClinics

@RevClinics

�� ��� ��� ���� ������