DigBoston 7.5.18

DIGBOSTON.COM 07.05.18 - 07.12.18

MUSIC

AUBREY HADDARD WE HEART BLUE PART

NEWS

ICE CHARADES WHERE EDUCATION MEETS DEPORTATION

TRUMP

DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS FAREWELL FROM OUR DC COLUMNIST

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JUL 05, 2018 - JUL 12, 2018 BUSINESS PUBLISHER Marc Sneider ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone John Loftus Jason Pramas SALES ASSOCIATES Christopher Bent Victoria Botana FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com BUSINESS MANAGER John Loftus

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EDITOR IN CHIEF Chris Faraone EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Pramas MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Dewar MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan THEATER EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COMEDY EDITOR Dennis Maler STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Patrick Cochran, Mike Crawford, Britni de la Cretaz, Kori Feener, Eoin Higgins, Zack Huffman, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus Johnson-Smith, C. Shardae Jobson, Heather Kapplow, Derek Kouyoumjian, Dan McCarthy, Rev. Irene Monroe, Peter Roberge, Maya Shaffer, Citizen Strain, M.J. Tidwell, Miriam Wasser, Dave Wedge, Baynard Woods INTERNS Thomas Ashton (Hampshire College), Endre Joseph (UMass Boston), Abigail Martin-Ryan (Lesley University)

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ON THE COVER PHOTO OF AUBREY HADDARD BY KAYA BLAZE KELLEY. READ NINA CORCORAN’S FEATURE ON ‘THE LIFE AND SOUL OF THE PARTY’ IN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC SECTION.

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ROYALE RAPHAEL SAADIQ

WAITRESS

“She’s only 28 years old, and at this time last year she was working as a bartender!”

I left my morning eggs to briefly fry unsupervised and poked my head around the kitchen wall to see what all the fuss on television was about. The way the local anchor said the word “bartender,” I thought that someone from the service industry had become the first human being to fly with no help at all from any sort of artificial propulsion. Like a superhero.

Rather, the news was that Alexandria OcasioCortez—a political neophyte and democratic socialist who, in addition to various qualifications that naturally complement a politician’s duties, was indeed recently tending bar at a tapas joint in Manhattan— rocked an entrenched incumbent US congressman in a significant primary upset, further igniting an ongoing dialogue about how far the Democratic party should and could move to the left.

Don’t get me wrong. Ocasio-Cortez is every bit the promising anomaly that sympathetic media is making her out to be, and what she has accomplished in New York—her district includes a swath of my native Queens—should be studied and admired. All I’m saying is that journalists and talking heads should act far less surprised about the candidate’s experience mixing mojitos, like this kicker from Business Insider: “28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was bartending last year—now she’s likely becoming the youngest congresswoman in history.”

As anyone who’s worked in food service before knows well, slinging grub and suds is only half of what they do. The rest of the time, they are dealing with the foulest quirky selfish pigs you can imagine, entitled animals who act as if they’re more important than the working-class people propping their world up. In other words, it’s fantastic preparation for going to work with greedy DC pricks who are accustomed to doing nothing and being applauded for it. Plus there is the practical aspect of having a food service pedigree— unlike members of Congress, who get pay hikes and excellent healthcare no matter how bad they are at their job, when you wait tables or tend bar you need to actually put in real effort if you want to make a buck.

If only more elected politicians had to work under that kind of pressure.

What am I ranting about, anyway? In two phrases: lazy buzzwords, clickbait. As necessary as summarizations can be to reduce a complicated situation to a simple headline, sometimes such sensational shorthand comes at the expense of the subject, as I believe happened with Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a BU grad, by the way.

Do I have a solution? Not really, but I did think of a more accurate headline: “Longshot congressional candidate who thinks that sick people and immigrants should be treated humanely elected to office.”

Now that’s something I would click on. How about you?

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NEWS+OPINION

BRIC OF ICE IMMIGRATION

The feeble Massachusetts records law aids ICE in Mass

BY MAYA SHAFFER OF CRITICAL MASS It’s widely known that the Trump administration is holding immigrants indefinitely in camps on military bases, while the president has called for the deportation of detainees without due process.

What’s less known is that here in Massachusetts, our feeble public records law is helping to bolster these efforts by obscuring the process through which local officials share information with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

News last week about the deportation of a Boston Public Schools student sparked public outrage when it was revealed that an incident report written by an East Boston High School resource officer was used against the student in a deportation hearing. A pending lawsuit, filed against BPS by attorneys from the Center for Law and Education and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, is seeking the release of records related to how the resource officer’s report was sent to ICE. The suit alleges that the information was turned over by the Boston Police Department-run “fusion center,” better known as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, or BRIC. Boston is a so-called sanctuary city. In 2014, Mayor Marty Walsh, along with all 13 city councilors, passed the Trust Act, which in theory blocks police from detaining people based on immigration status unless they are wanted on a criminal warrant. But as DigBoston and Critical Mass have reported, under Walsh’s watch the BPD has worked with ICE numerous times to turn over immigrants facing only civil charges for deportation.

This history of this administration working with the feds runs counter to the mayor’s public comments and the city’s sanctuary status. The only way to comprehend the breadth of the cooperation is to see the actual records and communications between BPS, BPD/BRIC, and ICE. In Massachusetts, though, it could take months to get those 4

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records—if anyone ever gets them at all.

The aforementioned lawsuit was brought by attorneys after they were unable to obtain records through the public records law. In the East Boston High School case, ICE used an incident report made by a BPS resource officer in an immigration case against a BPS student. Attorneys filed a public records request trying to shed light on how information flows through BPS to BRIC, and ultimately to ICE. Before they filed the lawsuit, the civil rights attorneys first attempted to get the state to enforce the records law by filing an appeal with the records division of Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office, which oversees the state’s public records law. On Feb 20, the suing attorneys won the appeal and BPS was ordered to turn over the records sought within 10 business days. Orders from the records division are rarely enforced, as the current dysfunctional law leaves the enforcement up to the attorney general’s office. The records division often refuses to send orders to the attorney general’s office, but even when they do, the AG’s office refuses to enforce almost all of the orders. Filing a lawsuit is slow and cost prohibitive in most cases, but it is the only real chance at obtaining records that an agency refuses to turn over.

Based on information contained in the order, it appears that the city maintains a database called “Boston School Police Department of Safety Services, Incident Report System,” into which resource officers can enter incidents involving students. ICE reportedly obtained such a report and used it at a hearing in the BPS case. It would appear that any incidents filed in such a system would be accessible to the BRIC, which is run by BPD. The BRIC is an information hub, designed amidst the war on terror, that gathers and passes intelligence between law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, and which also works

in partnership with private sector interests. Among other examples, BRIC has been found to monitor activists and journalists (see ed. note below), and to spread information about those nonviolent persons widely.

I’ve filed my own records requests to both of the state’s fusion centers, as well as a request to BPS. The second fusion center is run by the Massachusetts State Police and could be working widely with schools and/or school resource officers across the state. The dysfunctional transparency law gives these agencies months to produce records and allows them to never produce records at all under many circumstances.

Unfortunately, there will likely be a long wait before we find out if the public will get to see the records that could show us—definitively—who is leaking student info to the federal agencies indefinitely detaining people. Until then, it’s safest to assume that anything documented by law enforcement officers, including those employed in Massachusetts schools, is accessible by ICE and that students in schools that employ resource officers face possible exposure.

This is a critical time in our country. We are witnessing the end of due process and the beginning of indefinite detention in internment camps. Without transparency, we are allowing actors within our local government to support this historically horrifying agenda without consequence.

Ed. note: The author of this piece has a years-old privacy complaint pending against the BRIC. She was monitored as a journalist whose work was critical of the BPD’s systematic violation of the Fourth Amendment at pedestrian checkpoints. BRIC spread her information and information about her former media outlet widely to law enforcement agencies and likely to the military. The BRIC later boasted about tracking her in a conference at DHS headquarters.

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‘DON’T MOURN, ORGANIZE!’ APPARENT HORIZON

Why Janus might actually be good for the American labor movement

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS The Supreme Court issued a decision last week that will have profound consequences for American working people. In Janus v. AFSCME, the court overturned a 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, that allowed public sector unions—like the National Education Association, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—to charge government workers who refused to become members a “fair share” fee to defray the expense of representing them.

According to the Atlantic, “Until now, 22 states had in place a so-called ‘fair share’ provision, which required people represented by unions who did not choose to be members of these unions to pay fees to cover the cost of the unions’ collective bargaining activities. By contrast, 28 states were so-called ‘right-to-work’ states, and barred employers from including ‘fair share’ requirements in employment contracts.”

Private sector unions—although most large unions these days like Service Employees International Union represent both private and public sector workers—are also not allowed to collect “fair share” or “agency” fees in right-to-work states. The thing that makes this ruling so pernicious is that it expands that right-to-work mandate to cover public sector unions nationwide.

The understandable view of the majority of labor supporters is that Janus is a disaster for American unionism. Bankrolled by a rogues’ gallery of rightwing donors, its passage virtually guaranteed by the replacement of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with another conservative, Neil Gorsuch, the decision is certainly going to have a negative impact on public sector unions. Which comprise the largest wing of the US labor movement of 2018. Private sector unions having already been beaten back by endless attacks from corporations over the last 50 years.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the union membership rate of public sector workers (34.4 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than that of private sector workers (6.5 percent) in 2017. With only 10.7 percent of American jobs unionized overall, and public sector union members outnumbering private sector union members since 2009.

This low “union density” rate is no accident, as big business wants to eliminate unions as an impediment to their endless drive for profit. Since unions have the strongest track record of any institution in our society of keeping the pressure on employers and government for higher wages, better benefits, and more spending on government programs that benefit working families.

Just the sorts of things that lower corporate profits.

But public sector unions have been better protected than private sector unions—organizing jobs that are generally directly funded by government at all levels.

This has made them a primary target of the right wing— for whom giving unionized government workers a better deal over decades is tantamount to using public funds to expand the government.

Also, public sector unions—like most other unions— provide tens of millions of dollars to the Democrats every election cycle, and most of the ground troops the Dems need to run successful election campaigns in many districts.

For those reasons, right-wing strategists have been looking for ways to get rid of public sector unions since they rose to prominence in the mid-20th century. Even more than the private sector unions they’ve had an easier time busting. And Janus moved them a long way 6

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toward that goal by cutting into union bottom lines.

How? Fair share fees add up. Eliminating them for public sector unions nationwide will cut millions of dollars from their budgets. Effectively slashing the amount of money they can spend on organizing new workers and plumping up Democratic Party coffers. Even though the Aboud decision dictated that fair share fees could only be spent on “collective bargaining” costs— basically, providing nonunion government workers the same services provided to union members—not on political activity.

No surprise, then, that many union leaders and boosters think this is the worst anti-labor decision by the court in decades.

However, there’s a minority view on the left wing of labor—where I have always situated myself as a longtime union member and activist—that says that the Janus decision may actually save American unions. Why? Two reasons.

First, because the more money that American unions have raised from members and nonmembers alike, the more they have tended to bureaucratize. And become top-heavy with high-paid staffers and elected officials that have become culturally distant from those same members.

Because union leaders making secure six-figure salaries with generous benefits have very little in common with members making typical union wages.

They are also more likely to be college educated than union members are. A phenomenon that’s been growing (ironically) since the radical campus movements of the 1960s produced a generation of student activists who entered union jobs—and staff positions— in an effort to push them to the left politically. After the communists, socialists, and anarchists who actually built many unions through titanic workplaces struggles between the turn of the last century and the 1940s were pushed out of them during the anti-left “witch hunts” of the McCarthy Era. Today’s union leaders therefore are not like the leaders of those earlier struggles. They’re often more comfortable with the college-educated corporate and government leadership sitting across from them at the bargaining table than they are with their own members.

And they’ve tended to replace militant grassroots organizing on behalf of the entire working class with narrow bargaining for minor contractual gains for the shrinking number of members they represent. Such leaders make tough-sounding noises when it’s time to get a new contract with an employer or during big election campaigns. Yet they’re actually quite timid compared to their predecessors—who were often on the front lines of literal street battles with police and the National Guard or in jail on trumped-up charges when union activity was deemed illegal by courts stacked with pro-corporate elites.

Second, as this timidity in an era of renewed vicious corporate assaults against labor has contributed to declining union membership rolls as a percentage of the growing population, union leaders have turned to spending larger and larger sums of money on the Democratic Party. In a mostly vain attempt to purchase political clout they no longer have in the streets or at the ballot box. Even as the Democrats have moved steadily to the right since the 1970s, and become more and more beholden to corporations. Which still makes the Republican hard right angry enough to fight for court decisions like Janus, since the now slavishly procorporate Democrats are insufficiently capitalist by their

lights. And, more to the point, since the Republicans have a strong desire to rule—a “will to power,” one might say—and any force that opposes them is an enemy that must be defeated. An attitude that hapless Dem leaders have definitely adopted to anyone to their left, including the social democratic pro-union left of their own party.

But have failed to adopt to the Repubs and the outright fascists on their right.

So, Janus might be just what’s needed to cause a rebirth of the labor movement. It eliminates a big chunk of the money that union leaders have to spend on the Democrats—who have done little more than take that money and spit on union workers since the neoliberals of the Clinton administration took over party leadership.

It also will force the unions to cut staff. Including top staff. Which will definitely dump good leaders as well as bad ones, and that’s a drag. But it might very well help with the other big problem American unions have—a lack of internal democracy. Like other bureaucracies, too many unions have come to vest too much power in their top echelons. And leave their members out in the cold. Which is another factor that has led to union leaders making bad political decisions. Like backing procorporate Hillary Clinton over pro-labor Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Budget cuts caused by Janus could cause more power to be vested in union memberships’ hands. Leading to more victories like the one won recently by unionized teachers in West Virginia—who organized massive wildcat strikes over the protests of their own leadership.

And won big while lighting a fire that has spread to teachers in other “red” states like Oklahoma and Arizona. States that are, among other bad things, rightto-work states.

However things play out, moribund American union leadership has been in need of a wakeup call for decades.

And if Janus is what it takes to shake them out of their torpor, then so be it.

In any case, as storied labor martyr Joe Hill once said, “Don’t mourn, organize!” But don’t expect to win gains in the workplace and at the ballot box without a real fight—and without unions controlled by their members top to bottom.

Moribund American union leadership has been in need of a wakeup call for decades.

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.

PRISON LETTER GUEST OPINION

Feeling bored with the usual board meeting?

Advocates drop laundry list of problems with parole system on governor

BY THE COALITION FOR EFFECTIVE PUBLIC SAFETY

The following is an excerpt from a letter sent to Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker last week from the Coalition for Effective Public Safety, an alliance which comprises more than 40 social justice groups including Families for Justice as Healing, Citizens for Juvenile Justice, the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, the Prison Policy Initiative, Progressive Massachusetts, and the Green-Rainbow Party.

Dear Governor Baker: We are a coalition of agencies, associations, and individuals in Massachusetts who advocate for fairness in criminal and juvenile justice proceedings, corrections and parole, or who work directly with families and communities dealing with disabilities and/or poverty. On January 17, 2017, we sent you a letter signed by numerous community groups concerning the work being done by the Council on State Government (CSG). In that letter, we included our ideas for legislative reform and executive agency policy changes. Although there is still much work to do in the areas we addressed in that letter, we are encouraged by the passage of the new Criminal Justice Reform Act and we thank you for your work on that legislation.

We are concerned, however, that parole reform was largely omitted from the new legislation. With this letter, we are alerting you to some pressing and serious concerns about parole in Massachusetts—concerns which, we suggest, can and should be addressed through immediate executive action.

Re-Appoint Charlene Bonner Ph.D. to another term as a member of the Parole Board and appoint additional members with education, training and clinical experience in the treatment of substance use disorders and mental health conditions. Dr. Charlene Bonner is the only member of the Parole Board who has education, training and experience in clinical psychology and substance use disorders. Dr. Bonner’s term of office expired on June 2nd, and we are asking you to re-appoint her to another five-year term.

The need to have persons on the Parole Board with Dr. Bonner’s education and experience is essential if the Board is to function effectively. As the percentage of persons suffering from substance use disorders and mental illness continues to grow in our county and state prisons, the importance of having Parole Board members who have a thorough understanding of how these disabilities intersect with readiness for parole is magnified. According to the Department of Correction (DOC), approximately DigBoston meeting space ad.indd 1 80 percent of the persons incarcerated in Massachusetts state prisons self-report as having substance use issues.

To be an effective part of the justice system, the Parole Board must function better and parole more people with the appropriate supports in the community. The Parole Board is not completing important work in a timely manner nor is it reporting its work, undermining community confidence in the fairness of the process.

Parole is an important public safety tool that, when properly administered, would greatly ease re-entry problems, lower recidivism, and result in significant cost-savings for the criminal justice system. As we noted in our 2017 letter to you, it has been understood for decades that formerly incarcerated people reoffend at significantly lower rates when they receive appropriate support and supervision on parole. The Massachusetts Parole Board paroles prisoners at a very low rate, forcing the majority of parole eligible people to complete or “wrap up” their sentences and transition home ROOFING with no help and no oversight.

LICENSED AND INSURED The number of people released from Massachusetts prisons with parole supervision must be increased.

The following observations, shared by many stakeholders in the community, cause FREE ESTIMATES us grave concern about how the present Parole Board is functioning:

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• At present, persons serving parole eligible life sentences, as well as the victims of those crimes, are waiting an extraordinarily long time, presently approaching one year from the date of the hearing, to receive the Record of Decision.

• The “Decision” sections of most Records of Decision issued in lifer cases in 2016, 2017 and 2018 are largely word-for-word identical save for the name of the lifer and the length of the setback. They offer little or no guidance as to what a denied lifer should address before his or her next parole hearing.

• The last Annual Report published by the Parole Board was for calendar year 2015 and it was only recently made available. It is impossible to know what is happening at the Parole Board due to its lack of annual reporting and its confusing website.

We urge you to set both short and long-term goals, implementing best practices, to increase the parole rate and address these concerns. Thank you for considering our suggestions for steps to improve the parole process in Massachusetts in both the short and long-term. We are hoping to select several persons to be representative of these community groups and request a meeting with you. We hope to be contacting you shortly.

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MUCH LOVE AND GRIM SOLIDARITY DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

Baynard Woods takes stock in the last Democracy in Crisis column

BY BAYNARD WOODS @BAYNARDWOODS

This is the final Democracy in Crisis column that I will be writing.

I remember the urgency with which it started. I was super stoned in a Denver hotel room just days after Trump was elected.

Editors at various altweeklies had been wringing their hands about how to deal with Trump. Many of these papers had been militantly local during the Obama era—when I was managing editor of Baltimore City Paper, my unofficial motto was “militantly Baltimorean.” But now it seemed that whenever someone picked up their local paper, they would want to see some news from the alt angle—not the Nazi alt of alt-right, but the independent, insouciant, and fiercely opinionated alt of the alternative press.

Now, more than 70 columns later, either that has changed, or I was wrong-headed from the start. The Trump regime has taken up so much air from every other story that, while it is wildly important and has implications everywhere, I believe that each of these papers is better served following up on the way Trump’s policies affect their local communities.

If it were like the old days and papers were fat and had money, a national column would be great. But this is a time of crisis for the press as much as it is for democracy. David Simon, creator of the Wire, has said that the death of newspapers will usher in—or has ushered in—a golden age of corruption because there is no one left to watch city hall. Except for the wretches who work for the paper you’re holding in your hands.

Support them now or you will miss them when they are gone. Since the beginning of this column in January 2017, my own home paper, the Baltimore City Paper was shut down. We immediately responded with an attempt

Support them now or you will miss them when they are gone.

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to start a new paper. We partnered with the non-profit Real News Network and the Washington Blade and founded the Baltimore Beat. It lasted for four months before the people with the money pulled out.

Now, in our city where we will have more than 300 murders again this year, where we had a major police corruption scandal that will overturn nearly 2,000 cases, where the police commissioner was federally charged and resigned after only months in office, we have no outlet like the paper you are holding. There is no single place where you can mourn for those murdered, mock the bullshit politicians, and celebrate some artistic or culinary innovation or creature comfort. There is no where for voice. And our city sorely misses it.

The art and music scenes are less cohesive, hardly scenes at all anymore. New writers aren’t following their passions and learning their chops. People aren’t doing insane experiments like I once did of listening to only local music for an entire years (music editors, take note).

The Washington City Paper, one of the other early sponsors of this column, came dangerously close to death during the last year; an execution stayed only by the intervention of a billionaire—but a local rich dude.

The Bezos model seems to work in Washington, but we can’t all count on that.

I’ve gotten countless emails from other editors saying something like, “Hey man, we love the column but can’t afford it anymore.” I was once in the same boat myself as a managing editor. It is brutal.

Between the first draft of this column and this final version, five of my fellow reporters were murdered in their newsroom, an hour away from my own. Every reporter I have ever known has been threatened or maligned at some point, but this has gotten so much worse under Trump. We don’t need the CNNs and MSNBCs. We need the Annapolis Capital Gazettes and all the small struggling papers that carried this column.

Fuck you, Milo, and fuck you, Trump.

I learned from Spy magazine that every good column has heroes and villains. Donald Trump was one of Spy’s main villains back in the 1980s, and he was

the overarching villain of this column. But there were also all of those who enabled him and who he enabled, especially Michael Flynn, the alt-right goons of Charlottesville and the dark corners of the web, Project Veritas, and the ever-so-silly and sad “western chauvinist”™ frat of the Proud Boys, whose litigious western chauvinist™ lawyer threatened legal action against the papers carrying this column.

Foremost among the heroes are the 230 people arrested during the inauguration protests. The very first column detailed those protests, after I was gassed and pepper sprayed and almost arrested by the mobs of cops with covered faces who ultimately kettled a large group of protesters.

The protesters were all charged with the few windows that were broken on the theory that because they wore black and were part of a “black bloc” protest they all conspired to damage the property. They were facing more than 60 years each.

After a year and a half of paying two U.S. Attorneys to prosecute the case and a full-time detective and part-time Trump lover Gregg Pemberton to work it, several defendants have been acquitted on all counts, and the charges against many others have dropped.

This includes the charges against Elizabeth Lagesse, one of the real heroes of this column, who taught herself everything possible about the case and went to nearly every proceeding, and filed suit with the ACLU against Washington’s police department.

Aaron Cantú, a journalist at the Santa Fe Reporter, is still facing charges. Over the last year and a half, the #Resistance has half-heartedly fallen in love with the “free press,” railing against Trump’s tweets while still lying to us if they are politicians, and ignoring Cantú’s plight if they are Beltway journalists. He has been living under serious criminal charges for a year and a half because he covered a protest. And he’s a hell of a good reporter.

But the real heroes of the column are the alt-weekly papers that ran it and the readers who followed along.

I am so grateful to have been able to have a home in each of your cities and towns. And I learned so much from having editors in Colorado Springs or Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and so many others.

Finally, Mary Finn spent countless hours filing FOIA requests—some of which we are still waiting on (fingers crossed) and editing the column. Brandon Soderberg was a tireless editor and a great friend and collaborator through this.

Brandon and I will be writing a book over the next year, so if you enjoyed the column at all, keep an eye out for it.

Thank you to everyone for everything and to the great Lawrence Weschler for the second half of the sign off below.

Much Love and Grim Solidarity.

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COOKING ON HIGH TALKING JOINTS MEMO

Another show to watch on Netflix while you’re getting stoned

BY CITIZEN STRAIN I’m a bastard when it comes to cannabis in media. Like, a seriously stubborn curmudgeon, as likely to criticize TV and movies designed for the High Times crowd and their over-the-top tie-dyed kind bud nostalgia-mongering as I am to knock products and entertainment specifically styled for vapehappy business-class stoners.

But for Cooking on High, the new Netflix show— which, as you probably already guessed from the title, brings cannabis into the Top Chef and Chopped sphere—I am making an exception. It’s not the most polished show streaming, but it is pretty damn picture-perfect in its tone and approach, and that’s quite an accomplishment considering how often other marijuana media misses the mark.

Your host is Josh Leyva, who is technically still best known for the moronic YouTube clip “Annoying My Girlfriend.” He’s rough around the edges but gets the job done, largely because he is hardly different from the bums like me sitting at home watching along.

There’s no doubt that certain viewers will get jealous, perhaps wondering why they were not afforded such an opportunity to hang around with hipsters in cool hats while smoking weed and eating for a Netflix show.

Those people should pack their bags and head out to Los Angeles, because if they have something, anything, funny to say about bud and grub, there is a chance that they can land on an upcoming episode. The guests aren’t full-blown famous, at least not in the traditional sense— the first installment features Cali music man Mod Sun and comedian Ramon Rivas II—and that’s a real bonus as well. If the show featured the likes of Tom Cruise eating activated hors d’oeuvres, then the inevitable focus would be on his subsequent behavior and little else.

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And yes, the guests actually do get super high. Some show up stoned, then after consumption they even take a break from the filming for the edibles to kick in.

This makes for some serious antics and, I would argue, great television—from the specific stories told by judges about past experiences they’ve had with unpredictably high doses to a generally strong and natural dialogue throughout. There are some corny jokes for sure, but overall this is about as far as you can get from the insipid tortured humor you’d find on a typical reality show.

Do you have to be stoned to enjoy this? Of course not. On the other hand, should you be stoned while watching it? Yeah, probably. I mean, why not? As for whether Cooking on High will help transform you into a master marijuana chef in minutes—not exactly, but the talent really does make an attempt to explain what the hell is going on. Even for a longtime amateur weed cook like me, their weed 101 tips are appreciated, while procedural explainers like one on the decarboxylation process are handled quite well.

Otherwise, it’s not exactly cutthroat; asked about a stint he also did on Chopped, one Cooking on High contestant, chef Luke Reyes, says of the former, “It’s a pretty competitive show.” As in, the latter isn’t. That’s fine, because there’s something

bigger than a competition going on here. While similar shows have killed on the internet for years, Cooking on High sparks an arrival on a higher level, and is obviously only the beginning. I mean, how long until there are shows like this on HGTV? In the meantime, it’s nice to have some entertainment like this that is real; one contestant, chef Andrea Drummer, is the owner of a dispensary license who is working to get her own operation up and running. She’s also a woman of color, and it should be acknowledged that Cooking on High does a commendable job of showcasing the diverse shades of the industry.

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INTERVIEW + EXCERPT: CALL ME ANOREXIC FEATURE

The ballad of a thin man

INTERVIEW BY CHRIS FARAONE | EXCERPT BY KEN CAPOBIANCO Having moved to Boston in the early aughts to grow as a journalist, I can say from firsthand jealousy that Ken Capobianco is someone who a lot of music writers looked up to, including me. Rock stars feel comfortable around him and give up the goods in interviews, while his enthusiasm for and expertise in several genres is as honest as his prose. Always covering emerging musicians with the same dignity that he’s brought into conversations with the biggest stars of the past 20 years, Ken has been a major asset to a few scenes, with Boston being one of his seminal stomping grounds.

As it turns out though, Ken’s time in Massachusetts wasn’t as much of a blissful rock and rap adventure as his readers may have thought. For as he was making rounds to clubs and catching bigs like Wu-Tang Clan and every other influential act you can imagine from the ’90s, he was also suffering from severe anorexia. All these years later, with those hard times behind him, Ken has written his first literary novel, the autobiographical Call Me Anorexic: The Ballad of a Thin Man. We asked him some questions about his exceptionally brave feat, and were also fortunate to get an excerpt from a Boston-rooted chapter to accompany the interview.

Did you find that living in or spending time in different cities impacted you differently, as far as the extent to which you were struggling?

Before living in California, where I recovered, I only lived in New York and Boston. Boston was where my life unraveled and I began hardcore starvation. It had more to do with my life circumstances, though, than the city.

I was in a toxic living-together relationship I wanted no part of and felt trapped after getting my master’s from Tufts at 23. I wanted to leave Boston and move on but I was getting so skinny, I didn’t have the strength or courage to break off the relationship and move west.

I will say that the cold, snow, and everlasting winters in Boston exacerbated my depression—anorexia and depression go hand in hand. The darkness, cold, and snow create unbearable emotional paralysis, which James Joyce understood in his short story “The Dead.” I cribbed the idea of cold and snow as metaphors for paralysis for my novel. Ultimately in real life, I stayed in Boston for 24 years—now, that’s paralysis.

Guru handed it to me, thanked me for asking him real questions and almost begged me to eat once I got home. I felt guilty for making him uncomfortable.

How about in terms of what you were covering and reporting on? Were some things especially hard to cover in your most difficult times?

I was in clubs or at concerts almost seven nights a week. When I wasn’t at shows, I was at the movies but I never ate or drank water during the day, so by 1 or 2 am I was depleted. I just ignored it and pushed on until my body gave out.

Then I’d sit in my car on the street and take deep breaths until I got home and ate a blueberry muffin or two or three cookies

and go to sleep.

Sometimes, when I had to do interviews over food, I encountered problems because I’d come up with excuses 12

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not to eat. I remember meeting Mary J. Blige at a fried chicken place right around her first album, and I didn’t order. She said, “Your skinny ass is not going to watch me eat and talk. You need to order or there’s no interview, honey.” She was laughing, but she wasn’t kidding. I ate a wing, got the interview—an exclusive—and didn’t stop thinking about that wing for a week.

I interviewed Guru in the restaurant at the Sonesta in Cambridge, and he kept saying “You going to eat?” while he talked. I could see he was beginning to squirm, but I just drank Diet Coke. At the end, he asked one of his crew to order me a huge lunch to go. Guru handed it to me, thanked me for asking him real questions and almost begged me to eat once I got home. I felt guilty for making him uncomfortable.

What was it like consuming so much culture—music, movies, live shows—while dealing with these issues?

It’s a cliché to say the music saved me, but as I write in the acknowledgments of the book, the camaraderie of the music community brought me joy and the music helped me plow through the despair. I can still remember watching Rage Against the Machine at Avalon, and even though I hadn’t eaten and was 90 pounds at most, I felt so alive. All the anger at myself and self-hatred was being purged—that might not be a good word with this subject—but it was so cathartic. And that’s how I felt at Wu-Tang, Springsteen, X, Prince, Burma, Morphine, and Husker Du shows. I just lived for the music. Again, it sounds so goddamn trite, but it really helped me transcend all the pain. It still helps me get through bad times. As for movies, that’s where I got lost and dreamed about different lives.

Who was the first person to notice your problem?

And/or the first person who you opened up to? How much of an interference with your life and career had your problem become?

Let’s be clear: Anorexia destroyed my career. It destroyed my love life. It destroyed everything in its path. The first person who identified it was a doctor at Massachusetts General right after I got my master’s, but I knew I had a serious problem when I was 21. I had starved for two days while running miles—I was running eight to ten miles a day—and at a late-night screening of The Kids Are Alright about the Who, I lost all motor control and my body seized up. My girlfriend’s sister drove me to the hospital, and the doctor gave me something to eat when he heard I had starved. He never mentioned anorexia. He just told me to stop dieting and eat if I was going to run.

From there on, I lived in denial. My girlfriend knew all along, but she couldn’t do anything.

Over the years, though, I turned down jobs in Chicago, Seattle, and DC because I was afraid the move would kill me, and when I got really skinny, I was afraid to interview because I looked like an Edgar Allan Poe character. Who would hire me? Relationships or dating were impossible because women know immediately something is wrong if you don’t eat on the second date. And holding on to my anorexia was much more important than any woman.

Halle Berry couldn’t have gotten me to eat.

How many incidents like the one illustrated in your excerpt, with you having noticeable physical issues, were there through the years? Enough that you could count them?

I never hallucinated from starvation or dehydration, but I passed out at concerts a few times. I recall seeing Jill Scott at Avalon when the room started spinning. The next thing I knew, I was being carried by the bouncer through the back of dancefloor into the lobby. He tossed me on the bench next to the coat check and yelled, “What are you on?” I was totally out of it, so like a fool, I told

him “On a diet” because I was afraid he was going to call an ambulance. I explained I was anorexic and hadn’t eaten or had any water. He checked my eyes and walked away after I asked for an orange juice. It rejuvenated me momentarily. I walked down Lansdowne and through the Fenway parking lot onto Beacon Street, where I picked up the T to go home. When I got to my apartment, I flopped onto the bed and my first thought was how many songs did I miss? That’s how fucked up anorexia is. You never think, “Maybe I should eat something.”

I also passed out during a Kathleen Edwards show at T. T. the Bear’s Place. I went to get a Diet Coke and next thing I knew there were dozens of people looking at me as the music played. They wanted to call an ambulance but I just walked to my car, which was covered in snow, and waited until I could think straight and drive home.

How much of a help was it to write the book? Was the process as hard at some points as it was helpful?

I had recovered seven years when I began writing it.

I could never have written it while I was living it—and I tried—because I was too close. There was no humor or perspective, just anger and pain then. When I wrote the parts where Michael is in physical pain in chapter 3, or when he has a near breakdown in his psychiatrist’s office, I had to stop and leave my desk. The subconscious is a powerful thing, and I found myself feeling dizzy or feeling aches in my arms like I used to. Once I walked to the beach outside our place or sat in m my car with the music loud, though, I was fine. But let’s just say, it was very, very hard work.

I can’t say writing the book helped me with my anorexia, but it most definitely helped me as a writer.

I wanted to write a good literary novel with insight and humor. I think I did, and that makes me happy as a writer—something I rarely experience. I had zero interest in a memoir or a self-help book. Too many unqualified people are giving advice these days. Just because you listened to “I Will Survive” doesn’t mean you can give others advice on how to endure life. I have no advice for people other than to get into therapy and figure out your narrative. Each person with an eating disorder needs to figure out his or her own life to get better.

How are you doing now? Physically, but also creatively? You’ve written so eloquently about so many different things through the years. What’s next?

I’m better physically, scarred but better, as I eat meals and enjoy what I eat. But I’m never going to eat a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips in one sitting. I’m also not from the school of “I love myself and my body.” I still want to look like Michael Fassbender, and I live in what Michael calls comfortable discomfort. I’m happily married, love the beach, writing, music, sports, and most importantly, the depression has lifted.

As a writer, I’m at my best right now. I often wonder how I was so prolific—whether I was good or not is for others to decide—while starving and thinking about food 24 hours a day. When the brain is starved you can’t think straight, but I somehow managed to do it. I’m shocked there weren’t food references in my Jeru the Damaja, Maxwell, or hundreds of other profiles.

I still write about music, and I started my next novel.

It will be about identity and how we treat each other these days. I want to explore today’s culture of narcissism, and I think the endless confession and advice on social media are ripe for humor, but that’s easy pickings. Expect something about music, sex, and relationships. It surely won’t take seven years this time, though.

---///--When Michael—still reeling from his girlfriend Jessie leaving him—has a setback with his slow recovery after recalling a traumatic incident with his father, he seeks refuge by disappearing from his Allston apartment and wandering around Boston in 2001. His sister-in-law, Monique, part of his support system, has no idea he’s struggling again while she’s taking care of her skin care company in Manhattan.

The only way I managed to survive each day was to escape the silence of the empty apartment and deadly glare of the computer screen. I ended up strolling aimlessly through malls in Watertown and Chestnut Hill.

Almost every night, I headed to the movies. On the days without a doctor’s appointment, I went to the Coolidge Corner Theater or hopped between theaters at the Fenway multiplex.

After sessions, I took the T to the Harvard Film Archive and The Brattle Theater in Harvard Square to see double features. It didn’t matter what movies were playing—I sat through Godard, Fellini, Chaplin, Sturges, Mike Leigh, Chris Marker, Herzog, and Jarmusch.

I drew the line at Bergman. Did I really need to see sad, pale people living through a glass darkly? Bergman understood the world’s pain, but he also fucked Liv Ullman throughout all those years. We should all be so tormented.

If I wasn’t hiding out at the movies, my nights ended alone in the corner of the Middle East Upstairs in Central Square. I’d get drowned in sound by a random noisy, brooding Boston garage band.

At the end of the second week of my mindless wanderings, I happened to stumble into the Brattle’s Monty Python retrospective. It took the silly, Spam-loving Brits to pull me out of my rabid rabbit hole. I laughed like a high teenager throughout The Life of Brian and almost joined the crowd singing along to “Look on the Bright Side of Life” during the crucifixion scene.

A Wile E. Coyote sized keg of TNT detonated in my head during The Meaning of Life. And I never saw it coming. Through the spaces between my fingers covering my eyes, I watched the blimp-shaped Mr. Creosote projectile vomiting and eating to the breaking point before exploding. The scene’s grandiose absurdity and outsized slapstick evoked grimaces of disgust and uproarious laughter from everyone in the theater.

As often happens when sitting anonymously in the dark with strangers, I found myself caught up in the communal hysterics. It brought on a strange, wonderful sense of freedom. On the screen was my worst nightmare—an obscenely fat man bursting open from morbid obesity. For years, I’d imagined my waist rupturing after one too many imaginary donuts.

And goddamn it, there I was, watching someone do just that.

And yes, of course, it seemed beyond the boundaries of ridiculousness.

I sat amid everyone in the theater—sallow-skinned skinny women, squinty-eyed, chubby men and popcorn eating, finger-licking teenagers—squirming in fits of laughter. The girl next to me had tears of joy running down her cheeks. They were laughing at my most terrifying fear. I stared at the disgusting, vomit-stained restaurant on the screen and thought perhaps my whole life was just one big, fucking joke. The entire crowd was laughing at me. For the first time I wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was time to just laugh along with them.

I wasn’t going to explode like Mr. Creosote.

No one explodes like Mr. Creosote.

It was comical and ludicrous. And it was my life’s obsession. Perhaps the only way I was going to survive was by acknowledging that my very existence had become a sick, self-indulgent farce. Somewhere in a village in Africa, a mother was telling her son, “An adult in Boston is starving because he’s unhappy. He’s unhappy!

Those Americans and their unhappiness.”

I left the Brattle dazed and wandered around Harvard Square with the audience’s delirious laughter still ringing in my head. It was like a beautiful morphine dream. In the Massachusetts Avenue music pit, a saxophonist played a slow, sensual take on “Just Like a Woman” while a bearded man with a long, braided ponytail and an acoustic guitar sang “The Ghost of Tom Joad” in front of Au Bon Pain.

While frantically navigating through the crowd of students, I was sure I saw my dad—the thick tufts of black hair and wounded eyes— tossing money in the guitar case.

And, for a quick moment—barely a flash—there was Jessie. Her blonde hair gently flowed in the breeze as she walked past a double-parked Hertz truck on J.F.K. Street.

They were there. I saw them.

When I opened my eyes, a woman with thick glasses kneeled before me while holding my wrist. A small group of stern, concerned men and women stared down at me.

“Do you need the police?” the woman shouted. “He passed out. Call the police.”

I was on my back next to the Out of Town News rack in the heart of the Square. “I didn’t pass out, did I?” “Yes, dear, I watched you go down. You just collapsed.

Are you okay?”

The newspaper vendor rubbing his long beard tied in a knot with a rubberband reached down with a bottle of water. I jumped to my feet. “Easy, easy,” he said. “You took a tumble.”

Dozens of eyes were on me as if viewing an animal in a cage. I waved them away after grasping the bottle.

“I’m fine. No worries.” Upon finally regaining my balance, I remembered my knees buckling and the black night spinning.

The woman took my arm again to check my pulse.

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“Your heartbeat is very slow. You sure you are okay?”

A tall, bald policeman placed his hand on my back.

“We need an ambulance here? What’s the situation?”

I brushed the dirt off my sweatshirt and shuffled backwards to the T station. “I’m fine. I don’t know what happened. I’m just probably dehydrated. Going to drink the water and head home. Thank you. I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine.”

The cop gave me the obligatory double-check before moving on as the crowd dispersed. I thanked the woman while heading woozily down the escalator into the bowels of the T station. After downing the bottle of water in two long gulps, I waited for the trolley next a homeless man with the sports section of the Boston Globe sticking out of the waist of his gray, checkerboard pants. The last things I recalled before falling were the sound of laughter and Jessie’s face.

On the long slow, numbing ride home, I knew my movie binge had to come to an end—you can only spend so much time in the dark. I had to get a grip on my life again and eat a sandwich. Maybe two.

When I finally arrived at my place at one a.m., there were two messages on my answering machine. I played back the tape while manically scavenging through the refrigerator. Monique’s voice sounded so intimate and fragile like she was sitting near me.

“Michael, where are you? I know you said you’ve been going to the movies, but this is three days now, and I haven’t heard from you. Call me back when you get in whatever time it is. I don’t care. Call me for Christ’s sake.

One day, I understand. Three days, no. Call me. I’ve been having a bad feeling about things. I need to know you are alright.”

I picked up the phone receiver to dial her after biting into the dry chicken sandwich I had slapped together. The next voice I didn’t recognize.

“Hi, Michael, this is Kathy Myers from the Northeastern University English Department. I received your resume from Amanda Crosetti. I’d like to see if you could come in for an interview for a writing instructor position in the department. You can reach me at…”

I stopped the tape to get a pen and paper. After scribbling the number on the back of a yellow pad, I shoved most of the sandwich into my mouth, closed my eyes and sat at the table waiting to explode like Mr. Creosote. After three deep breaths, I dialed Monique. She needed to know what was happening.

When I finished the sandwich, I was still in one piece.

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

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13

BREAD WINNERS EATS

In America’s sandwiches, the story of a nation

BY THE CONVERSATION

Everyone has a favorite sandwich, often prepared to an exacting degree of specification: Turkey or ham?

Grilled or toasted? Mayo or mustard? White or whole wheat?

We reached out to food historians and asked them to tell the story of a sandwich of their choosing.

The responses included staples like peanut butter and jelly, as well as regional fare like New England’s chow mein sandwich.

Together, they show how the sandwiches we eat (or used to eat) do more than fill us up during our lunch breaks. In their stories are themes of immigration and globalization, of class and gender, and of resourcefulness and creativity.

A taste of home for working women

By Megan Elias, Boston University

The tuna salad sandwich originated from an impulse to conserve, only to become a symbol of excess.

In the 19th century – before the era of supermarkets and cheap groceries – most Americans avoided wasting food. Scraps of chicken, ham or fish from supper would be mixed with mayonnaise and served on lettuce for lunch.

Leftovers of celery, pickles and olives – served as supper “relishes” – would also be folded into the mix.

The versions of these salads that incorporated fish tended to use salmon, white fish or trout. Most Americans didn’t cook (or even know of) tuna.

Around the end of the 19th century, middle-class women began to spend more time in public, patronizing department stores, lectures and museums. Since social conventions kept these women out of the saloons where men ate, lunch restaurants opened up to cater to this new clientele. They offered women exactly the kind of foods they had served each other at home: salads. While salads 14

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made at home often were composed of leftovers, those at lunch restaurants were made from scratch. Fish and shellfish salads were typical fare.

When further social and economic changes brought women into the public as office and department store workers, they found fish salads waiting for them at the affordable lunch counters patronized by busy urban workers. Unlike the ladies’ lunch, the office lunch hour had time limits. So lunch counters came up with the idea of offering the salads between two pieces of bread, which sped up table turnover and encouraged patrons to get lunch to go.

When canned tuna was introduced in the early 20th century, lunch counters and home cooks could skip the step of cooking a fish and go straight to the salad.

But there was downside: The immense popularity of canned tuna led to the growth of a global industry that has severely depleted stocks and led to the unintended slaughter of millions of dolphins. A clever way to use dinner scraps has become a global crisis of conscience and capitalism.

I like mine on toasted rye.

East meets West in Fall River, Massachusetts

By Imogene Lim, Vancouver Island University

“Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein,” Warren Zevon sings in his 1978 hit “Werewolves of London,” a nod to the popular Chinese stir-fried noodle dish.

During that same decade, Alika and the Happy Samoans, the house band for a Chinese restaurant in Fall River, Massachusetts, also paid tribute to chow mein with a song titled “Chow Mein Sandwich.”

Chow mein in a sandwich? Is that a real thing?

I was first introduced to the chow mein sandwich

while completing my doctorate at Brown University. Even as the child of a Chinatown restaurateur from Vancouver, I viewed the sandwich as something of a mystery. It led to a post-doctoral fellowship and a paper about Chinese entrepreneurship in New England.

The chow mein sandwich is the quintessential “East meets West” food, and it’s largely associated with New England’s Chinese restaurants – specifically, those of Fall River, a city crowded with textile mills near the Rhode Island border.

The sandwich became popular in the 1920s because it was filling and cheap: Workers munched on them in factory canteens, while their kids ate them for lunch in the parish schools, especially on meatless Fridays. It would go on to be available at some “five and dime” lunch counters, like Kresge’s and Woolworth – and even at Nathan’s in Coney Island.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: a sandwich filled with chow mein (deep-fried, flat noodles, topped with a ladle of brown gravy, onions, celery and bean sprouts). If you want to make your own authentic sandwich at home, I recommend using Hoo Mee Chow Mein Mix, which is still made in Fall River. It can be served in a bun (à la sloppy joe) or between sliced white bread, much like a hot turkey sandwich with gravy. The classic meal includes the sandwich, french fries and orange soda.

For those who grew up in the Fall River area, the chow mein sandwich is a reminder of home. Just ask famous chef (and Fall River native) Emeril Legassé, who came up with his own “Fall River chow mein” recipe.

And at one time, Fall River expats living in Los Angeles would hold a “Fall River Day.” On the menu? Chow mein sandwiches, of course.

Read the full article at the conversation.com.

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15

AUBREY HADDARD MUSIC

The life and soul of the party

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

Hearing Aubrey Haddard’s music feels like you’re being washed over with nothing but pure sunshine. The 24-yearold soul singer-songwriter writes songs that are bursting with life, the kind that boast a radiant warmth, in a way that feels, simply put, just right. There’s a visceral rawness in her voice. It’s crisp and loud, like she has the lungs of a whole choir, but flexible in its perfectionism by way of emotion. Hearing her sing makes you wonder how much of this sound is studio trickery and how much is live energy captured in a moment, a lightning bug bottled in a glass jar.

But more than that, you wonder what it is that makes someone glow the way Haddard does. She doesn’t always sing about perfect scenarios or romanticized gestures, but that doesn’t stop her voice from filling you with the optimism that would come with had she been.

How do you sing like you’ve been filled with the spirit of springtime itself? How do you insert a coy wink into a visual-free medium like music? How do you sing like Aubrey Haddard?

Meeting her in person, those questions answer themselves. Haddard greets you with a hug and gentle eyes, even if you’ve never met. Freckles sparkle every inch of her skin, a jovial look even if it’s inescapable genetics.

Her voice, unlike the cooing her in her songs, is easygoing, comfortable, and, if you listen closely, has a soft rasp

hidden deep underneath. She fills the room with warmth.

It’s tempting to assume Haddard’s traits come from an encouraging environment and well-off upbringing, but it’s clear her confidence is the aftereffect of growing up with an inherent, assured type of determination that is hers and hers alone.

Growing up in the Hudson Valley, Haddard found her way to music almost immediately. Though she played in a handful of bands, including a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band and her school’s choir, she credits her distinct drive to a special afterschool music group called Rock and Soul Review that her middle school teacher Charlie Seymour founded. In it, Mr. Seymour played guitar, her social studies teacher played drums, her science teacher played bass, and a handful of students joined in on other instruments. The group performed three times a year. Haddard joined as a vocalist and quickly learned how to set up a microphone, lead a band, and be part of a contemporary ensemble. “He definitely made everything possible from the start,” she says. “It was the highlight of my young life.” While it put her ahead of the game technically speaking, it also instilled the quiet lessons of humanizing teachers beyond the classroom, creating cross-generational bonds, and letting students break down the barriers of what, when, and how to be a musician.

Hudson Valley hid a blues scene of its own beyond the middle school walls, too. Haddard’s parents encouraged her to sing, and she slowly found herself wanting to pursue it seriously. Her mother brought her to neighboring towns to sit in with the old blues jazz guys. At the time, Haddard was 15 years old—too young to go by herself, much less drive. “I realized I knew I wanted to do this, but I didn’t know how to make a career out of it,” she says. “It wasn’t until I started applying to colleges for chemistry and engineering that I realized I didn’t want to pursue academics. I spent a gap year in Senegal instead, and that’s when my priorities made themselves known.” When she returned in 2013, Haddard took another year to figure out what she wanted to do before applying to, and entering, Berklee School of Music.

For all of these opportunities, it feels somewhat surprising to learn Haddard never dealt with stage fright—or at least not until she began playing guitar.

It’s been nearly a decade since she first learned open chords, but it’s only recently that she’s been able to feel more comfortable with her skills on the instrument. A comically accessible yet difficult instrument, the guitar posed a handful of problems, most of them small, if she wanted to become a dynamic player. Once she broke the seal on diligence, the result of equal parts practice and patience, she became more comfortable as a songwriter, intentionally breaking her musical habits: neo-soul syncopated strumming patterns, using the same melodies, creating nearly identical arcs.

The real joy in Haddard’s music is her voice, that ability to belt not just a string of words at high volume, but singing with tangible energy, a slice of joy that slides right out of her ribcage in one piece. Honing it has been a gradual process. Like any singer, Haddard has her fair share of musical idols and the obsessions that follow suit trying to become them—the sheer power of Susan Tedeschi, the gentle cadance of Bonnie Raitt, the wild madman style of Jeff Buckley—by transcribing their vocal parts. Perhaps the most essential work done to her voice is the act of listening to it. As a musician who has recorded on albums, projects, and singles for other artists, Haddard observes the way she sounds and, subconsciously and sometimes intentionally, modifies her voice. But for the most part, it’s a natural instrument, one she’s whittled without much, if any, pushback.

“Not to sound snooty, but I feel like I had this voice for a long time,” says Haddard, lowering her voice as if ashamed to hear the words out loud. “I remember being in choir and hesitating because I had a strong voice. It was hard to meld with other voices even though I loved singing with other people. In a choir setting, things are different.

It wasn’t until my mom took me to see Susan Tedeschi live that I realized that’s okay. Here was this woman with this huge, powerhouse voice, and she was killing it. I saw

>> AUBREY HADDARD (ALBUM RELEASE SHOW), FLOYD FUJI, SOULELUJAH. THU 7.19. LIZARD LOUNGE CAMBRIDGE, 1667 MASS. AVE., CAMBRIDGE. 8PM/21+/$8. LIZARDLOUNGECLUB.COM

MUSIC EVENTS FRI 07.06

INDIE POP TO MATCH YOUR WIT FUTURE TEENS + MANDANCING + HARMONY WOODS + OLDSOUL

[ONCE Somerville, 156 Highland Ave., Somerville.

8pm/18+/$10. ]

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SUN 07.08

SUN 07.08

TUE 07.10

WED 07.11

[O’Brien’s Pub, 3 Harvard Ave., Allston. 8pm/18+/$10. obrienspubboston.com]

[Dorchester Art Project, 1486 Dorchester Ave., Boston. 8pm/all ages/$10. facebook.com/ events/1801512276823548]

[Atwood’s Tavern, 877 Cambridge St., Cambridge. 10pm/21+/$8. atwoodstavern.com]

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

8:30pm/18+/$15. greatscottboston.com]

SUBTLE JAZZ MEETS POETIC LYRICS REMEMBER SPORTS + NADINE + PUPPY PROBLEMS

DIGBOSTON.COM

POSITIVE TUNES TO DANCE TO MINUS DANCE CLUB SWEAT DEEP HOLE + MORE

ETCH A SKETCH DREAMS OF VIOLIN AND FOLK GUITAR SAM MOSS & THE HALF MOONS + AISHA BURNS

THE QUIET SIDE OF THE BEACH QUIET SLANG + ABI REIMOLD + KEVIN BOGART

WED 07.11

THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL: 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR LAURYN HILL

[Blue Hills Bank Pavilion, 290 Northern Ave., Boston.

6:30pm/all ages/$50. bostonpavilion.net]

someone who had a similar type of voice as mine and she was totally celebrated for it. It changed the way I saw my voice and how to utilize it.”

Eventually, Haddard reached a crossroads in her life.

Working full time at a restaurant, attending school full time, and trying to perform as often as she could in between, she found herself losing music opportunities because her schedule simply didn’t have enough time.

After turning down a string of gigs, she finally decided to bite the bullet. In 2015, she dropped out of Berklee to pursue music as a full-time job.

What she learned along the way, though, helped her become a more astute writer. Haddard wrote for a funk group, was in a jazzy soul project, and sang in a rock band, using each outlet as a way to figure out how to serve songs in different genre settings.

Perhaps the most helpful outlets were a collaborative band she helped form back home, the blue-turned-neo-soul-turnedprog group Breakfast for the Boys, and the New Review, a funk-bent group with its roots in Berklee’s scene where she gets to be a self-proclaimed diva onstage.

If it wasn’t for sound engineer Matt Peiffer, Haddard wouldn’t have jumpstarted her solo career so quickly either.

After finishing a Breakfast for the Boys record early with him, she demoed her debut EP last minute, utilizing the excess studio time. Afterwards, Peiffer approached her once more, eager to record a “passion project” of Haddard’s choosing.

Naturally, she decided to record her debut solo album, Blue Part, a longtime goal that was bound to happen sooner or later.

Of course, this wouldn’t happen without the help of her bandmates, bassist Charley Ruddell and drummer Josh Strmic.

Both members add an instrumental energy to her music, likely the result of how eager they were to jam with her. In March of 2016, Haddard performed one of her first solo shows opening for the band Strmic was in at the time. Throughout her set, he was dancing in the front row, cheering her on and filming videos. He approached her afterward and asked if he could work with her in some capacity.

Around the same time, she met Ruddell in New York City when they shared a bill together. The two hit it off so well that they started dating long distance. Though

she was hesitant to work with him, as she didn’t want to damage their budding relationship, Haddard eventually caved. The trio share an easygoing ability to perform as a unit. Ruddell and Strmic call her out all the time, offering gentle suggestions on how to change the music, ultimately pushing her abilities to the next level.

You can hear that on the record. Blue Part takes much of its inspiration from shared energy, specifically the romance between Ruddell and Haddard. The title refers to the hottest part of the flame, an analogy for the person who ignites the best part of herself, burning at the hottest she possibly could while creating a captivating look. In short, it’s a love concept album. Though that may seem like an exaggeration, it’s obvious when you lean in close to the lyrics, as each song follows its own single-word theme. It starts with “Seaweed & Sand,” a slow dance opener that centers around longing. “Charley” deals with the confusion of not knowing if your love is rational. The melancholic “Lullaby” deals with the

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loneliness of distance. “I Should Know Better” dismisses her past “bullshit” to embrace her new love life. “Blue Part” dives into the deeper love of a relationship. “What I Need Now” tracks the desperation of needing to be closer to your partner. “Take Me Under” is the extremely sensual indulgent track, channeling its own sexy narrative. Then the album wraps up with “Save Me,” an outburst of devotion.

“Everybody runs on love,” says Haddard. “It’s nice having a record with a coherent theme. Right now, I’m working on new songs about death and stuff, so having a string of songs that make sense together is so exciting.”

Blue Part is a mesmerizing listen, especially when keeping an eye out for the details. There are Greek mythology allusions (“Because they said I fly too close to the sun / I love Promethean”), deceptively dirty spoken word, and scaling guitar lines.

A traditional hybrid of folk rock and neosoul will be found side by side along a dark Latin bossa song. It’s an album bursting with life as it capture a year in the life of a couple. While Haddard’s remarkable vocals steal the show, her commitment to improving on guitar—halfway through the recording process, she bought a new guitar and pedal to encourage herself to get better—and patience with mixing show how much additional effort pays off on the album.

We’re proud to premiere Blue Part in full on digboston.com this week. The solo debut from Aubrey Haddard has been a long time coming, and yet it sounds so natural. There’s a whole lot of heart to soak in, and talking with Haddard makes it impossible to imagine the record being any other way. She’s friendly and inviting, calm and energetic, the type of musician who you want to hang out with offstage as a friend. So when she gets up from our table at Lamplighter Brewery midconversation because she sees a family she knows across the street, it feels like a musical moment happening in real time. The children’s faces crack into wide smiles, as does the mother’s, and Haddard reaches out to give them all a hug. It’s the type of immediate happiness Haddard brings to life, the kind you feel just being in her presence—perhaps the most clear-cut mirror image of what listening to Blue Part feels like, on record and off.

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

SCREAMING FEMALES WHEEL OF TUNES

New Jersey punks talk fantasy worlds, MRIs, and Agnes Martin

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN 5. “Agnes Martin” Which Agnes Martin painting is your favorite?

The painting “Untitled” from 2003. I haven’t got many reasons for loving it besides I find it to be very beautiful.

6. “Deeply” Which feeling do you wish you felt more often?

Wonder.

7. “Soft Domination” If you became the mayor of New Brunswick, what’s the first rule you would enforce?

I would fire all the cops, burn down the courthouse, fill Rutgers Stadium with marbles, then retire somewhere in the doldrums of obscurity.

8. “End Of My Bloodline” Out of all of your family members, who makes you particularly proud to be related?

Nearly all of my immediate family have worked as teachers in some form or another, which I find to be a pretty noble occupation.

9. “Chamber For Sleep I” Have you ever gotten an MRI? Yes. I’ve had three. They suck.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SCREAMING FEMALES As the music world slowly loosens its grip on punk, the bands still active within the genre get a little less time in the spotlight. But the New Jersey DIY punk trio Screaming Females has managed to stay relevant.

It’s almost comedic, as all three members—guitarist and vocalist Marissa Paternoster, drummer Jarrett Dougherty, and bassist King Mike—have never tried to propel themselves to fame or even ponder fame at all.

Instead, the band has spent the past 13 years trying to explore where they can go musically while still having fun. In that, Screaming Females continues to succeed.

Perhaps the band’s success is strong because all three members have never lost focus on what it is they’re doing. When the three create music, like their new album All at Once, it’s a collaborative process. When Paternoster designs the album artwork, it comes from a personal place. When it’s time to ship records, the band handles mail orders firsthand. For Screaming Females, creating punk music isn’t just about the songwriting process—it’s about everything that goes into it, from behind the scenes to the frontlines. That commitment to the DIY ethos is what gives their music such an edge in this period.

“It’s peculiar to me when artists are complicit with having an outside party curate their output,” says Paternoster. “I suppose it would be easier to outsource some tasks, but even the most minute of chores chalks up to the big picture. We value engaging in long-lasting, dependable working relationships, and those relationships take a lot of work. Community and friendship are very important to us.”

To understand the band’s daily grind, we interviewed Marissa Paternoster for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask musicians questions inspired by

their song titles. With All at Once as the prompt, her answers are to the point but vivid—a sampling of what to expect from the band’s brand of punk when it headlines ONCE Somerville this Saturday.

1. “Glass House” Which decoration, artwork, or piece of furniture in your home would look strange to somebody who knows nothing about you?

Probably the giant cardboard cutout that surrounds the window behind our kitchen sink that says “SQUIRREL TV.” 2. “Black Moon” What’s your least favorite part of the nighttime?

Right before bed my feet get really hot, so sometimes I have to fill the tub with cold water and stand in it until they cool down sufficiently for bed.

3. “I’ll Make You Sorry” What’s something a friend, family member, or coworker did that you’re still waiting for an apology for?

I don’t tend to wait for apologies!

4. “Dirt” When is the last time you walked barefoot?

I took some recycling out at my grandma’s house the other day. She has one of those finely cut suburban lawns, so it feels good on the old feet.

10. “Chamber For Sleep II” What’s your favorite recurring dream?

I don’t really dream.

11. “Bird In Space” Where is the most out-of-place location you’ve ever seen a bird?

We all got to lay eyes on a wild toucan in Costa Rica.

It was a thrill!

12. “Fantasy Lens” Can you name two characteristics at the core of your idealized fantasy world?

More trees, more quiet.

13. “My Body” Which aspect of your body are you most grateful for?

I’m generally pleased with my body’s functionality.

14. “Drop By Drop” What’s your favorite nonalcoholic drink?

Boy, I love a cucumber water. Now that’s a refreshing beverage.

15. “Step Outside” When you walk outside of your home on an average day, where are you most likely going?

Takin’ the dog for a walk! Wherever her nose leads her.

>> SCREAMING FEMALES, SPOWDER, SHEPARDESS. SAT 7.7. ONCE SOMERVILLE, 156 HIGHLAND AVE., SOMERVILLE. 8PM/18+/$15. ONCESOMERVILLE.COM 18

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DIGBOSTON.COM

PHOTO BY JOHN KENNARD. COURTESY OF ICA BOSTON.

ICA OPENS WATERSHED SPACE IN EAST BOSTON VISUAL ART

LA artist Diana Thater first to exhibit

BY JOHN PYPER

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art has opened a new and buzzworthy exhibition space in East Boston called the Watershed. Opened to the public on July 4, this new 15,000-square-foot space will exhibit site-specific projects each year from May through October. The first artist to exhibit in the Watershed is Los Angeles artist Diana Thater, who presents seven lens-based installations produced over the last 20 years.

On your first walkthrough, the works look like free verse poetry about happy, fun nature. Which would be an obvious choice for a space that repeatedly reminds us that we can experience the sea during our jaunty six-minute ride across the harbor via the free water taxi from ICA’s main building in the Seaport District. We are greeted in this well-converted industrial space by her 2008 untitled butterfly video-wall installation. Splashed across the wall behind that is a towering installation of her 1999 work Delphine—which projects four images of dolphins swimming in water near a nine-monitor wall showing a NASA-sourced image of our sun that shows its surface in all its dynamic and fluid motion. The non-terrestrial, freeflowing motion of these dolphins really drives home the linear traffic patterns—don’t forget to take that free water taxi—we’ve placed on the harbor.

But by the time you get to her 2017 projections A Runaway World and As Radical as Reality, you can’t help but start to see seams in Thater’s allegedly uncomplicated

relationship to nature. These very relaxing projections, one of elephants and the other of rhinos, seem bucolic enough, but then the cement and guards come into the foreground.

If these animals have been granted sanctuary status and are living their lives out as protected creatures, then what other man-made artifice was missed along the way?

Our relationship to nature is inherently unnatural here at the northern tip of the East Coast’s megalopolis.

At most we have grass and cultivated flowers in our daily lives and dive into the woods only for vacation. We rely on city-sized shipping vessels and belching factories so we can Snapchat our friends about how lucky we are to have stood next to the last rhinos on the planet. We send satellites into orbit to replace the last one we sent up to better train our unblinking technocratic eye on the sun. We reference nature more than experience nature’s quirky sense of humor. Primarily, we meet nature through data rather than through its essence and try to limit nature’s range to fit humanity’s discretion.

It gives me vertigo to see these images, and I believe that Thater intended this with her akimbo projections and scratched 16mm film stock. Even the simple act of dividing up the images into arrays of images creates an uncanny valley effect. Everything is just a bit too thunderous; it all vibrates a bit too anxiously. Everything traces everything else and somehow Thater finds distinctive visual echoes that build even more tension between the edge of reality

and realism.

For all their beauty, these tone poems are built of rather simple heuristics (camera + nature presented in sculptural space instead of on a single flat screen) that result in serious repercussions for image making. They are enchanting and still circumspect toward how we represent the world and ourselves in it. Thater’s self-awareness toward our self-nominated dominion over the world does not bog down her work and make it uninvitingly pedantic but rather asks the viewer to be heedful of the poetics of representation: to engage with the immediate directness of the beauty captured in her images and presented in her installations.

With this new space, the ICA of course has again entered into an agreement with the city to put a first national-level art institutional foothold in a neighborhood.

It’s not like there are not art spaces, yoga, or craft beers in Eastie; for one, HarborArts is literally right across the street from the Watershed. But I can’t help being hyperaware of the ICA’s early adopter relationship to the Condoport— sorry, Seaport—and its seemingly endless supply of new buildings. Placemaking and art has a long and sometimes ugly history, so it certainly feels like bad timing that the ICE Gestapo was combing Eastie on the same day as the ribbon cutting. No amount of Spanish text on some of the ICA’s exhibitions will expunge that reality.

>> ICA WATERSHED IS OPEN JULY 4 TO OCTOBER 8, 256 MARGINAL STREET., EAST BOSTON. ICABOSTON.ORG/ICA-WATERSHED

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

THE WINNER BOOKS + ART

An excerpt from a local master’s latest lurch into the surreal INTERVIEW BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 It is an accurate description, this is a very personal work, but at the same time it’s a very experimental work.

I went deeper into the sci-fi/fantasy and horror genres than before, and looked to find ways to bridge everything together.

How do you assemble something like this? How much was done before, and how much is done chronologically, if at all? I see some dates in there are 2015, etc. In a simple question, what’s the process? To those of us who only dream of having your talent, this seems like an extraordinary amount of work in all the detail. Is that how you see it? Is it ever a drag to have to work?

It was a assembled in a scattershot, but very organic way. I had gone through some major life changes these past few years: I married Alex, got sober, started exercising, and doing transcendental meditation. I figured that journey would make a good story; Karl grows up from a chubby, boozy hipster and into an angry, pre-middle aged butterfly. At the same time I was getting into these French cartoonists from the ’70s and ’80s: Moebius, Philippe Druillet, Caza, and the urge to make experimental sci-fi fantasy comics was rearing its cybernetic head. It proved to be a nice break in the dayto-day art making sense.

Draw Alex and me sitting on a couch talking one day, and the weird aliens and Pope Cat the next.

You may have appeared in a comic by Karl Stevens.

Perhaps you were the clerk or barista who rubbed him the wrong way, or the pretentious dumbshit who said something idiotic at a party and wound up sketched into or at least referenced inside a talk bubble in one of Karl’s elaborate sardonic strips.

Flattering or not, it would be nothing short of a win to find yourself drawn into one of his scenes. From book projects to popular recurring features for the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix before that, Karl has proven himself as a veritable double threat, with wit and edge as razor sharp as his artistic stroke.

We’re sweet on any opportunity to run Karl’s stuff in the Dig, whether as a contributor, as was recently the case when we published his “Kill the Rich” strip, or as an excerpted artist and author.

So with news that he is reading from and signing copies of his latest project, The Winner, later this month at HUB Comics in Somerville, we threw some questions at him and asked for samples we could print.

I figured that journey would make a good story; Karl grows up from a chubby, boozy hipster and into an angry, pre-middle aged butterfly.

A significant amount of your work that I’ve seen and admired through the years is autobiographical—Karl day-to-day—but something about The Winner seems even more personal. Is that an accurate description?

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Speaking of work, The Winner’s real-life tie in with your museum gig is amazing.

Not having gone to art school, but being an artist, how much of an art aficionado were you before becoming a guard, and to what extent have you become one since?

I did go to art school, briefly. I did one semester at Montserrat College of Art, and then one semester at Lesley. I had to drop out because my family was lower-middle class and unable to help me out financially.

Luckily, I found day jobs in the city that were connected to the art world, and thus able to meet fellow travelers— which is key for an artist’s growth. You gotta avoid the norms, man. Also, my painting teacher at Lesley, Anthony Apesos was instrumental in those early years. After I left, he would come over for studio visits, and invite me to dinner parties at his place with other artists and teachers. He and his wife Natasha Seaman, a gifted writer and art historian, really turned me on to old masters and got me excited about art history which continues to this day.

I really dig the surreal intermissions. Is that a direction that you see yourself moving in? How tethered to your own reality do you see your work being moving forward?

Any completely out of character projects in the works for you?

Absolutely. The next book is mostly the surreal, abstract stuff. I was, like most people, blown away by the recent Twin Peaks series last year. The way Lynch plays with reality through his own surreal language and narrative style is incredibly inspiring. That mixed with looking at those old Heavy Metal magazines and Correggio is definitely taking my work away from the Karl sitting on the couch and complaining strips. I’ll probably still do some of those though.

Karl will read from The Winner at HUB Comics in Union Square in Somerville on July 14 from noon to 2pm.

Original drawings from the book are showing from July 6 through August 16 at the Carroll and Sons Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave #404, Boston.

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FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

IT GOT BETTER SAVAGE LOVE

COMEDY EVENTS

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

THU 07.05

In a recent column, you said you never hear from married couples whose sex life got better and more frequent over the years. Well, now you have. My wife and I were married 24 years ago, and we are currently having more sex and better sex than we did in the first years of our marriage. There are many reasons why, including therapy, antidepressants, and weight loss and subsequent surgery—but I would have to say that the big reason is communication. If you had known us 25 years ago, Dan, you would not have given us good odds. We’d been dating only a year and a half when we got engaged, and we’d known each other less than two years. I was a virgin, my wife was not, together we hadn’t gotten much past second base, and neither of us had laid our kink cards on the table. We were (and still are) introverts with poor communication skills and anxiety/depression/mental-health issues. I won’t say it’s been fairy-tale perfect—the kind of perfect that makes you barf and roll your eyes—but it’s been pretty damn close. My wife has been incredibly GGG, and I hope I have been, too. So there you go, Dan! Now you know there’s at least one couple out there whose sex life has only gotten better over the years.

Better Erotic Ties Totally Enhanced Relationship

A unique blend of stand-up, sketch and other strange forms of comedy show.

Featuring: Kevin Tit, Max Wolfson, Yoki Danoff, Andrew Hall, Pete Musto, Emily Ruskowski, & Sam Ike.

Last week, I responded to IMDONE, a woman who married a man despite the sex being “infrequent and impersonal” during their courtship. To the surprise of no one who has ever given sex advice for a living, the sex didn’t get better after IMDONE and her boyfriend got married. “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,” I wrote in my response to IMDONE. I did allow for the possibility that my sample was skewed; people with good sex lives don’t write to tell me everything’s fine. So I invited people whose so-so sex lives improved after the wedding to write in. And did they ever: My inbox is packed with e-mails from couples whose sex lives got better after the wedding.

Am I the first or the hundredth person to write in? Yes, sex for us got better after marriage. I suspect you don’t see it in your inbox very often because this isn’t what most people would consider a problem and we don’t want to waste your time! All it took for the sex to get better was practice and paying attention to cues and solving problems. I strongly suspect that perseverance and a bit of luck were also major factors.

Practice, Practice, Practice My sex life improved after marriage. I am a straight male with a highly stigmatized kink. I was deeply ashamed of my sexual interest even before my mother discovered my porn when I was 14 and told me I was a pervert that no decent woman would ever want. When I met my wife, our sex life was okay—but I was never fully present, because I would have to concentrate on my fantasies in order to sustain an erection. I eventually retreated into masturbation. My wife knew I was masturbating in the middle of the night instead of having sex with her, and that led to some enormous fights. So I told her about my kink, fully expecting that it would result in the collapse of my marriage. We didn’t speak about it for a week, and then she calmly asked me if I wanted to do this with her instead of just watching porn about it.

Partnership Improved Sexual Situation My sex life actually did get better after I married my partner. I struggled with erectile dysfunction during my courtship with my wife. It really didn’t settle down until we’d been married for a while. I had trust issues and guilt issues—boring stories—and I got a lot more comfortable once we’d made that commitment. Now we have two kids, and we have sex almost weekly.

(Hey, that’s good for 40-year-olds!) I doubt it’s the norm, Dan, but that’s what happened with me.

Enduring Relationship Eased Cock Troubles First, I want to thank BETTER, PPP, PISS, ERECT, and everyone else who wrote in. I do feel obligated to point out, however, that these are anecdotes, not data. And while there isn’t data to back up my position—that sex doesn’t generally get better after marriage—my pile of anecdotes is a whole lot bigger. So I’m going to continue to urge people to establish basic sexual compatibility before marriage rather than hoping a so-so sexual connection—or a nonexistent one—will somehow get better after marriage.

But it can be done. You just need to have PPP’s luck or be married to someone willing to do the work, like CHOMP’s spouse was, or fortunate enough to wind up with someone willing to take the leak, like PISS’s spouse was.

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On the Lovecast, Justin Lehmiller on the true nature of sexual fantasies:savagelovecast.com

MIDNIGHT GARDENERS LEAGUE’S WHISKEY REBELLION @ WONDER BAR

186 HARVARD AVE., BOSTON | 9PM | $5 SUGGESTED DONATION THU 07.05

HEADLINERS IN THE SQUARE @ JOHN HARVARD’S BREWERY & ALE HOUSE

Featuring: Josh Filipowski, Tim King, Shyam Subramanian, AJ O’Connell, Shiv Patel, & Andrew Della Volpe.

Hosted by Tom Kelly

33 DUNSTER ST., CAMBRIDGE | 9PM | FREE SAT 07.07

DON’T TELL BOSTON (ALLSTON)

Comedy’s Worst Kept Secret.

South End Soccer is a youth soccer league that provides free programs to over 1,200 Boston youth annually. They work to bring together diverse communities through soccer, and break the barriers of economics and logistics that hinder urban youth playing sports.

To purchase tickets you can go to their website: http://www.donttellcomedy.com.

ALLSTON | 7:30PM | $25 SAT 07.07 - SUN 07.09

BROOKS WHELAN @ LAUGH BOSTON

Brooks originally hails from Iowa where he attended the University of Iowa. In 2015, he released his debut album This Is Cool, Right?, which hit #1 on the iTunes charts and was included on PASTE Magazine’s 10 Best Comedy Albums of 2015 list. His television credits include HBO’s Girls, Comedy Central’s The Half Hour, @Midnight, Adam Devine’s House Party, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Myers, MTV’s Ridiculousness and TBS’ CONAN. He was a writer and cast member on Season 39 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Rolling Stone named Brooks as one the Top 45 Acts of Bonnaroo 2014.

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8PM & 10PM | $25-$29 SUN 07.08

LIQUID COURAGE COMEDY @ SLUMBREW

Featuring: Pete Andrews, Logan O’Brien, Brian HIgginbottom, Shea Spillane, Erika Lindquist, Cher Lynn, Mike Setlow, & Peter Martin.

Hosted by Liam McGurk

15 WARD ST., SOMERVILLE | 8PM | $5 SUN 07.08

THE PEOPLE’S SHOW @ IMPROVBOSTON

Comedy for the people, by the people.

Featuring: Sam Ike, Francesca Villa, Reece Cotton, Jack Burke, Mike Dorval, & Srilatha Rajamani.

Hosted by Gloria Rose

40 PROSPECT ST. CAMBRIDGE | 9:30PM | $5 WED 07.11

COMEDY IN THE ELLIS ROOM @ MAGNOLIA SMOKEHOUSE

Featuring: Kyle Legacy Harnwell, Arty Przychodzki, Kathryn Gironimi, Jason Cordova, Pamela Ross, Lauren Kirby, Danny Killea, Kylie Alexander, & Dylan Krasinski.

Hosted by Ellen Sugarman & Brett Johnson

6 HARVARD SQ., BROOKLINE | 8PM | FREE

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.

Frank Santorelli w/ Orlando Baxter + Peter Martin Thursday + Friday

DIG5 code valid on ALL SHOWS.

Brooks Wheelan

Saturday Night Live, Comedy Central’s The Half Hour

Saturday + Sunday

DIG5 code valid on ALL SHOWS.

COMING SOON

Funniest Person in Massachusetts Competition

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

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.

Chad Prather

Special Engagements: Jul 22 + 23

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Corey Rodrigues + Kelly MacFarland July 27 + 28

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

SHIFT GEARS. GET WEIRD.

featuring

THE VOIDZ CITY HALL PLAZA • 12PM - 5PM • $15

AUGUST 11 BOSTON TH

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