DigBoston 4.18.19

DIGBOSTON.COM 04.18.19 - 04.25.19

BEER

VS

WEED

SPOILER: IT’S A TIE

EARTH DAY: EXTINCTION REBELLION CRITICIZES GLOBE CLIMATE COVERAGE

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ON THE COVER

HONESTLY, ‘BEER VS. WEED’ WAS ADMITTEDLY WHAT US JOURNALISM PROFESSIONALS OFTEN CALL A ‘HEADLINE WITHOUT A STORY.’ NEVERTHELESS, WE RAN WITH IT AND HAD SOME FUN, AND PLAN ON DOING A FOLLOW-UP NEXT YEAR WHEN THERE’S ENOUGH MASS LEGAL CANNABIS MARKET DATA TO COMPARE TO BEER SALES. UNTIL THEN, DRINK/SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM. ©2019 DIGBOSTON IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION CAN BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. ONE COPY OF DIGBOSTON IS AVAILABLE FREE TO MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

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FLAT EARTH DAY

It happens every year. The Boston Marathon, Earth Day, and 4/20 all fall on roughly the same week, and our team here at the Dig is tasked with figuring out how to cover all of these items at once. Which we want to do, since cannabis, our city, and this planet are things that we care about.

I’m not asking for pity. It’s hardly daunting for us to address these things, but rather something that we actually enjoy. Nevertheless, as an added complication this year, we also added alcohol into the mix, hence the whole beer vs. weed concept.

Meanwhile, Jason Pramas penned his column for the week on the environment and complemented it with a guest op-ed from a climate justice group on the front lines, and just like that most of the mid-April bases are covered (regarding the Marathon, we are going to wait until next year or perhaps even 2021 to reexamine notes and folders from the 2013 bombing of the finish line, a story that still warrants hundreds if not thousands of hours of additional intense reporting).

In preparing my annual column on this content conundrum, it also dawned on me that there is quite a bit connecting weed and Earth Day; namely, the rubes who want to tear them down. Prohibitionists are basically the cannabis equivalent to climate change deniers—from jackasses like Mass Governor Charlie Baker, whose crusade against marijuanaimpaired drivers is more of a response to chatter than to data, to the reefer-mad bipartisan pair out of Worcester pushing a bill that aims to crack down on the black market and—brace yourself for this one— disperse some of the fines levied to the state’s social equity fund. Which, apparently unbeknownst to the bill’s sponsors, was put in place to help communities where police bust down doors for dime bags.

How the hell can we trust politicians who still think there’s something wrong with weed? Despite all of the available information that’s out there?

And if they can’t be trusted on the simple issue of cannabis, how can we trust them to do the right thing about the damn environment? Most Mass pols may not sound as insanely idiotic as the antiintellectuals on Fox News who, last week for example, doubted the authenticity of NASA’s black hole image.

Nonetheless, they’re clearly prone to conspiratorial thinking. Which scares the shit out of me.

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

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NEWS US SORTING IT OUT FEATURE FOLLOW-UP

Will Boston set a new regional precedent and finally pay recycling workers a living wage?

BY COLE ROSENGREN For the first time in the city’s history, Boston’s living wage ordinance might finally get applied to low-paid workers sorting the city’s recycling—but only sometimes.

Boston is currently negotiating a new five-year contract with Casella Waste Systems, a publicly traded regional agglomerate that runs a major facility in Charlestown. The agreement could cost $6.16 million per year, a steep jump from past prices that has given officials a case of sticker shock, especially since Casella was the only company that submitted a bid. Those high numbers have in some ways overshadowed the wage question for those close to the negotiations; nevertheless, Boston has a fresh chance to address one of the region’s least-known and most vexing labor loopholes for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Casella has maintained it should be exempt from the landmark living wage law, which in Boston calls for any employees working on municipal contracts of a certain size to be paid at least $14.82 per hour (rising to $15.31 later this year). Cambridge, Somerville, and others have their own living wage rates, but have also never applied them to Casella. As uncovered in a 2018 special investigation by DigBoston and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, the company even helped craft the legal argument that some Massachusetts cities have used to give it a pass. Meanwhile, workers handling everything people toss in their recycling bins—a repetitive, high-risk job—are usually making minimum wage or just above.

With the administration of Mayor Marty Walsh set to unveil a new “zero waste” plan soon, labor and environmental advocates in the Zero Waste Boston (ZWB) coalition have grown increasingly adamant this issue be addressed as part of the city’s lofty equity goals.

Despite the topic coming up repeatedly at Zero Waste Advisory Committee meetings, officials have refused to show their hand. When pressed by coalition members during a December meeting, Chief of Streets Chris Osgood said the city had “a great understanding and commitment to ensuring that we have good labor practices in all of the work that we do,” and noted that Walsh “values” the spirit of the living wage ordinance.

The mayor-appointed Living Wage Advisory Committee suggested the city stop its pattern of exempting the recycling contract, along with other recommendations, back in the summer of 2018. That memo is still under review and budgetary analysis as of publication, but the inclusion of one simple sentence in a set of February bid documents marked a seemingly crucial shift: “This contract requires that all vendors comply with Boston’s Living Wage Ordinance.”

Casella’s opposition and successful exemptions to these living wage laws was once the source of ongoing press coverage, mayoral hand-wringing, and supportive protests from organized labor during the early 2000s.

Since then, the issue has languished almost completely outside of public view.

Now, after more than a decade of the status quo, Casella has finally changed course. On Feb. 21, when bids were opened at Boston City Hall, it was revealed the company put in two options—one with the living wage, one without. The difference was $10 per ton of recycling (about $385,000 extra per year) in expense for the city.

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Given that Casella’s price was already so much higher than usual due to major changes in global scrap commodity markets, and negotiations remain ongoing, neither the company nor the city would comment for this story.

This left many unanswered questions about whether either had actually changed their stance on if the contract qualified under the living wage ordinance. It was also unknown what Casella’s new pay scale would mean for workers. But after a protracted public records process, DigBoston obtained the (mostly unredacted) bid documents. Among the highlights:

• Based on the fact that Boston’s city-managed recycling comprises about 20% of the volume showing up at the Charlestown material recovery facility (MRF), “Casella proposes to pay all employees at the MRF the City of Boston Living Wage for 20% of the time worked …”

• Of the 163 employees working at the facility, Casella reported 124 were making between the state minimum of $12 and $14.82. Out of that low-paid bunch there were 149 minorities, 69 temporary employees, 56 Boston residents, and 54 women.

• Despite including the higher-priced option to comply, Casella still included a separate affidavit requesting an exemption from the ordinance with its traditional rationale: “Casella Recycling, LLC, contends that the contract for the receipt of recyclables from the City of Boston is a purchase of goods contract … As such, the relationship between Casella as the receiver of goods, and the City of Boston as the provider of goods, exempts the contract …”

paid by public dollars under the City contract, not just a subset, as Casella seems inclined to do.”

It’s possible that Boston could just accept Casella’s higher bid, let the workers get paid more during part of the week, and never address the underlying question.

But it won’t be the last time Casella has to face the living wage question, and setting a half-measure precedent could further complicate things for other cities.

Cambridge’s recycling contract with Casella is up next year. Somerville’s is up the year after that. Both are also expecting much higher costs overall, while dealing with growing pressure from local officials to sort out the wage issue. Asked how Cambridge might respond if Boston’s final contract did include a living wage rate for Casella workers, the city declined to take a stance.

“It is unlikely that Boston’s decisions will influence the City of Cambridge’s decisions regarding how best to comply with applicable statutes,” wrote spokesperson Lee Gianetti.

Somerville leaders, including Mayor Joe Curtatone and multiple city councilors, have been more vocal about their interest in fixing this. Asked for its take, the city doubled down while also looking to Boston for the first move.

“Somerville is still intent on pursuing a living wage for recycling workers when we rebid that contract, and we have reached out to neighboring municipalities to discuss this and the need for the region to join together in this effort,” spokesperson Denise Taylor wrote. “We need other cities and towns to cover their share of that increase by also requiring a living wage. So it’s great news that Boston is considering this. If they lead the way, it would be much more feasible for Somerville and other communities to establish similar living wage requirements.”

Boston is expected to finalize its new recycling contract as early as this month.

This article was produced by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. To see more media like this visit Based on this parallel approach, Casella’s seeming binjonline.org, and you can support independent local change of heart strikes some as hollow. reporting by contributing at givetobinj.org. “[L]et’s be clear: this is not a spontaneous act of generosity,” said Richard Juang, an attorney with ZWB member Alternatives for Community & Environment, in a statement. “Application of the living wage to the City’s recycling contract is a legal requirement.

Recycling is a service and the recycling contract for the City qualifies as a contract for services subject to the living wage ordinance.

Casella would not be eligible for the contract if it were not providing recycling as a service. Casella is disingenuous when it ignores that simple fact.

And the living wage should PHOTO BY DEREK KOUYOUMJIAN be applied to all the workers

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A WORD ABOUT RICH KIDS IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT APPARENT HORIZON

(And in oppositional politics in general)

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS For Earth Day, I’d like to write in brief about an internal dilemma the environmental movement is facing. Because if activist campaigns aimed at mitigating or stopping global warming have been failing to effect the necessary political, economic, social, and cultural changes toward that goal—as I think they have thus far—it’s important to talk about why that might be the case. And as a person who has been in and around the movement in question for over 35 years, there is one causal factor that springs to mind that could stand far more discussion by environmentalists: the fact that lots of children of privilege are attracted to environmental causes.

Which is as it should be, on one level. Especially in a university city like Boston where many wealthy people come to be educated. Such scions of the ruling class should absolutely be as concerned about global warming as anyone else. But on another level, once young people with money and connections get involved in oppositional activist campaigns, they tend to move to replicate class hierarchy in miniature … consciously or unconsciously.

Placing themselves at the apex of any available organizational pyramid. Which is a serious problem.

These are people who are “born in the purple.” Who have been trained to rule. From the first moment of Montessori pre-K. Through years of exclusive boarding schools (or public schools in wealthy suburbs like Weston or Sudbury or Concord). And ultimately at Ivy League universities like Harvard or other elite private universities like MIT and Tufts.

Many have real skills that any good social movement needs. But just as capital tends to distort political systems, it also distorts political activism—left, right, or center. When individuals with money and strong personal networks with connections to all kinds of experts and resources decide to do something—in activism as in

the other areas of their lives—they have the resources to do it. Whether it is well thought out or not. Whether it is the best move or not. It happens because they can make it happen. Be the project in question the launch of some new “environmentally conscious” juice box; or, to my point, a brand new environmental organization with staff, an office, and access to major media.

Even if wealthy young people don’t start their own groups, they can more easily maneuver to leap into the leadership of existing groups because of their money and connections.

Add to this the tendency of rich people to “flock together” like any other network and it should become apparent why I’m concerned about the effects of significant numbers of young people of means entering the environmental movement and quickly both setting its agenda and providing many of its most visible figures.

Who then stay on in top staff and board positions for the rest of their working lives (taking jobs that people from less gilded backgrounds could use). Which does not exactly provide a welcoming space for the majority of working people that have remained on the periphery of an activist scene that does not look like them or anyone they know. Precisely when the campaigns to stop global warming need to become an unstoppable societal force— with working people participating in vast numbers.

There’s no “cure” for this problem in any social movement that aspires to be majoritarian—as the environmental movement certainly does. Rich young activists can and should join up. But there are a few steps that wealthy people can take to ensure that their involvement doesn’t create more predicaments than it solves. And here they are in no particular order: 1) Join organizations that were not started by wealthy

people like yourself. Participate in heterogeneous networks and learn to be a good team player in them.

2) Give those organizations access to your money and connections without insisting upon taking a leadership role. And don’t hide the fact of your wealth.

3) Work in the trenches… for a good long while. If you emerge as a leader of one or more organizations based on track record and merit, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too. Go with the flow. Allow organic leadership to flower around you. Whether you end up being a leader or a foot soldier.

4) Don’t have a bifurcated existence—being an activist part of the time, and a typical rich person with a fat investment portfolio and ruling class interests the rest of the time. Choose sides. If you want to side with humanity, then put yourself and all your resources in its service.

If you want to make money like your extended family, and damn the consequences, then just own that and be an enemy of humanity.

Then at least the rest of us will know where you stand.

Apparent Horizon—winner of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2018 Best Political Column award—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s executive director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston.

Copyright 2019 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

GLOBAL WARMING NEEDS FRONT PAGE COVERAGE OPINION

Extinction Rebellion urges the Boston Globe to declare climate emergency

BY NICK BAIN, NIELS BURGER, GALEN HALL, MOLLY NIEDBALA, AND DAVID ST. GERMAIN For society to undergo the drastic, transformational change required to save our species, respected media like the Boston Globe should lead in communicating the existential risks of climate damage. The Extinction Rebellion is an international mobilization whose first demand is that governments and media tell the truth about the climate emergency.

Today, more than one in three people in the Boston Metro area remain unaware of the basic fact that humans are causing global warming. Our house is on fire; the media’s first challenge is simply to wake everyone up to this fact. The greater challenge lies in fully communicating how many lives and species we have already lost through inaction, and in accurately conveying the subtle scientific concepts that explain why our trajectory puts life and humanity at risk.

The truth is that governments’ long-standing inaction and obstruction on the climate crisis is potentially the most far-reaching human rights abuse ever committed.

Reporting on this crime requires courage to “expose the truth, even in defiance of powerful interests.” This goal, from the Boston Globe’s own mission statement, is one that the paper’s history lives up to. The Globe has exposed horrific human rights abuses, from violence against journalists to the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church.

Yet there is more the Globe can do to communicate the urgency of the existential challenge we face. We read poignant columns by Globe staff who understand 6

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and grieve for the state of our struggling world, and wonder why the climate emergency is not front page news every single day. New developments in the climate crisis deserve more attention than our state’s burgeoning marijuana industry. The narrative of this crisis— complete with corrupt politicians and shadowy networks obstructing progress—is one that the Globe’s readers want and need to hear.

The Boston Globe should devote more space and effort toward informing the public of the urgency of the ecological crisis which will shape the future of our commonwealth. Their already-impressive coverage, by reporters like David Abel and Beth Daley, deserves more prominence. Now is not the time to bury the lede by treating climate change as just another issue in today’s current events.

Extinction Rebellion Massachusetts has sent the Globe several requests to meet with Editor Brian McGrory and discuss how the Globe’s editorial policy and priorities can inform the public at the scale required. Since we have heard no response yet, we will present a call to action to the Globe in person on Wednesday [Editor’s note: April 17, as this issue of DigBoston hits the streets].

We do not blame the Globe for shortcomings that are pervasive in much of the media and government.

Because of the systemic nature of the climate and ecological crises, we need systemic change to address them. However, systemic change only comes when people are brave enough to push for it, as the Globe has done

before. For the launch of the International Rebellion this week, chapters around the world are asking their local media to measure up to what the truth demands.

We urge the Globe to lead this effort and treat this emergency as the cover story it is.

That said, given the urgency of this crisis, we cannot rely solely on traditional media to get the truth out. In the words of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg, “we have not come here to beg.” We are giving public talks around Massachusetts to communicate the scientific facts, the risks we face, as well as opportunities to act. You can hear one such talk at 7pm on Friday April 19 at the Boston Community Church.

We invite you, and the Boston Globe, to join us.

This article uses statistics from the Yale Climate Opinion Map, December 2018.

The Extinction Rebellion is an international mobilization for non-violent civil disobedience against continuing inaction on the climate emergency. The movement began in London in November 2018, and has since sprung up all over the world with over 200 chapters participating in the launch of the International Rebellion on April 15. More information about the Massachusetts chapter available on our website at xrmass.org.

The authors are members of Extinction Rebellion Massachusetts.

THE SUMMIT: PART II SOMERVILLE

Residents vent on issues related to Union Square and other development

BY BOSTON INSTITUTE FOR NONPROFIT JOURNALISM @BINJREPORTS As a major initiative for 2019, the team at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), in collaboration with partners at DigBoston, Somerville Media Center (SMC), and various other outlets, is focusing on identifying and reporting critical stories in the City of Somerville.

To that end, we have been leading journalism workshops at SMC, including some with high school students, and in February BINJ turned out more than 100 Somerville residents and active community members to the ONCE ballroom on Highland Ave to converse with area journalists about issues they think need more coverage. The information these participants provided has already seeded articles and will continue to bear fruit over the coming months.

In addition to our follow-ups, we have transcribed all of the presentations given at ONCE. It’s a lot to chew on, so for the purpose of reporting back we parsed sentiments of the participating Somervillians into the following categories (many of which overlap at multiple intersections):

• Neighborhoods, transit, and accessibility • Union Square and other development • Low-income residents and affordable housing • Immigrant communities • Trees and the environment • Arts, artists, and artisans In addition to reports that stem from the February meetup, over the coming weeks we will also publish words and ideas that stood out at the summit. This week, we get into excerpts from various testimonies related to Union Square and other development.

Somerville. This development has fueled runaway real estate prices so that 17.8% of Somerville renters pay 50% or more of their income on rent.

There has been and there continues to be wonderful work around affordable housing, but there has not been nearly enough around market intervention. We need to stop the raging locomotive that is running us down. This is not a story, this is an investigative reporting series.

Ann Camara, Union Square Neighborhood Council We’re working on everything … Any project that you have, come bring it to us, we will help you and we need your input and we need your help. We’re working with development for affordable, really affordable housing and jobs and training, sustainability, green space. I am also a member of Union United; if you need a voice, please join Union United. It’s someplace that you can have a voice, it’s organized and it fights for the right things.

Matt Lavallee, Somerville Free Press I’ve been doing a deep dive into [the] campaign finances of our mayor, Joe Curtatone. I basically downloaded the whole database of contributions to [the] Curtatone campaign since 2010, which is something that anybody can get from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, but the data that’s in it is wicked sloppy.

So I’ve been, for the last month or so, looking through to find all the connections between different people and parties [and to] fix everybody’s misspellings of their own names in there. To find out who is whose mother in law … there are a lot of cases where an executive from some company or another will give $1,000 to the mayor, and then several people with the same name and address will

also give a lot of money to the mayor on the same day.

Which is not illegal, but it does make you wonder.

There’s two reasons you might want this information—one of them is if you don’t care about campaign finance but you are in the market for an out-of-town, well-moneyed developer of real estate, a management company for apartments, somebody who owns a lot of real estate around town. If you’re interested in some heavy equipment rentals, somebody to put up a fence, construction firms of all sorts.

Another reason is if you think that the office of the mayor and boards appointed by the mayor are people in a unique position of power to mediate the relationship between for-profit companies and developers [and to build the] political environment in which we live in the city, you might be really interested in who it is that sees fit to give this mayor [thousands of] dollars a year to run generally with no opponent.

A Somerville Community Summit Follow-Up Meeting will be held on Saturday, April 27 from 12 - 2pm at the Somerville Media Center, 90 Union Square, Somerville. Hosted by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, DigBoston, and the Somerville Media Center. For more information, go to: facebook.com/ events/583649248783693/.

Transcription by Spencer Walter.

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

Bill Cavellini, Union Square Neighborhood Council One-point-five billion dollars.

Fifteen acres.

Two-million four-hundred thousand square feet. Over 15 years. It deserves some coverage. It’s gotten some, it needs some more. I’m talking about Union Square redevelopment.

I’m the co-chair of the Union Square Neighborhood Council, but my original involvement was through Union United. Which is a coalition of organizations, trade unions, and neighborhood groups. But the primary group were the Welcome Project, [Community Action Agency of Somerville], and the Somerville Community Corporation.

Union United’s been in existence for five years; we have been in the street as much as we have been in the halls of decision-making and we appreciate the coverage that we’ve gotten.

We are in the midst of negotiations with a developer from out of town, from Chicago, that stands to make millions of dollars of profit. It’s time for Somerville to get a piece of the pie. Jobs, housing that’s affordable to long term residents. We’re tired of families having to leave.

These are the stories that should be told. The individual ones and the group ones.

We’re tired of families having to leave. These are the stories that should be told.

Elaine Koury, Somerville resident Somerville is the victim of a hostile takeover by developers … whose motive obviously is to make money.

They are changing the face of our town.

The mayor still invites development and says, every chance he gets, that if you want to build, come to

RENDITION OF PROPOSED UNION SQUARE DEVELOPMENT VIA CITY OF SOMERVILLE UNION SQUARE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAN. NEWS TO US

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AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE DIG: EPISODE 5 FEATURE

Fighting for tattoos and weed in the Combat Zone

BY BARRY THOMPSON Nowadays when someone calls themselves a “libertarian,” what they actually mean is “anti-semitic conspiracy theorist.” As etymological developments go, this one’s particularly unfortunate. During Prince W.’s first term, libertarianism meant a healthy distrust of authority and an opposition to superfluous laws. Basically, when someone called themselves a “libertarian,” they were really more of a “stoner” sort.

The early Dig never declared itself ideologically aligned in any official capacity, but they sure did publish a lot of articles about weed.

Glowing green the proper way GRAHAM WILSON (sales manager): We “mostly wrote about weed.” That was a bit of criticism that I think was a bit overblown, but there were certain things we harped on, and marijuana prohibition was one. In 1999, tattoos were illegal in Massachusetts, and we harped on that shit constantly. Also gay marriage, gay rights—all these things that back in ’99—weren’t making mainstream media.

I’m not saying the Phoenix wasn’t covering all that, but because we had a smaller book, the editorial we did kind of stood out more.

J. BENNETT (music editor): At the time, tattoos were illegal in Massachusetts. Not to have, but to administer.

The parallel street behind the Kingston Street building in Chinatown—literally, almost directly behind the Weekly Dig office—there was a tattoo artist who lived there. He had a studio set up in his loft, and not only did he tattoo there, but he had it set up so other tattoo artists from other parts of New England and even some New York guys came through there. I actually left work a couple times to go get tattooed.

CRAIG KAPILOW (associate editor): Joe was particularly passionate about legalizing marijuana and passing tattoo legalization, and that’s probably the biggest piece of his legacy from the Dig. It was a really proud moment when the tattooing ban was lifted in 2000.

JOE BONNI (EiC): I was minimally involved in the tattoo legalization movement. That was mostly tattoo artists. I gave it a voice when I could. I helped organize based on what I knew from the marijuana movement, but they did most of the work. And now I know tattooists who are on PTAs instead of working in the underground, and that changes your local dialogue.

That’s the kind of movement I was interested in. If you can incorporate more people into a community, then you turn all these marginalized voices into a constant and accepted component of democratic discourses, like your PTA. MATT KING (classifieds manager): I started out doing regular advertising, and then classifieds, trying to beef up the ad section. I was looking at the Phoenix and they had all this adult stuff. I said, “Hey [publisher] Jeff 8

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[Lawrence], why don’t we have an adult section?” He said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you do that?” So I started doing that, and kind of got carried away for a while.

BONNI: Jeff and I had constantly evolving opinions on this. Literally, prostitutes and their pimps came in and paid Matt King on the spot, and that was a great cash flow scenario, because a lot of advertisers didn’t pay bills on time and the biggest payers often paid in 30 or 60day cycles that didn’t match our bills. The Phoenix had already established escort ads as a monster money maker for indie press in Boston, so we followed that and that led to some ladies showing up at parties. We were in the Combat Zone for fuck’s sake.

KING: Jeff was pretty good at getting people to do events. Sometimes you have an event and nobody goes.

These were all well-attended, good parties. That’s what I think about when I think about the early days of the Dig, and that’s the reason why I was willing to do such a shit job calling up prostitutes all day, hitting them up for money. The culture was there, there was crazy music playing every day, there was stuff to do at night. You couldn’t smoke a cigarette at your desk, but you could smoke weed if you wanted.

BONNI: Our office was shared for a while by a guy named Trey Helliwell, who was tragically murdered in 2001. He had a management company, and he would throw these huge parties—one fuckin‘ drink parties, like cosmos, all fuckin‘ night. But he would also bring up absinthe that he and his crew made down in New Orleans. I learned how to drink absinthe the proper way, over sugar.

JEFF LAWRENCE (publisher): It was psychotropic. It was insane. Shit glowed. Literally glowed green. Would change anybody’s disposition.

BONNI: Local bands would play, and there’d be hundreds of people there, and … I mean, the Phoenix couldn’t pull this off. They could rent out Lansdowne Street and bring in the biggest bands on earth, but having a couple local bands with a couple hundred people who loved the scene, wanted to hang out, drink some absinthe, and we’ve got this big warehouse space … y’know?

LAWRENCE: I remember Trey at the end of a party made an announcement to the rest of us, saying, “Like, so, I had four pounds of weed stuffed in cowboy boots.

And they’re gone.” We looked everywhere in the loft.

And he was like, “Y’know what? Fuck it.” Then we did the afterparty at J.J. Foley’s on Kingston Street, and I went back to the loft. It’s like 3:30 or 4 in the morning, and I’m mopping. I move the table, and there are the fucking cowboy boots. I remember calling Trey and he was like, “That’s cool.” I was like, “I just found four pounds of your fucking weed, and that’s all you can say?” He says, “Yeah, I wrote it off.”

In the next episode: Berklee College of Music’s internship program cuts ties with the Dig under undetermined circumstances, the Kingston Street era comes to an abrupt conclusion, and way too many Dig staffers see their editor’s bare bum bum.

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COINING ‘SACKIE’ TALKING JOINTS MEMO

Like a packie, but for cannabis. Get it?

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

Before getting to the business of the day, it’s critical to trace over relevant history. Specifically, the history of the term “package store,” or “packie” (or, less preferably, “packy”).

As Robert F. Moss, author of “Southern Spirits: 400 Years of Drinking in the American South,” writes, and as other seemingly legitimate historians largely agree with, the term—often used in “the Carolinas and New England”—did not come from states “not wanting their citizens to be seen carrying disreputable liquor bottles on the street” and mandating “that liquor stores sell all their goods in brown paper bags—that is, in packages.” “This derivation,” Moss writes, “is based upon the method of historical research I like to call ‘just making stuff up.’”

As for the actual origin, Moss continues about a “South Carolina dispensary, an early and unique experiment in state-controlled sales of alcoholic beverages”: Under the Dispensary system, only the state government could sell alcohol in South Carolina. A “dispenser” was established in the seat of each county, and each county dispenser purchased liquor from the central dispensary in Columbia. All the saloons, hotel bars, and retail liquor stores had to close their doors.

When the Dispensary law went into effect in 1893, the only entity in South Carolina that could legally purchase barrels of whiskey and package it in bottles for sale was the state government. Former liquor retailers and saloonkeepers tried every dodge they could think of to skirt the law … One possibility they seized upon was a U.S. Supreme Court decision … Leisy v. Hardin (1890) [in which] the court had held that no state could confiscate property that Congress recognized as being legally imported into that state.

Gus Leisy & Co., an Illinois brewery, had shipped a load of beer in barrels and bottles to Keokuk, Iowa—a dry state—sealed with metallic IRS seals. After the city marshal seized the beer, Leisy sued to get their confiscated property back. Because Federal law at the time did not ban the importation of alcohol into a state, the Court ruled, as long as the beer was still in its “original package” it was legal and could not be confiscated.

E’S DAN SAVAG

IVAL FILM FEST

May 4th COLUMBUS THEATRE, PROVIDENCE T I C K E T S AT H U M P FI L M FE S T.C O M

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And so it was. Now for my proposal …

At this point, Massachusetts has a chance to make a serious mark on legal cannabis culture. Sure, states out west have a head start, but having the first recreational shops on the entire East Coast still puts us in a seriously prime position to leave lasting marks. The Commonwealth’s Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) hopes to set replicable standards on the regulatory front and, despite blunders that include taking too long to approve businesses, may prevail in that way to a degree. As for me, while I’m always pushing to make some kind of an impact in the cannabis media space, my first priority is to put “sackie” on the map. That’s right, sackie. Or sacky. Take your pick.

That’s what I am calling legal weed dispensaries from now on. I’ve thought a lot about this and considered other options such as “bakery,” and this one seems to have the most potential. I’m sure that some people will find the term a bit testicular, but I’m sure that anyone who is mature enough to meet a guy named Dick and not immediately laugh out loud can handle it.

For official backstory, we need something a little bit less obvious than it’s shorthand for a “sack of weed,” since that’s how monikers that stand the test of time tend to work. People will always think it comes from that, which is okay, but it’s far more interesting for the origin to be, for example, that the lines were so long outside of the first legal shops that customers had to bring their own lunches. In a sack. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Listen, I’m quite aware that the best way to ensure that people don’t use a nickname is to suggest one in the first place, like George Costanza’s attempt to be called T-Bone. But I couldn’t resist. It’s early for the industry, especially around here, and the concrete on the sidewalk is still wet.

You can back me or sack me, but I’m going with—hell, I’m going to the sackie.

SACK SHACK

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“HANDSOME JOHNNY” ROSELLI

MAFIA SPIES FEATURE

Johnny Roselli was one of two top gangsters recruited by the CIA to try and kill Fidel Castro.

But Roselli had a life-long secret that this bold assassination plot threatened to reveal.

BY THOMAS MAIER Johnny Roselli spent most of his life in Hollywood. With both shrewdness and force, he pushed the Chicago mob’s interests in movies, nightclubs and labor unions.

Sam Giancana, his biggest pal in the Chicago Mafia organization known as The Outfit, marveled at how Johnny fit in with the showbiz crowd “quicker than you could hum a few bars of ‘Anything Goes’.”

In this land of make-believe, no one had more to hide than Roselli, a man of many secrets and identities.

He was born Filippo Sacco in Esperia Italy on July 4, 1905. With his mother Maria, he came to America six years later – his entry apparently illegal, so that he worried all his life about being deported. They joined his father Vincenzo already working as a shoemaker in Boston’s North End, with its many Italian immigrants.

Young Johnny strove to be accepted as an American.

“I stopped talking Italian because of the beatings I received in school,” he remembered.

A life of crime seemed the fastest method of becoming rich in a country that venerated millionaires.

“When Christ died on the cross, the closest man to him was a thief, and that’s good enough for me,” he proclaimed. During Prohibition, Roselli relied on bootlegging to raise himself above a grifter.“I was a young fellow with very little education,” he later testified. “Just buying and selling a little liquor here and there, trying to do anything I possibly can to make a living.”

Violence became part of this mix. FBI records 14

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indicate Roselli, under the name Philip Sacco, was charged with larceny and selling heroin. He reportedly killed the informant who implicated him before fleeing Boston. Sacco landed in Chicago, taking on a new name and identity. His new last name was inspired from a book mentioning Cosimo Rosselli, a 15-century Italian painter, who helped decorate the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.

Johnny’s choice of pseudonym begged a question: What form of devotion or delusion motivates a gangster to adopt the surname of an artist known for painting scenes of the Nativity and The Last Supper?

Or did Roselli simply recast himself the way Hollywood picked out stage names like John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe or Cary Grant?

Whatever personal insights this identity change might suggest, Roselli took care to hide his origins. No questions about his past were tolerated. He forged birth records to make it appear he’d been born in the Windy City. Over time, he’d use other aliases, including spelling variations of Roselli with a double “s”, to cover his tracks.

Yet no matter how carefully Roselli masked himself in stylish clothes and ill-gotten wealth, scrubbed away any hint of an accent in his voice, the fear of being found out – exposed as an illegal immigrant without proper papers—never left him.

In Depression era Chicago, Roselli became a soldier in the Capone gang and quickly a driver for the boss

himself. After a bout of tuberculosis, Johnny was sent to the warmer climate of Los Angeles, as the Chicago gang’s shakedown artist in the burgeoning movie industry. Roselli reported to local Mafia boss Jack Dragna but he never lost touch with his original sponsors, who got a piece of all his deals.

In Hollywood, Johnny proved a natural. He dealt with producers and film executives, accustomed to fakery and assumed names, who knew that behind his slick ingratiating demeanor was a well-dressed killer.

“You either click with people or you don’t,” Roselli explained. “The secret is not to look in their eyes. You pick a spot on their forehead and zero in. That way you don’t blink, you don’t move. It intimidates the hell out of them.”

Along swanky Rodeo Drive in May 1966, on his way to the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, Roselli remained discreet, aware that the FBI was still tailing him, keeping track of every move. Wise guys and other associates who wished to discuss business with Roselli usually received an advance preparatory phone call.

“Shamus, here,” said the telephone voice, clearly Johnny’s. “Call at one o’clock.”

Later at that precise time, the business partner would reach Roselli on a special private telephone that Johnny had access to at the Friars Club.

Similarly, when Florida don Santo Trafficante Jr. came to town with his wife, Johnny made sure their dinner together wasn’t interrupted. He brought along

a private eye to look out for any signs of snooping federal agents.

Given all his precautions, Roselli must have been shocked around noon on May 5, when two men abruptly approached him at the corner of Rodeo and Brighton Way. The two men identified themselves as FBI agents wanting to talk. The Beverly Hills confrontation took place near Cartier’s jewelry store with its elegant window displays.

“See my attorney,” Roselli growled, without breaking stride.

The agents kept walking with him along the sidewalk.

In front of him, they waved a photograph of a small boy as well as an old birth certificate. If Johnny got a momentary glance at the two items from his past, he didn’t let on.

“Filippo Sacco”, the FBI agents called out. They repeatedly mentioned his “true name” over and over.

The bureau’s constant sleuthing had discovered Roselli’s hidden identity, by far his biggest secret.

Like prizes they won at a scavenger hunt, the agents held aloft the photo of young Filippo Sacco and his mother, taken when he was in grade school in Boston. The birth certificate indicated Roselli wasn’t born in Chicago, as he previously claimed, but came to America illegally as an immigrant from Italy. Investigators discovered a phony birth certificate, filed in 1936 for “Giovanni Roselli” in Chicago, that had a forged signature.

“We know where you were born and when you entered the United States,” the agents informed him, as they later recounted in an FBI memo.

Roselli gave an unconvincing denial. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he insisted.

But Johnny surely knew what this discovery meant.

After years of fakery and covering his tracks—fraudulent testimony about his identity, and phony documents with incorrect dates and different spellings to his surname – Roselli came face to face with who he really was, his true identity.

The little boy in the photo had long ago left Boston as a young adult, under suspicion for murder or some other unknown deed. As if re-inventing himself under duress, he became “Johnny Roselli” to his fellow mobsters in Chicago and to all who met him in the bright lights of Hollywood and darkened casinos of Vegas and Havana. It wasn’t clear if even those closest to him – such as pal Sam Giancana or his former wife June Lang or anyone else—fully knew his story.

The feds now had something on Roselli that he feared more than a criminal charge.

They could deport him, just as the federal government had done to other Mafia figures such as Lucky Luciano and, more recently, Trafficante’s good friend, Carlos Marcello, the don of New Orleans.

The two FBI men told Roselli the bureau wanted his cooperation, intending to flip him as an informer. They wanted to meet Johnny in three days at DuPar’s Restaurant in Thousand Oaks, and gave him a business card with its address.

Johnny first moved to take the card and then, instinctively, rejected it.

“Go see my attorney,” he repeated.

The confrontation provided only a hint of the high stakes for the FBI as well as Roselli. Since the Kennedy administration, especially in the wake of JFK’s death, Hoover’s investigators had pursued why the CIA recruited Roselli and Sam Giancana.

In the complex political calculus of Washington, the FBI chieftain sensed an advantage over the rival spy agency if his agents could piece together the extraordinary story of how the two mobsters became government approved assassins against Castro.

By May 1966, the FBI had mostly figured it out. The CIA “compromised themselves by dealing with Roselli when they had him contact

Sam Giancana, head of the Chicago ‘family’ of La Cosa Nostra, to get someone to assassinate Castro,” explained the bureau’s LA office in a May 23 memo to Hoover’s deputy director, Cartha DeLoach. The memo stressed Roselli’s potential as a “top echelon criminal informant,” the highest ranking for a snitch.

Roselli clearly knew more about the Mafia’s machinations in American business and politics than the celebrated gangster Joseph Valachi, who made headlines with his 1963 testimony as an FBI informer.

The childhood photo of young Sacco with his mother “apparently touched a sensitive spot” with Roselli, the memo said. It called for the bureau to “capitalize on his inner turmoil to develop” Roselli as a top informant.

Privately, Johnny vowed to kill whoever had betrayed him. Little did he know that the photo, birth certificate and longtime secret about his origins – the FBI’s biggest break in its long-running surveillance of Roselli – had been revealed purely by happenstance.

It began when the feds noticed Salvatore Piscopo, Johnny’s fellow Los Angeles hoodlum, had failed to pay his taxes on bookmaking profits at various California horse racetracks. Like a small bug suddenly caught in a Venus flytrap, Piscopo (alias “Louie Merli”) panicked at the thought of going to jail. Inadvertently, he would lead agents to Johnny’s secret.

For nearly thirty years, Piscopo had performed a number of gangland tasks for Roselli. According to Vegas legend, Piscopo served as a getaway car driver for the 1947 mob hit on Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, the legendary casino owner. Bugsy was shot dead in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, who would also have an affair with Roselli.

Piscopo took note of Johnny’s success with the ladies, enough to mention it later to the FBI. He said Roselli “is very good looking and all the girls go for him.”

Presciently, Roselli worried about Piscopo’s judgment.

A possible slip of the tongue could land them both in trouble. He warned Piscopo that “a person’s own telephone is the biggest stool pigeon in the world and never use it to talk to people.”

As FBI surveillance followed Piscopo around town, they secretly photographed him meeting an unknown

person at the airport. The stranger carried an overnight bag and gave Piscopo an affable hug, like a long-lost brother. Indeed, he was Johnny’s brother—Albert Sacco.

Albert flew back to Boston with a satchel of cash, which would be given to his aged mother, Maria Sacco.

For years, the money from Johnny in Hollywood had helped his family in Boston stay afloat financially, including his brother who worked as a janitor. The exchange usually took place once a year with Johnny’s trusted bagman, Salvatore Piscopo, serving as his family’s conduit.

The discovery of Johnny’s brother was a boon for investigators. Under the veil of secrecy and great care, the FBI put together a complete dossier on Roselli’s personal background. It took more than two years to find and piece together all the documents in various cities.

When the FBI finally approached Roselli in May, 1966, the agents tried to appear warm and friendly.

“This has nothing to with you personally, John,” said one of the agents, almost apologetic. “It’s a matter of national security.”

Though Johnny acted unperturbed, he immediately contacted his local defense attorney, Jimmy Cantillon, who put the FBI on notice not to speak with his client.

The next day, Roselli flew to Washington, where he spoke in confidence to Shef Edwards, the recently retired CIA chief of security. Through buffers and go-betweens, Shef had overseen Johnny’s covert work against Castro.

Johnny explained the Sacco situation without seeking a deal. “I did not ask him to get the FBI off my back,” Roselli later claimed.

Edwards, an old CIA hand, chalked off the immigration matter as an inter-agency rivalry within the government.

As Johnny remembered, “they had a big feud going on between the FBI and the CIA.” But the family matter clearly haunted Roselli.

He showed Shef a copy of the photograph—left anonymously outside his apartment—of the four-yearold boy and his mother. He acknowledged to Shef that “the child was himself at that age,” records show.

The retired CIA man inquired about Roselli’s mother but Johnny remained “very touchy on this.” Johnny angrily labeled this FBI attempt to turn him into an informant as pure “blackmail.”

At first, Johnny had no idea who betrayed him. The FBI implied their discovery of Roselli’s true identity—and the family he left behind in Boston—was the sole result of their sleuthing of documents rather than informant Sal Piscopo and his determination to stay out of jail. Smelling a rat, Johnny swore one day he’s find out the name of his double-crosser and get even.

In alerting the CIA, Roselli assured Shef Edwards that he’d honor his commitment to keep his mouth shut and not to speak about his role in the agency’s top-secret plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Any public disclosure of these previous plans would undoubtedly prompt all sorts of recriminations, including doubts about a possible Cuban angle to the JFK assassination.

As Shef suspected, Johnny had become a pawn between America’s two premier investigative agencies. In a formal memo, CIA officials let Hoover’s FBI know they didn’t want Edwards questioned as a witness. They said Edwards’ participation might “open the door” to exposing “an extremely sensitive intelligence operation.”

Most tellingly, the CIA admitted Roselli had the agency “in an unusually vulnerable position.”

No one knew for sure what Johnny might do if he faced federal prosecution. And it came as a big surprise, especially to Roselli, when he was indicted for something far more serious than an immigration violation.

Thomas Maier is an award-winning investigative reporter and the author of six books. This is excerpted from “Mafia Spies: The Inside Story of the CIA, Gangsters, JFK and Castro,” published this month by Skyhorse Publishing.

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ONES 2 WATCH: LORD FELIX MUSIC

Behind the visor with the Brockton hip-hop artist behind ‘Nothing’

BY REDEFINED @BOSTONMUSICAWARDS Ones 2 Watch is a collaboration between DigBoston and Redefined, the company behind the Boston Music Awards and the upcoming Ones 2 Watch concert series at Hojoko in Boston. This first installment interview is with Lord Felix, a visor-sporting Brockton-bred artist who’s successfully kept his face shielded while rocking from New York to Mass since 2016. For more info on his performance this Friday and on other upcoming free shows in the series, visit bostonmusicawards.com/ones2watch.

How’s it going with Lord Felix today?

Everything is great man. Just been working on a couple projects as of late.

You have a background in fashion with your Amerikanah streetwear line, which is evident by your stage performance and styling. For those who have yet to see you live, what’s the story behind the visor?

I found these in Soho man. I already wasn’t showing my face online at the time just cause I’m a private dude. So when I found these, I completely lost my mind. When I performed with them on for the first time, I was like, “Yup, this is definitely what I wanna do for a living.”

Your debut full length, In Bloom, Forever, dropped in February and we’re pretty sure “Nothing” is going to become one of the songs of the summer. Despite its upbeat sound, you’ve talked about it coming together during a difficult time in 2016 …

Haha man, I’m already sick of that song. But that was actually one of the later songs I recorded for that project. That song almost didn’t see the light of day, but that’s another story for another day haha. You could say I was in a happier space.

You can expect a whole lot of drip, a whole lot of gravity-defying stunts, bras being thrown on stage, unnecessary crowd surfing, and grown men bursting into tears.

The video for “Nothing” looked like a lot of fun …

Man it was just me and the homies I do this with. I feel like this [latest release] was just one big group art project and we wanted to showcase the community we have going on over here. There isn’t any type of music infrastructure out here so we were pretty much forced to boss up and build what is now a scene. We had to become our own OGs in a sense.

There are so many talented young artists from where you’re from in Brockton who are starting to gain traction, and from all over Massachusetts as well. Who are you watching the most. Who’s leading the charge locally?

There’s sooo much talent man. My team of course (Meech, Jiles, Ricky Felix, Luke Bar$, Benjy, Saint Lyor), Latrell James moved out here and definitely laid a huge hand in the culture, Leo The Kind, Garrett, DTheFlyest, Stefan, them Dienue boys. I’m missing so much but those dudes right there are absolutely killing it right now. They keep me inspired.

You have a line—“Been the illest in the state since Bell Biv DeVoe”—which is one of our favorites from “Nothing.” And it got us thinking about a game we like to play: BMA Fantasy Festival Lineup. If you got to perform with one artist from the past and one from now, who would you go for and why?

Wow that’s hard as hell. You’re really putting me on the spot. But I would probably pick Jimi Hendrix as the artist from the past I would perform with. The things he can do with that guitar, man, sheesh. One of my favorite performance videos ever was him performing the Star Spangled Banner with his electric guitar. I would’ve went nuts if I caught that live. The other artist would probably be Anderson .Paak. I feel like he’s a super-underrated performer. His energy alone can amp up a crowd. That dude just has it.

This week you kick off the Ones 2 Watch series at Hojoko. What can we expect?

You can expect a whole lot of drip, a whole lot of gravity-defying stunts, bras being thrown on stage, unnecessary crowd surfing, and grown men bursting into tears. Just an array of emotions coming from me and from the audience. It should be fun.

Anything else you want the world to know about Lord Felix?

I’m hungry for this.

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DOUBLE-DOUBLE FILM

Watching and rewatching High Flying Bird

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

STILL FRAME FROM HIGH FLYING BIRD, COURTESY NETFLIX For me there were at least two reasons to watch High Flying Bird (2019) a second time. Reason number one was that the dialogue is performed with such a quickness that one can barely keep up with it on a word-by-word basis the first time around. Nearly all of the film, written

by Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed/photographed/ edited by Steven Soderbergh, is comprised of dialoguebased sequences; most are staged with two characters sitting down in one location for a few minutes or more, speaking rapidly towards their respective ends; with nary a hint of the narcotized slowness that’s become so typical of the way dialogue is now usually performed in American movies and television. The very first of those scenes depicts sports agent Ray Burke (Andre Holland) doing some financial advising for his much-hyped new client Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg); an incoming rookie for a New York-based pro basketball team, who should be living quite well except unfortunately said league is currently stuck in a lockout. So anyway I start my second viewing with my focus trained on the dialogue and I turned on the subtitles and found even they failed to represent the entirety of these high-speed speeches. In this scene, when Ray says to Erick, “Point of fact, last time this happened, folks went broke left and right”, the subtitles have it as “last time this happened, folks went broke”, which gets the point, maybe, but not the rhythm. This dialogue, even its own transcribers can’t keep up with it.

Deeply necessary that the performance and dialogue here are so distinctive (they are) because this picture has more office meetings than a Frederick Wiseman movie.

Ray, worried that his as yet unpaid client is “about to be a 30 for 30 episode”, also stressed about his own expense accounts getting shut down by his boss at the agency (Zachary Quinto), spends a long holiday weekend on a series of semi-professional conversations with other figures adjacent to the lockout, and that takes up nearly all of High Flying Bird’s 90-minute runtime (we also see interviews with a few actual pros, which serve as interstitials between the drama, never connecting in a direct sense, ending up somewhere between chorus and footnotes). These scenes/meetings see Ray bantering and bartering with a team owner (Kyle MacLachlan), a player’s association representative (Sonja Sohn), a local (South Bronx) basketball legend (Bill Duke), his client (Gregg), his client’s rival (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley), his client’s rival’s mom (Jeryl Prescott), his boss (Quinto) and his soon-tobe-former assistant (Zazie Beetz). And in nearly every case

they play out via exchanges of dialogue that are heavy on allusion (one conversation brings up the tax rates paid by professional athletes, the specifics of agency fees, and the history of integration in pro basketball all within the space of a couple sentences) and delivered with a theatricallyspeedy cadence (Soderbergh’s filmmaking doesn’t usually evoke the work of “Old Hollywood”, and certainly there’s nothing Hawksian about the look of this film, but the general cadence of the film’s many conversations is nonetheless somewhere near screwball, creating an entrancing contrast).

Reason number two for watching it twice is that the narrative structure of the film pretty much requests it.

Though on the surface Ray is a man constantly distracted and made vaguely irritable by the extensive demands of his job, there’s also something of a Columbo act going on behind his anxious looks, as we learn early on that on some level he’s always manipulating whoever he deigns to speak with—”He can see the business”, says Myra, the player’s representative, to Sam, the former assistant, in one of the few scenes that doesn’t include Ray in the conversation. “He’s a few steps ahead”. However Ray’s actual goals and plans are left deliberately unclear to his fellow characters as well as to us viewers, and there’s even some red herrings thrown in there to misdirect any viewers who may think they know what’s going on (one such detour involves the film’s own distributor, Netflix, in the process connecting the film’s study of “disruption” in American pro sports to comparable shifts in the film, television, and media industries). So you may hear what Ray is saying, but (on first view) the motivations behind what he’s saying are buried three layers deep within a plan we haven’t yet seen (no subtitles or dictionary can help you with that). Central to meaning is an early scene (the “point of fact” one, in point of fact), where Ray explains to Erick than an “opportunity” he was recently offered was actually more like a well-dressed scam. High Flying Bird is essentially a backstage drama set in the world of American pro sports, not a crime film, and yet it’s structured so that we spend nearly the entire film searching for the latter—we’re made intensely aware that below this ongoing torrent of dialogue, Ray is running some kind of barely-legal con of his own, to ends we can’t quite ascertain. The “how” is never hidden, just the “why?”

But while Ray is the primary figure by a long shot, the filmmaking in no way assumes or even elucidates his perspective. Soderbergh’s compositions keep an

>> HIGH FLYING BIRD IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON NETFLIX. 18

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objective distance from all the characters, often staying in stretched-wide long shots as the actors work through their dialogue, and usually granting equal ground between Ray and whoever else is in the given scene. Close-ups usually arise at the end of exchanges, more punctuation than emotional cues—and images which represent the subjective perspectives of particular characters are nonexistent, doubly surprising because that’s been a major component of recent Soderbergh work like Mosaic and Unsane (both 2018). In many ways on this film Soderbergh acts purely as a facilitator for the script and the performers (Holland is a producer), almost directing in the manner of a journeyman handling a pre-existing text (not actually the case on either count). What he does most clearly is provide the film a unified syntax, and what is frankly an extremely cool look—all burnished wood shades (like hardcourt) and icy blues (the end credits play over a spinning basketball tinted by a blue light, which is pretty much the whole aesthetic).

His eye is always serving, and never crowding, the performances, and his direction of the material prizes the dialogue, at some points even eliding physical action in the way that a on-stage performance of the same text might’ve done. For instance the film eventually arrives at a one-on-one game between Scott and his rival, which one might presume would be a perfect venue for Soderbergh to continue his ongoing interest in capturing displays of world-class physicality (see Gina Carano in his 2011 film Haywire, I mean really, watch it tonight). But instead the film pulls away just as the game begins. That’s probably a nod to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which similarly omits a central duel—but it’s also a choice made to make the spoken word the center of the whole piece, a decision which McCraney and Soderbergh have suggested is a matter of theme (“those highlights are being used to distract us from the business”, as McCraney related to GQ), but also one which more than anything comes to define the movie’s form.

This may be what some, myself included I suppose, would call a writer’s movie, or a literary one, maybe even a theatrical one. Whatever the right phrase is, it’s felt it in the film’s approach to fiction (the way that McCraney depicts his chosen subject by way of characters who each represent a wildly different class of person involved in that subculture), and it’s felt it in the way the narrative is arranged to be revealed entirely through dialogue (not even necessarily a positive thing, as more than a few lines are expository to the point of just ringing false). As if to clinch its designation as a writer’s movie, High Flying Bird even concludes with a book recommendation, as more than a few before me have noted. To watch it twice doesn’t quite open up the film’s meanings—for that you’d do better to read that book it recommends, Dr. Harry Edwards’ The Revolt of the Black Athlete (1968), which explores many of the historical events and occurrences which inform the subtext of High Flying Bird (especially the recently-published anniversary edition, which includes an introduction relating the original text to figures including Colin Kaepernick and the football players involved with the 2015-16 University of Missouri protests). Nor does the second viewing reveal any previously undiscovered key to the narrative, as one can rather adequate piece that story together once they’ve reached the end of their first viewing. Really more truthful to say the film is of a complexity, verbal and otherwise, that invites a second viewing—a rich text in more senses than one, it rewards the revisit.

VOL 14

Afro Flow Yoga

Stop by after work and enjoy Afro Flow Yoga®, a unique yoga experience that promotes healing, balance, and peace in a non-judgmental and safe environment created

by Leslie Salmon Jones and Jeff W. Jones.

Saturday • April 6 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

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April 11 & 25 | May 9 & 23 | June 13 & 27

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

6:00 PM - 7:00 PM | Northeastern Crossing 1175 Tremont Street, Roxbury

THIS MONTH!

All are welcome but this is an event focused on comics by and about people of color.

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Art by JAMSketch

Join us to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the for the Grove Hall Branch Library!

Discussion: What had been the impact of Black Panther?

• All-levels comics making activity • Samples of Black Comics • SNACKS!

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YUKO KASEKI. PHOTO BY BEN LENHART. COURTESY OF BOSTON BUTOH FESTIVAL.

BOSTON’S FIRST BUTOH FESTIVAL ARTS

Explore the archetype of the witch from its ancient history to its influence on contemporary feminism and girl culture

BY HEATHER KAPPLOW Boston is about to host its first ever Butoh festival. It’s a small festival this year—only one weekend’s worth of programming—but a good introduction to Butoh for those who are unfamiliar. Which is almost everyone. And even those who are most familiar with it have difficulty defining it.

Technically, Butoh is a type of dance. But it doesn’t look like most dance because it was developed to resist traditional Western forms like Modern Dance and Ballet.

Butoh emerged in Japan shortly after World War II. Which means that it is tied up with the large collection of experimental art movements that flourished mid-century, and also that it can’t help but be impacted by the American atomic bombings there at the end of the war.

Butoh’s movements are tense, taut, transfixing and often gothic. Though rooted in the gestures of farmers and peasants going about their daily lives, this art form operates like horror films do in comparison to non-horror films. In horror films, a story may begin as any other film does, but a thin layer of normal social behavior quickly dissolves to reveal what we fear most lurking right beneath.

Boston Butoh Festival, a 3-day event including performances and a 2-day workshop, is the brainchild of

Sara June, a performance artist affiliated with Boston’s Mobius collective, and also a teacher and practitioner of Butoh. Sara June became interested in Butoh after seeing a solo performance at Pan9, a long-defunct Allston venue, right after completing a BFA in painting in 1999. “The performer seemed to transform herself into a piece of visual art with her achingly slow movements. All the parts of her body, including her face, were activated by what seemed like raw emotion. I was hooked.”

Sara June sees Butoh as a reaction to colonization, “[It was] a response to the invasion of Western art forms in [Japan]. The stereotype of Butoh is of extremely slowmoving performers, painted totally white, with shaved heads. But it is really a very eclectic performance form.” She cites influences that include “physical theater, Noh theater, avant-garde performance of the 1960s and ‘70s, drag and feminist/queer performance,” and adds, “It also has roots in Japanese shamanism and indigenous movement.”

Gemica Rosenberg, a local who will perform at the festival, found her way to Butoh by accident. “After attending California College of the arts and completing my thesis show, I felt like my sculptures were beginning to incorporate sound and teetering on the edge of

performance. But I didn’t have that much exposure to performance art”, Rosenberg explains. “When I moved back to Boston, I was looking for a healing experience for mind and body that purely visual art hadn’t been able to give me. I started taking a somatic movement class at Green Street Studios.” When this class ended, she wasn’t ready to stop moving, so tried out a Butoh class. “I didn’t really know what Butoh was exactly”, she admits, “but since then,” she continues, “I’ve begun to integrate my material making with movement and sound.”

For the festival, Rosenberg will “Explore the archetype of the witch from its ancient history to its influence on contemporary feminism and girl culture. I’ve developed my own sound score with samples, synth and field recordings, designed a costume, and choreographed a10-minute solo.”

The festival also features artists from outside of Boston.

Including Yuko Kaseki from Berlin, and Zack Fuller, Emily Smith and Michael Evans from New York City. Sara June selected each because she found their work “boundarypushing” in a way that is rarely seen in Boston. “It will certainly challenge the more conservative sensibilities here,” she promises.

>> BOSTON BUTOH FESTIVAL. APRIL 19-21. GREEN STREET STUDIOS, 185 GREEN ST., CAMBRIDGE. LISTINGS AND TICKETS AVAILABLE AT MOBIUS.ORG/EVENTS. 20

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ANJON BISWAS COMEDY

The universal language of comedy and puzzles

BY DENNIS MALER @DEADAIRDENNIS

Learning to speak comedy is difficult in itself. Add in performing it in your second language and without the support of family and old friends, and you have the complications endured by this week’s interview subject, Anjan Biswas.

A comedian and show promoter, Biswas navigated his way through the Boston comedy scene one joke at a time. Working tirelessly to find stage time for himself, as well as for local and nationally touring comedians including Roastmaster Jeff Ross, he’s helped to create CitySide Comedy, one of the best-known and successful independent weekly shows in Boston.

Get to know Biswas before he locks an audience in a small room and records the whole thing.

You came to this country for school. Was that a daunting life experience moving to a new place, speaking a different language, with no family or friends?

I grew up speaking English and watching American and British TV shows, so language wasn’t a huge transition for me. East Asian humor is, however, a lot more brash, brazen, and insensitive than the stuff people in first-world cities indulge in. The things we’d say to each other on the playground were brutal but meaningless at the same time. There’s this massive separation between what you say and what you do. You could say literally anything. That’s not so much the case here. Words have distinct value. I made a lot of faux pas. I still make faux pas. Learning is both fun and painful.

in other countries too, but I think the industry here has much higher standards for what is and isn’t okay to say.

Sometimes I’ll chat to audience members from the UK, and they’re very proud of how British audiences are much more open to the idea that an ostensibly offensive bit is intended to be ironic or satirical. I hate to agree with Brits on anything, but that is sort of true.

I do think American audiences and the industry will eventually relax and enjoy a bit of raunchy satire when the country makes like the British and finally accepts itself as an empire in decline.

Oh the art we’ll see then!

American comedy writing, on the other hand, is a lot more incisive and clinical than anywhere else I’ve performed. In Asia, you can get away with a lot of affected flair and hackery and still have a great career. You can’t do that here.

The parents of a lot of immigrant comedians are appalled when they learn their child wants to become a performer. Did your parents react similarly, or were they supportive?

Honestly, I didn’t tell them. It was enough of an issue that I wasn’t majoring in computer science or [studying to be a doctor]. We still haven’t spoken about it, but I think they know by now. They’ve calmed down on a lot of their standards for me as they get older, and more used to me disappointing them. That’s my best advice to immigrant kids—keep disappointing your parents.

Eventually they’ll get used to it.

You’ve held a lot of jobs over the years to support your comedy career. What makes cluemaster at an escape room different from the rest?

At this point in my life, I’ve done a bit of everything, and it’s the first genuinely interesting job I’ve had. People who come to the escape room are always trying to peek behind the control room’s Wizard of Oz-esque curtains to see what goes on during their games. It’s all very mysterious. On the flip, as a cluemaster, I can see and hear everything they’re doing and saying while they try to solve puzzles. I see and hear a lot of nutty stuff.

Have you found parallels between doing standup and being a cluemaster?

Both require you to be an engaging public speaker, but that’s about it. Being a cluemaster has a lot more in common with theater, preserving the front-stage while running around frantically backstage trying to make sure the production doesn’t fall apart. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to work against the clock fixing a puzzle in one room while a team is in the room next door actively trying to solve a puzzle that would get them into the room I’m in.

Who works at an escape room?

The people are who run escape rooms are incredibly quirky and have a ton of fun. Some of it is at your expense. A large chunk of escape room clientele is corporate team building, so every day I meet people my age with mortgages and 401Ks while my coworkers and I bonk each other on the head with plastic swords and talk about weird online sex communities.

Working at an escape room has also been the least heteronormative job environment I’ve ever worked. Very few straights. Someone made a joke the other day they’d been trapped in the closet by straight people for so long that now they spend their life professionally trapping straight people in slightly-larger closets. It’s a funny sort of power.

ANJAN BISWAS’S ONE-MAN SHOW, CLUEMASTER: STORIES FROM THE ESCAPE ROOM. FRI-SAT, APRIL 19 - 20 AT MOOYAH BURGERS, 140 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON. OR SEE HIM EVERY MONDAY WITH CO-HOST SAM IKE AT CITYSIDE COMEDY IN CLEVELAND CIRCLE.

You had some high exposure early in your comedy career when you were a contestant on a contest for Comedy Central Asia. What was the process of getting into that?

At some point in 2013, the comedy boom was reaching Asia and Viacom had opened its Comedy Central Asia branch. A Viacom executive saw me have a good set at this club, Comedy Masala in Singapore, and approached me with a business card. I was sure I was about to get a special. But I got two minutes on a comedy competition called “Make Me Laugh” instead. “American-Idol”-style, buzzer-judges. The judges were comic friends of mine, so as you can expect, I got buzzed.

You’ve been fortunate enough to perform internationally. What are some of the differences you’ve experienced between comedy in the USA and other countries?

Comedy on the American coasts is very self-conscious.

It constantly checks and re-checks itself. It’s that way NEWS TO US

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WORKMATES

SAVAGE LOVE

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NETE3 When I first started dating my girlfriend, I asked her about past boyfriends and she said she hadn’t met the right guy yet. After dating for nine years, I found out about a past boyfriend and looked through her e-mails. I found out she dated her married boss for three years. She broke up with me for looking and for judging her. I feel like she lied, and she thinks it was none of my business. We’ve been broken up for five months. She’s reached out, but I can’t get over my anger or disgust that she was someone’s mistress. Am I a bad person?

Still Angry And Disgusted Yup. “Haven’t met the right guy yet” ≠ “Haven’t met any guys ever.”

Almost everyone has done something and/or someone they regret doing—although it’s possible your ex-girlfriend doesn’t regret fucking her married boss for three years, SAAD, and it’s possible there’s no need for regret. Sometimes people have affairs for all the right reasons. Sometimes abandoning a spouse and/or breaking up a home with kids in it, aka “doing the right thing” and divorcing, is the worse choice. Life is long and complicated, and it’s possible for a person to demonstrate loyalty and commitment with something other than their genitals. Sometimes people do what they must to stay married and stay sane, and their affair partners are doing good by being “bad.”

It’s also possible—and perhaps likelier—that your ex-girlfriend made an impulsive, shitty, selfish choice to fuck someone else’s husband. It’s possible he’s a serial philanderer, a cheating piece of shit, and then, after fucking him that one time, your girlfriend felt pressured to keep fucking him and wound up having a years-long affair with her married boss. And then, when it was all over, she stuffed it down the memory hole because she wasn’t proud of it and wanted to forget it.

It’s also possible she didn’t tell you about this relationship when you asked because she intuited—correctly, as it turned out—that you are, in your own words, a bad person, i.e., the kind of guy who would punish his girlfriend for having a sexual history, for making her fair share of mistakes, and for deciding to keep some things private. (Not secret, SAAD. Private.) In other words, she correctly intuited that you would punish her for being human.

Finding out about a past boyfriend doesn’t give you the right to invade your partner’s privacy and dig through their ancient e-mails. Your girlfriend was right to break up with you for snooping through her e-mails and judging her so harshly. And she didn’t even lie to you, dude! Her boss clearly wasn’t “the right guy,” seeing as he was married and her boss, and the relationship ended before you two even first laid thighs on each other nine years ago.

And from where I’m sitting, SAAD, it looks like she still hasn’t met the right guy.

To be perfectly frank, I don’t want to help you get over your anger and disgust—not that you asked me to help you get past those feelings. It kind of sounds like you want your anger and disgust affirmed… and I’m going to go with that and affirm the shit out of those feelings: Stay angry! Stay disgusted! Not because those feeling are valid— they’re not—but because those feelings prevented you from taking your ex back when she reached out. She may not know it yet, but she’s better off without you, SAAD, and here’s hoping you stay angry and disgusted long enough for her to realize it.

I’m a few months into OkCupid dating, and it’s going well! I’ve stuck to two “automatic pass” rules: anyone who mentions my looks and nothing else in the first message and anyone with no face pic. It’s worked out great so far. But I’ve noticed that most kinksters on OKC don’t post face pics. I can understand this. I once came across a coworker on the site—didn’t look, passed immediately—and I can imagine nobody wants their boss or coworkers to know they’re looking for puppy play and CBT. Not everyone has the luxury of taking a risk like that. So I’m tempted to drop my “no face pic = pass” rule for kinksters. But then I imagine how that would go: “Chat, chat, chat.

‘Hey, can I see a face pic?’ Oh no, I’m not physically attracted to this person!” Then I have to awkwardly un-match and feel terribly shallow and guilty for a while. So do I keep my rule and pass on some very promising profiles without face pics to avoid hurting someone’s feelings? Or do I bend the rules? I’m just not looking to hurt anyone in a bad way.

Not That Kind Of Sadist

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

RUTHERFORD

BY DON KUSS DONKUSS@DIGBOSTON.COM

Lead with your truth, NTKOS: “Hey, we share a lot of common interests—BDSM, CBT, TT—but I usually require face pics before I chat. I understand why you may not be able to post your pics and why you would want to chat for a bit and establish trust before sharing pics with me privately. So I’m happy to chat so long as you’re okay with the risk that I might pass after seeing your face pic. Still, even if we’re not ultimately a sexual or romantic match, every kinkster needs some kinky friends!”

On the Lovecast, Dan chats with Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow: savagelovecast.com.

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