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SEP 13, 2018 - SEP 20, 2018 BUSINESS PUBLISHER John Loftus ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone Jason Pramas SALES ASSOCIATES Christopher Bent Victoria Botana FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com BUSINESS MANAGER John Loftus
EDITORIAL
EDITOR IN CHIEF Chris Faraone EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Pramas MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Dewar MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan THEATER EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COMEDY EDITOR Dennis Maler STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Patrick Cochran, Mike Crawford, Britni de la Cretaz, Kori Feener, Eoin Higgins, Zack Huffman, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus 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 Want to be a DigBoston intern? Inquiries to internships@digboston.com
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Here’s what I wrote in this space one year ago this week: Having worked in newspapers and magazines for 18 rollicking years, roughly half the time I’ve been alive, I have penned enough “welcome back to school and Boston” articles and columns to fill one of those advice books that you buy at Urban Outfitters knowing damn well that it will rot on your coffee table and only occasionally get used to roll weed on. I’m half-kidding, of course, since many of the service pieces written by reporters on such fronts are infinitely useful; take, for example, the time I wrote a tip sheet titled “How To Grow Pot In Your Dorm Room” for my former employer, effectively compromising campus distribution opportunities for years to come. Nevertheless, you get my point. This isn’t my first welcome wagon rodeo. You won’t find too much red carpet pandering in this week’s DigBoston. We do have some critical guides and compendiums; overall, though, our approach was just to make an even bigger attempt than usual to inform across issues—from local news and happenings and on through nightlife, film, and the arts. For all those latter topics, we are proud to be one of the last shows left in town for the 85-andunder set. Frankly, I don’t have much to add. Other than that I’ve been in the game for 19 years now, and that the rest of my welcome back column from 2017 still applies too. I promise to try harder next time: In closing, while I am sure that I have said this many times before, I’d be a fool to miss an opportunity to at least try passing some positive vibes to those who really are showing up here for the first time. Please take seriously that this is an amazing city because of the eclectic mix of people who contribute to their neighborhoods and assist their communities. As the great Boston MC Exposition (RIP) once rhymed, this place is home to everyone from “businessmen, skate kids, and punk rockers,” to “construction workers, politicians, and doctors,” to “bums on the corner shaking cans looking for dollars.” We’re an ecosystem, and the actions we all take have consequences. Certain individuals or factions may not always get along, and there’s a lot more love needed across the board, but what I know for sure is that the Hub needs people who are aware of and care about others. If you’re simply here to treat people like shit and take as much as you can without giving back, then I’m pretty sure you’re going to have little use for this newspaper, and the feeling is mutual. Co-signed, CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Need more Dig? Sign up for the Daily Dig @ tiny.cc/DailyDig
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Tickets for Royale, The Sinclair, and Great Scott can be purchased online at AXS.COM. No fee tickets available at The Sinclair box office Wednesdays - Saturdays 12:00 - 7:00PM FOR MORE INFORMATION AND A COMPLETE LIST OF SHOWS, VISIT BOWERYBOSTON.COM NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
3
NEWS+OPINION FAREWELL CLUB BOHEMIA NEWS TO US
Iconic venue hosts final show after 25 years BY BRAD AVERY @BRADAVERY_
to his family, who sought to change the tone to a family-centric Irish Pub. Renovations took longer than expected, and the regular crowd moved on. When it finally reopened the new management was more hostile to the bands, sometimes yelling at them to turn the volume down, Bliss said. Ultimately, in 2007, the Kirkland Cafe closed and Bliss took Club Bohemia to Cantab.
Saturday, Sept 1, was supposed to be like any other night at Club Bohemia, a small basement rock venue that has served as an oft-overlooked spot for unknown bands to perform. But with barely two weeks before the date, the night’s acts suddenly found they had the duty to close out and pay tribute to a 25-year legacy on what would be the club’s final night. Located below the Cantab Lounge in Central Square, Club Bohemia is yet another in a growing line of Cambridge venues that have closed their doors in recent years due to rising rents and declining attendance. While the tiny hole-in-the-wall didn’t have the same notoriety attached to it as T.T. the Bear’s Place or the more recently deceased Out of the Blue Too, its closing nevertheless marks the loss of a venue where unknown bands could get their first gigs and build followings without the pressure to fill high-capacity rooms or conform to genre standards. Speaking with Dig, Club Bohemia founder and manager Mickey Bliss said the club’s closing came as a surprise to him mid-August when Cantab manager Stephen Ramsey told him the Sept 1 show would be the last and all future dates were cancelled. The ownership, he said, had decided to replace the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night live concerts with a computer jukebox where patrons can choose the music from a playlist of songs—a change that will ideally bring in young college kids but likely keep away the punks, metalheads, and various scene members Club Bohemia welcomed. According to Bliss, the change had been coming for some time, at least since the Cantab’s longtime owner Richard Fitzgerald retired due to health issues roughly a year ago. Fitzgerald’s son, Scott, has since taken over. With rents on the rise and frequent tension between management and the bands, Fitzgerald decided it was time for a change. “This summer we were starting to get a pretty good following of punk rockers, with the mohawks and stuff like that, and we had some pretty good shows, and the revenue was good,” Bliss said. “They didn’t really cause any trouble or anything, but they were just in and out of the club all night and he didn’t dig that.” While sales were up in August and Bliss had planned out a band schedule through December that he believed 4
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would draw big crowds, attendance in June and July was abysmal, he said. He hoped a rebound would impress Fitzgerald, but by that point it appeared the owner had already made up his mind. “The music venue has basically run its course,” said Cantab manager Stephen Ramsey when reached by phone at the club. “It’s time for a change. It was getting chaotic with four or five different bands every night, loading and unloading in the back. It wasn’t drawing either.” The basement space has since been renamed Cantab Underground and is open Friday and Saturday nights with the Be Your Own DJ setup, and Bliss is staying with the venue to run the sound system. Cantab also still hosts its long-running bluegrass nights on Tuesdays and poetry slams on Wednesdays in the basement—two events that were not promoted under the Club Bohemia banner. A Club In Its Prime Club Bohemia was founded in 1993 at the Kirkland Cafe on Washington Street in Somerville—at the time a spot known as a townie sports bar. Bliss had got wind that they were having trouble finding bands to play and, seeing an opportunity to get consistent gigs, he proposed that he take over Friday nights. To bring in crowds, he coined the Club Bohemia name and went hard and fast on promotion to gain media attention and generate hype around a new live music space in the city. “We transformed the whole club,” he said. “We had curtains and we had a logo and all that. We really made it look like this underground New York City village club even though it was a sports bar in Somerville.” Some of Club Bohemia’s most memorable performances happened at the Kirkland, according to Bliss. Jeff Buckley sold the place out one night and other name acts like Willie Alexander would provide big draws. Bliss also remembers mid-’90s fads, like a monthslong stretch where he could generate crowds by just having the words “surf rock” on a flyer. But mostly it was a place for local, unknown bands to test the waters, ultimately forming a community of regulars. But the Kirkland days entered decline in the late ’90s when owner Joe Hernon was diagnosed with terminal cancer. According to Bliss, Hernon left control of the bar
Central Square’s Changing Face Rising rents, contract disputes, the creeping specter of corporate blight. All have contributed to the loss of Central Square’s unique, artistic character in the past several years. While T.T.’s and Out of the Blue Too have been two of the more high profile closings in recent years, the area has also lost Weirdo Records, the EMF Building, and All Asia in the past five years. Beyond the arts, however, Bliss said he laments the loss of local mom-and-pop coffee shops and department stores that used to give the area a local flavor. “Yeah, that’s what’s happened, gentrification,” Bliss said. “They’re building more and more condos for the yuppies and moving out the people who make less money. It’s sad, very sad. Same thing happened to Park Square. I used to work at a place over there called Jack’s Drum Shop, and it’s just sad to see it going from a vibrant local space to just being big hotels and faceless corporate structures.” The Last Night Wanting to put a bow on the club’s final night, Bliss quickly booked a last-minute acoustic set from Nolan Hill and Andy Mac of local punk act the Runouts, who played their first-ever show at Club Bohemia, to play the final set. “It’s a bare-bones room, it’s just you on the stage in a basement, the crowd is right up in your face, it’s a great place to cut your teeth,” Mac told Dig, and added that he was honored to be the final act. “There’s nothing to hide behind, it’s a great place to hone your craft. The great thing about Mickey is he trusts people.” Club Bohemia’s fans started an online petition to save the venue, which at the time of writing has 203 signatures. Although Bliss is sad to see the space go, he’s accepted the Cantab’s decision. At 66 years old and with parents to take care of, he said he’s not sure whether he wants to seek out a new venue to host shows or if it’s time to hang it up. With competition from places like the ONCE Lounge and PA Lounge—both in Somerville—moving is no guarantee that crowds will return. But whatever he decides, Bliss said he’s proud of his career. “It’s funny,” he said. “This past spring and summer, even though there weren’t that many bands, I can remember just sitting there and thinking about how much I enjoyed doing this. Whatever it was like during the 25 years, I enjoyed it more than ever and I thought how lucky I was to be able to go in there three nights a week and listen to live music. And actually make a little bit of money at it. Not that I got rich, but I made a couple of bucks anyway.” Check out the full version of this article online at DigBoston.com.
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NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
5
DORCHESTER DISPATCH OPINION
CALL FOR COMMUNITY CURATORS
Meet the volunteers who helped Ayanna Pressley win BY MAX L. CHAPNICK
The Somerville Museum is pleased to announce the second bi-annual competition for Community Curators, two of whom will be selected to install their proposed exhibits in the Museum’s gallery spaces at 1 Westwood Road, Somerville, MA. Those selected will also receive seed grants of $2,500 for exhibition costs. The Museum welcomes proposals and encourages applicants to visit both the Museum and its website at www.somervillemuseum.org to learn more about the Museum’s wide-ranging exhibition history.
Information Session
Thursday, September 27, 2018 at 6 pm Somerville Museum 1 Westwood Road, Somerville, MA RSVP to alison@somervillemuseum.org
Deadline
INFORMATION SESSION
Friday, November 2, 2018 (by 11 pm EST)
Friday, October 12, 2018 at 6pm
Somerville Museumforms can be found at Application 1 Westood Road www.somervillemuseum.org/curator-application.pdf Somerville, MA RSVP: somemuseum@gmail.com
Upcoming Exhibits Triple Decker Ecology: Somerville’s Urban Landscape
Curated by Pennie Taylor, with David Buckley Borden October-December 2018 Opening Reception: Thursday, October 11, 2018
Our Stories, Our Stuff, Our Somerville
Curated by Bess Paupeck February-April 2019 Opening Reception: Thursday, February 14, 2019 For more information check out our website.
Somerville Museum
1 Westwood Road Somerville, MA 02143 www.somervillemuseum.org
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“I knew we would be, essentially, alone.” That’s what Ayanna Pressley, the Democratic nominee for Massachusetts 7th Congressional District, told her supporters last Tuesday night at the IBEW Local 126 in Dorchester. “I knew we would find no favor with the Democratic establishment,” Pressley continued. “I knew that we would have to fight for every dollar, every volunteer, every door, every vote.” Earlier in the evening, at 8 pm, the polls closed for the contest between Pressley and 10-term incumbent Mike Capuano. National and local TV cameras stood ready and folding tables were cluttered with journalists; still, spreads of cupcakes and hors d’oeuvres remained uneaten in the mostly empty hall. There were about as many reporters prowling, snapping photos, or typing away as there were volunteers. By 8:30 pm, the room started to fill. One of Pressley’s media consultants remarked with a heightened seriousness, “It’s gonna be close,” anticipating a late night. Over the next hour, with results and supporters trickling in, the air in the room sparked with tension and, over time, a crowd began to gather; suddenly, Pressley’s campaign felt far from a lonely enterprise, but became itself a community. The coverage on this congressional race often flattens a complex array of issues to make sense of Pressley’s win. As the New York Times wrote, Tuesday’s result represented a victory by the “insurgent left” over the “Democratic establishment.” In reporting the campaign in this way, the Times collapsed much of the nuanced difference between candidates into simple dichotomies like left vs. moderate and establishment insider vs. new blood. But while Pressley did outflank Capuano to the left on a couple of policies—like the abolition of ICE—Capuano holds a decades-long, undeniable record of reliably progressive positions. Similarly, while not a Washington politician, Pressley is by no means new to public life; this time last year, she was an incumbent city councilor pulling in more than 50,000 votes. If this election wasn’t won on leftist politics or disgust with establishment insiders, then why and how did Pressley win? One answer might be the nominee’s ability to inspire volunteers. Anthony Davis Jr., a recent graduate from Maryland, traveled all the way to Boston to help out in the final stretch. “This is the only majority-minority district in the entire state, and it has someone who doesn’t understand their lives and the experiences that they’re having and living representing them,” Davis said. Solomon Steen, a volunteer and public policy director for the Young Democrats of Massachusetts, spoke about Pressley’s attention not just to geographic communities but also communities of activists. Hearing Pressley speak at events like the Racial Justice Forum led him to believe that “she’s really listening to activists in a way that you usually don’t see politicians do because there’s no electoral dividend to spending time with these really niche individuals.” Activist-turned-Chelsea City Councilor Damali Vidot was particularly inspired by Pressley’s message and described communication style as key to the campaign: “Every time I heard her speak I was ready to kill turfs for her. And I have leg issues and I was ready to go!” Vidot lights up when comparing Pressley to typical politicians: “It’s not the regular, ‘oh how you doin’ type vibe. It’s about being able to connect with people from all walks of life. … It’s personal, it’s intimate.” (Full disclosure: I voted for Pressley because, after meeting her on Mass Ave, I, too, was convinced by the importance of personal life experiences to her policy ideas, by her magnetic style of speaking, and, simply, by the fact that she showed up in Cambridge.) Just after 9 pm, giant screens showed Capuano conceding and the entire room—friends, supporters, and volunteers—erupted with emotion. The election was ultimately called much earlier in the night than anyone had expected. I caught up with Davis again to ask how he felt. “This is a crazy moment right now,” he told me. “I’ll be honest, as a person of color, I have so much pride right now because not only are we sending another person of color to the Congress, but we are sending the first woman of color to Congress from Massachusetts.”
DEEPLY INVOLVED NEWS PROFILE
A campus-born engagement startup graduates and expands BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON When officials in Newton want to engage their constituents, they have an easy way to connect. Using tools and software from the Boston startup Involved, they’re able to, for example, gauge how much more money ratepayers are willing to spend to bring in more renewable energy. Founded by recent BU grad Jacob Dansey and co-helmed by fellow BU alum Caleb McDermott, Involved provides an important but all-too-often missing conduit between government and those who politicians are supposed to represent. Most recently, they helped the West End Civic Association in Boston poll locals about cannabis dispensaries. We spoke with Dansey and McDermott, as well as their business advisor Ky Edwards, about their fresh civic technology and what it’s like to grow beyond the campus incubator where they started.
Welcome Back!
Where did the original idea for Involved come from? JD: I originally had the idea for Involved back in high school. I’m from northern Virginia, right outside of DC, but I wasn’t really involved—I was discouraged by the process and the polarization. … It’s the suburbs where everyone is either in the government or working for the government. But just in general I felt disconnected from the two-party system. What did it look like when you first built it? JD: I was thinking it should be a mobile app at first. I thought a [politician] would post a question, you would swipe to answer, and that’s it. Thumbs up, thumbs down. But that was just an idea—I started doing research in my sophomore year, and wound up switching my major to computer engineering so that I could learn how to make this app that I thought would be cool. … I was thinking politicians would want to run these surveys and ask questions, and that we could get enough people to download [the app]. But then the thing was how do we get these average Joes to download the app? That’s when we started to bring a team together. Caleb and I starting working on this together in our senior year in the BU Summer Accelerator, which gave us a grant of $10,000 to work on it full-time for a summer. How painful was the progress? JD: We ran into obstacles, but we’ve pivoted along the way to build something that’s much more organic without having to download something. The questions are now coming from local community councils and civic associations and school boards. They do these monthly meetings where their whole job is to take concerns from the public, and so we’re finding that this is the audience for these kinds of questions. It’s very grass roots. Everything else we saw that was anything like this was targeted toward people who were already active. CM: We were working with state Rep. Liz Malia in her district at the time, and we had this mobile app. We were going around JP knocking on doors asking people to download it, but what we found was that while not a lot of people wanted to download the app, they were interested in the conversation and in receiving the questions in an email or a form that’s more convenient for them.
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How does the current product work? JD: We integrate with newsletters, and social media, and [politicians, civic groups, etc.] send out a question. You have your options to click, you can answer directly, you can leave a comment. The engagement this way is much high[er] than if there is only one external link. Users can do surveys on their own, and on the back end there’s a heat map of how people voted and a lot of other useful info. What hurdles do you still face? And what’s next for Involved? JD: We need civic groups and organizations posting questions, because every time they do it goes pretty wild. CM: Most of all, we want to be full time with this. That’s our goal over the next six months, and then hopefully we can just keep growing it from there. We think it stacks a every level of government pretty well. KE: We need to direct people, especially young people, to this platform so they can find out what their reps are doing. It’s really something for the future. This is the future of engagement.
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FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
7
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR PROFS HIJINKS
A practical guide for the new college student BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS So you’re a first-year undergraduate. You’re in college to cram your head full of knowledge, true. But you’re also there to build your personal network. Because the friends and allies you make while taking courses could very well stay with you for your whole life. And the stronger you build this interlocking web of connections, the better your job prospects (and existence in general) will be. The best way to do that—the most lasting and meaningful way—is to graduate. Everyone who does so has a profound experience in common. A strong bond forged in the fires of a seemingly endless series of term papers, labs (for you scientists), crits (for you artists), and exams. You get through that together, you can do anything… together. However, to graduate you need to meet the standards of the people who stand between you and your degree of choice: your professors. And it may seem to students new to higher education that the profs hold all the power in the relationships they have with you and your classmates. Two considerations should mitigate this concern. First, some professors—the best of them—will become part of your network. Help you get jobs, get into grad school, and so on and so forth. Second, you are living in an era where professors have less power in the American academy (based, as it is, on an older European model) than they’ve had since the Renaissance. You see, if you had been a college student in, say, Italy in the 16th century, you (being a rich male, as you would have had to be) would essentially be hiring older (also male, but often pretty broke) scholars to teach you what you wanted to study. The universities of the period were basically groups of students paying groups of professors to teach them. Each group had certain rights and responsibilities, and power on campus was distributed between them. In the intervening centuries, professors seized more and more control over higher education—culminating in the mid-20th century when they pretty much controlled the academy from top to bottom. Most of them were granted “tenure” by their colleges, guaranteeing them a permanent job in the interest of academic freedom. Fast-forward to today, and many professors—at least at the undergraduate level—have fallen upon hard times. Over the last half century, American higher education has become more and more corporatized. Colleges today are run like businesses. And many are big businesses indeed. Campus administrations have professionalized. Most key staff are no longer professors, but specialists trained to run universities along capitalist lines. One important job these administrators have is to keep students relatively happy—while extracting the federally guaranteed student loan money most bring with them. The better to convert them to donors after they graduate and become alumni. Unsurprisingly, as time has gone on, administrators have sucked up larger and larger portions of college
If enough people complain, and the complaints are legitimate, it will negatively affect problem professors’ careers.
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budgets. So, less and less of most schools’ budgets are being spent on professors. Causing faculty power to decline. Thus, in today’s higher ed establishment, a smaller and smaller percentage of professors are tenured faculty with good salaries and lifetime sinecures. A slightly larger percentage of lower-paid professors are tenure-track faculty spending several years at the mercy of their administrations and tenured colleagues in hope of landing a rare tenured professorship. And the vast majority of faculty are adjuncts—contract professors who, at many institutions, don’t know whether they’re going to have enough courses from semester to semester to pay their rent and keep food on the table. Unless they unionize (a movement that’s spread across public universities in the last quarter century and is gradually taking hold in private ones), the amount of money they get per course can be very low indeed and job security will be nonexistent. Yet even when unionized, adjuncts have trouble making ends meet. And where does all this leave an enterprising student like yourself? In a bit of a catbird seat, if you know how to manage your profs. Doing that involves four simple steps. The first three are practical tactics you’ll want to focus on with your most helpful professors. And the fourth is a “nuclear option” you can deploy if you’re unlucky enough to get a bad teacher while completing your undergraduate coursework. 1) Do what your professors ask you to do If you want to convert your professors from indifferent functionaries to active allies, you’ve got to get their attention. In a good way. And how best to get a prof’s attention? Follow directions carefully. Give them what they ask for in homework assignments, papers, and tests. Don’t go overboard. Good professors understand you have other courses. Just do what they want you to do, the way they want you to do it. Right there that puts you in the top 10 percent of students in a typical undergrad class. Particularly with adjuncts who have very little time to spend with each student, since they need to teach as many courses as possible—sometimes at more than one school—to attempt to make a living wage. The less work you make for professors, the more they will be pleased with you. The more pleased any faculty member is with you, the better your educational experience is going to be. 2) Give your professors good evaluations Every semester, at most colleges, your administration will ask you to give a fairly comprehensive evaluation of each course you take. This, in effect, allows you to evaluate your professors’ performances. What most students don’t know is that faculty are usually shown the evaluations—minus their students’ names. And what even fewer know is that many faculty members can tell which students gave which evaluations. Meaning they know who trashes them, and who praises them. So, be sure to mention something in your writeup that will help your professors know which eval came from you. Don’t be too glowing in your praise. But be fair. They will be much more likely to become your allies going forward if you are. 3) Help your professors with their careers Professors, especially adjuncts, are always looking for chances to stand out from the pack. In hopes of getting more secure long-term employment. Or, if they already have tenure or are tenure-track (or at least have a solid
union contract), in hopes of getting the types of “gold stars on their foreheads” that lead to better gigs. Those desired promotions come by making administrators like deans and provosts happy. And stuff like winning grants for flashy research projects is exactly the type of thing that makes such top dogs happy in today’s academy. Because it makes them look good to their higher-ups: campus presidents and boards of trustees. Given that, if your professor mentions an opportunity to assist them with some grant writing or research work or preparing for a big conference or whatever—and you can spare some time—help them out. Don’t be a suckup or teacher’s pet. Don’t jump on every opportunity that presents itself. That can backfire, or become inappropriate in any number of ways. But maybe once a semester do them a solid. That’s the kind of thing that leads to a long-term connection and adds professors to your personal network. “But surely,” you’re now thinking, “every professor isn’t good.” Isn’t helpful. Some professors are, in fact, obstacles that could stop you from getting your degree and solidifying your all-important personal network of classmates and good faculty. Correct. In a system of higher education where most professors didn’t get any practice teaching unless they were in the minority of graduate students that decided to be teaching assistants instead of research assistants, bad teachers are an unfortunately common fact of college life. And here’s where your newfound knowledge of the falling status of professors comes into play. 4) The enemy of your enemy is your friend If you have a bad professor… and I don’t mean a professor that makes you work for your grades. Those are generally the good ones. I mean if you have a professor who is feral. Arbitrary and capricious in their teaching method and in their treatment of students. Someone who gets off on giving low grades because they think they can do so with impunity. If you get a teacher like that, do not waste too much time complaining to them directly. Nasty professors are inclined to think they’re better than you—even if you make more money working at Starbucks than many of them make as academics. So they’ll tend to ignore your protestations. Better to try a different tack. Remember how administrators have steadily taken control of today’s corporatized academy? And how they want students to be happy? You go complain to them. To the highest level administrators that will sit down with you. In person. And encourage your classmates to do the same. And keep doing it. If enough people complain, and the complaints are legitimate, it will negatively affect problem professors’ careers. To forestall that—and being unable to retaliate since the eyes of the administration are on them—said profs will likely moderate their behavior. And you will have won. Have a great school year, folks. Study hard, don’t party too much, be decent to your fellow beings, and you’ll be fine. Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. He has also been both an adjunct and a “regular” professor at some college or other. And helped organize faculty unions at same. He has degrees and stuff.
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FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
9
TOUR GUIDE
WELCOME BACK: 5 FALL FAVORITES An excerpt from 100 Things to Do in Boston Before You Die (2nd Edition) BY KIM FOLEY MACKINNON
LIVE MUSIC • PRIVATE EVENTS 9/16 | 2-6p
All at ONCE: A triumphant return! Somerstreets Strike up the Bands with Awaaz Do, Lockette, sister PLUS: outside beer garden and ribbon cutting ceremony
9/16 | 2-10P
LOCAL Focus: Boston Rock Photography
More than 25 photographers displaying and selling work in the Ballroom
9/16 | 6-11P
A fond farewell to Bob Colby with 15 of his favorite bands on the ballroom stage incl. Lonely Leeza, Thrust Club, DYR FRASER and more
9/18 Simpson’s trivia 7-9 in the ballroom Metal Tuesdays 9-1 in the lounge 9/20 Allston Pudding presents Thin Lips with Cheer Up and Dump Him
156 Highland Ave • Somerville, MA 617-285-0167 oncesomerville.com a @oncesomerville b/ONCEsomerville
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Sneak a Peek at the Bleacher Bar
It can be hard, not to mention expensive, to score tickets to a Red Sox game, but this cool bar offers a sweet ringside seat to Fenway Park. Located beneath the bleachers of Fenway’s centerfield on Lansdowne Street, the Bleacher Bar has a feature no other bar has: a garage door-style window that looks right into the stadium. Formerly, the space was the visiting team’s batting cage, so you feel like you’re practically part of the action. Now fans jockey for prime seats in the bar to watch the game with cold beers and snacks. Even if there’s no game, the view of the field can’t be beat. Examine the Jewels of Boston’s Emerald Necklace
Forget gemstones—Boston’s Emerald Necklace is a long string of six delightful green spaces stretching seven miles from one end of the city to the other. Masterminded in the late nineteenth century by landscape architect extraordinaire Frederick Law Olmsted, who also happened to design New York’s Central Park (among many other green spaces), the parks are composed of the Back Bay Fens, the Riverway, Olmsted Park, Jamaica Pond, Arnold Arboretum, and Franklin Park. Tap Your Toes at Wally’s Cafe Jazz Club
This tiny spot is an absolute must for music fans. Ever since 1947, performers have been jamming at Wally’s, which is open every night of the year. The historic family-owned club is considered a training ground for many aspiring music students attending local institutions like Berklee College of Music. They are happy to hone their craft where big names like Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker once made appearances. Every night, there’s an early jam session from 6 to 9 p.m., then another from 9:30 p.m. until 2 am. Watch the Head of the Charles
This annual fall event brings out hordes of crowds who line the Charles River to cheer on sculling crew teams competing in the world-famous Head of the Charles Regatta, which has been held here since 1965. More than eleven thousand athletes of all ages, from their teens to their eighties, descend on the city to race in the globe’s largest two-day rowing event. Buy a Book at Trident Booksellers and Café
This Newbury Street store, temporarily closed at publication time due to fire [NOW OPEN!}, has been a gathering spot since 1984, with a large selection of new and used books, unique and hard-to-find magazines, and funky gifts, plus an excellent café, where you can read to your heart’s content while sipping on a glass of wine or snacking on sweet potato fries. Host to all sorts of literary events, from book readings to author Q&As to book clubs, the closure, even temporary, is a big loss to the neighborhood, but until it reopens, the shop is operating online and at special events around town. Get your copy of 100 Things to Do in Boston Before You Die (2nd Edition) at escapewithkim.com, Amazon, reedypress.com, or in local Barnes and Noble stores.
FUN
DODGE, DIP, DIVE, DUCK AND DODGE Nonlethal projectile pleasure in Chelsea BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1
IF IT’S NOT NECANN IT’S NOT NEW ENGLAND I had no real idea about what I was getting into. All I saw was an email invite featuring the words “games” and “archery,” along with the date and time of where I was supposed to be. “Dress sporty,” my buddy recommended. He’s familiar with the gauntlet, having ventured there to shoot it out with coworkers a few weeks earlier. Equipped with no more than a pair of running shoes, my standard-issue camo cargo shorts, and a buzz cut that’s appropriate for war (which I happen to have anyway), I made the short trip to the shopping center just off Broadway up in Chelsea where some punks would meet their doom (aka me). Of course, I didn’t start off as a gladiator. Don’t try to be cool like me during the mandatory educational session at Archery Games. When the instructor looked at me and asked, “Have you ever used one of these before?” I moronically applied my experience from camp three decades ago and said, “Yes.” But as I learned soon after while trying to fire one off and being rejected by my own bow, combat isn’t like riding a bike. Bottom line: It’s important to pay close attention. On that note, there are several specific rules of engagement, sure, but for the most part the parameters are simple: stick on your team’s side, don’t shoot people in between the midfield lines, and walk off to the side if you are hit. Otherwise, you’re left to your own skill and devices once your group splits into teams and the ref blows the whistle. Did I mention that instead of arrows at the end of the sticks you are shooting, there is a large padded fist that resembles a marshmallow? Nevertheless, these spears can do damage, especially if flung by someone of substantial size and strength. I took one lump on the knuckle and a couple in the face mask, and while none of the above shots stopped me from so much as texting as soon as the melee ended, I may sport batting gloves or some sheath on my future outings. As for the competition I survived to bring you this here dispatch—my team dominated. I’m not too sure why, other than that a few of us discovered early that it’s best to stay calm while opponents scramble, then to aim directly at their midsections so that they can’t easily duck, jump, or dodge the incoming twigs. It’s something like a slow and steady wins the race approach, but especially the steady part, since speed is half the battle—whether you are barrelrolling to evade a missile (as I did, making a complete ass of myself) or racing to duck behind one of the many protective barricades (in our session, the ref removed one with each round, leaving nothing but an open killing field for the last stretch). What good came of this murder scene in the end? My team won. What’s even better? It may have been the best time I’ve had in a while—especially without consuming dumb amounts of drugs and alcohol. I won’t kid you—on the days after the slaughter, my joints and muscles, all of them, screamed louder than my rivals did back on the field. Still, I don’t regret it for a second. A second, after all, is sometimes all there is between defeat and victory.
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Did I mention that instead of arrows at the end of the sticks you are shooting, there is a large padded fist that resembles a marshmallow?
NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
11
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW I (COULD HAVE) LEARNED FROM CHAPO FEATURE
In which we stroke the gang’s new book like Dems do war and the establishment BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 As somebody who thinks morticians should have fed the corpse of John McCain to livestreaming meth-addled cannibals, social media was nauseating through and through two weeks ago. The senator from Arizona was the sort of phony gode who coaxes so-called mods into fellating goons like Henry Kissinger, leaving no-oneunderstands-me prick contrarians like me without a place to turn and whine unless we feel like rubbing half our friends (and readers, in my case) the wrong way. While I’m always happy to back unpopular ideas, it still gets lonely being the guy whose tweets get lots of clicks and impressions, but relatively few likes and RTs. All shunning and shadow infamy considered, I was relieved and entertained to learn last year that my sympathies lie with a much larger assembly, namely the alleged “Dirtbag Left,” a loosely applied label for fans of the Chapo Trap House podcast and anyone else who genuinely loathes the work of Aaron Sorkin but lets people live at parties when they say they dig his shows because we’re more human than not. Not completely unlike Unitarianism, but for people who say things that make Unitarians uncomfortable. Without trying much harder to explain the Chapo gusto since you ought to sniff it on your own, I think their drama is well defined by the teardrops of one Bill Scher, whose recent Politico review of Virgil Texas, Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, and Will Menaker’s The Chapo Guide to Revolution is headed “Is This the Stupidest Book Ever Written About Socialism?” It may seem unfair to slam Scher for a line cooked by his editor that slugged its way to the front page, but he’s the same shameless apologist who blew a fart titled “Master of Grief: How Joe Biden’s exemplary eulogizing and willingness to share personal suffering helps him transcend our political polarization,” making his Demserving assessment of the Chapo book an ideal reactive explainer: Chapo Trap House is one of the fastest growing political humor podcast in the country, boasting the all time largest Patreon with over 20,000 paid subscribers. A mix of absurdist comedy and freewheeling commentary, the five-member comedy collective has gained an extremely loyal following due to their irreverence and frankness in dissecting the current political and cultural climate. … In their evisceration of liberals and establishment Democrats, we get the usual leftwing criticisms of the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton presidencies: The $800 billion stimulus had too many tax cuts, the Affordable Care Act is little more than a Heritage Foundation scheme, the crime bill sparked a wave of mass incarceration. Even if all of that were true, we don’t hear about how the Recovery Act stopped a Great Depression or how the … As I’m sure Scher understands as one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American experience himself, the Chapo crew is simply offering a side of meat that’s typically left off the table—a perspective that eschews capitalism and is funny for a change. These guys never (really) claimed to be historians or weathercocks but rather simply uploaded some podcasts that a few lost souls like me largely agree with. All to the increasing dismay of people who think Joe Biden’s a hunky sympathetic tough guy, and that Clinton and Obama are above all criticism in the age of Trump. In honor of the Chapo gang’s new book, as well as their visit to the Wilbur in Boston on Friday and this 12
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week’s exceptionally advice-laden student guide, I have compiled a compendium of basic helpful concepts that I didn’t really understand throughout my formative years, along with some brief excerpts from their Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason that I feel would serve anyone looking for answers between lines on the left quite well. Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath. It’s not supposed to. The actual lived experience of the free market feels distinctly un-free. Sure, I could have and did learn about the shit evils of capitalism elsewhere, like when I was clobbered by NYPD while covering Occupy Wall Street. Or even before that, like when Michael Bloomberg, the piece of trash whose namesake biz sells subscriptions to the software that biz dicks who cops that fucked me up were flanking despite all they’d done to soil the economy, was elected thrice to run that city. But it would have been nice in my younger days to find such a credible condemnation outside of a nihilistic stand-up routine that strikes truth by accident, a track by Immortal Technique, or an insufferably tedious socialist tract. [Ayn] Rand’s legacy in right-wing thought is clear. Not only did she write several thousand pages’ worth of pseudo-philosophical drivel that declared the highest moral good was achieved in being the biggest asshole possible, but, in elevating reason as supreme among all human faculties, she was the first philosopher to elevate facts over feelings. I actually read about 10 pages of Atlas Shrugged to figure this out on my own. Biggest waste of time in my entire life besides the decades I’ve spent living in a bubble inflated by her most vicious sycophants. The meanest thing you can say about liberalism (to a liberal, anyway) is that it’s not really a set of beliefs. … Bush’s first term, quite frankly, broke liberals’ brains. Mine included. Fortunately, I’ve been able to pick up the pieces. A generation after the neoliberal turn, the Democratic Party, headed and staffed by self-professed liberals, is arguably to the right of Nixon on most economic issues and committed to a largely symbolic (and almost always negotiable) progressive cultural agenda to mask it. If I would have learned this earlier, I wouldn’t have spent two years volunteering for blue campaigns before resorting to journalism. Journalists spent the coke-fueled 1980s living the dream. The nascent twenty-four-seven cable news channel CNN put frowzy pundits in front of cameras, increasing their celebrity and vanity. Meanwhile, America elected a Hollywood actor president, and unflinching, heroic newsmen got to the bottom of Iran-Contra, the S&L crisis, and AIDS denialism by demanding that Reagan tell them folksy stories about being friends with Tip O’Neill. Of course, I picked journalism roughly 10 years too late. Also, there’s your Boston reference. No doubt the Chapo chaps will enjoy their cruise through Tip’s tunnel en route to the Wilbur.
The dislocations created by climate change helpfully remind us that the political systems we live under are incapable of solving any fundamental problems or acting in the interests of anyone but the ruling class. As a reporter, there’s always been this nagging notion hobbling my thoughts that suggests everything I’m doing is a total waste of time if I’m not writing about how we are all—and by “all” I mean elected pols, their puppeteers who pollute indiscriminately, and the F-150-pushing curved hats who support the lot of ’em— hastening our untimely demise with every passing day. In a country where we have a hundred times more types of bottled water than we do options for cable, Chapo is a refreshingly rare circle of jerks that ravages the rubes who care not for our planet. The present and future of work is a lot like its past: stupid and arbitrary, and everyone’s terrible boss gets to fail upward to the next thing he can fuck up. … If you’re reading this book in one of the few “free” moments you have, on your way to a job that’s slowly sapping your will to live, you already know that the good side won. I guess I would have figured this one out all on my own, but it’s always more fun to learn it from Chapo. Or rather, to unlearn years of nonsense with a little help from their outstanding Guide to Revolution. Which brings me to the most important thing I’ve learned from listening to them, a lesson that has been cemented since spending a week with their tome: Nonpartisan haters of the world are not alone. There are thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of us out there. All we needed was a trap for congregating and a bible.
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13
HOW TO WALK THE BOSTON COASTLINE TAKE A HIKE
And eat burgers and hot dogs while you’re at it BY MARC HURWITZ
PHOTO BY MARC HURWITZ For those of you who are new to the area, the Boston coastline may seem a bit confusing and even intimidating in some ways, as it is basically a huge C-shaped harbor with many nooks and crannies while also appearing to have buildings and other development blocking much of it. Because of this, it might seem like walking along the harbor for long stretches would be difficult if not impossible, but this is as far from the truth as you can get, as the city actually has a walkway called the Harborwalk that basically goes from the Quincy line to the south all the way up to the Mystic River in Charlestown to the north. The path does have some pieces missing here and there, while other parts of it parallel and/or cross busy roadways, so if you like long walks, the key is to find a stretch of the Harborwalk that isn’t broken up while also having as few road crossings as possible. One section that does just that is the part between the JFK Library and Museum/UMass Boston area in Dorchester and Castle Island at the very tip of South Boston, and you can get at least seven miles out of this walk—nearly all of which is along the shore—while it can also be extended a few more miles if you want a really long walk. Oh, and the midway point has a stop that will either satisfy your hunger or force you to Uber it back to the start so you can nap (and more on this in a bit). The JFK/UMass to Castle Island walk is actually one that the Appalachian Mountain Club leads (and I am one of their leaders, by the way), so this is an established hike with a specific route taken. Ironically, it starts at a decidedly unattractive place—the JFK/UMass T station. Take the walkway that goes over Morrissey Boulevard and head back north, keeping the subway station within sight to your left until you reach Mount Vernon Street where you will take a sharp right. Mount Vernon isn’t much to look at, but you’ll notice that things quickly get quieter and you may sense that the ocean isn’t too far away. A bit more than a half mile in, you’ll see 14
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that the apartment complex to the left ends and right after the end is a pathway; take this and you’ll almost immediately be rewarded with spectacular water views, especially as the trail meets up with the Harborwalk, which goes in both directions. Our hike then goes left, hugging the harbor as it winds its way through the Harbor Point/Columbia Point section of Dorchester with jaw-dropping views of the Boston Harbor Islands in one direction and the Boston Skyline in the other. This is a section of the city that rarely gets explored, and the extraordinary water views really make it feel like a true find, so this is obviously a good place to take a break (or two) and soak it all in. Eventually, you’ll emerge from Harbor Point/ Columbia Point at Carson Beach, a crescent-shaped strip of sand that marks the border between Dorchester and South Boston, and you can either walk along a long boardwalk or hop right down to the water’s edge on the beach, both of which are good options. Curving west then north then east, the Harborwalk and the beach walk merge back together as you start to walk along Day Boulevard in Southie, and while this road can be a bit busy, it’s a very pleasant walk in part because this is the “old” South Boston, with lots of well-maintained multifamily homes lining the tree-shaded street and almost no new development to be found. The stretch of the walk along Day Boulevard is very simple to follow, as you keep the water to your right (as you’ve been doing ever since emerging from the Mount Vernon Street pathway in Dorchester a while back) and follow Day Boulevard to the left, watching the cross streets mostly go through the alphabet starting with G and eventually getting to P, with each block taking you what seems to be further and further out to sea. There are little “spur” walkways here and there on this stretch where you can lean against a wall or sit on a bench and take in the increasingly breathtaking water views, and a bit after P Street and Farragut Road, you’ll see a
shaded park on the left and a causeway on the right that heads directly out to the ocean. This causeway forms a circle with Pleasure Bay on the left and the Atlantic on the right and is called the “Sugar Bowl” by locals, and it is easily one of the most scenic parts of Boston—and one of the windiest, so hold onto your hat if you have one. Head onto the causeway and walk out to a pavilion-like area with a circle of benches, stopping for views in all directions, then continue along the causeway as it jogs left and ends up at Castle Island, an historic area that includes Fort Independence and has been used as a military fortification site since the 1600s. Upon entering this strip of land, you can either go left or right; while you can go either way, going right is a bit more interesting, as it takes you along the perimeter of the fort and gives you views of the ocean and the islands to the right and eventually parts of the Boston Skyline again as you turn left around the fort. A fishing pier can be found just before heading left, and it’s worth taking this very short detour to the right if you want to grab a bench out in the middle of the ocean and soak up more views. The left turn of the walkway takes you away from the water for a short time, and it also makes a beeline toward Sullivan’s, a legendary snack shack favored by locals that offers the aforementioned hot dogs and burgers along with fried clams, lobster rolls, chicken and fish sandwiches, ice cream, and more. Grab some food if you’re hungry, and then either sit out front or head up the hill toward the fort if you want to get away from the crowds. From Sullivan’s, keep walking counterclockwise along the Sugar Bowl, with the start (or end) of Day Boulevard to your right now, and soon you’ll meet up with the causeway entrance once again. From here, you can simply walk back along the Harborwalk, skipping the Harbor Point/Columbia Point section and taking Day Boulevard right back to the subway station, or if you want some extra miles (and more of those great views), head back toward Harbor Point/Columbia Point and then back to Mount Vernon Street. If you do the former, the entire route is between seven and eight miles; doing the latter will get you closer to nine miles, and depending on your pace, expect to be out walking for about four hours or so. Well, there you have it: a long seaside walk that you can do without leaving the city, and one that’s really more known to locals and longtime Bostonians than newcomers. If you want to do a combination walk/lunch that takes you far away from the crowds while also being very easy to get to, this is one that is very tough to beat. [The JFK/UMass T station is located on the Red Line, three stops from South Station going outbound toward Braintree/Ashmont.]
OCTOBER 7
NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
15
SCHOLARLY ADVICE MUSIC
One generation of Boston musicians gives pointers to the next BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN September is officially here, and so are all of the students. Boston has swelled in size once again because of the student population. While many are tempted to groan at the sight of clueless students pingponging their way down the streets, it’s important to remember just how many of us originally came to the city to pursue higher education. In that, it’s key to give back, especially if it helps alleviate the fear and stress that can accompany joining not only a new city, but a new music scene. To make that process less scary than it needs to be, we asked local musicians and artists to share some tips. Folk punk guru the Michael Character, psych rock act Bat House, hook maestro Sidney Gish, electronic producer Mmph, neo-soul singersongwriter Aubrey Haddard, art rock explorer Anjimile, and pop punk band Mint Green each shared a fresh batch of recommendations for this year’s back-toschool roundup. Whether they chose to dish on the best spots around campus to plow through work, to highlight the free amenities your college offers, or explain what to expect from Boston’s music scene at large, there’s a lot to learn. So grab a pen and get ready to take notes. These words are ones you’ll want to remember forever.
record in their studio, so it’s not technically allowed to be released, but Northeastern doesn’t do that. You can use the studios for whatever you want. I’ve worked in them for classes before, but haven’t really used them for my own music yet. I’m going to try to in the future before I lose access.” — Sidney Gish (Sidney Gish, Northeastern) “Check your library’s computers. Ours are stacked with several DAW programs (Pro Tools, Logic, etc.). So, if that is of interest to you, goofing off in those programs between classes is a good way to get your footing in those programs for free.” —Shane Blank (Bat House, Berklee)
UNDERUTILIZED COLLEGE PERKS CLOCKWISE (L TO R): SIDNEY GISH, MINT GREEN, ANJIMILE, “Berklee has amazing gear that you AUBREY HADDARD, THE MICHAEL CHARACTER, MMPH, BAT HOUSE can check out if you’re an EPD major. It’s amazing to see them sometimes hardly touched. Also, hardly anyone uses the EPD studios during regular JOIN THE MUSIC SCENE semester periods. I’ve noticed that it only gets busy “[Boston’s music scene] is in constant transition. So during midterms and finals, and there were stretches of get involved in any capacity, whether it is as a showgoer, weeks where I was able to check out a studio and use it a promoter, or as a band, because there is a lot to be seen for the entire day.” and heard here.” — Sae Heum Han (Mmph, Berklee) —Shane Blank (Bat House, Berklee) “There’s a recording studio (Snell Studio) at our on-campus library (Snell Library) that is available to all students. It includes a control to outfitted with monitors, pro tools, and a nice mixing board, in addition to a nice recording space with a drum kit, a keyboard, bass and guitar amps, and an array of microphones. All you have to do is sign up for space on the Snell Library website.” — Anjimile (Anjimile, Northeastern) “Berklee does this super cool thing where Mass Eye and Ear comes in and does hearing exams. If you let them examine your hearing you get free ear plugs. That’s super duper important cause once you lose your hearing that’s kinda it.” — Muñeca Diaz (Mint Green, Berklee) “Northeastern has pretty good studios available to students studying recording. At other schools sometimes, the school owns the masters of what you
“If you’re looking to be in a band, I met Ronnica, Mint Green’s vocalist, through the musicians section of Craigslist. That worked for me, but it took a lot of patience. Check often because there is a lot to sift through.” — Daniel Huang (Mint Green, Boston University School of Medicine) “Practice all the time, and don’t be afraid to try new things! Your best work will always happen while you’re working, so getting started is the most important thing.” — Sidney Gish (Sidney Gish, Northeastern) “Because the music scene is essentially a massive network, you can start going to shows to see nationally touring acts that you might be familiar with, catch the local openers, then find shows where those local openers are headlining, then follow the opening acts of those shows and continue the process until it’s just you and 12
MUSIC EVENTS THU 09.13
THE GREAT BRITISH PUNK OFF SHOPPING
[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 8:30pm/18+/$12. greatscottboston.com]
16
09.13.18 - 09.20.18
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FRI 09.14
LAID-BACK RAP FOR WITS AND GIGGLES MICHAEL CHRISTMAS + VINTAGE LEE [Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. 8pm/18+/$15. crossroadspresents.com]
DIGBOSTON.COM
other people in a living room listening to someone play their first show. It won’t take too long. There is a frankly unreasonable number of incredible artists in Boston, and no matter what your taste is I am willing to bet that your new favorite local band is only a few degrees of separation away from that big show you see at the Royale or the House of Blues.” — James Ikeda (The Michael Character, Tufts) I WISH SOMEONE TOLD ME “I wish I knew that despite almost everyone having attended Berklee, Berklee is pretty removed from the music scene of the actual city. Other than their own privately owned events and venues, I was never encouraged to participate in anything not Berklee related.” — Aubrey Haddard (Aubrey Haddard, Berklee) “I wish I knew earlier that there was an entire community of queer and trans musicians, and queer and trans musicians of color that kick ass and don’t take shit. I wasted a lot of time watching hordes of generic straight white dude bands playing straight white dude band indie rock. Yawn. Also, the boston hip hop community is popping off — don’t sleep on that shit.” — Anjimile (Anjimile, Northeastern) “If you don’t see any events that are precisely your jam in terms of how they are run or curated, start running your own events. Chances are you’ll be great at it. Feel free to get in touch with the Bummer City Historical Society for more specific advice towards this end. But if you really like music and want to play music but can’t, SURPRISE, you actually can! And you should. Just do it.” — James Ikeda (The Michael Character, Tufts) “If you are passionate about music, start getting involved now! Join music groups, enroll in music classes, and take every opportunity to perform. I just wish that I had known about the amazing bands and artists in Boston (Honey Cutt, Edge Petal Burn, Raavi & the Houseplants, Ozlo, Cosmic Johnny, The Water Cycle, Sidney Gish, and many others) earlier!” — Daniel Huang (Mint Green, Boston University School of Medicine) “I wish I knew that no one really cares if you go somewhere alone! I went to a lot of shows alone and wasted my time beforehand being like ‘Who do I know who’s gonna be there?’ It’s fine to go somewhere by yourself if you’re there since you like the music, and you’ll probably meet people at the show anyway.” — Sidney Gish (Sidney Gish, Northeastern) Check digboston.com for even more words of wisdom from some of our favorite artists.
FRI 09.14
SUN 09.16
SUN 09.16
[Dorchester Art Project, 1486 Dorchester Ave., Boston. 8pm/all ages/$5. bostonhassle.com]
[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 8:30pm/18+/$8. greatscottboston.com]
[ONCE Somerville, 156 Highland Ave., Somerville. 7pm/all ages/free. oncesomerville.com]
IN LOCALS WE TRUST SERVICE + SUPERTEEN + DIVA KARR + JARVA LAND
ASPIRATIONAL JAMS, HEAVY ON THE BASS ZULA + ALEXANDER + TARGUS TARGUS
BOB COLBY’S MUSICAL ADIEU CARISSA JOHNSON + CHRIS BROKAW + CLASSIC RUINS + MORE
WED 09.19
DECONSTRUCTING ROCK, ONE RIFF AT A TIME MOTHERS + LALA LALA [Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 8:30pm/18+/$13. greatscottboston.com]
MUSIC
DARLINGSIDE
he steady rise from a cappella college days to folk festival favorites BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Some people are born with a natural singing voice. Others are determined to hone their talent. But for a handful of people, singing isn’t really a thing they can do. But that doesn’t mean they won’t sign up to do so anyway—even if only because it’s nice to make music with others. That’s the case for Darlingside, or at least it was for one of the folk band’s founding members, Harris Paseltiner, when he wound up attending the same school as his soon-to-be bandmates: David Senft, Auyon Mukharji, and Don Mitchell. It all started when the four guys enrolled at Williams College in Western Mass. With graduating classes spanning from 2006 to 2009, it seems likely that they never would have met. Then again, Williams is tiny, usually tapering off each graduating class at around 500 students or so. So while Paseltiner is the youngest of the bunch—he was a freshman when Mitchell was a senior—it didn’t prevent them from meeting each other. In some cases, like for Senft and Mukharji who were freshman-year roommates, it was education magic playing a solid hand. In other ways, it was simply fate. After showing up a little too early on the first day of orientation his first year, Paseltiner headed to the IT area to get his laptop set up. Meanwhile, holed up at the IT center was Senft, who was the student worker designated to help new students set up their computers. “He was one of the first people I met at school in general, and he was sitting there with a guitar in his lap, trying to figure out a guitar tab,” Paseltiner says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh! I guess people play music here!’ It was a big deal to see, especially given it was from him of all people.” The next day, Mukharji actually came to Paseltiner’s dorm room just to ask if he could borrow his amp for a performance. Because he was a total stranger at the time, Paseltiner declined. While he regrets it in hindsight, Paseltiner recognizes that the early introductions to his future bandmates were signs: there were people on campus who not only wanted to make music, but were driven to make it happen regardless of their circumstances. That’s a running theme for Darlingside. Years deep in their career, the four musicians have found a way to make music that resonates and feels intimate, if only because the four are running on pure passion and determination. That’s why they met more formally in the Octet, their school’s 13-member a cappella group that performs both traditional barbershop arrangements and modern pop hits, which doesn’t require students join based on vocal skill. Paseltiner had never sung before joining the group his freshman year. “I looked up to him a lot because he was involved in concert choir and classical music growing up, so he had so much musical knowledge to impart,” Paseltiner says of Mitchell, who was the music director at the time. “Soon we all ended up meeting and playing together outside of singing groups on campus: cover bands, choir, classical music, stuff like that. It was a very supportive group of guys. Honestly, at the time, it was about the friendships and the social experience of hanging out in a group where you all enjoy music. It wasn’t quite about perfection and performance. That supportive, friendly environment got me super comfortable with singing very fast. All I could think was, ‘Hey, this is fun so I’m going to do it just to enjoy it.’ But now it’s panned out to be my job, which is pretty wild to look back and realize.” The extra dose of comedy that comes in looking back is that Darlingside is more centered around vocal arrangements than most other folk acts. Though each member is dexterous when it comes to cello, guitar, and banjo, it’s their ability to weave their voices so seamlessly that sets Darlingside apart from the bunch. On Extralife, their newest and arguably best record, they sing as if it’s second nature. The racing energy of “Futures” or extra sweet harmonies in “Old Friend” will win over the most whimsical hearts and musically-attuned listeners, even if it’s their first time listening.
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Read the rest of the article at Digboston.com >> DARLINGSIDE. SUN 9.16. SOMERVILLE THEATRE, 55 DAVIS SQ., SOMERVILLE. 6:30PM/ALL AGES/$26. BOWERYBOSTON.COM
NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
17
THEATER REVIEW ARTS
BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS
OH, WHAT A MANGLED WEB KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN AT THE LYRIC STAGE
It’s no wonder that Kiss of the Spider Woman, Kander and Ebb’s ambitious but faulty 1992 musical, is so rarely revived. It isn’t only that the score is second rate or that the script (by Terrence McNally) is unremarkable and problematic, but that its success is dependent upon a production that can bring to life the vision required to make it work. (Hal Prince, no stranger to ambitious concepts, directed the original production.) And that’s to say nothing of the caliber of performers required to pull off the musical’s two enigmatic leads. The current revival playing at the Lyric Stage Company, where it will run through Oct 7, has none of these things. Despite being directed and choreographed by Rachel Bertone, a director of considerable vision not averse to taking big risks (Cabaret at Moonbox, anyone?), this Spider Woman weaves a web of tedium and shruggery that is both surprising given Bertone’s track record yet also par for the course given the kind of work that the Lyric has developed a reputation for of late. Two very different men—one a flagrant homosexual, the other an anti-government revolutionary—share a miserable cell in a Latin American prison and develop a relationship that neither saw coming. As Rihanna would say, they found love in a hopeless place. Molina (Eddy Cavazos), the prison’s resident queen, is three years into his eight-year prison sentence for corrupting a minor. Flamboyant and outsized, Molina endures regular physical, verbal, and sexual assault at the
hands of both the prison guards and its inmates. As a way to escape the horrors of the prison, he daydreams of Aurora, a gorgeous siren of the silver screen. Aurora is played by Lisa Yuen, who in a series of glitzy production numbers (Bertone’s choreography is exquisite) livens up the gritty hopelessness of the prison. He knows all of her movies by heart and, to a certain extent, wants to be her. (In several versions of Kiss of the Spider Woman, including Manuel Puig’s original novel, Molina is not gay but transgender.) But there’s one role of Aurora’s that frightens Molina: the Spider Woman, an unforgettable diva with a fatal kiss. The other prisoner is Valentin (Taavon Gamble), the rough revolutionary who refuses to name names, even if doing so would put a stop to his relentless regular beatings. But the warden, played by Luis Negron, isn’t accustomed to not getting what he wants, and he enlists Molina to help him crack Valentin. Aside from the odd structure of the musical, the two decades that have passed since Spider Woman premiered have rendered many aspects of it problematic: We are shown an eccentric homosexual incapable of manning up and saving himself. Head in the clouds, he eventually succumbs like a silly man who is unable to control his emotions. He comes off as a pawn for the straight man, which is, of course, not at all the point of the story. But with McNally’s script paired with Cavazos’s caricature-like rendering of Molina, we aren’t left with much more than that. For Kiss of the Spider Woman to land an emotional punch, we must believe that Molina and Valentin have formed a legitimately intimate bond, which isn’t at all the case here. (Other versions show their bond as faked, but that is compelling for altogether different reasons.) Their sudden relationship doesn’t ring true here and their scenes
>> KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN. THROUGH 10.7 AT THE LYRIC STAGE, 140 CLARENDON ST., BOSTON. LYRICSTAGE.COM 18
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DIGBOSTON.COM
together are as sparkless as the other major problem with this production: the Spider Woman herself. Lisa Yuen is an actress of considerable talent (she was excellent as the Baker’s Wife in the Lyric’s 2014 production of Into the Woods), but those gifts do not at all align with the demands of Aurora, who must effortlessly seduce and smolder as if our lives depend on it. Yuen is an unconvincing showgirl who seems uncomfortable as the center of attention. Rather than emerging as the star of her escapist numbers she fades into the background and lets the trio of male dancers take the spotlight. (Bernie Baldassaro is one to watch.) Aurora’s numbers must be an escape for the audience as much as they are for Molina, but it’s a problem when the prison doesn’t seem all that bad and, all things considered, Molina looks pretty content. The scenes between Molina and Valentin are endlessly more watchable than the clumsy production numbers which, although exquisitely choreographed, are frequently in the way of Janie E. Howland’s set. The Lyric’s space is intimate but such intimacy often gets in the way of illusion, something else Kiss of the Spider Woman should have a bit of. To this end, Jonathan Carr’s projections are a nice touch, and Franklin Meissner Jr.’s lighting is richly detailed and atmospheric. Marian Bertone’s costumes seem to check all the right boxes, yet the looks for Aurora’s numbers appear half-hearted. There’s a dowdy green velvet number (that appears twice!) that is all different kinds of wrong. Although the musical is flawed to begin with, Kiss of the Spider Woman flirts with a few different issues that make it a compelling choice for our current social and political woes. Under better circumstances, Bertone might be able to get her message out.
SHAKEY GRAVES WHEEL OF TUNES
Eccentric neighbors and opiate fields in Wizard of Oz BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN “Next album. New sound. Sell your suspenders,” Alejandro Rose-Garcia tweeted late last year. Those six words, though dramatic in their minimalism, were the perfect heads-up to fans who didn’t know what to expect from Can’t Wake Up or the new influences impacting the Texas singer-songwriter. What Rose-Garcia, the man behind the moniker Shakey Graves, was prepping was a lucid dream-like romp that switches from his past in barnyard folk to more open-minded, experimental pop. Can’t Wake Up sees him unveiling the traditional hooks and catchy howls that he’s exemplified in the past, but it’s rooted in dreams and polished studio tricks, something that calls to mind Patrick Watson or Andrew Bird. It’s dark and playful all at once. And according to him, it felt equal parts risky and exciting deciding to go all in with the absurdities. “I’ve experimented a lot over the years. There’s hundreds of recordings of me playing shitty synths or bizarre instruments with weird lyrics,” he laughs. “But on this record, I trusted myself to go places that I do go normally, but I don’t always put out. Maybe it’s because of a personal fear of how it will impact my overall look, or if I want people to hear it. On all those fronts, the answer is always yes. Because whenever I don’t share [new songs], I end up going crazy because it feels untruthful to keep it to myself.” To dive deep into the storytelling mind of Shakey Graves, we interviewed Alejandro Rose-Garcia for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask musicians questions inspired by their song titles. With Can’t Wake Up as the prompt, his answers are freewheeling and entertaining—traits that appear in every corner of his music on record and live, including when he headlines the House of Blues this Friday.
9.13.19
1. “Counting Sheep”
How do you make yourself fall asleep when you’re having trouble calming your thoughts? Oh God. You know, I guess it used to be smoking weed. Now it’s definitely not smoking weed because I would go crazy. That’s a weird thing to realize. Picturing in time travel talking to early high school me and being like, “Man, you’re not smoking weed before you go to sleep. Isn’t that weird?” And I’d be like, “Shut the fuck up.” But at this point, strangely enough, I usually watch Forensic Files compulsively because I don’t have to look at it but it tells me a story. Either way, it’s always resolved, too. I don’t have to pay attention to it with my eyes to be able to follow it. I guess I could just listen to a fucking podcast, but I don’t know. I just love Forensic Files. It’s one of the longest-running true crime shows. There’s like 17,000 episodes. That’s an exaggeration, but there are so many. I’m just now realizing that I have to figure out how to get up to date with it because they’re still making them. I honestly don’t know why it would calm me down to hear about crazy things people do to one another. There’s something about the guy’s voice and the music of it [hums]. It still comes out, and it’s still the same format. You just get locked in it. I don’t know how many I can watch before falling asleep. But you fall asleep to “Missing woman!” and wake up to “And then they found out who the arsonist is!” 2. “Kids These Days”
Which current trend leaves you completely baffled? Hmm. Let me see. I was going to say racism but that’s just a shitty funny answer, that’s not a real answer. I mean, there’s the basics of Tide Pod munching or whatever the new version of ghost riding the whip is that’s worse, where you walk along outside of the passenger side of the car while someone else drives it. It seems like a totally weak way of ghost riding the whip. But I guess all of that falls under general YouTube dumbassery. Basically what blows my mind the most are social media influencers. I don’t get influencers. Have you watched Chasing Cameron? Ugggh. Oh god, I don’t want to talk about him! I’m going to say it now, though. I’m not giving him any more time and energy in my life, except for right now. He’s crazy. Basically, he’s an Instagram model, I guess? But he’s become a total package? I’m sure he’s a multimillionaire now. It’s him and a bunch of dudes that go on tour, all kids who have Instagram accounts, and I guess they Snapchat and other stuff. But they have actual shows where 13-year-olds will go and the guys just jump around onstage to a DJ setup. They kind of have crowds. Then they meet everyone in the crowd and take photos and stuff. That’s the thing: It doesn’t totally baffle me, because I went to high school in the age where I had a LiveJournal and didn’t have a phone freshman year but did by senior year of high school. It wasn’t crazy if you didn’t; you probably had a flip phone. But I can only imagine what life would be like if I did have access to this stuff in middle school. I do know I’d be all about it for sure, though. But yeah, taking your social media influencers thing on the road blows my mind. They’re selling out rooms I play in Europe … but the bigger rooms. Like, what the fuck? It’s crazy. They’re like 17. >> SHAKEY GRAVES, THE WILD REEDS. WED 9.19. HOUSE OF BLUES, 15 LANSDOWNE ST., BOSTON. 7PM/ALL AGES/$29.50. HOUSEOFBLUES.COM NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
19
FOUR NOTES ON FLYNESS BOOKS
A few things about the best television show of the summer BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN
Hampton’s residence, and is then followed by another segment made of pre-existing footage, “Acts of StateSponsored Violence,” which is very much what it sounds like.
1. The first image shown on Random Acts of Flyness [2018-] is shot with a phone held vertically: We see the creator of the show, Terence Nance, riding his bike while recording a selfie video. That puts the image somewhere around the 9:16 aspect ratio, pretty much the shape of your phone itself—which is the aspect ratio we’ve come to associate with our entire digital life and more specifically the aspect ratio we’ve come to associate with digital footage of brutalities committed by the police in this country. It is the latter tendency that is referenced directly in this particular scene: Just as Nance is finishing his video, he’s interrupted by a police officer. And without a single edit, our perspective on the footage changes: What we first processed as phone footage shot for artistic or personal reasons must now be processed as phone footage shot for the sake of personal safety. At one point Nance refers to Random Acts as a “show about the beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life,” and the harrowing formalist bite of this one-minute sequence does much to exemplify the show’s treatment of those very themes. That it astutely documents acts of oppression and prejudice ranging from state violence to microaggressions is almost beside the point. But that it so astutely documents the way those oppressions and prejudices fatally infect nearly every corner of the digital society we’ve set up adjacent to our physical one, right down to the nature of videos recorded on personal consumer devices? At this moment that seems beyond any point—that just seems necessary. 2. Random Acts of Flyness aired on HBO, at midnight, a fact that seems relatively essential to its form. Nance’s program takes the shape of a late-night sketch comedy show, albeit one that’s been fractured into bits. Each of the six episodes does revolve around particular scenes or themes—one imagines Najja (Dominique Fishback) as she plays a Coney Island arcade game based around shooting down street harassers (Kekubian Assassin), and then moves circularly around the social issues suggested therein—but the delineation between those segments is deliberately surreal. The show also mixes together a great number of
photographic textures, creating a historical continuum as it does so: There is the phone footage of the 21st century, and the crisp digital photography of the 21st century, but there is also significant amounts of archival footage taken from the 20th century (like an interludes that details the murder of Fred Hampton), as well as other pieces shot with 20th-century formats (like “Everybody Dies!” which affects the look of VHS tape). Bluntly, the show displays an exceptionally wide range, regularly crossing from fiction to nonfiction, live action to animation, archival footage to original footage, its form constantly in flux. And what’s created in all these shifts is something like the actual ideal of a “variety show”—which is simultaneously also something of a nightmare, given the long scope of history that Random Acts charts and all that we’ve failed to address in the meantime. 3. Most episodes of Random Acts are directed in tandem by the team of Nance, Mariama Diallo, Darius Clark Monroe, Naima Ramos-Chapman, and Jamund Washington. But it’s the first episode, directed by Nance, Frances Bodomo, and Shaka King, that I think best expresses the show’s utterly modern and yet deeply historical sense of form. This is perhaps by nature of its creation: This episode, titled “What Are Your Thoughts Raising Free Black Children?” first began as a proof of concept, per Nance, and therefore much of it is culled from low-resource shoots and pre-existing sources. It begins with the phone-shot confrontation with the cop, then shifts into “Worry No. 473 of 1,000 Worries That a Black Person Should Not Have to Worry About” [2015] (a pre-existing Nance short film), then into an opening title sequence, and then into clips from “Everybody Dies!” a short film by Bodomo originally made for the anthology feature Collective: Unconscious [2016] (“Everybody Dies!” was itself based on an original idea by filmmaker Josephine Decker, whose latest feature Madeline’s Madeline [2018] opens at the Brattle Theatre this weekend). Bodomo’s footage is regularly interrupted by static, as well as by the documentary footage about the attack on Fred
This description only covers the first nine minutes, but I hope it does something to convey the sense of formal collage that characterizes the whole of the episode. Even shorter pieces based on repetition of sounds and images are often interspersed as well—one, for instance, has a voice repeat the word “blackface” aloud, in a monotone, as close-up images of black people fill the screen (later, when images of white actors in blackface makeup are seen, the voice reads “not blackface” instead). And when all this is mixed up alongside more constant interruption from segment logos and intertitles (it’s the funniest gag of episode one), the whole episode reaches a jarringly rhythmic quality that borders on the hypnotic. Many recent articles have connected Nance’s work to Afrosurrealism and other black American art movements, but I also find that his work indirectly lines up with that of the film structuralists of the ’60s and ’70s, who often played with repetitions of image and audio in comparable ways. Random Acts of Flyness employs looped sounds and flashing on-screen text in a manner that reminds me of the work of Paul Sharits, to be specific, and its constant skewering of institutional-video tropes reminded me of works by George Landow as well. But of course the ends here are not mere homage: Like many programs of this moment, Random Acts of Flyness is preoccupied with its own potential to affect social change. But it’s also the extremely rare commercial object that believes aesthetics themselves can affect that change. So if Random Acts does end up altering someone’s mind, it’ll have been by rewiring their eyes and ears first. PS: Befitting a series that’s so deeply concerned with the online element of contemporary existence, the world of Random Acts of Flyness extends far beyond the its own 30-minute episodes. The aforementioned Kekubian Assassin is hosted online at kekubianassassin.com and is playable as a mobile game; a video essay from episode five regarding the use of the “white devil” archetype in shows like Breaking Bad [2008-2013] and Mad Men [20072015] is unofficially accompanied by a separate 32-minute video piece currently hosted at whitepeoplewontsaveyou. com; and of course there is Nance’s entire body of other artworks, many of which are directly referenced in Random Acts, and most of which are freely available online through his Vimeo. One such work is 18 Black Boys/Girls Ages 1-18 Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines: $X in an Edition of $97 Quadrillion, a motion picture work that’s briefly excerpted in Random Acts. In the piece (which has been performed live numerous times, four iterations of which are currently available on Vimeo), Nance does Google searches for “Black [Boy/Girl] Age [X],” moving from 1-18 sequentially, stopping to view the videos and read the news clippings that the algorithm serves up in response to those searches—and in the process, capturing a snapshot of the expectations that are very literally being attached to black children in the United States. This project seems to me inextricable from the HBO program, perhaps even something of a flipped image. If Random Acts works to see the understand how we exist and interact in an online world, then Spiritual Machines documents the way that online world sees back.
>> RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON HBO’S ONLINE STREAMING PLATFORMS (SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED). THE FIRST EPISODE, “WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS RAISING FREE BLACK CHILDREN?” IS AVAILABLE FREE ON YOUTUBE AND HBO.COM. 20
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DIGBOSTON.COM
ARTS
ARE YOU BUYING?
A conversation about a performance about advertising BY DIG STAFF + BRIAN COLEMAN Brian Coleman is a local writer and historian whose new book, Buy Me, Boston, offers a cornucopia of more than 375 vintage ads for businesses and characters that “made this city tick in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—restaurants, hair salons, bands, bars, clothing boutiques and more.” So when Somerville-based artist Catherine Siller wrote us PHOTO BY MELISSA BLACKALL about her “new, theatrical dance performance ‘Are You Buying?,’” a “free performance” that “combines larger than life video projection, movement, and sound clips from radio and TV ads to playfully skewer fashion and beauty tropes from the 1920s to today,” we asked Coleman to write questions we could slide to Siller. The resulting exchange provides a fascinating look at advertising then and now, as well as a bona fide incentive to check her show (and his book) this week. BC: How did the idea for “Are You Buying?” come about, and how long ago? Was it always envisioned to be this manifestation (with sound clips and video), or has it gone through many different stages over time?
CS: In 2015 I was working on a series of performances and videos called “Applying Myself,” where I juxtaposed poses from contemporary fashion ads with gestures of habitual body monitoring—pinching loose skin, plucking unwanted hairs, things like that. I wanted to contrast the confident public posturing that had become so common in selfies and the self-conscious private beauty rituals that go on behind the scenes. While I was working on this series, I started to wonder how our fashion and beauty stereotypes have evolved over time, which gave me the idea to look back at the history of advertising. … For “Are You Buying?” Downtown Crossing, I’ve focused exclusively on ads about beauty and body image. I’ve also developed the mannequin character and costume a lot over the past year. Transforming into that character has become a part of the performance. Why did you specifically want to address advertising? Is that something you’ve always been drawn to? (Or, conversely, repulsed by?)
As a teen and young adult I spent more time and money than I’d like to admit trying to get the kind of flawless complexion promoted in all the ads. Finally, I realized that maybe I couldn’t get a “flawless” complexion because the ads kept raising the bar—there were always new “problems” that only their products could fix. I’ve always found advertising incredibly seductive, but when I started looking more closely at the messaging … I realized that ads are completely absurd. I started making videos and performances to explore this juxtaposition. What are some of the most harmful ways that advertising affects people, especially in the world of beauty and fashion?
Ads are training a whole generation of young women to be dissatisfied with their bodies. Most beauty and fashion ads distort our reality by featuring models who fit a very narrow definition of beauty. Are there any positive aspects of advertising—in beauty / fashion or beyond— that you want to make people think about with “Are You Buying?”
I love that people can use makeup and fashion to change their appearance to reflect who they are and how they feel. “Are You Buying?” celebrates the playful ways we can transform ourselves through beauty and fashion, while critiquing ads that reinforce stereotypes and promise impossible transformations. What is your ultimate “best case scenario” for people to walk away with after viewing “Are You Buying?” What do you most want to make people think about (and, maybe even deal with in their own lives)? There’s a tension between female empowerment and objectification in advertising. For every ad promoting the positive, transformative power of beauty and fashion, many others reinforce gender stereotypes or objectify women’s bodies. I’d like viewers to walk away from “Are You Buying?” thinking about how these conflicting messages impact their lives. … I don’t think that advertising is inherently bad, but I do think that we need to be more critical consumers of media messages. Every time we see an ad, it would be great if we thought, “What’s the message and am I buying it?” Beyond the Downtown Crossing performances in Sept, do you have any other future plans for “Are You Buying?”
I’m working to organize at least one other pop-up performance of “Are You Buying?” in the Greater Boston area in next few months. Keep an eye on my website for more information or to sign up for my newsletter. >> ARE YOU BUYING? WED 9.12–SAT 9.15. 449 WASHINGTON ST., BOSTON. FREE. CATHERINESILLER.COM FOR MORE INFO. NEWS TO US
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DEPT. OF COMMERCE
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GAY AND LONELY SAVAGE LOVE
BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET
I am a gay man in my late 50s and have never been in a relationship. I am so lonely, and the painful emptiness I feel is becoming absolutely unbearable. In my early 20s, I hooked up off and on, but it never developed into anything. I have always told myself that’s okay; I’m not a people person or a relationship kind of guy. I have a few lesbian friends but no male friends. I have social anxiety and can’t go to bars or clubs. When hookup apps were introduced, I used them infrequently. Now I go totally unnoticed or am quickly ghosted once I reveal my age. Most nonwork days, my only interactions are with people in the service industry. I am well-groomed, employed, a homeowner, and always nice to people. I go to a therapist and take antidepressants. However, this painful loneliness, depression, aging, and feeling unnoticed seem to be getting the best of me. I cry often and would really like it all to end. Any advice? Lonely Aging Gay “In the very short term, LAG needs to tell his therapist about the suicidal ideation,” said Michael Hobbes. “In the longer term, well, that’s going to take a bit more to unpack.” Hobbes is a reporter for HuffPost and recently wrote a mini-book-length piece titled “Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness.” During his research, Hobbes found that, despite growing legal and social acceptance, a worrying percentage of gay men still struggle with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Loneliness, Hobbes explained to me, is an evolutionary adaptation, a mechanism that prompts us humans—members of a highly social species—to seek contact and connection with others, the kind of connections that improve our odds of survival. “But there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely,” said Hobbes. “Being alone is an objective, measurable phenomenon: You don’t have very many social contacts. Being lonely, on the other hand, is subjective: You feel alone, even when you’re with other people. This is why advice like ‘Join a club!’ or ‘Chat with your waitress!’ doesn’t help lonely people.” The most effective way to address loneliness, according to Hobbes’s research, is to confront it directly. “LAG may just need to get more out of the relationships he already has,” said Hobbes. Another recommendation: Seek out other lonely guys—and there are lots of them out there. “LAG isn’t the only gay guy who has aged out of the bar scene—so have I —and struggles to find sex and companionship away from alcohol and right swipes,” said Hobbes. “His therapist should know of some good support groups.” And if your therapist doesn’t know of any good support groups—or if you don’t feel comfortable telling your therapist how miserable you are, or if you’ve told your therapist everything and they haven’t been able to help—find a new therapist. I’m a fortysomething gay male. I’m single and cannot get a date or even a hookup. I’m short, overweight, average looking, and bald. I see others, gay and straight, having longterm relationships, getting engaged, getting married, and it makes me sad and jealous. Some of them are jerks—and if them, why not me? Here’s the part that’s hard to admit: I know something is wrong with me, but I don’t know what it is or how to fix it. I’m alone and I’m lonely. I know your advice can be brutal, Dan, but what do I have to lose? Alone And Fading “AAF said to be brutal, so I’m going to start there: You might not ever meet anyone,” said Hobbes. “At every age, in every study, gay men are less likely to be partnered, cohabiting, or married than our straight and lesbian counterparts.” And it’s not just gay men. In Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, sociologist Eric Klinenberg unpacked this remarkable statistic: More than 50 percent of adult Americans are single and live alone, up from 22 percent in 1950. Some are unhappy about living alone, but it seemed that most—at least according to Klinenberg’s research—are content. “Maybe there is something wrong with AAF, but maybe he’s just on the unlucky side of the statistics,” said Hobbes. “Finding a soul mate is largely out of our control. Whether you allow your lack of a soul mate to make you bitter, desperate, or contemptuous is not. So be happy for the young jerks coupling up and settling down. Learn to take rejection gracefully—the way you want it from the dudes you’re turning down—and when you go on a date, start with the specificity of the person sitting across from you, not what you need from him. He could be your Disney prince, sure. But he could also be your museum buddy or your podcast savagelovecast.com cohost or your afternoon 69er or something you haven’t even thought of yet.”
On the Lovecast, Wait—why can’t gay men donate blood?: savagelovecast.com 22
09.13.18 - 09.20.18
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DIGBOSTON.COM
COMEDY EVENTS WED 09.12-SAT 09.15
19TH ANNUAL BOSTON COMEDY FESTIVAL
BOSTONCOMEDYFESTIVAL.COM for a schedule of all events
MULTIPLE LOCATIONS THU 09.13-SAT 09.15
MATTEO LANE @ LAUGH BOSTON
MATTEO LANE is a New York-based comedian, originally from Chicago. Matteo is in the new Comedy Central series THE COMEDY JAM, and also recently performed on LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS and Comedy Central’s ADAM DEVINE’S HOUSE PARTY. He can also be seen on MTV’s GIRL CODE, MTV2’s GUY CODE, and the IFC holiday special AT JOE’S PUB.
425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8 & 10PM | $25-$29 THU 09.13
THURSDAY NIGHT SHOWCASE @ THE NEW COMEDY STUDIO
Featuring: Rob Crean, Debimon Antiqua, Caitlin Arcand, Jiayong Li, Chrissy Judge, Scott Oddo, Andy Ofiesh, Mike Pincus, Valeria Dikovitskaya, Janet McNamara. Hosted by Rick Jenkins
1 BOW MARKET WAY #23, SOMERVILLE | 8PM | $15 THU 09.13
OSAKA KOMEDY @ OSAKA JAPANESE SUSHI & STEAK HOUSE
Featuring: Alan Richardson, Ben Quick, Zach Russell, Jere Pilapil, & Leslie Battle.. Hosted by Alex Giampapa
14 GREEN ST., BROOKLINE | 8PM | FREE FRI 09.14
THE GAS! @ GREAT SCOTT
Myq Kaplan, Jordan Jensen, Jack Slattery, & Greg Bach. Hosted by Rob Crean
1222 COMM AVE., ALLSTON | 7PM | $5 FRI 09.14
LEAGUE OF LAUGHS @ COMICAZI
Featuring: Brian Higginbottom, Dan Martin, Kylie Alexander, Tooky Kavanagh, Wes Hazard, David McLaughlin, & Elisha Siegel.
407 HIGHLAND AVE., SOMERVILLE | 7:30PM | $7 SAT 09.15
JAY CHANDRASEKHARJ @ THE WILBUR
Director/writer/comedian/actor Jay Chandrasekhar has contributed and appeared in a wide variety of critically acclaimed television programs and films throughout his career. Chandrasekhar directed, co- wrote and starred in Fox Searchlight Picture’s comedy cult classics Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2
246 TREMONT ST, BOSTON | 9:45PM | $25 SUN 09.16
LIQUID COURAGE COMEDY @ SLUMBREW
Featuring: Emily Ruskowski, Mike Settlow, Alan FItzgerald, Zack Russell, Sam Pelliteir, Kathleen DeMarle, Barndon Vallee, Jordan Handren-Seavy, & Ethan Diamond. Hosted by Ellen Sugarman
15 WARD ST., SOMERVILLE | 8PM | $5 SUN 09.16
THE PEOPLE’S SHOW @ IMPROVBOSTON
Comedy for the people, by the people. Featuring: Nathan Burke, Ben Quick, Arty P., Tooky Kavanagh, EJ Edmonds, Trent Wells, Janet McNamara, & Greg Bach. Hosted by Paul Landwehr
40 PROSPECT ST. CAMBRIDGE | 9:30PM | $5 MON 09.17
FREE COMEDY @ CITYSIDE
Featuring: Shane Torres, Dwight Simmons, Jordan Handren-Seavy, Greg Bach, Sam Ike, & Anjan Biswas. Hosted by Marie Forster.
1960 BEACON ST., BRIGHTON | 8:30PM | 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!
Matteo Lane
Girl Code, Guy Code Thursday - Saturday
COMING SOON The Naked Magicians Sept 17-23
Tom Arnold VICELAND’s The Hunt for the Trump Tapes Special Engagement: Fri, Sept 21
THE WAY WE WEREN’T BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM
Andrew Schulz The Brilliant Idiots Podcast Special Engagement: Sat, Sept 22
Aida Rodriguez
Showtime, HBO, Joey Diaz’s The Church of What's Happening Now Sept 27-29
OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET
Craig Shoemaker
Showtime, Comedy Central Oct 4-7 617.72.LAUGH | laughboston.com 425 Summer Street at the Westin Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District NEWS TO US
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