DigBoston 6.28.18

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ROYALE

BOSTON STANDS UP

I was standing in the middle of a beautiful benevolent Beacon Street mob by the State House last week when a woman behind me yelled out, “He’s signing it. He just said that he’s gonna sign it. The president is going to sign an executive order.”

It was too late. By that point, people had already been disgusted with our moron POTUS and his racist stubborn immigration dance for years, and particularly outraged about his administration’s child separation policy for the last several weeks. No sudden turnaround on said horrendous policy, no matter how sincere (it wasn’t) or feasible (not that either) it may have been, could have pushed back the voices that had come to Beacon Hill to call for change. For the force they brought into the State House was that of a tide that had been ebbing for the longest, a gushing presence of people ranging from long-fighting immigrant activists to young people newly perturbed by the lack of humanity on such clear display these past couple of weeks.

Unless it’s First Night, the Fourth of July, or a championship sports parade, if there are that many folks crowding the streets of Boston, there’s usually negative national news in the air. This time it happened to be the extraordinarily horrible treatment of migrants and children in particular, but in my 15 years of covering this stuff I’ve seen the tipping point approached a few times—when the second Bush and his gang started their war in the Middle East, when Barack Obama let creatures of Wall Street not just clean up the enormous house of cards they toppled but allowed them to stack future decks with near impunity, and so on. These social forces may rise out of despair, but they also represent the best that we can be—a people and community that, while it may take quite a bit to motivate us since everybody’s always busy handling their own personal baggage, includes enough good and decent people who will rise up when monsters step too far out of acceptable boundaries. Like when the government gets caught abusing kids on camera.

As for those groups and individuals who always stand up on the right side of these issues, even when they aren’t in the headlines, here’s what Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition Executive Director Eva A. Millona said about Trump’s move that was announced from the crowd during MIRA’s action on Beacon Street last week.

This executive order does not reverse the “zero tolerance” policy initiated by this administration. Rather, it seeks to treat persecuted families as criminals. This is a despicable act that is a debasement of American values.

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MIRA added: In addition to continuing to detain and criminally prosecute people seeking refuge, the Executive Order calls on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek a modification of the settlement reached in Flores v Reno. “Flores settlement” dictates that U.S. Department of Homeland Security keep children in custody in the “least restrictive conditions” possible, provide basic necessities such as medical care, and separate them from adults to whom they have no relation.

“In seeking to overturn Flores, in seeking to deny basic dignity to asylum-seekers, this administration is once again dehumanizing immigrants,” Millona said. “We urge Congress to see these heinous actions for what they are and take immediate measures to truly protect children and families.

They must stand up and show the world that the values of this administration do not represent the values of our great nation.”

Co-signed.

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NEWS+OPINION

THE END OF THE WEED AS WE KNOW IT NEWS TO US

Dear people of 3018, this is what pre-recreational cannabis looked like. At least from my perspective.

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 2018 — I’m sitting on a couch inside an apartment on the South Shore. Since gentrification took hold in Boston proper, say about eight or so years ago, most of my dealers have retreated to the ’burbs, or more specifically to places such as Malden, Quincy, and Medford outside of the more bourgeois zip codes. Most of the cats I’ve copped from through the years spend a whole lot of time on the homefront, servicing their customers and playing Xbox, and so it makes sense to shack up in cheaper, roomier locales. Especially if they have their own grow ops, but that’s another story altogether.

My South Shore connect is right out of central casting.

On a recent trip to his den, which happened to be during the NBA playoffs, his man cave was swollen with friends.

Doobies the size of dildos were in full rotation, while his girlfriend served up bowls of pasta to the hungry mob. This time things are much more calm, though; there’s still a spliff in circulation, but he’s with just one other buddy playing Madden. I find a cushion, make myself at home, and puff away while waiting for my turn to speak.

After about 15 minutes, my guy turns to me and gives that look: You are now permitted to talk business. I order up the usual, a $100 bundle that gets me an eighth of flower (he has roughly 20 strains to choose from, each one with its own backstory and usefulness), plus a moon rock the size of a chicken nugget, and an assortment of four brownies and blondies that he advertises are baked by a former Top Chef runner-up. The culinary arrangement sounds official, and my dealer’s selling thousands of these treats a month, so I’m surprised to hear that he isn’t investing in the legal market.

“Fuck that shit,” he says, exhaling while laughing. “I’ve 4

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made at least 100k a year for as long as I can remember, and I never had to do a single application with the state.

I’m going into online marketing and spam mail—there’s a lot of money there. But I’m not going to sit around and compete with dispensaries owned by the same rich guys from Hingham and Duxbury who I have been selling weed to since high school.

“I made my money. I’m done. I’m getting the fuck out.”

1996 — I’m in a seemingly abandoned sweatshop in Manhattan’s garment district, standing on a giant sheet of plastic that’s unrolled across the floor of what must be tens of thousands of square feet of old factory floor space. The guy with dreadlocks who opened the steel door to let me in is clutching a battered semiautomatic rifle affixed with what I recognize from films as a banana clip. He gestures the nozzle toward the back right corner of the room, where there’s a group of dudes behind a bar surrounded by a cloud of smoke.

I’m halfway to them across the enormous plastic tarp when I realize the potential consequences; in no time at all, these guys could fill me with bullets and roll me up like a caucasian burrito. I have roughly seven grand on me, the spoils of a couple months of slinging weed and also steroids to the meathead athletes at my high school, and this is my big level up. But now I’m slightly worried about getting out of here alive.

To my relief, they’re some of the most cordial guys I’ve met in several years of selling weed. Artillery excluded, they’re even pretty welcoming. They never ask me to sit

down—there are no chairs or couches, so maybe that’s why—but they do pass me a blunt, offer a beer, and break down all the costs and options. I’m in and out in less than half an hour, my giant gym bag stuffed with product. I jump into my friend’s car and head back to Queens. My mom is out of town for the next month. The whole time she’s away, my living room’s the neighborhood dispensary.

2017 — We finally have recreational marijuana in Mass.

Well, kind of. The majority of folks who made it to the polls last November, on the same day dolts across the nation sent Donald Trump to Washington, voted in favor of cannabis and certain parameters for a subsequent law to be drafted by a special commission tapped by the governor, attorney general, and treasurer. But before said yet-to-be-appointed body gets to handing out retail licenses, it looks like legislators are going to meddle with the will of voters as much as they can.

At today’s hearing, which is apparently for advocates to explain shit to legislators that the latter should already know, State Treasurer Deb Goldberg uses her soapbox to explain, in unapologetic terms, that she wants higher marijuana taxes than are now on deck—they could already hit 12 percent in some municipalities that tack on a local option atop the state’s base and a 3.75 percent marijuana tax—in order to pay for an oversight program, which she says will cost about $10 million a year.

As for how much all those tax bucks could add up to—Mass Commissioner of Revenue Michael J. Heffernan presents an informative Department of Revenue study,

noting the jarring newness of such windfalls since the Commonwealth doesn’t tax medical cannabis. Using the rates reflected in the current bill and guidance from legal precedents in Washington and Colorado, Heffernan estimates that first-year revenue will come in at about $64 million, with that number bumping up to $132 million in year two. At the same time, DOR officials say there is uncertainty in their estimates, as they are basically assuming since it is a “market whose use has been heretofore illegal.”

2012 — My cousin calls me crying. “I really fucked up here, Chris.” You don’t say. Without a college degree, his chance of landing a halfway decent gig to pay the bills was hard enough. Now he is about to lose the job he has because his friends and he thought it would be a good idea to clambake in their car outside of Citi Field in Queens. I have comparable pocks on my own personal record, but I’m an independent journalist and have never really had a real job or a background check. Things are different for my cousin; this could impact his entire life.

We’re going to do everything we can to make the charges go away, but it isn’t looking good. My cousin doesn’t have a single prior arrest or conviction; still, his lawyer says that while expungement may come in due time and at a serious cost, his record will at least be tarnished temporarily.

Just another statistic, I guess; according to the ACLU, “of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88 percent were for simply having marijuana.” And while my cousin’s white, not all of his friends in the car were, and “nationwide, the arrest data revealed one consistent trend: significant racial bias. Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana.”

It’s 2012. One has to hope this changes sometime soon.

Not just in New York and Mass, but from coast to coast to coast.

2014 — It doesn’t take a soothsayer to see that cannabis is being normalized at relative lightspeed. But for some odd unknown reason, many of my peers and colleagues in the Massachusetts media are acting like prohibitionists deserve a voice in the ongoing debate over medical and recreational weed. And so I write this open letter to reporters about prohibition for WGBH, our local NPR and PBS outlet, hoping that one day eventually I’ll be proven right: [Dig reporters] universally apply an underlying belief, affirmed to varying degrees by Massachusetts voters twice now, that green is good. Sort of like how nearly everybody to the left of Limbaugh appropriately covers warming oceans

and gay marriage these days, with the benefit of the doubt going to progressive, not regressive forces, and to researchers instead of rhetoric. Too many of you enter from the other side, holding marijuana guilty until proven innocent by bureaucrats or your own editorial boards. That’s when you’re not making jokes about the munchies and giggling like a rookie smoker, or shamelessly sensationalizing with stock footage of grandma taking bong hits.

If my approach seems to mock traditional objective ideals, then consider just how glaringly subjective pot reporting has been thus far. Because if outlets really valued objectivity, then they would quote a patient in distress to counter every claim by DPH officials holding back the process. Furthermore, they would harangue politicians who baselessly equate cannabis with opiates, and perhaps even skewer banks for discriminating against caregivers.

2009 — I’m on assignment in Los Angeles, but my first day out here’s dedicated to figuring out how to get medical weed. Everything I’ve read online suggests that it should be quite easy to secure the right permissions, and so I’m scanning the back pages of alternative newspapers. The number of ads for green healing services is stunning, with each one claiming to provide the finest medicine in California, and I have to make a choice. There are essentially two kinds of dispensaries—those which are over-the-top clinical-looking, and a minority which shamelessly embrace the throwback tie-dyed stoner vibe. I choose one of the latter, mostly because they promise to provide a prescription on-site.

A nice guy sitting on a stool inside the front door of the weed spot redirects me back outside and to a wire staircase around the corner. Two flights up, I walk through a door and into what’s allegedly a doctor’s office, but that in reality is nothing more than a few empty folding chairs and a portable card table being used as a receptionist’s hutch. The entire place could be packed up and stuffed into a hatchback in less than a minute; nevertheless, I proceed.

After filling out a form, the woman at the plastic desk asks me to pay her $75 before seeing the doc. I don’t have that much cash on hand, so I ask if there’s an ATM nearby.

She counters: “How much do you have on you?” I open up my wallet: “Forty bucks.” “That’s enough,” she says. “Wow, thanks.”

The doctor’s just as lenient. He’s in street clothes and smells like unfiltered cigarettes, but that’s okay with me.

I tell him that I’m having trouble sleeping, he passes me a piece of paper, and I bring it back downstairs to the dispensary bouncer. This time I am granted entry, and as I’m walking in, the first thing I see is an ATM machine. I explain to the woman who takes my prescription, the ink still wet

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on it, that I just asked the doc’s receptionist upstairs if there were any ATMs nearby, and I am told that I was not allowed inside the shop before I had the slip. It turns out that the butt-puffing physician owns the whole operation, and they didn’t want to risk me running off to find an ATM and not returning to get my prescription and spend a grip inside of their candy store.

2018 — I’m at the second meetup of the Massachusetts Cannabis Business Association. Recreational dispensaries aren’t open yet, but the industry has arrived. There’s money in the room, a lot of it; I can feel it in my shoes. The crowd’s comprised of business people, attorneys, and political players, as today’s event—mingling followed by panel discussions about profit and policy—is hosted by the State House News Service and is taking place at the rather fancy Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education center on Winter Place. The start time’s also 7:30 am, a first for any cannabisrelated activity in my experience.

Among other speakers, Rob Hunt, a cofounder of the Calibased Shingle Hill consultancy group, looks into his crystal ball to forecast the soon-to-be-booming industry in Mass. In California, Hunt warns, overproduction is a serious problem, with eight times more licenses to harvest than are needed to meet the supply, and far too many parties overbuilding in hopes that interstate commerce will soon be permitted.

“There are ghost towns in the making,” he says, also talking about Colorado. “There will be a decent boom, but there is also going to be a bust.”

As for Mass, Hunt predicts there will be roughly 50 recreational shops open statewide by June 2019. At the same time, the expert says high taxes here will keep the black market cranking, and suggests for the Cannabis Control Commission to prioritize pushing illicit dealers out of existence. “You need to migrate people over,” he says.

Less than one week later, Boston Globe journalist Dan Adams drops a bombshell on us all, reporting that Mass Attorney General Maura Healey ruled “that local officials can unilaterally prohibit cannabis companies for another year without polling residents.” All stemming from a “decision approving an extension of Mansfield’s temporary moratorium on pot shops and other marijuana businesses through June 2019.”

In response, Jim Borghesani, spokesman for Yes on 4 Coalition, tells the press that “the unnecessary ruling is a devastating setback for a voter-approved legalization measure that has already seen significant delays. … The only people who will benefit from Maura Healey’s ruling are the criminals who have controlled cannabis sales for decades.”

Sounds familiar.

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GRAND SCHEME APPARENT HORIZON

Mass legislature helps, harms workers in “deal” with labor and business lobbies

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

No sooner did the Supreme Judicial Court shoot down the “millionaires’ tax” referendum question last week than the Mass legislature rammed a so-called grand bargain bill (H 4640) through both chambers. A move aimed at shoring up tax revenue threatened by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts referendum question that is virtually certain to lower the state sales tax from 6.25 percent to 5 percent if it should go before voters in November.

The house and senate did this by rapidly completing the brokering of a deal that had been in the works between pro-labor and pro-business forces on those issues for months. Giving each side something it wanted in exchange for encouraging the Raise Up Mass coalition to take its remaining two referendum questions—paid family and medical leave, and the $15 an hour minimum wage—off the table, and the retailers association to do the same with its sales tax cut question. Both organizations have not yet made the decision to do so.

If passed, the so-called grand bargain bill will give labor watered-down versions of its paid family and medical leave and $15 an hour minimum wage ballot questions, and give business something that’s explicitly anti-labor: the end of time-and-a-half wages for people working Sundays and holidays, and their ability to legally refuse to work Sunday and holiday shifts.

While Gov. Charlie Baker still has to sign the bill, as of this writing it’s looking like he will do so. Soon.

Which is a pity because it’s not such a great deal for working people as written. True, the grand bargain does ensure that the state minimum wage will raise to $15 an hour for many workers. But it moves up to that rate from the current $11 an hour over five years, instead of the four years it would take with the referendum version. Plus it betrays tipped employees, whose wage floor will only rise from a pathetic $3.75 an hour now to a still pathetic $6.75 an hour by 2023. Keeping all the cards in the bosses’ hands in the biggest tipped sector, the restaurant industry. Although it’s worth mentioning that even the referendum version of the $15 an hour wage plan would have only raised tipped employees to $9 an hour. When what’s needed is a single minimum wage for all workers.

It also makes Massachusetts one of the first states in the nation to institute paid family and medical leave for many workers. Which is truly a noteworthy advance. Yet again, the referendum version is better for workers than the grand bargain version.

But legislators gave away another noteworthy advance from 20 years ago in the process: time-and-a6

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half wages for many employees who work on Sundays and holidays. Which will hurt some of the same people who the new minimum wage and paid and family medical leave will help.

Thus far, the labor-led Raise Up Massachusetts coalition has had only positive things to say about the deal. However, the main union representing supermarket workers—many of whom currently take Sunday and holiday shifts—is already vowing to torpedo the grand bargain. Even though their union contracts also mandate time-and-a-half pay for working Sundays and holidays. And they’ve resolved to take down legislators who backed it over their protest.

Jeff Bollen, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445, minced no words on the subject in a recent video message to his members: “I am really pissed off at our state legislature for stabbing retail workers in the back by taking away time and a half on Sundays and holidays for all retail workers in Massachusetts.

“Remember, it was this local union in 1994 with big business and the retail association wanting to get rid of the blue laws; so they could open up their supermarkets, their big box stores, and their liquor stores and make money on Sundays that we fought hard to get a law passed to protect you, the retail worker. And we did.”

The supermarket union leader went on to explain that state lawmakers “panicked” when the millionaires’ tax was derailed and pushed through the grand bargain to avoid losing any more revenue from the referendum question to lower the sales tax. He swore the union was “going to remove those individuals that voted against you. We’re going to get them removed and replaced with pro-labor legislators who are going to fight for the rights of working people.” And defiantly concluded: “We’re going to continue to fight. We’re going to continue to try to get this whole thing repealed.”

How much support the UFCW can expect to get from the rest of the labor movement remains to be seen. But the fact is that some Bay State working families are going to suffer nearly as much pain as gain from the grand bargain.

Worse still, there’s a deeper problem with the bill. It potentially stops the retailers’ referendum drive to lower the sales tax—which they’ve definitely put on the ballot to ensure that big businesses make more profits. But it must not be forgotten that the sales tax is a regressive tax that disproportionately harms working families.

And even though the state desperately needs money for

many programs that help the 99 percent, it remains a bad way to raise funds compared to a progressive tax system that would force the rich to pay higher tax rates than everyone else. Like the federal government has done for over a hundred years.

Yet since the rich and their corporations continue to rule the roost in state politics, and since a state constitutional amendment would be required to allow a progressive tax system in Massachusetts, there is no way that is going to happen anytime soon. As I wrote last week, the millionaires’ tax would have at least increased the amount of progressivity in the tax system had it been allowed on the ballot (where it was projected to win handily). But business lobbies got the SJC to stop that move.

Given that, the revenue lost from a sales tax cut would really hurt in a period when many major state social programs are already being starved for funds.

Nevertheless, many working families will take a big hit from the grand bargain bill as written: They’ll see the full introduction of the $15 minimum wage delayed by an extra year, they’ll get a worse version of paid family and medical leave, they’ll lose time-and-a-half wages on Sundays and holidays, they’ll see the sales tax remain at 6.25 percent… and if they’re tipped employees, they’ll still be made to accept a lower minimum wage than the relevant ballot question would get them and still have to rely on customers to tip them decently and their bosses to refrain from skimming those tips.

So, it would behoove Raise Up Massachusetts and its constituent labor, community, and religious organizations to stay the course with the paid family and medical leave and $15 an hour minimum wage referendum questions that are still slated to appear on the November ballot. And pro-labor forces should also be ready to lobby harder for a better deal should Gov. Baker refuse to sign the grand bargain bill.

Of course, it could very well be that the bill will be signed into law before this article hits the stands, and that labor and their allies will throw in the towel on their ballot questions. And that would be a shame.

Here’s hoping for a better outcome for Massachusetts workers. Even at this late date.

Many working families will take a big hit from the grand bargain bill as written

Note: Raise Up Massachusetts announced that it had accepted the “grand bargain” bill shortly before this article went to press on Tuesday evening (6.26), according to the Boston Business Journal.

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

Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

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DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

TRUMP’S ABSURD THEATER OF CRUELTY

How the regime wants you to be outraged about all the wrong things

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For all of its horror, outright tyranny is always a bit buffoonish. Think of how easy it was for Charlie Chaplin to ridicule Hitler and Mussolini, without straying far from their actual characters. Our own insane regime was almost perfectly prefigured by Alfred Jarry’s 1896 psycho-slapstick Ubu Roi, or King Ubu, a reimagining of MacBeth where a hammy guy with a head like a Klan hood assumes power. The play, which showed the tyranny of absurdity as much as the absurdity of tyranny, caused riots when it premiered. That is our reality—a high-farce, postmodern president as reality show tyrant.

It seemed for a moment like the screams of children being separated from their parents at our border might break through the absurdist denial of reality by the Trumpists. And there was a moment where it was possible that reports that numerous detained kids were beaten while handcuffed and left naked in concrete cells might be enough to make all but the outright fascists balk.

That was when moderate Republican pressure caused the President to backstep, slightly, on the barbarous practice, signing an executive order seeming to reverse the policy of separating children from their parents who had been caught illegally entering the country—but it maintained the initial zero tolerance doctrine, which had caused the problem in the first place. It was for show, like the teleprompter statement stuck in the middle of the off-the-cuff “fine people” “both sides” remarks he made about Nazis in Charlottesville.

And then things got really weird. Here are some snapshots of the beginning of our summer of absurdity, the concentration camp as summer camp, where each member of the regime has laid their own layer of ludicrous across the suffering of children.

“I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” As Melania left to visit the Texas, Mexico border, she became both more punk and more monarchical at the same time—Johnny Rotten, the Queen, and the fascist regime all rolled into one, when she boarded Air Force One wearing an army-green jacket with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” faux-painted on the back. It takes the old avant-garde trope of showing contempt for your audience—spitting on them at punk shows—and turns it into pure politics. Spit on the separated children you are going to visit.

To add another twist, Trump tried to turn it into a commentary on the press—on Twitter, of course. “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” written on the back of Melania’s jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!

“We’ll have the guacamole.”

As the border crisis continued, both Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and architect of zero tolerance and family separation Stephen Miller found themselves craving Mexican food.

In his remembrance of Anthony Bourdain, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, tells a story about eating at Le Bernardin, a fancy restaurant, only to see world-class war criminal Henry Kissinger at another table.

Simon later felt guilty about letting the moment pass and wrote to Bourdain.

“I could have done something,” he wrote. “I could have summoned Aldo, the master sommelier, and asked him for the most expensive bottle of Chilean red on the wine list.

I could have had the bottle quickly decanted, taken a sip for myself, and then marched over to Henry Kissinger’s table and poured it over the bastard’s head: ‘Compliments of Senor Allende, you ratfucking murderer.’”

Bourdain called him a “pussy” for demuring.

The Democratic Socialists of America in DC didn’t quite pour a bottle of mescal on Nielsen’s head, but they disrupted the restaurant with a protest.

“How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you’re deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people who come here seeking asylum?” one person asked.

They chanted “shame.” But that is exactly what this administration lacks. Sure, perhaps, Nielsen was just clueless. But Stephen Miller’s presence in a DC mezcaleria was no more an accident than Melania’s jacket.

Again, no one poured anything on his head. Someone did call him a fascist—but it certainly wasn’t a Casablanca moment, drowning out the Nazis as they sang their anthem with a rousing rendition of the “Marseillaise.” Really, these people should not be allowed to eat at any restaurant.

But there was no cost to the DSA or the people who yelled at Miller. Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hen, in Lexington, Virginia, put her own livelihood on the line when she asked White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave.

The MAGA mob has attacked her online and the Red Hen was closed the next night.

Read the rest of this week’s Democracy in Crisis at digboston.com.

OPINION

SCRIPTURE AS A TEXT OF TERROR The gospel according to Sessions

BY REV. IRENE MONROE

Christians like US Attorney General Jeff Sessions like to smugly recite biblical scripture to promulgate their self-righteous acts of discrimination. In defending President Trump’s now-scrapped yet still indefensible policy of separating children from their families—even a child being breastfed—Sessions cited a passage from Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans.

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” he said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

Sessions is no biblical scholar; that’s evident in his bastardization of Paul’s message.

Nonetheless, the attorney general knows Romans 13 is used as an edict to obey authority. The scripture has been used as a text of terror by miscreant thugs in power throughout history: slave owners, Nazi sympathizers, apartheid enforcers, supporters of Japanese-American internment, and loyalists opposed to the American Revolution, to name a few. Now, Christians like Sessions apply Romans 13 to issues like abortion, taxes, and same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile, our LGBTQ community continues to be clobbered with biblical texts used to either scare us straight, or terrorize our everyday existence. I recently received a query from a troubled soul in our community: I’m a transman. One of my brothers from church asked me this: if being an LGBTQ+ is not a sin because it is part of human diversity then what is? Does that mean we are allowed to do anything that we desire like adultery, incest, prostitution, pornography (just to name a few)? I don’t know how to respond, so please enlighten me regarding this subject matter.

The Bible is replete with contradictory and damning messages to all people, and is filled with homophobic scriptures, like Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27, Matthew 19:3-6, Corinthians 6:9-10, to name a few. Determining which messages are discarded and which are upheld is not a battle about biblical inerrancy or God’s will. It is an unmitigated battle of human will either to uphold justice as Jesus spoke about it, or to codify discrimination as Sessions is so fond of doing.

For example, there are two creationist myths in the Bible (Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:22). The first myth says that God made woman and man simultaneously. The second creation myth is our “rib story,” in which Eve is born from a rib of Adam. Undoubtedly this story has poked at Christian women throughout the centuries since it’s used to justify gender inequality. Likewise, the Curse of Ham (Genesis 9:18-27), and Apostle Paul’s edict to slaves (Ephesian 6:5-8) served as the scientific and Christian legitimation for the enslavement of people of African ancestry. While the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative (Genesis 19:1-29) is one of the most quoted scriptures to argue for compulsory heterosexuality and queer bashing.

My heart aches and soul cries out knowing what’s going on at our country’s southern border. But sadly that’s not the case for many of Trump’s henchmen. To watch these children traumatized and held in human cages is not only an act of personal moral turpitude, but it’s also a pox on the moral integrity of this country.

Legally, it is a universal human right to seek asylum. Morally, governments have an obligation to come to the aid of those fleeing persecution, a minimum standard any decent administration recognizes.

As for Sessions, members of his own church back home have responded. Citing Paragraph 2702.3 of the 2016 United Methodist Book of Discipline, 640 of his fellow parishioners leveled “the chargeable offenses of” child abuse, immorality, and racial discrimination.

“As his denomination, we have an ethical obligation to speak boldly when one of our members is engaged in causing significant harm in matters contrary to the Discipline on the global stage,” the church letter states.

In his role as AG, Sessions won’t be held accountable for his severely heinous acts.

But as a Christian, he will be.

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PICTURED: UPPER LEFT: FORMER BU PRESIDENT JOHN SILBER IN LATER YEARS (IMAGE VIA YOUTUBE/TEXAS TRIBUNE); BOTTOM RIGHT: EARLY CAREER JULIA BROWN BU FACULTY PIC (IMAGE COURTESY OF JULIA BROWN)

PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND THE PATRIARCHY FEATURE

How a BU professor fought her sexist denial of tenure and won

BY MAX L. CHAPNICK @MAXCHAPPY It is a truth universally acknowledged that an assistant professor in possession of widely admired scholarship should receive tenure.

And yet, in 1981, Boston University denied tenure to professor Julia Brown despite her nationally reviewed book on Jane Austen and the near-unanimous support of her colleagues.

Over the next decade, Brown took the university to court, alleging sexual discrimination. In the end, a federal jury, three federal appeals court judges, and the Supreme Court agreed with her, ordering the university to grant her tenure, $215,000, and lawyer’s fees. Like an Austen novel, but fought in the courts instead of in the drawing room, Brown’s case turns the banality of an insular culture—for Brown, academia; for Austen, Georgian gentry—into a dramatic study of the way society restricts women’s opportunities.

It’s almost too fitting, then, that in the book that should have gotten her tenure, Brown argues that Austen’s novels carry “the idea of social change,” specifically as women gain an “increased freedom of choice in marriage.” Brown writes about how Austen uses the technique of irony to articulate her “moral vision,” or as Brown says, to “mediate between the ideal and the real.” In other words, Austen’s comedic characters exist for more than just laughs: Austen’s humor points out where society fails to measure up to a more morally just vision of itself.

Brown is retiring this year, and the university she leaves is very different from the one of her tenure suit that began more than 30 years ago. But while much has changed, Brown’s story contains a certain timelessness, particularly in the current struggle by women against institutions traditionally dominated by men. Like an

Austen novel, Brown’s battle forces a reckoning with the type of sexism society tries to hide from itself. As Brown says, “Making the people who had done this have to defend themselves and be accountable, that was worth it.” *** Julia Brown came to BU in 1974, fresh from graduate school at Columbia University, where she studied with some of the most well-known academics of the 20th century, like Lionel Trilling, Michael Wood, and feminist scholar Kate Millet. Millet’s Sexual Politics, published in 1970, “absolutely blew people out of the water,” says Brown. “It was an attack on sexism in writers. She was a political radical and she had an influence on me.”

Brown recalls why she decided to move to New England, “It was a great job. It was in a major city. It was a really attractive, major research university. That’s the kind of place I wanted to be.”

Less than four years before Brown arrived in the city, BU’s board of trustees appointed John Silber to serve as president of the university. As the student union president from Silber’s first year at BU told a campus newspaper for the president’s obituary (Silber died in 2012), Silber was “a great man in terms of being a leader to build the university into a major corporation.” But according to Brown and many others, Silber’s efforts to turn the school into more of a corporation began with alienating students and faculty.

Many at the university fought back. The faculty, including Brown, unionized and then went on strike.

In her suit, Brown alleged her denial of tenure was retaliation for the strike, which she fully supported, in

addition to sexual discrimination; the jury, however, only found the university guilty of the latter count.

During the strike, Brown’s friend Howard Zinn, noted historian and author of A People’s History of the United States, wrote in a 2010 autobiography that he rented a loudspeaker and conducted class for 200 students outside on Commonwealth Ave. “To get a faculty of intellectuals and scholars to do that was really extraordinary,” Brown says about the strike. This event was historic. As Brown’s lawyer Dahlia Rudavsky said during the trial, the action represented “the first and only time in its history [the faculty] went on strike.” Brown explains: “These were people who are not fighters by nature. They are scholars. They don’t want to be wasting time picketing. It was bizarre. It was ridiculous.” *** I first heard about many of the details of Brown’s case at an English department reception in the Metcalf building at 1 Silber Way. In a speech on her retirement, Brown’s colleague, professor of English William Carroll reflected on the irony of the ceremony’s location: In Silber’s former office, on a street named after Silber, the department was celebrating the career of a woman Silber fought for so many years.

“Some more recent colleagues and students may not know,” he said, “that our mild-mannered and cordial Julia also took on and defeated [him] … in a federal courtroom as well as in the court of public opinion.”

The case went from largely private, insulated sexism to a public battle in the courts and press, and fast. What started in the bureaucratic confines of three-letter

PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND THE PATRIARCHY continued on pg. 12 10

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PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND THE PATRIARCHY continued from pg. 10 committees spilled into a federal courtroom, then onto the pages of national newspapers, and finally tainted Silber’s failed campaign for Massachusetts governor in 1990.

At first, Brown’s tenure battle bounced between faculty meetings. After six years at the university she became eligible for tenure. Following what professor Eugene Goodheart, department chair, said was an “unusually positive discussion” about Brown’s teaching and research, the English department voted unanimously, 22-0, in recommendation of Brown’s tenure. Brown’s book, published to acclaim by Harvard University Press, was reviewed widely, including in the New York Times. With such a strong record, two more committees, one with a vote of 9-0 and another with a vote of 9-2, recommended her.

But despite the overwhelming approval of more than 50 of her colleagues (later, the third committee amended its vote to 10-0 in her favor), Silber’s administration pushed back. The dean took issue with elements of Brown’s scholarly work and suggested Brown be subject to a three-year extension, after which she would be reviewed again. The assistant provost and provost echoed the dean’s reservations, but Brown felt the extension was simply delaying the inevitable denial of tenure. Brown says she asked the dean, What would I have to do to get tenure in three years?

“And the dean said to me, ‘Have a second book written and published,’” Brown recalls. “A second book! And you can’t even get a book printed in that time. … In three years I would have been denied tenure. So I may as well just go for it right then and there and just do it.”

I recently spoke to Rudavsky, Brown’s lawyer, on the phone about the trial. Rudavsky remembers Brown’s decision not to take the extension as “a stand on principle.” “A lot of people would have taken that” extension, Rudavsky explains. “That shows [Brown] was very much acting out of principle. … She had worked hard and she had earned it, and she was going to stand for that and not take second best.” *** As Rudavsky, Brown’s lawyer, told the court in her opening statements in July 1987, “This case is not about abstract concepts; it’s not about discrimination in the abstract. … It is about the life and work of one woman … a woman who at an early age had a dream of becoming a writer and becoming a teacher and who set out to prepare herself for a career as a college professor so she could fulfill her dream.”

But when Brown talks about why she took the university to court, it is often more than a fight to restore a very personal, individual “brilliant career” that was “shattered by the administration and trustees of BU almost beyond repair,” as Rudavsky said. For Brown, it was also a matter of standing up for the women who preceded her and, like Brown, were denied tenure.

Among the documents Brown sent me, in the context of a speech, was a list of over 19 women faculty at BU she says reported, to her and to others, being unfairly “denied promotion or tenure, or merit increase,” or experienced “some other form of unequal treatment” because of their gender.

Looking back, she told me, “I felt really strongly that I was at the end of a long line of women who had been unjustly denied tenure at BU and that someone had to stand up. I had money in the bank. So I was at a kind of advantage.” Brown had the money, the support, and ultimately, the guts to stand up to the university publicly. “Things go on behind the scenes all the time at universities and they don’t want people to find out about it,” Brown says. She was up to the challenge of letting people know.

The trial carried a high cost for Brown. BU and its lawyers interrogated her and her work, calling parts of 12

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her scholarship “surprisingly bad,” and insinuating she was a “lousy teacher,” “lazy,” and “doesn’t do much work.”

Silber accused her of paranoia. Besides the humiliation of courtroom comments, the case dragged on, lasting around 10 years. The legal process was, for Brown, a “tremendous, continual distraction. It really slowed down my work. Terribly. Slowed it down terribly.” Brown spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees, and “towards the end,” she says, “I would have owed [my lawyer] a lot of money. I would have owed her $100,000 probably if I had lost.”

Part of the trial even involved litigating emotional damages, an experience where Brown was asked about her depression. Following her denial of tenure, Brown says, “I got depressed and I remember talking about that.

I saw a therapist who testified for me. I cringed when he was called to the stand, and left the courtroom. I hated it.” Seeing a therapist, Brown reminds me, “was viewed differently then than it is now. So that sort of branded me a little bit as a nutcase to a lot of members of the public.”

Through it all, Brown persisted.

because if you examined the reviews of my books … ” As Brown says,“The academy is made up of people who dispute all the time, who argue and disagree—you can have disagreement about the book.” The fact that Brown’s book spurred a lively debate in mainstream and academic publications was a mark of its success.

Though the case mostly centered on this type of sophisticated comparison of academic records, or what the appellate court judge calls “voluminous tenure files” of “‘similarly situated’ faculty,” the specific sexism of the man, John Silber, came into question as well.

Brown noted her particular enemy when she said: “There are women younger than myself and my own age who must fight adversaries far more clever and cautious, far more guarded and knowing, than John Silber. In an age in which sexism has gone underground, he was wonderfully forthright. If you must have an opponent, I would wish on you someone like him.”

To illustrate the point broadly, Brown recounted a story from the trial itself. At the end of the first day of Silber’s testimony, first Silber and then his lawyer asked if they could interrupt his cross examination and “alter *** the schedule to accommodate him” by meeting much earlier in the morning. Brown tells me, “And here there are The main argument presented by Brown and her women on the jury who had adjusted their schedules to lawyer during the jury trial involved a comparative serve on the jury and who were coming from afar and at analysis, showing that if it weren’t for sexism, Brown real inconvenience to get to the downtown courthouse would have gotten tenure: The question was whether every day.” The judge, politely but firmly, responded, “You “she had been held to a stricter standard than her male can come back and respond to cross-examination or we peers,” according to the will simply strike all his appellate court. testimony.”

Because the heart of Brown called Silber the argument involved her “star witness,” not just comparing the record of because of his arrogance, professors-to-be or not but also because of his to be with one another, explicit sexism. In 1990, these parts of the trial the year the Supreme meant agonizingly Court agreed with the listing and analyzing the appellate decision by minutiae of academia. denying to hear the case, At one point the judge Silber was running for asked Brown’s lawyer, governor. In a televised “Do you really want to debate, his opponent do this to a jury, before a rattled off “the long list of jury? The vicissitudes of published commentary academia … are about as

by Silber on the subject foreign to these people of women,” Brown says, as growing oats on and “three-quarters of Mars.” his examples were taken On one hand, Brown from the transcript” of and her lawyer argued her trial. that Brown’s scholarship One of the most more than measured quoted phrases from up. On the other, though the trial was Silber’s they weren’t experts statement that the in the field, Silber and English department, BROWN’S 1979 BOOK, JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS: other members of the where only six of over 20 SOCIAL CHANGE AND LITERARY FORM, administration tried to faculty members were BECAME A FOCAL POINT OF HER TENURE CASE, prove where Brown’s women, was “a damn WITH BROWN’S ACADEMIC RESEARCH COMING scholarship failed. Silber matriarchy.” In another UNDER SCRUTINY IN COURT. implied that Austen quote, republished by was an inherently less the Globe, Silber said, complex or worthy subject than Dryden or Kant. At “There’s not very many years that a woman is a beautiful one point, Brown told me, the dean “said that he felt girl,” and that those years are “roughly from 15 to 25—10 comfortable judging a book on Jane Austen because he years, that’s not a long time.” Another time, when another had lived in England near where Jane Austen lived.” At female professor was up for tenure he told her, “Your this point, “The judge leaned over and said,” according husband is a parachute, so why are you worried[?]” to the transcript, “not in those times?” To which the dean Brown summarized these revelations of Silber’s replied, “Not quite, sir.” sexism to me like this: “One of the things the case did, BU’s lawyers and witnesses fairly literally put Brown’s was it brought out in the open certain ways of speaking work under a microscope. “They would take a bad review about women.” Brown heard that at an all-male dinner of my book,” Brown says, “and blow it up and put it on for economists, Silber had joked about judging the this great big poster board,” magnifying it and pointing “‘bed-worthiness’ of women coming up for tenure.” For out criticism of her work. Brown’s colleagues were able to Brown, the sexism and arrogance of the administration put that criticism in perspective, like professor Goodheart was institutionalized. Brown says that for a period, the when he said: “I am glad that I am not on trial here, only woman in the upper administration was a nun, and

because of this the faculty members often joked that “you have to be celibate to get tenure,” or that “you would get tenure if you gave up your firstborn son to the university.” *** After years of litigation, a jury agreed: Brown’s denial of tenure constituted discrimination. If it weren’t for sexism, she would have received tenure. Brown won $200,000, $15,000 in emotional damages, legal fees, and tenure. This type of award of tenure was extremely rare and never before granted in subjective circumstances.

Several other universities—MIT, Williams, Boston College, Tufts, Suffolk, Adelphi—filed an amicus brief on behalf of BU, out of a worry that the court would undermine their power. Though BU argued during the trial that “neither [the jury] nor anybody else is entitled to second-guess the university’s decision” and the universities collectively argued that granting tenure violated their first amendment rights, the circuit court found that “academic freedom does not include the freedom to discriminate … on the basis of sex.”

Brown’s victory in many ways represented a public victory for women. In a speech to the Radcliffe Institute in 1990, Brown talks about “silencing of women” and what her victory means to women.

But at the very end of that speech she notes how her victory is not an exclusively feminist victory. For Brown, the case became a symbolic triumph over rule by “administrative fiat.” While Brown’s denial of tenure represented a move towards corporatization, with dozens of experts overruled by less than a handful of administrators, her victory represents a return to “intellectual values.” *** Brown’s father was an amateur boxer, and he fought in the Golden Gloves. During the four days of her testimony, in July 1987, the Globe reported how Brown “decompressed” by watching the famous middleweight title bout between Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler “on a tape brought back from Las Vegas by her husband.”

Brown told the Globe, “The fight was like my court battle.”

The boxer’s stamina became a reflection on her own: “I had thought [he] would win if he could go the distance, if he made it to the end.”

Brown’s determination made the university pay, a victory that cemented the precedent she set with additional monetary cost for the university: “They had to pay the piper for delaying it for so long because they had to pay interest for every year. And that was a good thing because it made universities afraid.”

Reflecting on that long fight, Brown remembers Silber “saying I had ‘no staying power.’” I talk with Brown in her empty office, shelves newly cleaned, as she looks back over her career: four books published with a fifth on the way, admiring colleagues around her, generations of courses taught and students advised.

More than 20 years after the dust settled, with the files buried deep in archives, Brown sums up her experience succinctly: “I don’t have any regrets.” She lost years of research, risked significant debt, and had her depression questioned in a federal court; but for Brown, it was a fight worth having.

“You really do lose something if people treat you unjustly and you don’t stand up to them,” she says. “You lose something inwardly and you lose something morally if you don’t oppose injustice done to you. You absolutely must fight it to maintain your integrity.”

Max is a PhD student in English and American literature at BU. Previously, he worked at the NGO GiveDirectly, an organization that sends cash transfers, no strings attached, directly to extremely poor families. In 2014, he studied and wrote poetry in Wellington, NZ on a Fulbright scholarship.

This article was written in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you would like to see more reporting like this, please consider supporting independent media at givetobinj.org.

BROWN’S TENURE CASE WAS COVERED WIDELY, WITH REGULAR REPORTING BY THE BOSTON GLOBE (TOP TWO IMAGES) AS WELL AS UPDATES ON MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS IN OUTLETS INCLUDING THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS TO US

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The Greater Boston area is home to many people of Greek ancestry, with pockets of Greek and Greek-American folks found in such places as Roslindale, Arlington, Watertown, Peabody, Belmont, and Newton, but there really aren’t that many Greek restaurants in the region, even with the opening of a handful of new spots over the past several years.

A few Greek friends jokingly explain that the reason for so few restaurants is that the cooking they get at home is so good that there’s really no need to dine out, but whatever the reason, it can be tough finding good old-fashioned Greek comfort food in and around Boston. This is why the opening of a new Greek dining spot tends to come with some real anticipation, which seems to have happened with Grape Leaf Mediterranean Grill, a little eatery in Newton Highlands that was packing them in soon after it debuted this spring, including lines right out the door. The lines seem justified, however, with Grape Leaf being quite an impressive place that has the potential to become a regular haunt for those who love Greek fare.

Grape Leaf resides in one of the most charming parts of Newton, right in the heart of the village of Newton Highlands, which feels like a quiet hamlet much farther away from downtown Boston than it seems (by the way, for those of you who rely on public transportation, a Green Line stop is located a few steps away from the place).

Like some of the other dining spots in the village, this is a pretty tiny place, with one room consisting of an ordering counter, a display case of food, and that’s about it, while a second room off to the left has a few tables with bench seats and chairs along with a high-top or two. The slightly cramped digs indicate that this is more of a takeout spot than a dine-in restaurant (especially if you live nearby), but if you don’t mind sitting in a space that feels closer to a house of pizza than, say, L’Espalier or Deuxave, you should be ok.

Because it’s such a small restaurant—and because the food is made fresh—the menu at Grape Leaf is relatively small, and there are no guarantees that it will have everything available, especially later in the day. But the menu here has many of the familiar Greek items found at other dining spots in the area, plus a few traditional items that are a bit less common. Some of the options include a refreshing “Village Salad” that has olives, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, feta cheese, and a zingy Greek dressing; tiropita, or a hearty cheese pie that is more savory than sweet and is a bit like spanakopita but is all cheese rather than cheese and spinach; roasted lemon potatoes that are just a touch on the dry side but are more lemony than most, brightening up the flavor of the wedges quite a bit; meat-stuffed grape leaves that are tightly packed and have a deep, rich flavor, possibly among the best tried in the Boston area, actually; a falafel gyro that has a sweeter taste to its falafel than you might expect, but the sweetness is subtle enough to keep from overwhelming the herbs and spices; a marvelous version of pastitsio with pasta, ground beef, a rich red sauce, and creamy bechamel; a lamb gyro made with handcut rotisserie meat; and a slice of baklava with just the right mix of sweet and savory.

Other offerings at Grape Leaf include hummus, tabouli, moussaka, youvetsi (braised lamb with red sauce and rice pilaf), chicken souvlaki, and pork kabobs. Beer and wine are unfortunately not available at Grape Leaf, so expect to stick to soda, juice, or water. Prices are extremely reasonable overall, with most items under or just around $10, while the aforementioned youvetsi tops out at around $13.

Grape Leaf seems like a pretty solid place overall, with the only minor quibbles being the rather plain environment (again, consider takeout if you can) and the possibility that not everything will be available if you go late in the day. But between the friendly folks behind the counter, the tasty and inexpensive food, and the easy parking (and easy access from the Green Line), there’s definitely a lot to like about one of the Boston area’s newest Greek restaurants, and it’ll be interesting to see if it continues to get the crowds that it was getting when it first opened not too long ago. >> GRAPE LEAF MEDITERRANEAN GRILLE. 6 LINCOLN ST., NEWTON. GRAPELEAFNEWTON.COM

NEWS TO US

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DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

THE BEST LOCAL ALBUMS OF 2018 (SO FAR) MUSIC

Speedy Ortiz, Fiddlehead, Vein, Michael Christmas, and more top the list

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

is the product of doing hard work with a carefree saunter. After making its own label, booking its own shows, and sharpening its songwriting process, the surf pop trio has found a comfortable balance between lower-tier national fame and their DIY heart.

Set to the band’s cleanest melodies yet, Smell Smoke centers around frontman Brandon Hagen’s four-year grapple with watching a loved one decline in health—reminding listeners that the band didn’t blow up on heedlessness and jubilation alone.

Edge Petal Burn Glass Cannon Self-released

If you read DigBoston, you know our city’s music scene produces phenomenal talent with ease. Which means this list, our annual Best Local Albums of 2018 (So Far) list, is a roll call of sorts. With hundreds of artists who explore folk, rock, hip-hop, electronica, metal, R&B, experimental, and beyond come hundreds of albums that soothe the soul.

Narrowing down the standouts, however, is a grueling process.

The easiest way to verify the strength of this list is by looking at the contenders who didn’t make the cut (despite churning out some quality records). Though no longer a Boston band, the Breeders reunited the Last Splash lineup for the sturdy comeback album All Nerve. Salem group SUPERTEEN won our hearts with the enigmatic Over Everything. Ultra Chapelle made a post-twee anthem with WOMP WOMP, squitch found the meeting point between math rock and art rock with Uncle Steve in Spirit, and Daeves channeled his inner Stephen Malkmus for Whatever Before the Storm. Band bedbug took a perfect snapshot of Boston’s bedroom pop scene with i’ll count to heaven in years without seasons. Blues rock duo Mr. Airplane Man released Jacaranda Blue, its first proper album in 14 years. Barrence Whitfield & the Savages revived the vintage rock soul of R&B with Soul Flowers of Titan. The often overlooked trio E—Thalia Zedek, Jason Sanford of Neptune, and Gavin McCarthy of Karate—built off their various alt-rock backgrounds on their sophomore LP, Negative Work. Grindcore act Limbs Bin finally released the heavily anticipated One Happy World. Today Junior gave surf rock a face lift with Single Forever. Folk got a friendly bump thanks to

Neon by Sam Moss and The Measured Mile by sundog.

Gia Greene overcame emergency surgeries to reveal her debut LP Unexpected Guest. Indie rock act Cosmic Johnny established itself as a must-know name on the Allston scene thanks to Good Grief. Psych rock trio Sundrifter launched listeners to space with Visitations. Slowcore group Tuxis Giant released its first music in three years, Here Comes the Wolf. Lowell favorites oldsoul played into the emo side of alt-rock with coy. Artists like Animal Flag and Good News played into the performative side of rock with Void Ripper and It Is Time respectively, and wowflower skated through the downtempo electronica scene with lo-fi record feverdream. Lesser Glow gave doom a post-metal spin with Ruined. At some point during all of this, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones released their first album in seven years, because ska refuses to die.

To help you fall in love with these albums the way the DigBoston staff has, we’re throwing a concert to celebrate the midyear list. Head over to the Sinclair on Saturday, June 30, to hear the magic of Kal Marks, BAERD, Edge Petal Burn, Pink Navel, and Prior Panic live onstage. Tickets cost $12, the show is all ages, and doors open at 6 pm. We’ll see you there. In the meantime, study the list below to know the creme de la creme of this year’s musical crop.

Vundabar Smell Smoke Gawk Records Few Allston basement bands get the chance to crawl their way to fame. Rapid as it may be, Vundabar’s ascent

You can’t erase every trace of a scar, but you can reclaim it as it fades. That’s the mentality Olivia West tried to revel in while writing the crux of Glass Cannon, the longawaited debut album by her band Edge Petal Burn. West confronts her past experiences with relationship abuse, emotional trauma, and long-term brain damage. Along with her band, West sets her darkest moments on fire with heavy bursts of sludge guitar, Korean folk music influences, and multilayered vocal harmonies. Songs like “Five Golden Rings” and “Letters” snake their way through dark corners while bearing the type of emotional vocal delivery that gives you goosebumps. It’s cathartic, to say the least.

Lake Street Dive Free Yourself Up Nonesuch Records Lake Street Dive have straddled the line between idolizing retro motown and pushing jazz pop onto the radio for a long time now. But with Free Yourself Up, the band embraces the slicker side of pop that it used to mask in ’60s girl group tang. While that comes across as a safe move, it’s clear the band, from singer Rachael Price on down to upright bass player Bridget Kearney, wanted to inject edge into the lyrics. Want to remind an ex that you were the better kisser? Check. Want to reflect on our darkening regime under this government? Check. In that, Free Yourself Up a quiet reminder that nothing is ever quite as sweet as well-worded revenge.

Francine When We Were Loud Self-Released The O.C. superfans or underground indie rock obsessives may recognize the name Francine, but there’s a good chance most of you reading this don’t. There’s no better time to be introduced to Francine than right now

MUSIC EVENTS THU 06.28

SAT 06.30

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 9pm/18+/$18. sinclaircambridge.com]

[Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. 8pm/18+/$13. crossroadspresents.com]

SPOKEN WORD APPLES DON’T FALL FAR FROM THE DOOMTREE DESSA + MONAKR

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06.28.18 - 07.05.18 |

A SURFACE-LEVEL PRIMER IN BOSTON RAP STL GLD + AVENUE

DIGBOSTON.COM

SUN 07.01

POP, ROCK, AND DROP IT TODAY JUNIOR + MILK + DUTCH TULIPS + SOFT PYRAMIDS

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

8:30pm/18+/$10. greatscottboston.com]

MON 07.02

FINAL NIGHT TO BE MORE KIND FRANK TURNER & THE SLEEPING SOULS + KEVIN DEVINE & THE GODDAMN BAND + TRAPPER SCHOEPP

[Royale, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 6:30pm/18+/$35.]

TUE 07.03

TI AMO, FRENCH DANCE POP PHOENIX

[House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston.

6:30pm/all ages/$39.50. houseofblues.com]

TUE 07.03

GUITAR LESSONS IN MINIMALISM, DRONE, AND FOLK MARISA ANDERSON + GLENN JONES

[Atwood’s Tavern, 877 Cambridge St., Cambridge.

10pm/21+/$12. atwoodstavern.com]

with When We Were Loud, the band’s first new album in 12 years. The group recreates the quintessential alt-pop, breezy indie rock, feel-good melodies of the early 2000s that made bands like the Shins and Death Cab for Cutie famous. Over a decade later, Clayton Scoble’s voice still floats with a comfortable warmth, making it all too easy to fall in love with these songs. Next thing you know, you’re sneaking songs like “Fine Afternoon” and “One Benefit” onto mixtapes for your closest friends.

Sidney Gish No Dogs Allowed Self-Released Where most musically inclined students in Boston attend college during the day and write music at night, Sidney Gish seems to create full albums in her sleep. The 20-year-old singer-songwriter runs on a steady diet of never-ending hooks and self-taught production, using that fodder to create a delightfully surprising blend of anti-folk, pleasing pop, and indie rock licks. No Dogs Allowed arrived on New Year’s Eve of 2017—an arbitrary deadline she gave herself, much like with 2016’s Ed Buys Houses, to dump a year’s worth of song ideas onto the internet—with Gish’s best use of tracklist order yet. From the casual guitar solo in “Sin Triangle” to the self-aware sigh in “Rat of the City,” No Dogs Allowed demonstrates why the innate songwriting skills of Sidney Gish are just as much a breath of fresh air in indie rock as they are a pathway toward a bigger career in music.

Fiddlehead Springtime and Blind Run For Cover Records Pull any hardcore-loving kid off the street and four times out of five they will tell you straight-edge group Have Heart changed their life. Frontman Patrick Flynn is a musical hero in that sense, as his words became scripture for a generation, and his new post-hardcore band Fiddlehead continues that tradition. As a posthardcore group, Fiddlehead—Basement member Alex Henery on guitar, Casey Nealon on bass, Heave Heart member Shawn Costa on drums, Alex Dow on guitar, and Flynn on lead vocals—hurl themselves into heavy riffs and speedy punk payoffs like a combo of Fugazi, Samiam, and Archers of Loaf. But lyrically, Flynn grapples with the death of his father by analyzing, questioning, and empathizing for his mother’s grieving process.

Springtime and Blind is abrasive and emotional, and at no point does it let up on either.

Pink Navel Born on The Stairs Self-Released There’s a certain charm to artists who can’t imagine a life without music yet consistently treat their art with a patient approach. Despite publishing music with a rapid-fire speed, Pink Navel is a rapper and beatmaker who wraps their work up in careful thought and stressfree environments—even if the subjects they rap about are rooted in stressful events. Following a live mixtape and a collection of beats built around Mario samples, Pink Navel dropped Born on the Stairs, a 12-track record that gets lost in the feeling of being stuck in between a higher and lower state. Pink Navel spits out words with enunciated care but deviates from the rigidity of down beats, occasionally slapping words on the tail end of a bar. Though the influence of alternative rappers like milo is obvious, Pink Navel stands rooted in their personality, letting the calculated stuttering on songs like “say-theleast.dev” add meaning to their words, an affecting example of art in motion.

BAERD Crete Self-Released

Michael Christmas Role Model Fool’s Gold Records

Listening to BAERD is like watching a forest bloom and grow before you, all sped-up sprouting and seasonchanging beauty. The seven-piece Americana band pulls the best parts of folk, jazz, and classical music into their work. On Crete, that combination swells like a beautiful meeting of Fleet Foxes and Skinny Bones. From the cooling vocals and dreamlike banjo of “Out of The” to the stomping energy and manic drawl of frontman Isaiah Beard’s voice on “Stand,” Crete is an album that uses crisp production to highlight how a dozen different pieces, big and small, can create a massive sound—proving folk doesn’t have to be a quiet genre after all.

Kal Marks Universal Care Exploding in Sound Records In the past few years, Kal Marks frontman Carl Shane has seen a lot of people die. Two friends died from drug overdoses. One friend burned in a fire. He reached a new low, depression to the point of immobilization, before a new instinct rose within him to fight back, to live meaningfully, to outlast the world’s shadows. Thus the plot of Universal Care was born. The record sees the heavy rock trio welcome their bright side: Mellotron chords that wobble, a Stevie Wonder vibe on drums, lyrics that don’t want to give up. Though it still has monstrous songs— “Fuck That Guy” centers around a terrifying scream—the album is a change in the band’s catalog, showcasing a new side of Kal Marks and, with it, a new performance style.

Nature Shots Foreclosure Self-Released As someone who has spent years performing in indie rock bands, Michi Tassey didn’t expect to start a project like Nature Shots—and yet, and the same time, it was entirely unavoidable. The People Like You member picked up the moniker as a way to reflect on the loss of a dear friend, not as a method of coping with loss, but rather an extension of empathy to someone she still cared deeply about. The resulting album, Foreclosure, hangs Tassey’s voice like light strings around a bare room, her words echoing in an intentionally sparse landscape as fingerplucked guitar and slow piano fade in and out behind her. On first listen, it sounds like a blend of Grouper’s Ruins and the Antlers’ Hospice. The longer Foreclosure plays, though, the clearer it becomes the album is a bright light reflecting on the empty space of someone who passed: a beautiful, haunting, and lasting image that stands on its own.

Nick Minieri Swatchbook Zakim Recordings Don’t let the slick production of Swatchbook fool you. Everything Nick Minieri created on this album was built on his iPhone. Aside from using a hand-picked sample library and a proper studio to master the final mixes, he created the 11-song record while riding the T, sitting in hotels, and chilling on park benches. That change of scenery explains why he was able to go from a lo-fi techno track or thick house number into a minimal drum and bass piece or downtempo electronic groove (The transition from “Look & Feel” into “Calibrate” is particularly good). Listen for bird chirps and distant chatter. Minieri smoothed those details out in the studio, giving the collection of songs the continuity of an album, hence its ability to suck you into a world of dance music that never quite lets you go, forcing you to move along.

Boston’s funniest rapper is all grown up. With the “Michael Cera” days behind him, Michael Christmas enters his major indie label phase on Fool’s Gold with Role Model, and with it comes heavy hitters that never sacrifice his brand of humor. “Honey Berry” sees him play the celeb status name game again while “Girlfriend” sees him reference Beck and Beyonce in the same breath.

Even when Cousin Stizz, Domo Genesis, and G Perico hop onboard to share bars, Christmas holds his own, returning to the mic with the right amount of confidence to keep the spotlight on him while still showcasing how a little collaboration can deepen your own story. It’s the step up his career has been building toward without trying to do anything overtly flashy.

Prior Panic Finicky Things Self-Released The biggest allure of Prior Panic’s debut album is how comfortable the record is with its imperfections—a way of living few people will accomplish in their lifetime. You can hear finger slides on guitar strings. People chatter in the background of the opening track. The cymbals occasionally flood over one another. But the way in which frontperson Julia Fulbright sings, all while plucking at their cello, makes it clear this album stands on pride and pride alone. It’s an addicting type of confidence, the kind you wish you had. By the time “Float” kicks in, Fulbright’s ability to weave their instrument through Zachary Ellsworth’s drumming or Otto Klammer’s guitar feels like a hypnotic new dance, the kind you want to learn immediately and obsesses over with repeat viewings, eager to be just like them.

Vein errorzone Closed Casket Activities Vein got the memo about going big or going home.

Though it opens with a seemingly random flash of late ’90s touchstones—a burst of DnB drum samples, megaproduced bass drops, overlapping distortion pedals—on “virus://vibrance,” the hardcore band’s debut album, errorzone, is stuffed to the brim. Vein’s brand of hardcore is an erratic fury of rage that gets by on being perfectly synchronized. It’s a lot to take in, for sure, but the band’s blend of math, metalcore, and screamo leaves a strong impression, ultimately leaving you with no choice but to play the mosh pit-primed onslaught again.

Speedy Ortiz Twerp Verse Carpark Records Speedy Ortiz does more in a year than most bands do in five. So when the band found that its initial demos of Twerp Verse material sounded better than expected, it came as a surprise (to them and to listeners) that they would decide to run with those instead of rerecording their parts in a studio. That decision explains the off-kilter sound of Twerp Verse. Though it’s filled with frontwoman Sadie Dupuis’ usual bizarre chord progressions and unexpected midsong pivots, the real hook of Twerp Verse is its ability to sound both rough—as if performed live right in front of you—and polished, the trickery of grade-A studio work. Lean in when she suffers, yes, but lean in everywhere else too, because hearing the way the music comes together highlights how Speedy Ortiz continue to push themselves creatively the way no other band does..

>> DIGBOSTON’S “BEST LOCAL ALBUMS OF 2018 (SO FAR)” SHOW: KAL MARKS, BAERD, EDGE PETAL BURN, PINK NAVEL, PRIOR PANIC. SAT 6.30. THE SINCLAIR, 52 CHURCH ST., CAMBRIDGE. 6PM/ALL AGES/$12. SINCLAIRCAMBRIDGE.COM NEWS TO US

FEATURE

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17

THEATER REVIEW PERFORMING ARTS

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

IS BEBE WINANS BOUND FOR BROADWAY?

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After runs in Atlanta, DC, and Los Angeles, Born For This arrives in Boston retooled anew with Broadway in its sights. Telling the story of Gospel superstar BeBe Winans, who has written a completely original score for the occasion, Born For This is a formulaic biomusical similar in structure and ambition to On Your Feet and Motown: The Musical.

Although Winans’s original score sets Born For This apart from other musicals of its kind, it nevertheless fails to rise above the stigmas of its genre.

Given that Born For This is a musical by BeBe Winans about BeBe Winans, you can guess how close to deification it gets. Yet the chief problem with the show is that the book, by Winans, Detroit playwright Lisa D’Amour, and Motown director Charles Randolph-Wright, fails to illustrate why Winans’s story is worth telling at all, particularly when told alongside the story of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, which is arguably a more compelling tale (Randolph-Wright also serves as the show’s director).

The musical charts the rise of BeBe and CeCe Winans, who as teens left their famous family in Detroit to head down to North Carolina to join the Bakkers’ The PTL Club on their Praise the Lord Network. The Winans siblings quickly become the stars of the show and eventually cross over to mainstream fame, thanks to their 1984 hit song “Up Where We Belong,” a Christianized cover of the 1982 Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes hit.

The Winans’ rise to fame was not quite meteoric, but they broke boundaries and their careers were given a major boost by Whitney Houston, a fan, who would go on to become a lifelong friend of the Winans. The musical touches on the racism that they encountered in this very white world of televangelism, which infuses the show with some much needed weight, yet such an exploration winds up making us feel more for surrogate mom Tammy Faye than it does for what BeBe and CeCe endured.

There are several conflicts in the show, none of which are satisfactorily explored. It seems that the show tries to center on BeBe’s conflict between faith and fame, yet it isn’t an interesting enough question upon which to hang an entire musical. And when CeCe gets married at the end of the first act, BeBe is thrown into some existential crisis that is never explained and never mentioned again.

There is an interesting juxtaposition between the Winans’s ascent and the Bakker’s downfall and a barely there attempt to touch on BeBe’s increasing penchant for gambling. Yet the gambling never really seems to be a problem, which makes its inclusion curious. And while it is true that details of the Bakker empire’s demise are not the focal point of the musical, it is fertile dramatic territory that ought to be explored.

Rather than a throw-away scene showing BeBe visiting Jim Bakker in prison, a scene in which BeBe pays a visit to distraught and disgraced Tammy Faye would serve a greater dramatic purpose.

The focus of the second act, then, becomes the Winans’ involvement with Whitney Houston and the death of Ronald, one of the Winans brothers. The former comes across as a forced way to inject the story with some star power and the latter a forced way to coax some emotion from the audience. Although Liisi LaFontaine, who plays Houston, has a tremendous voice, her scenes are clumsily acted and they don’t ring true. And while it is true that Ronald’s death produces one of the show’s musical highlights (the hair on my arms is still standing up from Nita Whitaker’s eleven o’clock number), it would be more effective if either we had gotten to know Ronald at all or if we saw how it affected BeBe. Although it is his story, we never really get to know who BeBe Winans is. We see a man relentlessly singing about his purpose but never are we presented with a reason to care one way or another.

Winans’ score goes down easy though his lyrics could stand to be a bit smarter. (“This life isn’t always easy, but we trust God completely” is one of the show’s cringier lyrics.) And although Broadway is said to be the ultimate goal, I am dubious about the show’s broad appeal.

Despite the show’s flaws, Born For This is well-acted and flawlessly sung. Donald Webber Jr. is a likable BeBe although he fails to bring any sense of drive, spirit, or depth to the role. Loren Lott is a luminous CeCe who nails the wide-eyed innocence of the early days and effortlessly transitions into a woman who knows exactly what she wants.

Born For This may very well be the story of BeBe Winans, yet—as it turns out—the musical belongs to someone else entirely.

It is Kirsten Wyatt’s performance as Tammy Faye Bakker that elevates Born For This from saccharine cliche to solid-gold musical comedy. Her performance is so blindingly, deliriously delicious that the show cannot help but sputter whenever she isn’t onstage.

Should Born for This ultimately move to New York, there’s at least one Tony nomination in its future. >>BORN FOR THIS. THROUGH 7.15 AT EMERSON CUTLER MAJESTIC THEATRE, 219 TREMONT ST., BOSTON. ARTSEMERSON.ORG

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NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

ON THE ROAD AGAIN FILM

An interview with Debra Granik

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

characters really function and perform something, really make something, really cut something, or really use the wood to light the fire, whatever it is, even if the fire doesn’t light magically on the first take. Let’s just say it takes four tries. In that scene, it’s damp, he’s getting frustrated, and it’s important to let that play out.

Which brings us back to the nonfiction elements.

Yes, absolutely. I was wondering what [Tom] would find in the rural setting. She found a young man next door who’s getting through school by being interested in agricultural class, who does 4-H. 4-H exists in every state of the country. You have fifteen 4-H clubs that you could ask just in that same area we were filming—to bring their real rabbits, to bring their real selves, and to really do a 4-H protocol.

PHOTO BY DEREK KOUYOUMJIAN

Debra Granik is an American filmmaker whose movies include Stray Dog [2015], a nonfiction portrait of Vietnam War veteran Ron Hall, and Winter’s Bone [2010], a narrative crime drama set and shot in the Missouri Ozarks. Her latest film is Leave No Trace [2018] (based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock), which follows the teenaged Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) and her father Will (Ben Foster) as they live quietly on an Oregon park before getting detained, shuffled through social services, and then placed in housing with conditional terms, which only provokes further movement on their part. On that note…

Leave No Trace shares a lot with the “road movie.”

Every 20 minutes or so, we end up in a new location, and a process of indoctrination comes with it: We’re constantly looking at the characters acclimate to a new job, or new social codes, or even just what they have to eat now.

That’s even how we edited them, as chapters. “The forest,” “the farm,” “on the road,” “in the cabin,” and finally that community at the end, which is named Squaw … We didn’t know what we were going to find. We knew [the script] would lead to some kind of community.

But we didn’t know what that would look like.

It was an old logging camp from the 1920s, with those dwellings which look a little bit like an advent calendar, or like a Hobbit village. It’s not just RVs but micro-cabins— original tiny houses. It was not a set that we built. And we were grateful when we found it, because it did remind me of some of the wonderful parts of Stray Dog’s micro

park … the idea that the people in the dwellings are neighborly, at times—not always, but you know—they can decide to pull out a guitar, say, and make a night of that.

You stay in the long shot, and in deep focus, probably more so than most of your peers.

Well, I love to include the details in the frame. I want people to be able to see the camp, and to see how they start a fire. Near the end, there was a moment where Ben lights a fire with a stick, like striking a knife against a ferro rod. And I really wanted the knife to be seen—it was pretty much a close-medium [shot]. There was of course another one that was more focused on him igniting and blowing it. But my favorite close-up is one that includes the hands.

Could you tell me about finding the editing rhythm?

We go through a lot of versions. So knowing that—like when to cut in closer—is very much a matter of trial and error. … We try a lot of different permutations. I would say that editing is a lot of trial and error unless you have a big dogma, a big formal thing you’re going to do.

Would it be fair to say that you’re not dogmatic in that sense?

It’s fair to say that, yes. I’m very eclectic, actually, when it comes to [editing]. I’m trying to look for how long people can actually take in the scene, let the

>> LEAVE NO TRACE. RATED PG. OPENS FRI 6.29 AT KENDALL SQUARE CINEMA. 20

06.28.18 - 07.05.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

Your cinema has a very “realist” perspective, but then it bleeds past that line. Leave No Trace also functions as a parable, one concerned with the way that people of a certain military background struggle to readjust to workaday society. And it pushes that concern to almost mythic ends.

Yet there’s still this intense focus on surface texture that we’ve been talking about—the nonfiction side, which is clearly discernible and doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s being used in service of the parable itself. Is this a balance that you’re conscious of while you’re working on the films?

You can never be so conscious of that. I think you grow into it. It was kind of a fluke, but halfway through one of many rewrites on Leave No Trace, I happened to go to a performance of The Tempest. I was like, lo and behold, here’s this really adrift father character, and it’s different circumstances but, he’s also exiled, he also has a storm in his emotions, and he’s also hypervigilant yet conflicted and confused, and feels harmed, and is a roiling person, and his daughter is his whisperer, the person who can bring him into balance. So I loved that this classic work of literature shed some light about dyads—about two people who offer each other something complementary that somehow facilitates survival. … After screenings of Winter’s Bone, it was European people who kept telling me: That’s a classic fairy tale. The witch warns her not to go too far into the forest, she goes anyway, and she has to bring back a trophy, the heart of the hunter, to prove she was there, that she did the journey, and that she didn’t turn back. Leave No Trace has a few of those elements. Getting very lost in the tempest, right? They go deep into the forest, there’s a storm raging, trees are blowing, the water’s coming down, it’s getting colder, they’re very lost. Those are the elements of many a myth. … And you can’t tell a story in the forest without the mythic.

BOOK REVIEW BOOKS

The Lost Family by Jenna Blum. HarperCollins. 413 pages. $27.

BY ED MEEK

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• quickly relieve stress(an and anxiety; improve A number of writers who teach at Grub Street independent “creativesleep writing quality center” on Boylston Street) have been landing on the bestseller lists and reeling • improve andnovel brainLittle power; in million-dollar advances.

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Fellow Grubbie Whitney Scharer received a million• boost immune system from ill Jenna healthBlum, dollar advance from Little Brown for her first noveland Therecover Age of Light, and • strengthen bones has andaincrease whose novel Storm Chasers was a bestseller, new bookflexibility out: The Lost Family.

The plot of The Lost Family sounds like a hit movie. A German Jew who survived the camps as a cook comes to the United States and opens a successful restaurant where he meets a beautiful model whom heFree marries.

The problem is that his history Name of Event: Energy Bagua Walking follows him to America.

He can’t get over the loss of his young wife and their twin Meditation Workshop girls to the Holocaust, and benefactor, cousin who bankrolls his restaurant, is, Datehisand Time: July 12 Sol, at 7p-8:30p & July 15 at unbeknownst to our hero, a crook.

2p-3:30p Any attempt to keep the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in the Address: 101 Mystic Ave, Medford MApublic’s 01255mind is to be applauded with thePhone recent lurch toward authoritarianism here and abroad. Jenna Number: 781-874-1023 Blum, however, doesn’tE-mail go into: aboston.bodhi@gmail.com lot of detail about the war or the camps; instead the novel takes place from 1965 tohttps://www.puti.org/en 1985 in the US. Although the main character, Peter, Website: flashes back to the war now and again, he represses his memories and refuses to talk about it with his wife, June Bouquet, who gives up her career to settle down with Peter, first in Manhattan and then in Claremont, New Jersey. In Claremont, the novel goes into the point of view of June, who leads a life of suburban frustration à la January Jones from Madmen while Peter throws himself into his job as chef of his restaurants, the place he feels most at home.

This may work well as a film in which actors bring June and Peter to life, but that never really happens in the novel. We want to feel sorry for Peter, who, we learn, ignored his first wife Masha’s entreaties to leave Germany with the twins. Peter’s father smuggled Jews out, but Peter refused his help. The inability to take action is Peter’s salient characteristic. In addition, throughout the novel, the way Peter deals with his grief is to suppress it, so we never really learn what he went through in the camps as opposed to, say, Elie Wiesel and his son in the excellent Holocaust memoir Night.

As the writer William Kittredge once said, “Great character makes great fiction.”

The characters in The Lost Family, with the exception of the daughter Elsbeth, are all a little flat. Halfway through the novel, June, looking at Peter, thinks: “How different he was from the man she’d thought he was, the man he’d turned out to be.” This insight might work if earlier in the novel Peter had been different, but he is exactly the same as he was 200 pages ago.

The plot finally picks up in the last section of the book, which is told from the point of view of the daughter, Elsbeth, who is left to work out the problems she inherits from her parents. Blum has a good feel for how teen girls talk and think. The tone in this section is satirical, almost as if it is from a different book.

Nonetheless, you might want to include The Lost Family on your list of summer reads.

IMAGE COURTESY OF HARPERCOLLINS

Lack of energy or feel stressed?

Join us to:

Free Energy Bagua Walking Meditation Workshop

• Quickly relieve stress and anxiety; improve sleep quality

• Improve concentration, focus and brain power • Boost immune system and recover from ill health

July 12 (7 - 8:30pm) July 15 (2 - 3:30pm)

• Strengthen bones and increase flexibility

Contact 781-874-1023

more info: puti.org/en

boston.bodhi@gmail.com 101 Mystic Ave., Medford, MA, 02155

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

COMEDY EVENTS

JUST ASK

SAVAGE LOVE

THU 06.28 - SAT 06.30

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET When I started dating my husband, he told me he had a low libido. I said I could deal with that. We waited several months before having sex, and then after we started, it was infrequent and impersonal. There was some slow improvement over the three years we dated. Then we got married, and suddenly he had no libido at all. He blamed health problems and assured me he was trying to address them. Despite being diagnosed and successfully treated for multiple physical and mental health issues over time, things only got worse. After four years of marriage, the relationship has become strictly platonic. I can’t even start a conversation about intimacy without him getting irritated. After we married, he also decided he no longer wanted children, and I eventually convinced myself it was probably for the best, given his health. We built our dream home, adopted a pet, and built an outwardly successful life together. I was, if not happy, at least complacent. Until I ran into an ex-boyfriend at a party. We split many years ago on good terms.

We ended up talking about how important it is to him to have a biological child—something we talked about a lot when we were dating—and we got physically close, and that got me thinking about how much I missed sex with him. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about him. I think he was hinting that he wants me back, and right now that sounds like the answer to all my problems. But if not, I don’t want to leave my hubby and lose the decent life we built together. Plus, my leaving would hurt my husband’s feelings, his health, and his finances. I also worry that people would blame me because it will look like I left because things were tough. Can I follow up and clarify with my ex before I break it off with my husband, or is that too much like cheating? Is it selfish of me to even consider leaving at this point? I’m a 30-year-old woman, so I don’t have a lot of time left to decide about children.

Indecisively Married Dame On Nearing Exit Here’s something I’ve never seen in my inbox: a letter from someone explaining how sex with their partner was infrequent, impersonal, uninspired, unimaginative, etc. at first but—holy moly—the sex got a fuck of a lot better after the wedding! Now, maybe that happens—maybe that happened for you, dear reader (if so, please write in)—but I can’t imagine it happens often. So, boys and girls and enbies, if the sex isn’t good at or very near the beginning, the passage of time and/or muttering of vows isn’t going to fix it. If sex is important to you—if you wouldn’t be content in a companionate marriage and/or don’t want to wind up in divorce court one day—hold out for someone with whom you click sexually.

Okay, IMDONE, either your husband married you under false pretenses— putting out/in just enough to convince you to marry him and only pretending to want kids—or his good-faith efforts to resolve his health issues didn’t help (at least where sex is concerned) and he changed his mind about being a dad (perhaps because he doesn’t feel healthy enough to do the work of parenting). Either way, you’re free to go. Even if the sex was good and your husband wanted 30 kids, you’d still be free to go.

Whether or not you stay, IMDONE, you should explore your options before making up your mind. So go ahead and call your ex and ask him if he’d like to get coffee with you—in a public place and shortly before an appointment you can’t cancel. Your ex may have been hinting about wanting to get back together, or he may not want to get back together and was engaged in what he thought was a little harmless/nostalgic flirtation— harmless because he knows you’re married and presumably unavailable.

There’s only one way to find out what your ex wants or doesn’t want, and that’s by asking your ex. So ask.

On the Lovecast, is porn getting more and more violent?: savagelovecast.com

JEFF DYE @ LAUGH BOSTON

Jeff Dye is a nationally touring comedian, actor, host, prankster and Bigfoot enthusiast. He stars in NBC’s new comedy adventure series Better Late Than Never. This exciting project follows the travels of Henry Winkler, William Shatner, Terry Bradshaw and George Foreman as Jeff creates for them the adventure of a lifetime. NBC has fast tracked season two after the show became a summer smash hit!

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8PM & 10PM | $25-$29 THU 06.28

GOOD LUCK COMEDY @ VANDERBILT KITCHEN & BAR Featuring: Orlando Baxter, Jiayong Li, Peter Martin, & John Paul Rivera, & Music by Supr Sprt Hosted by J Smitty & Sam Ike

105 WATER ST, BOSTON | 9PM | FREE THU 06.28

BOSTON COMEDY CHICKS @ OSAKA JAPANESE SUSHI & STEAK HOUSE

Proceeds benefits the BCCNS Alliance.

Featuring: Emily Ruskowski, Kathe Farris, Ericka Welch, Carolyn Riley, & Brett Johnson.

Hosted by Alex Giampapa

14 GREEN ST., BROOKLINE | 8PM | $20 FRI 06.29 - SAT 06.30

SEAN SULLIVAN @ NICK’S COMEDY STOP

Featuring: Jai Demeule, Isha Patnaik, Jonathan Thomas, May Keith, Kwasi Mensah, & David Thomas.

Hosted by Chloé Cunha

40 PROSPECT ST. CAMBRIDGE | 7PM | $5 SAT 06.30

MICHAEL CHE @ THE WILBUR

Michael Che will be partnering with Yondr for this performance. No cellphones, cameras or recording devices will be allowed at the show. Upon arrival, all phones and smart watches will be secured in Yondr pouches that will be unlocked at the end of the show. Guests maintain possession of their phones throughout the night, and if needed, may access their phones at designated Yondr unlocking stations in the lobby. All guests are encouraged to print their tickets in advance to ensure a smooth entry process. Anyone caught with a cellphone in the venue will be asked to leave the premises. We appreciate your cooperation in creating a phone-free viewing experience.

246 TREMONT ST. BOSTON | 7 & 9:45PM | $27 - $37 SUN 07.01

WEEDING OUT THE STONED @ IMPROVBOSTON

The Game Show of Sobriety Tests comes back to Massachusetts after a sold out show at ImprovBoston!

Fifteen comedians enter. All but one of them are stoned. It’s up to the audience to find the sober individual so the entire audience can win prizes.

Hosted by Alex Grubard

40 PROSPECT ST. CAMBRIDGE | 8PM | $12 SUN 07.01

LIQUID COURAGE COMEDY @ SLUMBREW

Featuring: Emily Ruskowski, Zach Russell, Joe Kozlowski, Austin McCloud, Jimmy Cash, Mike Settlow, & Geoffrey Asmus.

Hosted by Liam McGurk

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

savagelovecast.com

22

06.28.18 - 07.05.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

Lineup & shows to change without notice. For more info on everything Boston Comedy visit BostonComedyShows.com Bios & writeups pulled from various sources, including from the clubs & comics…

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

HEADLINING THIS WEEK!

CODE DIG TAKES 5 OFF S $5 ELE SHOW CT S.

Jeff Dye

The Tonight Show, Girl Code Thursday - Saturday DIG5 code valid on all shows – except June 23, 8 pm.

COMING SOON Frank Santorelli w/ Orlando Baxter + Peter Martin Jul 5 + 6 DIG5 code valid on ALL SHOWS.

Brooks Wheelan

Saturday Night Live, Comedy Central’s The Half Hour Jul 7 + 8 DIG5 code valid on ALL SHOWS.

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Funniest Person in Massachusetts Competition

July 10-14 DIG5 code valid on ALL SHOWS.

Alex Edelman

Just For Laughs, @Midnight, Conan Jul 19-21 DIG5 code valid on ALL SHOWS.

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Chad Prather

Special Engagements: Jul 22 + 23

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

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23

MORE BAND + TICKET INFO Subscribe to the Daily Dig at digboston.com for updates and opportunities for free tixx

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