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WOW. JUST, WOW.

Here is the description of an event being held next Monday, March 11, at the new WBUR CitySpace facility in Allston. As one local activist noted on Facebook, you can’t make this kind of thing up: Massachusetts has the lowest firearm death and disability rate in the continental U.S. This is the result of a set of policies that were implemented by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, working with local advocates and researchers to develop best practices that can set an example for the country. In partnership with WBUR CitySpace, the Boston University School of Public Health and The Boston Globe, senior correspondent and host Deborah Becker will moderate a discussion exploring how Massachusetts has achieved this and what we can learn from the state.

Wait, it gets worse. For this celebration of how awesome Massachusetts is on the firearm safety front, these outlets of record have invited, among others, Gov. Charlie Baker, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, Attorney General Maura Healey, and John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence. Look, I’m not here to do that whole lefty whiteboy shames the less progressive reporters because he’s just so goddamn woke thing. Frankly I don’t have to, since several folks, many of them people of color, already decorated the event page: What about more black and brown youth voices in the conversation? I know I spoke at the march last year, along side other youth, whose voices deserve to be heard. My family has had to deal with gun violence in the community, as well as hundreds of others, so why not have voices like mine be heard?

I was looking forward to sharing this event with my friends interested in confronting gun violence... but then I noticed the lack of representation for Black and Brown communities that are most disproportionately impacted by this crises and neglected in our policy responses.

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Sometimes our intentions are great but the impact falls short. It’s disheartening to see that those who are most impacted have been left out of this conversation.

For those and other reasons, there’s no end to how much this ordeal offends me.

As a journalist who has spent the past year covering how pols like Baker and DeLeo turn their backs on a completely unchecked law enforcement firearm procurement process and how the former, among others, has raked in tens of thousands of dollars in campaign gifts from gun dealers and distributors, I’m absolutely outraged.

As an editor (DigBoston) and editorial director (Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism), I’m horrified that organizers would be so tone deaf on issues they’re pretending to address. It’s bad enough that our efforts are ignored by reporters and politicians who consider themselves to be more serious than those of us who work in the alternative press, but the thought that any of the orgs involved in this disaster get big funding for such fraudulent community engagement while my team at BINJ relies on scraps and volunteers to host legitimate community discussions is saddening.

On the other hand, as somebody who suffered through that awful Globe series on race in Boston, I can’t say that I’m surprised by any of this, from the guest lineup, to their hosting it in Allston, to their charging 10 bucks for admission.

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RIGHTS, CAMERAS, EXTRACTIONS NEWS

Hampshire County has the most violent small jail in the state, and one of the least transparent

BY SETH KERSHNER

At the county lockup in Northampton, corrections officers have been involved in a number of violent altercations with inmates over the past two years. Yet unlike every other such facility in Massachusetts, administrators at the Hampshire County Jail and House of Correction choose not to film these encounters.

An analysis of written reports, obtained under the public records law, reveals at least two suspicious incidents in 2018 where corresponding video footage would be helpful to determine whether officers acted appropriately.

Sheriff Patrick Cahillane oversees the department’s Rocky Hill Road facility, home to an inmate population that hovers around 200. Around half of those inmates have some form of mental illness, according to public information officer Thomas Mitchell.

For its size, Hampshire County jail is one of the most violent in the state. Records obtained for this story show that in 2017, Hampshire County officers used pepper spray to subdue inmates on 13 separate occasions, exceeding the number of such incidents in Berkshire and Franklin counties combined, even though each of those two jails held around the same number of inmates as Hampshire County. In the same period their facility even had a higher rate of “chemical agent” use than Norfolk County, where jailers are responsible for twice as many inmates.

Following the controversial in-jail death of Sandra Bland in Texas in 2015, a growing number of state and local correctional facilities have sought to increase their transparency and accountability to the public. In 2017, the Wisconsin state legislature awarded $591,000 to its state prison system for the purchase of 200 body cameras.

Still, what happens inside these institutions is largely hidden from public view.

Despite the fact they have little effect on police behavior, body cams are increasingly embraced by departments in the US. Yet in correctional settings they are “very seldom used,” according to Kevin Murphy, executive director of the US Deputy Warden’s Association.

In a 2016 Washington Post article, Murphy explained that most of the resistance to body cameras was “because of the expense involved.”

Which is not to say that there is no video recording going on inside jails and prisons. Fixed surveillance cameras capture the action in hallways and common areas, allowing officers to keep a watchful eye on inmates.

Whenever jailers plan to use force against an inmate, the generally accepted standard in the corrections world is to assign an officer to record the action using a handheld 4

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camera. Massachusetts state prisons, as well as nearly all 13 county jails in the state, routinely film such encounters, which include cell extractions—a violent procedure in which officers wear protective gear to forcibly move an inmate from his cell to another part of the facility.

The video recordings, which can be studied for training purposes, also enable jail administrators to protect themselves from lawsuits.

Last August, in response to a public records request, the Hampshire County sheriff’s office confirmed that cell extractions are not filmed in their facility. In response to a more detailed inquiry regarding its camera policies this year, spokesman Mitchell took a different approach, declining to answer any questions about what is or is not filmed in its jail.

If Hampshire County is in fact not filming cell extractions, that “would be notably outside the accepted practice in corrections,” according to Lauren Petit, staff attorney for Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts.

The lack of video evidence makes it difficult to account for exactly what happened during two unusual incidents in 2018. Like most dramatic accounts of staff use of force, they occurred in the Special Management Unit. According to Mitchell, the public information officer, the SMU is a 24bed section of the jail where inmates undergo a regimen of “voluntary segregation,” designed to keep them “safe from themselves and other inmates who may pose a threat.”

Last February, SMU inmates got an early morning wakeup call when one of them, apparently enraged over having had property removed from his cell by an officer on an earlier shift, began loudly banging his desk against a cell wall. Responding officers failed to verbally deescalate the situation, so they pepper-sprayed and extracted the inmate from his cell. In accordance with department policy, the inmate was then transferred from his cell to a part of the facility where inmates are able to shower and “decontaminate” from the effects of the chemical agent. One officer’s written report describes a tense situation, describing the inmate as “uncooperative the entire way.” While in the shower, and despite being restrained on each side by a corrections officer, the report notes a curious turn of events: The inmate “banged his head off the wall several times causing a small laceration above his right eye.”

Per department protocol, an officer photographed this injury. In response to a public records inquiry, the Sheriff’s office claimed that these photographs are exempt from the public records law since the department lacks “technology capacity to reproduce the photos that you requested without disclosing the identity of the inmate which is CORI protected.”

On Sept 11, officers used similar language to describe an incident with a different inmate. Shortly after 10 o’clock in the evening, Sgt. Andrew Robidoux and Officer William Jackson responded to a disturbance in the

SMU. This time, an inmate—whose name was redacted from reports released by the sheriff—had attracted the attention of officers by covering his cell window with a jail-issued towel. (Since it impedes an officer’s ability to check on inmates, any attempt to block the window is considered a serious offense in most correctional environments).

After pepper-spraying the inmate, Sgt. Robidoux noted in his report that he applied wrist restraints “firm to the skin but not to impede circulation,” in preparation for removing the inmate from his cell. “I doubled locked the wrist restraints for safety,” Sgt. Robidoux wrote, and “took control of [redacted]’s right arm and wrist” while Officer Jackson held the inmate’s other arm. Following protocol, the immobilized inmate was thus escorted from his cell to the shower area. But despite the restraints, Sgt. Robidoux’s report notes that as the trio were descending some stairs, the inmate managed to hit his head twice against a wall before officers were able to pull him away.

In response to questions about how an immobilized inmate could hit their head against a wall, Hampshire County sheriff’s counsel Charles Maguire said he made a personal visit to the jail to interview the officers involved in the two incidents. In a five-page statement dated March 1, Maguire sought to clarify what happened on February 8, 2018. He acknowledged that during the decontamination process the inmate was handcuffed and “stabilized” by two corrections officers, and noted that an “exceedingly narrow” shower, measuring little more than two-and-a-half feet wide, made it all too easy for the inmate to hit his head through a series of “rapid, repetitive and violent” movements.

In response to inquiries about the stairwell incident of September 11, 2018, Maguire pointed out that the inmate in question had “sustained no injuries whatsoever.”

“What in particular do you find so difficult to understand?” Maguire wrote. “Under these circumstances is it reasonable to assume that other officers could have done better?”

The appearance of impropriety, together with the absence of video footage, does not sit well with Rahsaan Hall, an attorney who directs the Racial Justice Program for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

“It is disturbing,” Hall said, “whenever there are questions surrounding the use of force in correctional institutions and there is a lack of transparency to try to get answers about what happened.”

While Hampshire County had no handheld camera footage to share, there were fixed security cameras in the facility. But those cameras, the sheriff’s counsel claimed, hold secrets too dangerous to divulge.

In response to a public records request for surveillance camera footage of the two incidents, Maguire deemed such media exempt from the state’s sunshine laws.

The disclosure of such video recordings “could prove detrimental,” he explained, to the Hampshire County Sheriff’s Office law enforcement efforts.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism in collaboration with the Shoestring in Northampton. If you want to see more reporting like this, you can donate to BINJ at givetobinj.org

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THE FALL OF THE GE BOSTON DEAL, PART II APPARENT HORIZON

AG Healey should form independent commission to investigate the failed agreement

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

WE’RE S SUNDAY

,

Walsh, Baker, an d DeLeo giveaway s investiga ted

by Attorn ey General

Last week in the first installment of this two-part column, I ran through the many problems with the January 2016 deal between General Electric, the city of Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that has now collapsed for all intents and purposes. At one point the city and state were ready to give over $270 million in public funds to a company with a terrible track record in the Bay State and beyond. But the multinational’s bad business fortunes led to the originally secret agreement’s termination a mere three years after it was signed. And only dumb luck has saved the city and state from handing most of the promised lucre to a thoroughly undeserving corporate scofflaw like GE. Which doesn’t make the failed deal any better or less worthy of public scrutiny.

So this time out, I’d like to propose some ideas aimed at making sure that such a deal can never happen again.

1) Form an independent commission to investigate the GE Boston deal It’s patently obvious that the state legislature, and most especially the offices of Gov. Charlie Baker and Mayor Marty Walsh, are incapable of investigating a bad scheme that they all helped ram through with no public oversight. And the kleptocratic federal government is not currently a place to turn for assistance either.

So I think it would be worth the effort for grassroots activists to call for Attorney General Maura Healey—a state official who does seem to keep the public good in mind much of the time—to form an independent commission reporting directly to her office to investigate the parties to the GE Boston deal for evidence of civil and criminal malfeasance. Which, if found, could then be prosecuted by the AG in the appropriate courts of law.

After writing the equivalent of a short book on the deal, I don’t have any smoking guns about it in my possession yet. But I feel like the character “Popeye” Doyle in the film The French Connection when he’s ripping apart a car he’s convinced is filled with heroin. And says “That car is dirty!” Then finds the drugs.

A commission of the type I describe would have the power to examine the GE Boston deal in ways that journalists like me cannot. And I am sure that if commissioners fully independent of all parties to that deal start looking at it closely with the AG behind them, 6

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MARCH

8, 2020

ORRY

they will find that it was indeed “dirty.” Once civil and criminal prosecutions begin, the people of Massachusetts may see how they’ve been played for decades and consider supporting politicians and administrators willing to clean house in the legislature, in city government, and in various shadowy quasi-independent agencies like the BPDA and MassDevelopment. Until we get more honest local and state governments that focus on working people’s needs over the needs of the rich and powerful.

2) Ban government giveaways to corporations in Massachusetts It’s one (extremely flawed and often unnecessary) thing for governments to pay companies for goods and services. But it’s entirely another to shovel public funds at major companies like General Electric merely because they convinced local, state, and national politicians to compete with each other for the “prize” of some major facility on their turf. Especially because corporations claim to be “private” enterprises run by capitalists, but spend much of their time trying to grab money from government at all levels. All while lobbying to remain largely free from taxation.

As such, legislators in a growing number of states are drafting legislation to ban the practice outright. Notably, New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Ron Kim have filed NY Bill A05249/S03061, the End Corporate Welfare Act. Which, according to the bill’s web page, “[p]rovides that no compacting state shall permit company-specific subsidies and shall not provide any company-specific subsidy to any company whose headquarters, manufacturing facilities, office space or other real estate developments are located in their state or to incentivize any company to locate their headquarters, manufacturing facilities, office space or other real estate developments in their state.”

As Salazar and Seattle-based union organizer Shaun Scott—both members of Democratic Socialists of America—put it in a recent Guardian op-ed: “State legislatures across the country should come together to ban taxpayer funded giveaways to corporations. … If we stand firm, major corporations will have to change how they do business. They might have to discontinue the

kind of union-busting activity that Amazon has been known for. Like Microsoft, they might increase the philanthropic contributions they make towards local housing solutions. Or maybe they’ll finally pay their fair share of taxes. As any labor organizer will tell you, direct action gets the goods.”

If enacted, the Mass legislature could be enjoined to sign onto the compact—working together with New York and other states to stop the “race to the bottom” between such polities caused by huge corporations demanding public tribute. And end special treatment for favored companies that other entities—both for-profit and nonprofit—don’t get. Giveaways that, all told, provide nothing of value to the cities and states megacorps force to fight each other as if they all were gladiators in some giant cage match. But that instead do very real harm to working families in Massachusetts, around the nation, and across the globe.

3) Demand a public apology from the Boston Globe Stopping future agreements like the GE Boston deal requires that otherwise reputable news organizations stop acting as propaganda mouthpieces for powerful corporations. A practice that has the unfortunate effect of normalizing very abnormal schemes in the public consciousness, and preventing popular outrage from crystalizing into movements for political and economic reform. Of course, remediating damage done starts with an admission of past wrongdoing. Which is why the people of Boston and Massachusetts deserve an apology from area news organizations that dropped all pretense of journalistic responsibility to support the GE Boston deal. And a promise to never do that again.

The worst offender by far was the Boston Globe— which allowed itself to become an extension of the press offices of General Electric, the governor of Massachusetts, and the mayor of Boston. Other news outlets also had their moments of cheap boosterism, and could stand to apologize too. But the Globe’s servile behavior was really beyond the pale of propriety. So its editorial board members should swallow their pride and apologize to the readers they betrayed. If they ever expect their paper to be taken seriously as a journalistic institution again. In an era when its continued existence—billionaire owner or no billionaire owner—is far from certain. And public trust in journalism is at a historic low.

In closing, some tough love for local organizations across the political spectrum that fight against government corruption. You all really dropped the ball with the GE Boston deal. Though a strong and fairly broad grassroots campaign stopped the similarly questionable Boston 2024 Olympics bid from seeing the light of day in 2015, in 2016 those forces stood down and allowed the GE agreement to go through with barely a peep of protest.

Hopefully, “good government” activists can unite at speed to enact reforms like the ones I mention above.

Doing so won’t break the corporate stranglehold over local and state government. But it will weaken it, and put conglomerates like GE on notice that the public gravy train of the last century is coming to an end.

Creating new political possibilities for working families in Massachusetts.

At a time when we are in dire need of such possibilities.

YOUR FUTURE IS BEING WRITTEN IN VENEZUELA

OP-ED

BY SUREN MOODLIAR

Make no mistake, your future is being written in Venezuela, perhaps more so than elsewhere. The only real question is whether or not you will allow Donald Trump and his crew of ’80s retreads, Elliot Abrams and co., to be the authors.

Remember that we have 136 months to reverse the entire planet’s dependence on fossil fuels, but the power grab that originates in obscure corporate HQs and coordinated through Foggy Bottom, Langley, and field offices in Bogota and Brasilia is one for the world’s largest oil reserves.

Three futures are possible: In one, an embattled but sovereign Venezuelan government persists and out of necessity opens the spigots of extinction to maintain power; in the second, a US-puppet government—sure to be christened “democratic” by Fox, CNN, the Times and the Post—welcomes back Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, and others to open the spigots, albeit with the latest tech. More oil, more quickly. Hasten the end, why don’t you? Or, a third option prevails—principled anti-Trump resistance recognizes that Venezuelan solutions to Venezuelan matters count before any other, the path of dialogue and diversification follows… and the spigots are gradually ratcheted back. To be sure, Brazilian, Colombian, and US forces are poised to ensure that one of the first two prevails.

But there is an equally important reason for Americans to challenge Trump’s bumbling but lethal agenda in Venezuela: His foreign agenda complements an equally disastrous domestic one. Over two decades, the Venezuelan people’s attempt to reset their economy, redress extreme inequality, recover indigenous and Afro-Latino identities, and empower women and the elderly has met with intractable and implacable opposition.

Once the opposition was mostly a minority, scarcely able to reach 40 percent in elections. However, over the years, it has been fortified by continuous US interference that makes Putin’s alleged cyber burglary of the US election process seem like a minor misdemeanor. Today the opposition has forged a negative unity that approaches a majority. On the other hand, the besieged and tightly sanctioned government, robbed of its reserves, has far less room to maneuver.

No wonder then that Donald Trump has signaled his intention to make his 2020 re-election bid a referendum on his caricature of socialism—a critical element of which is his redirecting blame for Venezuela’s travails away from US sabotage and a harsh international economic environment to that country’s socialist aspirations.

Foreclosing on the Venezuelan people’s right to experiment and to repurpose their economy and national patrimony is essentially foreclosing on the American people’s right to correct or replace its economic system should their turn come to do the same. The war abroad is also a vicious domestic war with the future—one based on unlimited corporate power even as the planet boils and against a Green New Deal or some other new logic—perhaps one that replaces corporate interest with democratic initiatives at the community, state, and national levels.

The war abroad always comes home.

But there’s always blowback. Three million Venezuelans have fled their borders already; more will follow if the Trump agenda of Syrianizing Venezuela is allowed to continue. Better build that wall, eh? To put things in context, though, neighboring Colombia’s own US-fueled civil war has left 7.7 million people displaced within that unhappy land. Ironically, Venezuelan diplomacy over the last decade was critical to ending that war—reverse karma to be sure! What if armed incursions into Venezuela reignite the Colombian war or even a broader regional conflagration?

Now as never before is a dangerous moment; Americans who support Trump’s regime-change agenda in Venezuela cannot hope for a meaningful resistance to its domestic incarnation.

Although the Maduro-led government has confounded expectations that his overthrow will be a quick and easy coup, those who support Venezuela sovereignty have a tough fight ahead—Republicans and Democrats (save for a few honorable leaders) are united in their desire to intervene. There are many places to mount the challenge locally. Several local universities have faculty members who are closely connected to Venezuela’s far right; surely now is the time to engage with them and challenge the complicity in the attempted destruction of that country’s sovereignty. Where a genuine democratic opposition exists in exile, the Boston left should disabuse them of the oxymoronic notion of “humanitarian military intervention” and point out that even the threat of foreign involvement exacerbates an already sharply polarized country and preempts negotiated solutions.

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BREAKING CONCRETE CEILINGS FOR WOMEN OF COLOR COMES WITH A TAX OPINION

A response to the Boston Herald

BY BEYAZMIN JIMENEZ

In response to the Boston Herald’s overtly racist and sexist article on MassHousing’s dining expenses and the appointment of its executive director’s new role on the MBTA Fiscal Control Board, I felt compelled to express my disappointment in the tired narrative that follows women of color in leadership roles and in the workplace.

Chrystal Kornegay made headlines when she was named the executive director of MassHousing in February 2018, an independent, quasi-public agency charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts. MassHousing raises capital by selling bonds and lends the proceeds to low- and moderateincome homebuyers and homeowners, and to developers who build or preserve affordable and/or mixed-income rental housing. Kornegay became the first black woman to lead the agency.

Although Kornegay is arguably overqualified for the role she currently holds at MassHousing, having held several positions in public service and the community development sector from project manager to executive director to the top job in the housing world as the head of the Department of Housing and Community Development for the Commonwealth, she is still being subjected to the taunts of the old-school thinking that has led Boston to a massive leadership gap for professionals of color that includes men and women.

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight series made a big splash last year when it referenced that power was still held in the hands of few white male executives in the city.

Yet how can we be surprised when news headlines such as the one the Boston Herald promoted on Jan 29 discrediting Kornegay’s appointment to the MBTA fiscal control board and calling routine company outings “outlandish” plays right into the hands of sexist and racist attitudes about the leadership potential of women of color?

The focus on the agency’s expenditures has a suspicious urgency as it comes one day after Kornegay was appointed by Gov. Baker on two of the Commonwealth’s transit boards. The leadership of women of color is often viewed under a critical magnifier as every move is challenged and questioned by those uncomfortable with the reality of a growing, diverse workforce and the rise of

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women of color in leadership roles.

Kornegay joins a long list of women who have been subjected to extraordinary scrutiny in comparison to their white colleagues. During Stacey Abrams’ historic campaign for governor of Georgia, the media became obsessed with her personal debt and finances, painting a picture of the candidate as one who would be unable to handle the pressures of a high public office. The true story hidden behind the scandalous headlines was Abrams’ commitment to her family’s health as she was a primary caretaker for her niece and later for her parents as they dealt with sudden illnesses that crippled their family’s finances. None of this made the news. The only thing that stuck was a black woman in debt running for high office.

Fast-forward to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ historic win as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and the conservative media’s attack on her finances as the millennial leader confessed to being unable to pay for housing in Washington, DC, until her new job began. The stories that poured out from this relatable dilemma (DC has one of the highest costs of living in the nation) were focused on Cortez’ fashion and less on the real matter at hand: Rent is too damn high!

But women of color in public service and elected office aren’t the only ones who receive this type of crippling scrutiny. Women of color in the workplace are often overlooked for promotions, seen as “less likable” even as their white counterparts participate in similar behaviors.

The emotional tax that professionals of color face, especially women, is very high. Not only do we need to seem less threatening to avoid the never-ending “Angry Black Woman” stereotype, but we must also work for less pay as the persistent wage gap affects black and Latinx women more than any other minority group.

The term “emotional tax”—discussed in a study conducted by Catalyst—is in reference to the heightened experience of being different from peers at work because of your gender and/or race/ethnicity and the associated detrimental effects on health, well-being, and the ability to thrive at work. For women of color, that tax is two-fold.

It comes from often being the only person of color in the room and often also the only woman. Women of color have a “double hurdle” of not being too aggressive and proving, sometimes repeatedly, that we are intelligent

enough to warrant an audience for our ideas. While women, white in particular, face what is commonly referred to as the “glass ceiling,” women of color face a “concrete ceiling,” one much more complex to penetrate especially for black and Latinx women who historically rank as the lowest-paid workers in America.

Still, we persist. Nearly 90 percent of women of color want to be influential leaders—demonstrating the benefit to companies of attracting and retaining top talent from all backgrounds. Research shows that teams with diverse perspectives produce higher-quality work than more homogenous teams. Even more research shows that companies whose leadership contains a higher proportion of women enjoy higher financial numbers than those with less women. As a young professional woman of color, age can also be tied into this equation. I have experienced my own stifling challenges of speaking up in the workplace and being perceived as “too young to lead” or “insecure” for pushing forward with my ideas.

If the Boston Herald is committed to fiscal oversight, I challenge their publication to also comb through the expense reports of white, male-led organizations. The outcry around the expenditures at MassHousing is another coded method to discredit a black woman in a position of power. Instead of focusing on the agency’s phenomenal housing record, the turmoil in the Boston housing market, or the peril many Boston residents face as rents skyrocket in the city, the sensationalized attacks were pointed out as a character flaw baited for clicks. The underlying statement is also that public service agency workers do not deserve to celebrate their accomplishments even though MassHousing does not use any public tax dollars to sustain its operations. In an era of massive income inequality, stagnating wages, and a growing racial leadership and wealth gap in Boston, we need to demand better. Breaking concrete ceilings for women of color comes with a tax—one that we all pay if we refuse to disrupt the status quo and uplift the potential that many of us carry.

Beyazmin Jimenez is a housing activist and Boston resident.

DILAPI-DAVIS SQUARE SOMERVILLE

Somerville residents squawk about the state of infrastructure, deteriorating public art

BY LYNNE DONCASTER Around Christmastime, a mirrored box the size of a telephone booth appeared on Davis Square’s Statue Plaza. People wondered what it was—a bathroom? A maintenance shed? A TARDIS? There was a wooden door on one side, though you wouldn’t see it if you approached the box from Elm Street, Highland Ave, or Holland Street.

If you tried to open the door, you would find it pushed inward just a few inches, not enough to enter the structure, and a light inside turned on.

As it turns out, the box was an installation commissioned and funded by the Somerville Arts Council and designed by Lam Partners, an architectural lighting design consulting firm with offices in Cambridge and Pittsburgh. An artist’s statement in a plastic sleeve tacked to a nearby tree said it was meant to evoke the “warm inviting light of ‘home’” and urged people to share photos of their interactions with the piece on social media, with suggested hashtags.

The statement also said the piece was temporary, meant to stay up through the end of January. Soon after it was installed, though, blue masking tape appeared on corners of the box, as though holding it together. One silver panel fell off during an especially windy week, then another a few days later, exposing plywood and scabs of adhesive. There was no hardware holding the plastic panels in place. The light inside stopped working.

The doorknob disappeared. As January stretched into February, it was still there, broken.

It was there the night of Feb 13, when concerned residents and business owners packed the Dilboy Post for a meeting hosted by Davis Now, a group advocating for better maintenance of Davis Square. There was no shortage of other items to be discussed, though, and the big silver box wasn’t on the agenda.

The room was buzzing even before the meeting began, with people trading stories about falls they’ve suffered or witnessed on the square’s undulating brick sidewalks and crosswalks that are pocked with potholes. During the presentation, someone noted that Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone himself once stumbled and fell on the uneven ground.

The brick sidewalks on the plaza were installed in the ’80s, when the city made major neighborhood investments in conjunction with the opening of the Davis Square T station. Over time, the base under the bricks has shifted, leading to bumps and valleys underfoot. The sidewalks have experienced wear and tear as well as the neighborhood has grown in popularity, but the city hasn’t always been so quick to fix bricks that were broken or missing. Chris Iwerks of Davis Now noted that Somerville DPW doesn’t have anybody on staff that does brickwork, which is why many spots have been patched with asphalt.

Last fall, Davis Now created a “punch list” of items that need attention, including more than 100 spots where sidewalk bricks are broken or missing, asphalt patches that look messy, places where granite curbs are cracked or misaligned, and decorative cobblestones that have come loose. Some of these were remedied when the brick sidewalk in front of 212 Elm St was torn up and replaced with concrete, but there are currently no plans to do this all throughout the area, and to do so might be controversial. At the meeting, debate ensued about the aesthetic and practical merits of brick vs concrete.

Nearby is Seven Hills Park, the area behind the Harvard Vanguard building. It runs from the back of the Holland Street T Station exit to the community bike path and is named for the original seven hills of Somerville, which are commemorated with sculptures perched high above on brick and metal posts. Installed in the ’80s, they have suffered with age; the sculptures are dirty and faded, some scratched by tree branches, while the enamel signs describing the landmarks have rust spots

or are missing altogether. The ground is plagued with the same broken and uneven brick sidewalks as the rest of Davis Square. Areas meant to be lawns are patchy or just dirt. Trees are overgrown. Drainage issues lead have led to a semipermanent puddle Davis Now refers to at the Seasonal Pond and Mosquito Hatchery.

Seven Hills Park may be a victim of its own success.

ArtBeat, HONK!, and other events use it throughout the year, and the grass gets trampled under thousands of feet. In an interview, Iwerks recounted a night that a HONK! band was playing in the pouring rain, and the band and audience stomped the muddy ground.

“The grass never recovered after that,” he says. At the meeting someone suggested relocating HONK! and other events, at least temporarily, to let the ground recover, but for now that is just an idea.

George Proakis, the city’s director of planning, was at the Davis Now meeting and touted another idea the city has tested to improve Seven Hills Park: moveable plastic chairs. They appeared one summer, and community reviews of this innovation were mixed. While the chairs were used, they also broke and disappeared over time.

Iwerks dismissed the short-term measure: “I find it insulting to say that [plastic chairs] are some sincere effort to do something.”

The concerns of Davis Now and the local community don’t end with the sidewalks, crosswalks, or even Seven Hills Park. The punch list Davis Now created last fall includes 107 bent sign poles, 56 bent parking meter poles, “for rent” signs that have been in place for years, and traffic signal poles with peeling paint and exposed wiring.

In addition to the pressing pedestrian safety concerns, some worried that an ongoing state of disrepair could lead to fewer businesses investing in Davis Square.

At the Davis Now meeting, City Councilor Lance Davis noted that Davis Square has experienced a lack of investment by the city for many years. As ambitious projects like SomerVision and Davis by Design have brought in parades of consultants who held community

meetings to discuss long-term goals and grand visions, small issues like broken bricks have been ignored.

By the estimates of the DavisNow team, it would cost about $750,000 to fix all of the problems on their punch list—the sidewalks, the poles, the landscaping, and art repairs. For now, it appears the city may be listening.

Representatives from the engineering department have met with representatives from Davis Now to discuss sidewalk and crosswalk issues, and there is a plan to attend to broken crosswalks and curb ramps. DPW hasn’t shared any plans with Davis Now but will reportedly look into things when the weather improves.

Interviewed a few days after the meeting, Iwerks was cautiously optimistic: “I think what we’re going to have to be vigilant about is half measures and inattention. We have their attention right now. In three months or four months, that could wane.”

Which brings us back to that big silver box on the plaza—on the morning of the Davis Now meeting, I sent an email to the Somerville Arts Council to ask for comment on the concept and maintenance of the piece. I didn’t get a reply, but the structure disappeared the next morning, about 24 hours after I sent the message.

It’s unclear what exactly happened to the box, but the life of the piece seems an apt metaphor. It was an interesting concept that fell apart due to poor planning and shoddy construction. Only half-hearted attempts were made to ameliorate the threat of damage, and nothing was done when it started to break. It was shiny, slick, and futuristic but claimed it wanted to be warm and nostalgic. It was made of plastic, never meant to last. It speaks of a city more concerned with buzz than craftsmanship, more concerned with what is Instagrammable than what is livable.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism as part of its initiative to cover Somerville. If you want to see more reporting like this, please consider donating at givetobinj.org.

PHOTO BY LYNNE DONCASTER NEWS TO US

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SANCTUARY STATUS DIRTY OLD BOSTON

The eerily familiar tale of Shadrach Minkins and the centuries-old federal threat to our Commonwealth

BY ZACK HUFFMAN

Long before the modern fight over safeguarding immigrants from deportation, Massachusetts was the focus of much controversy over its being a sanctuary state. The situation heated up after a new law required law enforcement officers to ignore the sanctuary status, and Boston’s mayor formally announced his intention to comply with the feds.

In the 19th century, Massachusetts, and New England as a whole, was often a destination for runaway slaves.

This was in part because the Bay State passed a law in 1843 that essentially made it a sanctuary state for suspected slaves; An Act Further to Protect Personal Liberty forbade all state-level judges or law enforcement officers from acting on an accusation that a black resident was an escaped slave.

That all came into question when President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act on Sept 18, 1850.

The new law required state authorities to respect slave ownership—even if that state had already outlawed the horrific institution. Essentially overturning most of the Bay State’s sanctuary state law.

In response to the development, Boston Mayor John Bigelow announced his support of the new law and pledged to go after escaped slaves. Local abolitionist forces, meanwhile, organized a vigilante group to protect their black neighbors from predatory slave catchers.

With so much hostility swirling, on Saturday, Feb 15, 1851, a slave hunter from Virginia nabbed a man named Shadrach Minkins while he was working as a waiter at the Cornhill Coffee House in Boston. Minkins, who was also known as Frederick Wilkins, escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1850. He came to Boston and attempted to start a new life—until the law came after him roughly a year later.

“I do not believe the mayor of Boston represents the public feeling even of Boston, low as that public feeling is,” abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention on May 27, 1851. “I do not believe that this creeping, crawling official is high enough in the scale of being to represent even the meanness and 10

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degradation of the city.”

A few months before Garrison’s speech, Minkins’ arrest would become the first in New England under the new slave law. Minkins was not entitled to a jury, nor could he take the stand to defend himself under the Fugitive Slave Law. Despite all the hurdles he would have to clear, several attorneys offered their service to Minkins, including Robert Morris and Ellis Gray Loring, both of whom were leaders of the Boston Vigilance Committee, which actively protected runaway slaves through both legal action and via the Underground Railroad.

Although the Fugitive Slave Act required Massachusetts officials to apprehend Minkins, one of the few surviving elements of the 1843 state law barred those officials from using jail space for an escaped slave.

So the US Marshals made a deal to house Minkins in a courtroom over the weekend until he could face a US commissioner, which is who accused slaves had to face in lieu of a judge.

Before the weekend ended, though, about 100 people stormed the courthouse, disabled US Commissioner Patrick Riley, and freed Minkins. According to the Boston Post’s account: Mr. Riley, who was jammed into the corner near the door, called upon his assistants to resist the rescuers, but their numbers were too great, and they dragged Shadrack [sic] out in a few seconds. … One of the assistants managed to get hold of the marshal’s sword, but a portion of the rescuers hugged him round the body, thus fastening his arms, and the sword was dropped in the struggle. A colored man carried the sword into the street, where he gave it up to a young man, name Hosea, who was not aware that it had been taken from the court.

Minkins was covertly transported to Cambridge and then continued north into Canada, where he eventually settled in Montreal. One year later, in 1852, Minkins’ attorney Robert Morris, who was also treasurer of the

Boston Vigilance Committee, began petitioning the governor of Massachusetts to approve the formation of an all-black militia. At the time, state law explicitly mandated that only white soldiers could serve in sanctioned militias, so those petitions went unfulfilled.

By 1854, local business owner John P. Coburn, along with Morris and others, had taken matters into their own hands and formed the Massasoit Guards, naming themselves after the Native American leader who first allowed the Pilgrims to live in 1620.

“We learn that the prospects of success of the contemplated colored military company in this city, are very flattering,” read an unsigned news item in an 1855 edition of the Liberator. “About eighty young gentlemen have enrolled themselves.”

The guards prepared to fight any slave hunters who entered Boston, and specifically patrolled the streets of the West End and the northern slope of Beacon Hill, which at the time was home to the majority of the city’s black population. Since slave hunters only had to present an affidavit swearing that they had the right person, all black people, regardless of whether or not they were former slaves, were in danger of facing a trial without any legal defense.

The Massasoit Guards petitioned the state for militia status, which would have let members carry guns, but were repeatedly denied. So they carried cudgels, which were essentially short, wooden bats that could cave the skull of any unwanted person who entered Boston’s black neighborhoods.

“We hear that this newly formed company of colored men, to whom Governor Gardner refused to loan the arms of the state, have decided to purchase arms themselves, and will, as soon as the arrangements are completed make a public parade,” according to an Aug 27, 1855, edition of the Boston Post.

The guards only remained active a few more years, as the nation soon plunged into the Civil War. By 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, and his secretary of state finally authorized the formation of a black military unit, the 54th Regiment Infantry. Based in Massachusetts, they would go on to become the far more famous successor to the Massasoit Guards.

This throwback was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and Dirty Old Boston. Read more and support nonprofit media at binjonline.org.

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MASS IMPACT MUSIC FEATURE

An oral history of the 1999 Boston Superbowl MC battle

BY DANA SCOTT Twenty years ago, the Boston hip-hop scene hit a relative peak when the region’s leading promotional company, MetroConcepts, held its inaugural Superbowl MC Battle at the Western Front in Cambridge. The pivotal moment, which went down during the 1999 Super Bowl, which the Pats didn’t play in, left an eternal stamp on local music.

“This was 1999, pre-Patriots being good,” said Papa D, a co-founder of the Mass-based Brick Records. “No one really cared about going out on the night of the Super Bowl.”

Despite already having won respect through earlier pioneer acts like the Jonzun Crew, the Almighty RSO, Edo Rock (later known as Edo G), and TDS Mob, the Boston rap scene at the time had some impediments. Namely, besides college radio shows and occasional one-off events where local artists got exposure, there were few rapfriendly places to perform, largely due to policies and trends that, with very few exceptions, kept hip-hop out of downtown clubs and venues through the ’90s.

“Race is what caused most venues to avoid booking hip-hop, period,” former Boston hip-hop promoter O’Neal Rowe said.

In spite of the obstacles, Rowe and his friend Tim Linberg partnered to form MetroConcepts in 1996. Both men helped spark a Boston hip-hop revolution as they worked tirelessly to break local talents such as Akrobatik, Mr. Lif, 7L & Esoteric, REKS, Sage Francis, Virtuoso, and DJ Fakts One. The first Superbowl Battle was a major catalyst for so much movement on the scene, as the event was stockpiled with several artists who would go on to become underground rap legends. This is an oral history of how it came to fruition and left an indelible legacy.

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community, and at the time hip-hop was premainstream.

The white club owners on Lansdowne Street did not want people from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan coming to their clubs. It took a bunch of years for hip-hop to break through, and I have no doubt that race played a role on both sides for their reluctance to book and on my ability to break in.

Edo G (MC, Boston rap legend): We needed more places. The Channel, near South Station by the seaport, was in the ’80s and the early ’90s. Other than that, it really wasn’t nowhere. … We had nowhere to go. I can’t remember any place where there were having consistent hip-hop shows from ’90 to ’95. I didn’t perform “I Gotta Have It” when it came out, when it was at its height in Boston, because there was nowhere to perform it. We performed it in Cambridge at a school. That was the only place we did it.

Esoteric (MC, half of 7L & Esoteric): Venus Di Milo, Avenue C, Bill’s Bar, the Middle East, the Playhouse, Western Front, even Bahama Beach Club—I went anywhere clubs were letting people rap. I did a few odd talent contests at Chez Vous Roller Rink and lots of other venues off the beaten path when I was coming up, when grabbing the mic was a lot more scary and more of a risk than it is today. Today every fifth person has tried their hand at rapping. Back then it was, “Whoa, you rap?”

Linberg: I started DJing house parties in college, nothing of particular merit. I wasn’t a great DJ but I was into it. I moved back to Boston after I graduated college, bought a pair of turntables and started buying records.

My buddy [O’Neal] and I started to get some sense of where hip-hop was being played, so we made a mixtape and went to a few clubs and said, “Hey, we want to do a

hip-hop show.” And the Western Front said, “Okay, we’ll give you two shows a month.” Then we were like, “Damn, really? Now what do we do?”

We set up shop at the Western Front for a couple years on Sundays and that’s where we started doing an open mic for local MCs. It started out as a DJ thing, which was really like a bunch of friends doing parties. It wasn’t a business. Also, there was a low-wattage pirate radio station set up in Allston/Boston area called Radio Free Allston. Good people who were trying to do something pretty cool. We had a show on that station called Hip-Hop 617.

O’Neal Rowe (co-founder of MetroConcepts): When we started getting people together in ’96-’97 or so, it was clear there were so many hip-hop artists that were looking for opportunities to perform together and on a stage. Boston had a ton of talent all over the city, all different backgrounds, but venues really weren’t into opening up to hip-hop acts or DJs. REKS (MC): The issue in Massachusetts has always been a lack of major radio push for artists. I feel a lot more of us could have broke out of the city with support from major stations. The college stations were truly a godsend.

Mr. Lif (MC): In that era, when the independent hiphop scene was born, it still revolved around the studio. It was Butta Beats that was run by Ray Fernandes … a studio where people kind of congregated.

Fakts One (DJ, radio host): I started at WERS [99.9 FM] as a producer, which is basically like a show assistant, in the fall of 1995. I got my own show the next year in ’96.

Linberg: Fakts was like our Funkmaster Flex for Boston.

SAGE FRANCIS … If an artist came to town, we were taking them to 88.9@ Night. That’s basically as big as it got from an exposure standpoint. It was our lifeblood. If college radio and WERS didn’t promote our show, we were screwed.

Esoteric: 88.9 [Emerson College], 90.3 [Boston College], 88.1 [MIT], 95.3 [Harvard] were all very important to spreading the word about local artists with material.

Most things aired on 88.9 by local artists were typically off of cassette demos before cats became ambitious enough to press vinyl. Our first vinyl was 1996 thanks to Truth Elemental from Brick [Records], and when that was pressed we felt like superstars.

Fakts One: I learned some FCC tricks from the reggae cats to boost up the power of our transmitter so eventually I had people listening live from as far north as Maine. Prestreaming, preweb. At the time, my radio was on and I focused on the indie/underground scene, so I had relationships with everyone as artists. It was the perfect storm.

Rowe: Once we did a handful of events and open mics we were able to convince booking agents and owners that there was a vibrant audience in Boston that was completely untapped. And I think Boston hiphop artists got more chances to open up shows and headline their own record release parties to continue to build a scene that contributed to a lot of talented acts getting a chance to shine. I credit these artists as their fan bases really made the scene what it was, so without acts like Lif, Ak, Edo G., Illin’ P, 7L & Esoteric, Reks, Skitzofreniks, Fakts One, and many more it wouldn’t have been as meaningful.

Equally dope but different from each other. And both really freestyled! None of the corny prep rap battle shit nowadays.

Ken Capobianco (music journalist): The hip-hop crowd in Boston was mostly all white college kids. I used to go to the Middle East and Bill’s Bar, and I was a bit older in my early to mid-30s, and it was nothing but people [who were] in the city to go to college. That’s why it was hard to build an audience for a lot of these guys, because the people coming to the show would come and disappear.

Really, those crowds were not diverse.

Linberg: O’Neal and I started to hook up with this dude name Rocky LaMontagne who was doing All That!

Hip-Hop, Poetry & Jazz events at the Nuyorican Cafe and Lyricist Lounge in New York, so we got connected through him, and started doing All That! together at the Western Front as an open mic night with a live band called Downlow Connection. Great guys. We did that, and then decided to do a battle.

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FAKTS ONE

Linberg: There had been battles, both planned and unplanned for events at the Western Front, but we just said we’re going to get everyone because there was a hole in our schedule because of the Super Bowl and the Patriots sucked. It was like, What are we gonna do?

The first battle we did was all locals in that Cambridge melting pot scene. Checkmark (of Skitzofreniks); Lif; Akrobatik; Esoteric; REKS; Virtuoso; Big O, who was incredibly dope; and Sage Francis, who no one knew.

I think half of them didn’t want to do it, but they felt obligated.

Capobianco: Lif wasn’t into battle rapping. That wasn’t his thing. I covered him from his very beginning. I think he did maybe two, and I don’t think he wanted to be there at the 1999 Superbowl MC battle.

Fakts One: I was honestly surprised at how many “known” MCs wanted in. That made it bigger.

REKS: As far as the battle scene, I feel it was ultra competitive with great talents comprised of young and hungry MCs. The likes of Alias, Ripshop, Mr. Lif, Akrobatik, Esoteric, and Professor Shuman was phenomenal, just to name a few.

Papa D (co-founder of Brick Records): Lif, Ak, and Eso all had records out prior to this event. As for that second generation of dudes like Alias, Big O from OVM—I don’t know if it was a proving ground, but you know, it was definitely the start to their careers. Everyone that was in the battle was doing something in the Boston scene, so it wasn’t all filled with dudes you’d never heard of. But the internet wasn’t popping yet, so it was really dudes you would see at shows, who were trying to record with certain producers.

Linberg: I definitely know that some of the artists were more amped to be there than others. It was the first battle that we had done, and we didn’t really figure out the formatting of it too well ahead of time. When we got there we were like, “Man, we have too many rappers” because basically we put out a call for participants. … A lot of great MCs didn’t make it past the first round because the format was so fucked up. …

The prize was $100. I’m sure some of the people got mad when they lost, but they took it for what it was. It was definitely a “respect” thing.

Capobianco: I remember judging a lot of the battles at that time. … These guys really understood what it took to battle. They weren’t just giving out stupid silly punchlines. It went beyond that. They really understood how to work a crowd and how to weave runs and themes through the short battle.

Sage Francis (MC): [It was] everyone who was doing anything in New England’s hip-hop scene back then.

To the credit of almost everyone I battled, the only thing they knew about me is that I did spoken word and I had a college radio show in Rhode Island. As a radio host, and as a fan of their music, I knew a lot about everyone I was battling. Not only that, but I was battling regularly

in Providence for quite some time before the Superbowl MC Battle happened. It was a big deal to me. Not that it wasn’t a big deal to others, but I think I was the one who went full “gym class hero” while almost everyone else was in more of a “we’re all friends” chill mode. I wasn’t friends with them, though. I was definitely an outsider trying to get my name out there.

Fakts One: It was basically a who’s who of Boston rap.

Energy building up to it was nuts. Just about everyone in that battle had vinyl out or coming out—reps and egos on the line.

Linberg: It was chaos.

Linberg: A year after, we took it to the Middle East because we needed a bigger room. January 1999 was the first one, and then we did six more battles after that. The last one was the nail in the coffin at Avalon [nightclub] in January 2005. 8 Mile had already come out, so we jumped on that and got JAM’N 94.5 FM onboard as a sponsor, and they agreed to throw down $5,000 as the prize. It was a bigger opportunity, and MCs from all over were flying in for it. We booked KRS-One to perform and be a judge, and it was sold out with like 1,000 people. It was a big show in a big room.

I have to say, looking back, it was a JAM’N 94.5 audience that wanted to see an 8 Mile-style rap battle, and we had these wordsmith sort of underground kids from Cincinnati and other places … so there was a disconnect. So I don’t look at that battle as one of my particular favorites. But all the Middle East ones and the first at the Western Front were all dope to me in their own way.

Fakts One: Sage versus Akrobatik was the best. It was yin vs yang—the two different styles both representative of the division in the indie scene. Nerdy verbose white dude, technical versus street-smart brother/poet.

Equally dope but different from each other. And both really freestyled! None of the corny prep rap battle shit nowadays.

Sage Francis: Winning that battle definitely kicked off a lot of major developments in my career, especially since no one really knew who I was outside of the Rhode Island scene. It was a surprise attack on my part and it was definitely an “underdog victory” story, which helped my momentum.

None of this would probably be talked about if it wasn’t for my video camera. The video that is posted on YouTube was from my video camera, which was stolen from me a couple months after the battle. It’s the only footage that exists, so I’d like to thank whoever stole my shit for bootlegging the material and eventually getting the footage into someone’s hands who posted it YouTube many years later. You’re still a steaming pile of shit, though.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. To see more long form arts reporting like this, support independent journalism at givetobinj.org.

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PRO PARTY TIPS TERMS OF SERVICE

A bartender’s guide to St. Patrick’s Day in Boston

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Oh, St. Patrick’s Day, yet another holiday widely revered and respectfully celebrated in its native country only to be co-opted by Americans in the name of getting shitfaced.

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in Boston at least makes sense: Even if Southie isn’t Southie anymore, and has been almost fully gentrified into South Boston, Massachusetts is definitely the most Irish-American state in the union: 20 percent of residents claimed Irish heritage in the 2015 census.

But we all know it’s not just that 20 percent that hits the streets on March 17 for Jameson and Guinness. Oh, no, it’s fucking everyone, and it’s not only Southie that gets hit with 22-year-olds vomiting in gutters. These days, half the city gets mobbed.

As someone who has worked their fair share of St. Patrick’s days, I could tell you war stories from past shifts, but I think the most helpful thing for people looking to go out and have a few drinks on the 17th—which falls on a Sunday this year—is to tell you where I’d go for a drink that day.

In other words, here’s a list of bars and locales to consider—and those to avoid—if all you really want to do when it comes to drinking on Sunday is sit down, have a cocktail, and not be surrounded by people in green hats who look like they’re ready to puke on your shoes.

Avoid Southie Moonshine 152, Capo, Croke Park—I love you, I really do. But you couldn’t pay me to battle the crowds and the Red Line delays to swing through on St. Patrick’s Day. And Davis Square Again: Sligo, the Burren, Foundry, and Saloon—y’all know I care and that, honestly, all I want is a glass of super basic white wine. Which is why I won’t be joining the throngs of Tufts students bouncing down Elm Street. The one exception to this might be Saloon, since this basement cocktail haven doesn’t open until most of the revelers will already be unconscious for hours.

And the South End I made the mistake of visiting a friend at work in the early evening hours on St. Patrick’s Day last year. Even if you don’t, like I do, get horribly stressed out being in a bar as shit’s about to get insanely busy, the usual coziness of South End watering holes will make you claustrophobic.

Think dark With Irish bars across the city opening as early as 8 am, if you want to miss the craziness don’t go out before nightfall. If you want to drink all day, you truly do have to start in the morning, but even the best intentioned Guinness-guzzlers won’t make it past three or four. This makes 5 o’clock your time to shine with a relatively grown-up drinking crowd.

Dozens of bars across the city don’t even open before 5: Saloon, the Hawthorne, Yvonne’s (okay, 4, but close enough), Drink, Franklin Cafe, and Brick and Mortar are stellar examples, and that’s only a wee tiny portion of evening-hours-only establishments.

Lastly on this point, because March 17 is a Sunday this year, some generally-onlyopen-at-night spots may be open for brunch, like Park and Alden & Harlow in Harvard Square, as well as Tiger Mama near Fenway, so check the hours before you head out.

Think South of the Border I never need an excuse to seek out an agave-oriented bar: Give me a spirits list heavy on mezcal and tequila, and I’ll be entertained for hours (or at least until I max out my credit card). If you, too, don’t feel like you need whisk(e)y to commemorate St. Patrick, then consider heading somewhere that focuses on South American cuisine and cocktails. Lonestar (Allston and East Cambridge) has a great agave selection and is likely to be less than packed, same with Tres Gatos in JP. Basically, think like hipster Ariel My motto for Big Drinking Days—St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve, Mardi Gras, Halloween, Saturday—comes from the Little Mermaid’s slightly misanthropic cousin: I want to be where the people are not.

Why? Go ahead and try getting into the Burren or Moonshine on Sunday and see for yourself.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

MAGNUS OPUS VISUAL ARTS

A Boston counter culture icon finally gets overdue props for his oil orgies INTERVIEW BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 While his radio days are well documented, though, what’s less known about Johnstone is his life’s work as a visual artist.

Starting in the ’70s and painting almost through his dying from cancer in 2013, he completed more than 100 intricate oil paintings, all apparently inspired by his musical influences and life in the artistic struggle. Until last year, most of the works had been in storage on Cape Cod. But thanks to some of Johnstone’s old friends, they’ve recently been put on PHOTO OF MAGNUS IN HIS MAINE STUDIO IN 2010 BY AND COURTESY OF ED ‘MOOSE’ SAVAGE prominent display—on a dedicated site that displays his body of Believe it or not, 40 years ago, not everybody had a work, as well as in a podcast and an Etsy page, since those things didn’t exist. show last year at the Nave Gallery in Somerville and now Yet Magnus Johnstone, scenester extraordinaire, excelled in a follow-up event in that venue this weekend. on multiple creative spectrums, from college radio to “A lot of his friends came out for that [reception canvases. last year],” Brian Coleman said. A former college Born in 1952 in Chicago, Johnstone relocated to Mass radio DJ himself whose show once bumped up next with his family in the ’70s. By the ’80s he was filling to Johnstone’s, Coleman was among the old cadre of hearts and minds with music people hadn’t yet heard friends who unearthed the works and spurred new much of on terrestrial radio, if they’d heard it at all. interest in them. Sunday’s show is a follow-up to the From his internationally focused smorgasbords on MIT’s last-minute event last year, where Coleman said they WMBR 88.1 FM to the groundbreaking early hip-hop sold more canvases than anyone expected considering show, Lecco’s Lemma, that he famously hosted, Johnstone short time they had to promote in advance. On the embodied the avant-garde mentality. By the time a trend heels of that success, this week’s opening will feature a got played out, he’d been over it for years. discussion with fellow creatives who knew Johnstone, along with eight of the large canvases and some of his small pieces as well. As was the arrangement last time, all proceeds go to the artist’s family and to help maintain the giant (most are 72” by 55”) works.

“There are some people who knew him just through

music, and people who knew him just through art. There were a small number who knew him through both, but I knew Magnus purely from music,” Coleman told the Dig. “I knew he painted, but I had no idea about these large canvases that he did. He’s probably somewhere right now laughing that I helped with this.”

Not that Coleman, a longtime scenester himself, was surprised. “A lot of the early punk scene in Boston was started in art galleries,” he said. Johnstone was especially active at the Punkt/Data Gallery in the North End of Boston and Gallery East in Boston’s Fort Point Channel.

“That was no coincidence—these galleries could see that a lot of cool stuff was going on.”

As Coleman and his team wrote in their bio for the project, “In 1990, Magnus was diagnosed with leukemia, and in 1994 he received a life-saving bone marrow transplant. After numerous other radio journeys in the 1990s, on WZBC, he relocated to Maine in the early 2000s with his life partner, Mango.” Neither his illness nor the relocation dulled his instincts; in addition to continuing to paint, Johnstone worked days at an art gallery, and even continued to host college radio shows on WERU, a community station two and a half hours north of Portland.

“I don’t get the sense that it was his main goal to sell [art],” Coleman said. “I get the sense that he wanted to sell them, but he painted because of the love of painting, and to express himself. Moving to Maine isn’t exactly the best way to make your art career explode. Honestly, I think he got sick of city living and of carting shit around.”

He continued: “There’s a point in the late ’90s with these medium canvases where he gets so complicated that I can’t figure out how he did it without a computer. … He was prolific, too. He was cranking out one of these every month [in certain years].

“I’ve never seen anything like it. One thing Magnus was not was someone who would copy another artist. He wasn’t a biter.”

“CYBER ST. GEO” (1997)

“MS FOUND IN A BOTTLE” (1976)

“MAN CENTIPEDE” (1984)

>> MAGNUS JOHNSTONE: LARGER WORKS OPENING RECEPTION. SAT 3.10, 3:30-5PM. NAVE GALLERY, 155 POWDER HOUSE BLVD., SOMERVILLE. MORE INFO AT MAGNUSJOHNSTONEART.COM 16

03.07.19 - 03.14.19 |

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VOL 13

Presented by Celebrity Series

MARCH 19-23

Saturday • March 9

MARCH 19

2:00 PM - 4:30 PM

41 Geneva Ave • Dorchester 02121

Comics In Color is a safe space where you can come and nerd out about illustrated stories by and about people of color.

THIS MONTH! Featured Guest: Basil El Halwagy

Basil will do workshop for all ages with an interest in creating a costume including armor or a headpiece.

Discussion: Collaborative comics making • All-levels comics making activity • Samples of Black Comics • SNACKS! All are welcome but this is an event focused on comics by and about people of color.

COMICSINCOLOR.ORG

Art by Cagen Luse

Grove Hall Branch of the Boston Public Library

ANNA & ELIZABETH APPALACHIAN MUSIC DUO

MARCH 20

EDMAR CASTAÑEDA TRIO HARP VIRTUOSO COMBINES TRADITIONAL COLOMBIAN MUSIC WITH LATIN JAZZ

MARCH 21

LADAMA WOMEN FROM ACROSS THE AMERICAS COME TOGETHER IN AN IRRESISTIBLE QUARTET

MARCH 22

ORACLE HYSTERICAL & MUSICIANS FROM A FAR CRY LUSHLY TEXTURED ART ROCK WITH LITERARY INSPIRATION

MARCH 23

TIGUE & AROOJ AFTAB WITH GYAN RILEY EVOCATIVE SOUNDSCAPES AND INNOVATIVE BEATS

160 Mass Ave (Berklee College of Music)

$35 per ticket (all ages) $10 per student ticket with I.D., (all colleges accepted, not just Berklee) Doors & Bar open at 7pm - Concert at 8pm Two 45-minute sets with a 15-minute break

SPONSORED BY

MARGARET EAGLE & ELI RAPAPORT, SUSAN & MICHAEL THONIS,AND THE BARR FOUNDATION THROUGH ITS ARTSAMPLIFIED INITIATIVE. WITH ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY MICHAEL & DEBRA RAIZMAN, YUKIKO UENO & ERAN EGOZY, RANDOLPH HAWTHORNE & CARLISS BALDWIN, AND MARYLEN STERNWEILER

STAVESESSIONS.ORG NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

BOOKS

BOOK REVIEW: SEA PEOPLE

Western science gradually catching up to Polynesian oral history

BY MAX CHAPNICK @MAXCHAPPY On Hawaii’s Napo’opo’o pier, Christina Thompson’s husband, Seven, walks over to one of the “big Hawaiian guys with tattooed calves” overseeing the kayak rentals.

Seven asks, “how much for a kayak?” “Thirty dollars,” says the man, then, “twenty for you, brother.”

This nameless kayak-renter registers kinship—ancestral, familial ties—with Seven, who is of Maori heritage. Though New Zealand lies in the southwest corner of the great Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from these Hawaiian islands, the two men can both “trace their roots back to the islands of central Polynesia.” This shared heritage is nothing short of a miracle: “Seven can get on a plane in the country of his birth, fly for nine hours, and get off in a completely different country where he will be treated by the locals as one of their own.” He could repeat this exercise “in an entirely different direction”: “the Polynesian Triangle” bounded by “the three points of Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Easter Island” spans “ten million square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

Thompson’s new book, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia sets out to untangle the mystery of that miracle: How did Polynesians become “the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in world”? How did one “identifiable group of voyagers,” with a “single language and set of customs,” “a particular body of myths,” and a “‘portmanteau biota’ of plants and animals” spread themselves over this massive ocean? How did these ancient voyagers, without airplanes, steamships, or even “metal tools,” colonize “the largest single culture area in the world”?

Not to mention, this feat of human exploration happened without writing—“no maps or compasses”! ”We are talking about prehistory,” Thompson says; there are no written historical records of that Polynesian expansion.

Thompson’s project therefore narrates “not so much a story about what happened as a story about how we know.”

Specifically, her book charts how the last few centuries of thinkers reconstructed this ancient colonization. “The history of the Pacific is not just a tale of men and women (and dogs and pigs and chickens) in boats,” she writes.

“It is also the story of all those who have wondered who Polynesians were, where they came from and how they managed to find all those islands like stars in the emptiness of space.”

Thompson’s intellectual history takes the perspective of Western thinkers. But as Thompson self-consciously acknowledges later in the book, “according to the Polynesian view, history is not an assortment of data points to be cherry-picked at will but something much closer to a kind of intellectual property.” She quotes Maori scholar Tipene O’Reagan: “To inquire into my history or that of my people, you must inquire into my whakapapa [genealogy]. … I am the primary proprietor of my past.” Respectful of that ownership, Thompson’s project traces the Western metahistory operating parallel to native stories: Rather than describing Polynesia’s history as told by Polynesians, she narrates how modern European, American, and Oceanian thinkers reconstructed this history.

Because Thompson surveys nearly 500 years of theories about the Polynesian diaspora, from 1519 to 2018, she never lingers too long on any one period or figure. Asides and footnotes imply Thompson’s knowledge stretches much deeper than she reveals explicitly; she chooses only the most meaningful and relevant events. For example, Thompson hones in on Cook’s Polynesian guide Tupaia and Tupaia’s enigmatic, and symbolically revelatory, map. She reimagines the “complex collaboration” between Cook, his on-board scientist Joseph Banks, and Tupaia, which resulted in this fascinating chart documenting the native man’s extensive knowledge of Polynesian islands.

Like the mystery of the Polynesian diaspora itself, that sets out to prove that Polynesians could have drifted this mesmerizing artifact remains in many respects from the western coast of South America. (The theory indecipherable to present-day readers. Tupaia likely carried the sour taste of aiming to undermine “Polynesian conceived of geography very differently than the longitudes navigational ability.”) But later, in the 1970s and 1980s, and latitudes of his 18th-century European collaborators, the Hokule’a, a canoe built and navigated by means of and much was lost in translation. “Everyone who has traditional Polynesian technologies, proves Polynesians ever thought about it has no doubt wished he or she didn’t drift, they navigated. In both cases, the Polynesian could go back and shake Cook, Banks, and the others and mythology was more accurate than post facto guesses after demand that they try harder to extract what Tupaia knew,” all.

Thompson writes, “so that we, in the future, could more Thompson’s message about the multiplicity of fully understand what the world looked like from Tupaia’s knowledge systems does not reaffirm the primacy of point of view.” modern science, and that in itself is refreshing. (Her After Cook, Thompson paddles swiftly through the final chapter begins: “should we be surprised that the centuries: stopping in the 19th century to discuss the efforts latest science brings us closer to the oral history of of linguist Edward Tregear and lore-collector Abraham the Polynesians?”) Just as the overarching question of Formander, and then in the early 20th century to explain Polynesian origins marries the “romance of a great human the work of anthropologists like Herbert E. Gregory, Te Rangi adventure with a cool, cerebral awareness,” the book also Hiroa, and Edward W. Gifford. In each historical moment, reaches toward the merging of different ways of thinking; Thompson retraces that moment’s key inquiries, e.g., for here Thompson offers not a binary (science vs myth) but the 19th century: What can oral stories reveal about when a proliferation of knowledge frameworks: linguistics, and how islands were colonized? Is it possible to accurately oral history, computer science, anthropology, navigation, backdate original landings via remembered genealogical archaeology, etc. Thompson affirms a stance of intellectual lineages? Thompson takes account of disciplinary advances appreciation, humility, and wonder. Each system has like philology’s reconstruction of ancient languages and something to teach. nuclear science’s breakthroughs in carbon dating, while One of the best anecdotes in the book is, fittingly, one noting the often racist undertones to some of these of learning. Mau, the Micronesian sage of navigation, scientists’ assumptions. who by means of the sea Reading Thompson’s style, and sky alone guided the though learned and lyrical, Hokule’a from Hawaii to can at times feel like being Tahiti in 1976, is convinced rushed through a museum to return, four years later, by a charismatic docent who to mentor an aspiring is also constantly checking Hawaiian navigator. The their watch: Chapters rush young Nainoa had not past with hurried snippets grown up with the ancient of biography, like the tragic traditions, but he wanted death of Formander’s native to learn: “he was weaving Hawaiian wife and four of his together the strands of two five children. Turn a page and very different traditions, we’ve moved from biography combining everything to mythology, then just as he had learned from quickly to biology. It is to school and books and Thompson’s credit that this the planetarium with narrative spans such a wide everything he had learned historical and intellectual from Mau about looking range while keeping its at the horizon, feeling the focus so well-trained on that wind and waves.” essential question: From In the end, Nainoa was where, when, how, and why successful: “the first from did Polynesians conquer the Hawai’i in hundreds of Pacific? (No spoilers, you’ll years” to pilot thousands have to piece it together on of miles of ocean without your own.) Along the way, modern technology. “Only Thompson never fails to note once during the voyage did the relevant evidentiary claims Mau step in,” Thompson and the still unanswered points out. Hours IMAGE COURTESY OF HARPERCOLLINS or unaccounted for pieces, from their destination, pulling this reader, everNainoa thought a bird curiously, forward. was flying away from The false turns, too, kept this reader on his toes. At an unseen island; Mau, channeling decades of native one point, a miraculous archaeological dig suggests navigational experience, reminded Nainoa to look at that, contrary to Maori oral tradition recorded by 19ththe food in the bird’s beak. The bird was flying toward century Europeans, maybe New Zealand was settled by “a the island. Thompson, like Mau, offers not only a body of founding group of just ten or twenty young people.” But knowledge, but a methodological lesson: Different systems then hundreds of pages, and decades, later DNA evidence of knowledge, be they evolutionary biology or Polynesian contradicts the archaeology; the DNA suggests a “much mythology, offer value in how they focus our attention on more genetically diverse” colonizing party ”than anyone what we’re viewing—not just the bird itself, but also what had imagined,” except maybe the Maori storytellers, who it’s carrying. “Vision,” Thompson quotes Nainoa as saying, said so in the first place. At another point, Thompson “Is not so much about just looking, but knowing what to narrates Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 balsa-raft voyage from Peru look for.”

>> SEA PEOPLE: THE PUZZLE OF POLYNESIA. BY CHRISTINA THOMPSON, PUBLISHED BY HARPERCOLLINS. OUT ON 3.12. $29.99.

THOMPSON DISCUSSES THE BOOK AT HARVARD BOOK STORE ON 3.12 AT 7PM. 18

03.07.19 - 03.14.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

THEATER REVIEWS PERFORMING ARTS

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

JIEHAE PARK AND WAI CHING HO IN ENDLINGS. PHOTO BY GRETJEN HELENE

DIVING DEEP: ENDLINGS AT AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER

Miss Saigon had the helicopter. Phantom has the chandelier. And Endlings—a daring and audacious new play by Celine Song—has a water tank.

Partly set on a small, remote South Korean island, three elderly women are the last of their kind: the final three haenyeos, free divers that harvest seafood 65 feet deep without any equipment. They’ve been doing it their

THE UNIMAGINABLE BEAUTY OF ONCE AT SPEAKEASY STAGE

No modern musical captures the essence of tender love quite like Once, the Academy Award-winning sleeper hit film of 2007 that was adapted for the stage in 2012, sweeping that year’s Tony Awards.

It isn’t only the lightning-in-a-bottle romance at the core of Once that has spellbound audiences for over a decade, but also the healing and connective powers of music, both of which are omnipresent in SpeakEasy Stage’s unimaginably beautiful production, which will run through March 30.

Guy (Nile Scott Hawver) is a down-and-out busker-turned-vacuum cleaner repairman who is left heartbroken and with a trunkful of love songs when his girlfriend leaves Dublin for New York to pursue her music

THE LITTLE FOXES AT LYRIC STAGE COMPANY

Lillian Hellman’s thrilling 1939 play about the greed that tears apart a Southern family has been given a firstrate revival at the Lyric Stage Company in a profoundly impressive production directed by Scott Edmiston.

Anne Gottlieb is a forest fire as Regina, a woman willing to do anything—and step over anyone’s dead body—for a chunk of change. It’s a role that was

entire lives, and they’ve become pickled by the salt and the sun. They’ve got no one but each other, and few are as aware of the interminableness of life as these three.

Han Sol (Wai Ching Ho), Go Min (Emily Kuroda), and Sook Ja (Jo Yang) spend their days cursing their terrible lives, regularly wishing for death. They wouldn’t wish their lives on anyone. But Song effectively mixes comedy with just the right amounts of poignancy and fancy to make their stories delightful, captivating, and wholly original.

But Endlings also takes place in New York City where we find Ha Young, a young Korean-Canadian playwright

writing the very play that we are watching. Young is played by Jiehae Park, who is herself a playwright (she wrote peerless, which Company One produced recently), which adds a fascinating layer to all of this.

While Young wonders about why she lives in an overpriced studio apartment with rodents, the three haenyeos wonder why they never moved away from their island while time was on their side. And while the young playwright struggles with how to find success in the white world of the theater without selling her soul and sacrificing her identity, our elderly divers go to sleep alone on the floor of their modest shacks with television as their only company.

It is in this way that Endlings is most successful, but it ultimately goes off the deep end—as many new adventurous works tend to do—and the metatheatrical nature of the play (particularly a too-heavy-handed second act) unravels Song’s more brilliant writing earlier in the play.

Directed by Sammi Cannold, Endlings brims with promise and originality. And even if Jason Sherwood’s must-see set design (the tank!) steals the show, it does so without feeling like a gimmick.

The story of the haenyeos could (and probably should) be its own play. But in thinking about how the play might be better without what I perceived to be the outlandish self-indulgence of the second act, I realized that my white, male opinion of a bold and exciting new work from a thrilling, nonwhite, nonmale playwright is very much not the point. Rather, Endlings is a beautiful theatrical exorcism of some of what has been on Celine Song’s mind: fear of being seen, fear of not belonging, and the courage to exist on her own terms.

ENDLINGS. THROUGH 3.17 AT AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER, 64 BRATTLE ST., CAMBRIDGE. AMERICANREPERTORYTHEATER.ORG

career. Girl (Mackenzie Lesser-Roy) is a Czech woman whose husband left her alone to raise their daughter.

She’s drawn to Guy after hearing him sing on the street and—as fate would have it—she happens to have a vacuum in need of repair.

She’s also a musician—a pianist with the voice of an angel—and she sees great promise in the songs that he’s written. With her help, and the help of the entire community, they set out to make an album of Guy’s songs. Girl is convinced that the songs are going to launch his career and it doesn’t take long before the entire town (and one stubborn bank manager) is on board.

In just two days, Girl brings the heartbroken, depressed Guy back to life; and in just five days, they are totally in love. The trouble is, sometimes love is easier said than done. And there’s the matter of the exes: his in New York and hers ripe for reconciliation.

Paul Melone’s production isn’t only gorgeously staged, but it is infused with infectious heart and an ache that is

impossible to shake. The magnificent ensemble doubles as the orchestra—Steven Ladd Jones deserves a world of praise for his musical direction—and let me be the first to say that Kathy St. George plays a mean tambourine.

SpeakEasy’s Once is that rare beauty where all the elements coalesce into one freakily gorgeous whole (Karen Perlow’s lighting is a particular delight).

The radiant Mackenzie Lesser-Roy brings a disarming gentility to Girl that in many ways makes her the heart of this production. As Guy, Nile Scott Hawver falls short vocally but more than makes up for it with his heartstopping vulnerability. Together, they left me breathless.

Easy to love and hard to forget, SpeakEasy’s Once is the embodiment of everything that we love about the theater and everything we love about love. Just bring tissues, okay?

originated by Tallulah Bankhead and immortalized by Bette Davis, and Gottlieb ably makes the role her own, albeit with an impressive pair of fangs.

One of the best-acted productions in recent memory, this ensemble of actors is the finest assembled in several seasons. Amelia Broome is luminous as Regina’s damaged alcoholic sister, and Cheryl D. Singleton finds unimaginable beauty in the smallest moments as Regina’s maid, Addie. Also impressive are Michael John Ciszewski and Rosa Procaccino, who play two cousins at opposite ends of the morality spectrum. While Procaccino is new to me, Ciszewski is not, and he once again shows

why he’s one of the most promising young actors on the Boston theater scene.

Janie E. Howland has designed the best set I’ve seen on the Lyric’s stage, and with Karen Perlow’s lighting and Dewey Dellay’s original music, this production is gloriously cinematic.

The Little Foxes is that rare classic that shows virtually no signs of age. And with this Edmiston home run, this is as close to a must-see as it gets.

NEWS TO US

ONCE. THROUGH 3.30 AT SPEAKEASY STAGE, 527 TREMONT ST., BOSTON. SPEAKEASYSTAGE.COM

THE LITTLE FOXES. THROUGH 3.17 AT THE LYRIC STAGE, 140 CLARENDON ST., BOSTON. LYRICSTAGE.COM

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

SPONSORED CONTENT FILM

Catching up with the films of Joel Potrykus

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Homework for a film critic works like this: If you miss somebody’s movie the first time around, you really oughta see it before their next one comes out. So while I’ve long meant to acquaint myself with the work made by the Michigan-based filmmaker Joel Potrykus, it was only this past week, motivated by the impending release of his next film Relaxer (2019), that I finally actually did so, watching four of his movies that are currently available online, the 20-minute Coyote (2010) and the features Ape (2012), Buzzard (2015), and The Alchemist Cookbook (2016).

The first three, all of which feature performer Joshua Burge in a lead role, are often referred to collectively as Potrykus’ “Animal Trilogy” and develop their way toward a highly detailed portrait of a very specific kind of lower-middle-class white failson (portrait accomplished, potential realized, in Buzzard), each depicting a young man totally unequipped to do much other than engage with his preferred brands and/or forms of entertainment (there are a great many connections one could draw between Coyote, Ape, and Buzzard, but the most prominent motif is a pair of headphones, which Burge’s character uses in all three to quite literally tune out from the world surrounding him whenever its sensations become too much to bear).

Each of the animal films casts Burge as a black metal enthusiast and social outcast who undergoes a radical transformation leading to a surreal and climactic act of violence that seems to confirm the given character’s ongoing psychological breakdown. In Coyote (shot on Super 8) he plays a squatter who spends his time using drugs (and sometimes dancing), until he becomes a lycanthrope at which point his interests become somewhat different. In Ape (shot digitally, as is Buzzard) the character is an execrable stand-up comedian who accepts a golden (delicious) apple from a dimestore Satan and suddenly finds the will to fight back against his hecklers (meanwhile tree branches sprout from his midsection). And in Buzzard the character, named Marty Jackitansky, is a temp working for about $9/hour at a suburban bank, running cheapskate scams on the side to fund his diet of mass-produced frozen meals and Mountain Dew (food and drink and all forms of consumption are emphasized in the frame, constantly), his plan working out all right until he’s found out by his boss and thus forced on the lam, which eventually leads him all the way to Detroit (where his scams and eccentricities are met with far less patience than they found in the suburbs). The first two works are baldly allegorical in the way that American independent movies far too often are—but with its barely there crime “plot” and its eerily prominent display of consumer products as aesthetic objects, Buzzard lands somewhere far beyond.

Growing perhaps from the Steve Martin posters and Jerry Lewis telethon VHS tapes that adorn the set of the protagonist’s living space in Ape, Buzzard presents a world defined by a nearly complete immersion within the detritus of material culture, represented here by posters of A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, by Marty’s treasured NES Power Glove, by his choices of sustenance (foods bagged, fast, or frozen), and by so much else that’s similarly as-seen-on-TV, basically the whole film textured with objects and materials one could buy at a Walmart at one time or another. Released around the same time as Buzzard back in 2015 was Josh and Ben Safdie’s Heaven Knows What, a movie I found singular in part because its characters (drug-addicted squatters not totally

dissimilar from the person Burge plays in Coyote) spent their time in places like Starbucks, Dominoes, Dunkin’ Donuts, and the like, those franchises’ corporate logos a literal presence over every conversation, not to mention watching over the streets themselves (the Safdies continued this interest in their 2017 feature Good Time, wherein a cathartic soundtrack cue is set off alongside the visual reveal of a White Castle). What Heaven Knows What does for public spaces, Buzzard sort of does for private ones: I cannot recall the last film that so truthfully represented the extent to which so many American living spaces are defined not by the “homey touch” but rather by the display of products to signify allegiances to specific brands and hobbies (you would, perhaps, have to go all the way back to 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and indeed Potrykus’ animal films sometimes feel like the psychhorror flip sides of Judd Apatow’s boy-with-toys-meetsgirl-with-job rom-coms).

Ape partially and Buzzard emphatically depict their lead characters as examples of a masculinity stunted in part due to an overindulgence in one’s preferred comforts. In Buzzard Marty’s first stop on his runaway is a long-fabled symbol of the stunted man, the “parent’s basement,” in this case one belonging to the elders of his coworker Derek, who’s played by Potrykus himself.

Derek has dubbed this space the “party zone,” and it’s adorned with 8-bit video game systems, posters for movies and WWE (the latter one of the rare indications the film is taking place in the 2000s, as for the most part the cultural signifiers are ones that date back to the ’80s and ’90s), and various other possessions that one might reasonably expect to find in the bedroom of a preteen. It says it all about Buzzard that the first major passage in its criminal-on-the-run section plays out like a sleepover held among 12-year-olds; for scene after scene we see Marty and Derek bicker their way through arguments about matters involving Hot Pockets, who’s “being gay” (the slurs of the schoolyard), and what game they’ll play next. Potrykus’ films live off the long take, which are often used to watch Burge alone in his space, like a scene later in Buzzard where he’s seen devouring an entire “$20” plate of spaghetti and meatballs. But in the party zone passage, Potrykus applies his lingering takes and still frames to backand-forth dialogue, in doing so greatly expanding his study of men who seemed to have been raised by household objects. With Derek and Marty, even their recreation is based around consumption, and literally so—at one point Marty lets Bugles run directly into Derek’s mouth via treadmill, in an image that many have noted recalls Space Invaders, yet another brand-name

shout-out to add to the list of them.

Despite the fact that all three films move unwaveringly toward a depiction of traumatic psychological distress (often cutting to black frames in between scenes to suggest disruption, in one of many formal techniques that’s deployed somewhat haphazardly in Ape but with greater precision and purpose in Buzzard), there’s still an extent to which these films’ depiction of bygone pop-cultural signpoints borders on the outright fetishistic anyway. I think, for instance, of a scene from Buzzard where Marty calls his family’s home via a conspicuously extant pay phone, then, at the request of the person on the other side, explains the auxiliary functions available on an old analog television—the scene itself references An American Werewolf in London (1981), which itself is heard playing in a movie theater in a later scene that also references Taxi Driver (1976), and we could go on like this. But when it works, the effect is destabilizing, a properly alienating portrait of the consumer products we spend our lives surrounded by, at those moments when we’re not actually consuming them—and the American cinema, with its unending examples of po-faced product placement, so often fails to see these kinds of products for what they really are, and more importantly for how they really look, just as surely as I was missing out on Potrykus’ movies until a week or so ago.

These depictions of consumer detritus intermingling with eccentric-bordering-on-violent behavior within working- and lower-middle-class living spaces urban, suburban, and rural of course links Potrykus to filmmaker Harmony Korine, with the former even citing the latter’s Gummo (1997) as a significant influence. For this writer so much of Potrykus’ sense of mise-en-scene recalls a somewhat famous compliment paid to Korine by fellow filmmaker Werner Herzog, who once remarked about Gummo: “There’s the scene where the kid in the bathtub drops his chocolate bar into the dirty water and just behind him there’s a piece of fried bacon stuck to the wall with Scotch tape. This is the entertainment of the future.”

Buzzard, with its dirty, taped-up form, is a whole film of those bacon strips, the very future that Herzog foretold.

>> COYOTE AND MANY OF POTRYKUS’ OTHER EARLY WORKS CAN BE FOUND ON HIS VIMEO PAGE (VIMEO.COM/USER8163886).

>> APE, BUZZARD, AND THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK ARE CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ON VOD SERVICES AND STREAMING PLATFORMS, INCLUDING BIT TORRENT (NOW.BT.CO), WHERE EACH CAN BE PURCHASED ON A PAY-WHAT-YOU-WANT BASIS (MINIMUM PRICE PER FILM RANGES FROM $1-5). >> RELAXER IS SCHEDULED FOR A LIMITED THEATRICAL RELEASE BEGINNING LATER THIS MONTH AND IS LIKELY TO PLAY IN THE BOSTON AREA SOMETIME THIS SPRING. 20

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LOADED QUESTION SAVAGE LOVE

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

Let’s say my kink is edging and I edge myself for a few days leading up to a date. Is it my responsibility to tell my potential partner? There are a few variables here that are important to note. This is a first/Tinder date, and it’s just a coffee date, BUT she and I have talked about our expectations and there will likely be a physical aspect in whatever potential relationship may ensue. I understand that it’s never cool to involve someone in your kink without their consent, but what are the rules here? On one hand, if I don’t divulge this information, I could see how my production of an unexpectedly large amount of ejaculate could be upsetting, depending on the circumstances/ activity. But on the other hand, at least some amount of come is expected, right? If I randomly had massive loads every single time through no effort of my own, would I be responsible for letting a partner know? Perhaps it would be the polite thing to do.

I guess I’d feel comfortable saying, “Hey, by the way, I produce very large loads,” if sex was imminent. But when you add the kink factor into the mix, I think something like that should be talked about before sex is “imminent.” So what responsibility do I have to divulge this information? And if I do have a responsibility to divulge this, when would be the appropriate time to bring it up? I feel like it could be sexy to be so open about a taboo, given that we’ve already discussed the desire for a physical aspect to the relationship. But at what point between sex being “not off-limits” and “my parts are going to be interacting with your parts as soon as our clothes are off” is the right moment to disclose my kink?

What Ought One Do? Let’s say… you blow that load. I can’t imagine your new friend will be shocked.

Blowing loads, after all, is what men do* with their penises**, WOOD, and most people who are attracted to men are aware of this fact. And anyone who’s slept with two or more men is aware that some men blow bigger loads than others. Volume varies.

Volumes vary between men, and the volume of an individual man’s loads can vary naturally or as the direct result of an intentional intervention, like edging.

Backing up for a second: Edging entails bringing yourself or being brought to the edge of coming over and over again. It’s about getting yourself or someone else as close as you can to the “point of orgasmic inevitability” without going over. Draw out the buildup to a single orgasm for hours or days—by edging yourself or being edged by someone else—and the resulting load will be larger than normal for the edged individual. But even so, an edged dude’s load can still be smaller than the load of a guy who just naturally produces more ejaculate.

And in answer to your question, WOOD, no, I don’t think there’s a pressing need to disclose your kink to your date. If it gets sexual, she’s going to expect you to produce ejaculate at some point. And even if the load you wind up blowing is enormous, you’re not going to drown her or wash out her IUD. Frankly, WOOD, your letter reads like you got baked out of your mind and sat up half the night trying to come up with an excuse to tell this woman about your notthat-kinky kink and “I should tell her as a courtesy” was the best you could do.

If you want to tell her, go ahead and tell her. But since there’s no need to tell her that you sometimes like to stroke for a bit without climaxing, there’s a strong chance she’ll react negatively to your “courtesy” disclosure. Even if she’s made it clear there could be “a physical aspect in whatever potential relationship may ensue”—even if that’s not just dickful thinking on your part—she’s going to be scrutinizing you for signs that you aren’t someone she wants to get naked with. She’ll be looking for red flags at your first face-to-face meeting, and if you come across like a creep with piss-poor judgment—and a needless conversation about how much ejaculate you produce and why you produce so much ejaculate will definitely come across as creepy—then she may decide not to ensue with you.

RUTHERFORD

BY DON KUSS DONKUSS@DIGBOSTON.COM

On the Lovecast, we got punked!: Listen at savagelovecast.com.

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“SHE CAUGHT ME FOOLIN’ AROUND WITH A COMFORTER”

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

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OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

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