DigBoston 9.7.17

DIGBOSTON.COM 09.07.17 - 09.14.17

COVER: TACO RUN

EXCERPT

THE ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE BOOK

A POT BROWNIE EXCLUSIVE ARTS+MUSIC

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

PLUS: WEAKENED FRIENDS

BYO HARD SHELL INTERSECTION OF

BIKES AND BITES NATIONAL

TRUMP’S CRIMINAL POSSE

PLUS: HOUSTON’S INDIE PRESS ON HARVEY

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BOWERY BOSTON WWW.BOWERYBOSTON.COM VOL 19 + ISSUE36

SEPT 07, 2017 - SEPT 14, 2017 BUSINESS

SOMETHING POSITIVE (FOR CHANGE)

SALES MANAGER Marc Sneider FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com BUSINESS MANAGER John Loftus

EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Chris Faraone EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Pramas MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Dewar ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran ASSOCIATE FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan ASSOCIATE ARTS EDITOR Christopher Ehlers STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Mike Crawford, Kori Feener, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus Johnson-Smith, Micaela Kimball, Derek Kouyoumjian, Andrew Quemere, Jonathan Riley, Peter Roberge, Adam Sennott, Maya Shaffer, Miriam Wasser, Dave Wedge, Baynard Woods INTERNS Katie Martin, M.J. Tidwell

DESIGN DESIGNER Don Kuss COMICS Tim Chamberlain Pat Falco Patt Kelley DigBoston, PO Box 51960 Boston, MA 02205 Phone 617.426.8942 digboston.com

ON THE COVER CHECK OUT OUR INTERVIEW WITH THE BOSTON CYCLISTS UNION ABOUT THEIR SECOND ANNUAL TACO TOUR ON SUNDAY. DESIGN BY JON RAMOS.

©2017 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 TOMASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

ROYALE

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I was heading toward Alewife on the Red Line last week reading a New York Times op-ed titled “Make Pot Legal for Veterans With Traumatic Brain Injury.” Written by Thomas James Brennan, a former US Marine Corps sergeant and the founder of the veterans’ news outlet the War Horse, the piece eloquently walks along the author’s journey and the trading of “pill bottles for pipes and papers,” which led to his feeling “less numb” and starting “to smile more often.”

Brennan, a Massachusetts native with whom I’ve enjoyed several discussions about joints and journalism, also points to the insulting problem that in states like North Carolina, where he currently lives, one still can’t legally attain a medicine that is demonstrably useful in cases ranging from post-traumatic stress to migraines and depression, not to mention the residual dependence on multiple drugs that can follow.

It’s always sickening when any patient can’t get easy access to the natural meds that they deserve. But the hypocrisy and stubbornness is only compounded when pondering the plight of veterans, who in many cases literally have to break the law—and face significant criminal charges in far too many jurisdictions—in order to get much-needed relief for injuries sustained while serving Uncle Sam and all of us. Thanks to advocates like Brennan and Stephen Mandile, the latter of the Commonwealth-based Veterans Alternative Healing (VAH), who are open about their experience and can really talk some sense into compassionate conservatives who have long ago been brainwashed on the issue, there’s been a fair amount of movement on this front—but not nearly enough, and it is maddening.

I was stoned while on the T and reading Brennan’s article, and was also heading to pick up some top-shelf marijuana for a friend of friend; they have horrible digestion problems that beg for routine sweet leaf relief, but live in a place with overly restrictive access.

Meanwhile, as I realized that I missed my stop, I noticed a tall jovial man using a walker step on board at Downtown Crossing. More specifically, my nose noticed that he was cracking open plastic jars of kind buds, inhaling the magic that he just purchased aboveground at the Patriot Care dispensary. We got to rapping about pot, and within 30 seconds I learned all about how, much like Brennan with his post-war complications and my friend’s visiting pal with their troubles, his difficulties with vision and mobility are best wrestled into submission by meds with such silly names as Cinderella 99.

Amazingly, my green friend on the Red Line mentioned that he reads the Dig, and he cited our review of that particular strain from last month.

Though intended as a hybrid service-humor-lifestyle approach to covering cannabis, it turns out that dispatches from the consumer’s point of view are helpful right down to the highly personal medical level. All of the above miracle applications considered, it’s impossible to fathom the opposing view from any angle. Just a couple more reminders of the inspiration fueling countless media makers, from Brennan to the columnists who crank about dank for the Dig, to stand up proud and tall against an antiquated, discompassionate, and goddamn persistent opposition.

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Tickets for Royale, The Sinclair, and Great Scott can be purchased online at AXS.COM or by phone at 855-482-2090. No fee tickets available at The Sinclair box office Wednesdays - Saturdays 12:00 - 7:00PM FOR MORE INFORMATION AND A COMPLETE LIST OF SHOWS, VISIT BOWERYBOSTON.COM NEWS TO US

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NEWS US

BATTLE OF THE CENTURY NEWS TO US

Nearly 100 years old, Frances Crowe is every polluter’s worst nightmare

BY KORI FEENER @KORIFEENER In June, Frances Crowe was arrested with seven others in Sandisfield, a small town in the Berkshires, for protesting the Connecticut Expansion Pipeline, a 10-plus mile natural gas loop planned to run through three states including Massachusetts.

As reported by this journalist in May, the potential consequences of that pipeline include construction and environmental complications in some Western Mass municipalities, as well as damage to Native American historical sites. Kinder Morgan, the Houston-based business behind the project, has been steadfast in protecting its investment; as was recently reported on the news and public information site MuckRock, the company has actually paid the Mass State Police more than $100,000 this year for “pipeline authority” and “pipeline security,” effectively blurring the lines between public and private interests, not to mention protection.

None of this is new, or comes as a complete surprise to Crowe, who has been fighting battles against war, nuclear power, and apartheid, among other real-life horrors, for her entire life. At 98 years young, the veteran protester is

“They were in charge then, why didn’t they help us?”

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still a badass activist who stands up for the things that she believes in. With open white supremacy on the rise, along with concern over an all-out nuclear war with North Korea, it seems that the advice of an eternal activist like Crowe, who was born around the time when workers were still striking for the eight-hour work day, has more urgency in 2017 than ever before. To see what knowledge she could share, I went to interview the well-known activist, whose age got her in headlines following her last arrest, at her home in Northampton. *** Crowe’s house is hard to miss. Signs defiantly stand in the ground: Black Lives Matter, War is Not the Answer, Ban Assault Weapons, to describe a few. Stepping into her home feels like entering the headquarters of a resistance movement. Posters of her past work—calls for disarmament, campaigns with the American Friends Service Committee—are carefully placed in each room, and complement a wall-full of books spanning related topics.

Crowe lounges comfortably in a white seat, at stark contrast with her black clothing and Stop the Pipeline pin, which she proudly displays these days. Her arrest in June in Sandisfield made headlines everywhere; just Google “Frances Crowe,” and most of what you’ll find is clickbait along the lines of, “98-Year-Old Activist Arrested…”

Knowing that there’s much more to her action than her years, I asked Crowe to get right into the Sandisfield story.

“I thought I had one more arrest in my life, and that’s where I wanted it to be,” she says. “To try to stop fossil fuels from being taken out of the ground.”

Crowe goes on to explain the difficulty that her group had getting to the site. She uses a wheelchair or a walker, and the ground down by the pipeline is rocky (otherwise, she says the area is “pristine,” with “all of these beautiful wildflowers such as I have never seen before”). Crowe was pushed in her chair by some comrades from the Sugar Shack Alliance, the whole way meditating on her reason for being there, the protection of Mother Earth.

Looking back on the events that landed her on CNN, Crowe recounts that there were 13 state police officers brought in to arrest the nine protestors standing on the pipeline route. After handcuffing everyone (other than Crowe, who was left to fend for herself), she says the troopers walked back up the hill and waited for the demonstrators to follow.

“They were in charge then, why didn’t they help us?” Crowe asks. “Other people that I knew in the group gathered me up and tried carrying me up on my wheelchair, but it was not easy for them to get up the hill.”

Crowe has been arrested several times before, often under similar circumstances. Still, she was dismayed by what she felt was disrespectful treatment during intake at the Pittsfield police station.

“I had prepared my lunch, which is a corn fatilla with

some almond butter in it, and the woman going through my backpack took it out and threw it in the wastebasket,” Crowe says, still bothered by the whole experience. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and she said, ‘We don’t allow any food in.’ But that has never happened to me before—they put your backpack away, they check to see if there aren’t any drugs or weapons, and they leave it intact.

But I sensed a little bit of hostility to us.”

Asked about their policy, a Pittsfield Police Department spokesperson confirmed that protocol was seemingly ignored. “We try to secure anything that they have,” they said. “I can’t think of a case when we would dispose of anything.” *** The Connecticut Expansion Pipeline is a relatively minor injustice on the long list of threats to the planet that Crowe has been chipping away at.

As New England movement historian Robert Surbrug Jr. wrote in his 2009 University of Massachusetts Press book, Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990, Crowe was one of the very few individuals who played a significant role in several actions over multiple generations in Seabrook, where the Clamshell Alliance and other anti-nuclear fronts have stood against the power plant in that New Hampshire town.

Asked to describe what it is like to be involved in an action, and to offer some advice to millennials who are looking to get more involved, Crowe recommends focusing “totally on why you are there, and [on] what you are trying to do, and the way opens as you proceed ahead.” She continues: “If you are really focused on the injustice that you are trying to right by doing that, then I don’t think you think about yourself, you just follow the light that has led you there, and there is a very good feeling when you are finally arrested, you know that you have done everything you can and now they’re responsible for your body.”

As I sit on the floor in front of her, she goes on about how once the cops have you in handcuffs, it is necessary to cooperate. Authorities, Crowe says, are just part of the system. I feel like she’s my grandmother, telling stories about the good old days—even if her memories are mostly about getting shoved into police cruisers.

Crowe is aware that there is worth in her deep recollections, and even published her own autobiography, appropriately titled, Finding My Radical Soul.

Her entire life is packed into the pages, from balancing her family responsibilities and a dedicated activism schedule, to her family moving to Mass in 1951 so her second child, Jarlath, could attend the Clarke School for the Deaf. Mostly, the book is about her life as a rebel, with such highlights as a part describing the time she was put in solitary confinement after an arrest outside the office of a military weapons manufacturer.

“I was supposed to mop the floors in the hallway, and when I went to the closet where they kept the mops and the pail, I noticed a box of books,” she writes.

“I got a couple of them and put them in my pail.” From there, Crowe placed the mop on top of the contraband, and returned to her cell. “Then I mopped the floors, so it was good. You try to be creative and take the opportunities you have.”

In her own life, Crowe remembers waking up politically in 1945, after America dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These days, she thinks that the white nationalist mayhem in Charlottesville, as well as escalating rifts with North Korea, might make for the moment that this generation needs for an awakening.

“Trump,” she says, “is scaring us all.”

I ask Crowe if she thinks that things have gotten better, worse, or remained the same in terms of progress.

“I think it’s worse,” she says. Her tone is somber. “I think as our society falls apart, that people have been led to believe that they will have a good future, that they will have all the comforts, style, food, and retirement with an income. Healthcare, everything.” Nevertheless, Crowe says, “a certain segment of the population is unemployed, and they don’t see a future for themselves. They’re angry—they don’t know what to do with that anger.”

I ask if there is anything that people can do to help…

“We have to organize, take to the streets, put our bodies on the line, and do what we can,” Crowe says. “It’s the only thing they will respond to!”

Whatever others do to help, Crowe will keep on hammering. She recently introduced an article in the City of Northampton calling for no increases in the war budget. “I refuse to call it defense,” Crowe says. “No more funding of nuclear weapons!”

Before I leave, she takes me on a tour through her house and her office. In the latter, Crowe points to a folder that she has devoted to the Connecticut pipeline.

It’s stuffed full of paperwork and news clippings, as are more piles of files. She’s been compiling these dossiers for decades, all with a common goal in mind.

“Try to live simply, so that others can simply live,” she says. “As Dorothy Day said, try to build a new society in the shell of the old.”

“It’s the only thing they will respond to!”

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

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EVERY DAY IS LABOR DAY LABOR

DigBoston commits to expanding coverage of workers and unions

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS For the past many years, I’ve written an annual Labor Day editorial for whatever publication I’m running at the time.

And it’s always a relentlessly depressing exercise. Because there just hasn’t been much good news for working people in decades.

Since the 1970s, corporate profits and CEO salaries have skyrocketed nationwide while pay, benefits, and working conditions have stagnated or declined for most everyone else. Unions, once the main institutions of working-class power, have become a shadow of their former selves.

Struggling to stop their decline at the hands of both relentless corporate attacks and internal decay. As they diminish, the remaining roadblocks to capitalist supremacy are now being removed. Big business is triumphant and triumphalist.

Most news media dutifully trumpets its successes, softpedals its failures, and gushes over the most trivial pronouncements of its leaders as if they speak the wisdom of the ages.

I inveigh against this state of affairs on a regular basis, of course. But I didn’t see much point in doing that this Labor Day. Because I wanted to do something more positive than list the manifold crises facing all of us toiling in the Trump era.

Instead, my colleagues and I have decided to use the occasion of the workers’ holiday to announce a new initiative at DigBoston. We will follow in the footsteps of American newspapers of old and start expanding our coverage of both labor union news and workplace issues in general.

If a company lays off hundreds of workers, the news media focuses on the rationale presented by the bosses who ordered the layoff.

Because until about 50 years ago, even at the height of the McCarthy era, mainstream US newspapers covered the travails of working people on a much more regular basis. Some even had a regular “labor page,” or at least a smaller section devoted to “labor notes.” More importantly, working-class organizations and their leaders were consistently considered newsworthy. For example, when Samuel Gompers of the old American Federation of Labor gave a speech at Harvard nearly a century back, it was frontpage news. Today, a local appearance by Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO might get a mention deep within a paper— usually (and ironically) in the business section. Or maybe entirely ignored.

In fact, in most of today’s news media, serious labor coverage from the perspective of working people is limited to one day a year: Labor Day. And the other 364 days a year, labor-related news is reported from the corporate perspective.

If a company lays off hundreds of workers, the news media focuses on the rationale presented by the bosses who ordered the layoff. If workers are injured or killed on the job, it’s first reported as a tragic accident even when it’s clearly the result of management malfeasance.

Much-needed reforms like raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour are discussed in terms of how they might hurt corporate profits.

Meanwhile, the entire daily news cycle revolves around how the stock market is doing—without ever asking if the global economy should be based on the performance of a giant casino. In this framing, bosses are ever trustworthy and workers are ever suspect.

Corporations are largely benign

UNIVERSALIZING RESISTANCE A Q+A with BC sociology professor Charles Derber on his new book

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS Why did you decide to publish a book on “universalizing resistance” at this particular moment in history?

Because our survival is at stake. Universalizing resistance is a path toward dismantling the militarized capitalism before it wipes us all out. Climate change and nuclear war threaten the end of our very existence. Moreover, we face particularly urgent crises of authoritarianism, plutocracy, inequality, racism, xenophobia, and other institutionalized bigotry. We are seeing many “siloed” or single-issue movements rising up to fight slices of the problem. But they need to “universalize” or work closely together on overcoming the system at the root of all their problems.

You’ve done decades of research on American politics.

How do you think we got to a place where Americans could elect President Trump… and how do we get beyond him?

Trump is psychologically a wacko, but he is a natural product of the development of our politics since the New Deal era, which ended finally with the Reagan revolution. The Reagan revolution intensified a global corporate system running on the polluted fuels of racism and sexism, and made profit-gouging workers all

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over the world the operating system of the US. This left the working population in a desperate insecurity and disenfranchisement. The Clinton administration bought into Wall Street and the global system, formally rejecting the New Deal and embracing a Democratic Party built on corporate neoliberalism. So we ended with two parties of business, and labor was out in the cold. Moreover, the left after the 1960s fragmented into an identity politics devoid of any strong class politics, just as Reagan was destroying unions. This created the vacuum in which Trump could win over the white working class, since nobody was speaking for them, and Trump could appeal to their worst prejudices.

What do you say to people who feel that the left has to move to the center in order to win over a majority?

It’s a huge mistake. Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the US. The “center” perpetuates the impotence of the Democratic Party and the weakness of the left as it has abandoned anti-systemic policies. The only path to attract an anti-establishment majority is a new movement of universalizing resistance, not just against Trump but the system that created him. This can only arise from grassroots movements universalizing to come together for

and unions are hopelessly corrupt. Hardly the exemplar of fair and accurate journalism.

We’ve done better than that—with labor-related articles year round—but now we’d like to do better still.

By flipping the proverbial script. When covering stories of economic import, DigBoston staff will do our best to ask, “How does this situation help or harm working families and their communities?” When writing editorials on issues that matter to labor, we’ll feature working-class perspectives front and center. We will open our pages wide to opinion pieces by working-class leaders and their organizations, and we will profile ordinary working people on the job. The better to provide our audience a complete picture of the city they live in and improve their ability to make the right decisions about political and economic developments that affect their daily lives. Rather than only reflect a corporate perspective 24/7 like far too many other news outlets.

So that’s where we’re at. We remain independent journalists. We will continue to cover the news critically regardless of subject. But from now on at DigBoston, every day is Labor Day. Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston

a new society, working to push Sanders-style “democratic socialism” inside and outside the Democratic Party, toward a deeper change than Sanders himself envisions. By the way, polls show that a majority of millennials reject capitalism and that “socialism” is viewed more favorably than “capitalism” by almost half the population.

Your book includes a full analysis and set of prescriptions for people on the political left, but it also includes short passages from nearly 30 other thinkers. Why was this necessary?

I wanted the book to be a model of the universalizing movement we need. I wanted to lay out a framework, but I wanted inspiring activists and thinkers from all of our social movements to come together and flesh out the universalizing resistance we need from their own perspective. Their short essays are truly inspiring. They ground my analysis in vivid stories—of Standing Rock, Ferguson, cross-racial labor struggles—that show how identity and class politics can be melded into a mass resistance to transform our society.

Charles Derber will be speaking about his new book, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times, (Routledge, 342 pgs., 2017, available on Amazon) at the Harvard Coop Bookstore on Mon 9.11 at 7pm.

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HEADLINING THIS WEEK!

STRAIN REVIEW: THC BOMB TALKING JOINTS MEMO

Sweet with a twist of shrapnel

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A lot of top notch green these days smells like a turd of horse shit wedged between your stinky cousin’s jizz-filled sock and a gym locker floorboard. Not like it necessarily smells bad in a traditional way, but rather that the totally extreme conditions these days, of so many chemicals cross-firing through multicolored buds, can knock one on one’s bottom. When you burp particular strains—take Cheese, or any fart off the Skunk family tree, for example, all of which should be kept on the back porch, away from the cats but close to the litter if you need to mask the pungency—by breaking nugs in half, then shove your nose into the crack, the scent can be a fiddle overwhelming, sort of like the age we live in as a whole.

Stench aside, there’s a smorgasbord of flavor in the Bomb, though mostly from the dark side. Despite some superficial sweetness, there is a pinching pepper undertone, reverberations from which may shoot down (or up) your backbone.

It’s something that you’ll want to try, even seek out and grow for yourself if at all possible.

We got ours from a farmer north of Boston, in a state and city we won’t mention, and later that week a dispensary consultant who I showed it to said that the Amsterdam-based Bomb Seeds, from which this magnificence originates, is becoming a popular topic of conversation in nerdier herb circles of late. I hope so, but even if it takes a while for these alien delights to grow in all gardens, there is a chance that the ferocious fistful of the THC Bomb I secured will last for some time. Or at least the high will. It doesn’t make for super cloudy eyeballs, nor impede my ability to crank out cannabis reviews on keyboards with impressive manual dexterity, but it did kick me into a rabbit hole searching for aerial metaphors that describe highness…

Of course, with pro sports come professional injuries, and riding with a fat bowl full of THC Bomb in your gas tank from the morning through your midnight supper is hardly advised. Between the intensely dry tongue, and the way that you can keep on getting higher upon higher in the drop zone, this is not exactly weed to keep at your side in a dab holster all day, but instead something to regard as a respiratory treat that you stash for a special occasion, like movie-watching.

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‘I WILL MANAGE THIS PROCESS’ DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

Politics as crime in the age of Trump

BY BAYNARD WOODS @BAYNARDWOODS Donald Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff and top-notch torturer Joe Arpaio was, in many ways, the quintessential Trumpian act, the tarry, shitsmelling extract of the president’s politics.

In the same Phoenix campaign rally—yes, it was actually paid for by Trump’s 2020 campaign—where Trump spent 15 minutes attacking the press and Antifa and defending “our heritage” embodied in Confederate statues, he all but promised that Arpaio would be pardoned, but didn’t actually do it.

Instead, he waited until Hurricane Harvey was bearing down on Houston to pardon America’s most famous Torquemada impersonator, because he thought the ratings would be better.

But even more than all of this, Arpaio’s career is an encapsulation of what matters most to Trump: sheer, brute force masquerading as law. Politics as crime or crime as politics. *** The stories that the Phoenix New Times, a member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia like DigBoston, ran about Arpaio over the course of two decades constitute a crash course in American fascism.

Not only did Arpaio openly call his tent city jail a “concentration camp,” but the rate of suicide in his jail is double or even quadruple that of most other jails. Many of these deaths were never even investigated. Jailers denied people medical coverage and strapped them to a torture chair if they raised any hell about it. They closed the only vents bringing fresh air to hot cells, causing at least one death. Arpaio failed to investigate reports of sexual assault.

When the New Times reported on Arpaio’s real estate interests and included his address, he tried to bring charges against the reporters (who were also the founders of the paper). Later, his men arrested the reporters at their homes in the middle of the night for revealing grand jury proceedings—a misdemeanor.

While Arpaio seems to be generally sadistic, he prides himself on being especially cruel to people with brown skin, who he racially profiled—and held in their own segregated part of his “concentration camp.” This unconstitutional racial profiling is the source of the crime that Trump pardoned.

In 2008, George W. Bush’s administration began an investigation into Arpaio’s racial profiling. In 2011, the Department of Justice ruled that he had in fact been engaged in the systematic profiling of Latinos in Arizona.

The case in which Arpaio was charged with criminal contempt of court stems from even before the DOJ investigation, when a 2007 traffic stop became a classaction suit. A 2011 court order commanded the Maricopa County sheriff’s office to stop detaining

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people on suspicion that they had immigrated illegally, i.e. because they had brown skin.

“I’m still going to do what I’m doing,” Arpaio said in defiance. “I’m still going to arrest illegal aliens coming into this country.”

He also tried to destroy hard drives that were supposed to be handed over as part of the investigation, and hired a private investigator to spy on the judge and his wife.

Meanwhile, Arpaio did use taxpayer money to send a deputy to Hawaii to investigate Barack Obama’s birth certificate, so… *** Reading the stories highlighted by the New Times’ nowviral Twitter thread, laying out 20 years of Arpaio’s criminal politics, I was reminded of Ron Rosenbaum’s wonderful and tragic portrait of the Munich Post, which covered Hitler from before the Beer Hall Putsch to until he took power— and then killed most of the writers and editors of the paper. Like the New Times, the paper mixed hard-hitting investigative pieces with satire and humor intended to taunt, and ideally thwart, the soon-to-be Führer.

“There were other opponents to Hitler, but they were the ones who were constantly investigating him and discovering things that were really not well known about Hitler’s rise—how much he depended on his death squads to murder his political opponents, for instance,” Rosenbaum told me back in February, when the Los Angeles Review of Books published a piece that revisited the chapter on the Munich Post in his 1998 book “Explaining Hitler.”

According to Rosenbaum, the Post’s essential insight into Hitler was that he was a political criminal. While later historians have credited Hitler’s rise on his power as a public speaker, the Munich Post showed that murder, extortion, and blackmail played an even larger role.

While others were laughing off Hitler in the same way we laughed off Trump or the so-called alt-right, the Post tried to open the public’s eyes. They uncovered Nazi party documents in 1931 that contain the first mention of the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

So when Sheriff Joe “jokes” that his tent city is a

“concentration camp,” we should take note. When he raids the homes of journalists who question his shady business dealings, we should take note and we should be on guard.

When the president pardons him, this is a signal. And the reporters at the Phoenix New Times show us what it means.

When Trump pardoned Arpaio, he was sending a signal that he, like the Arizonan torturer, has contempt for the court and rule of law. It was also a promise, not only of more brutality, but perhaps that he would pardon those probed by special counsel Robert Mueller, should charges arise. *** Political criminality explains Trump’s fevered admiration of Vladimir Putin, who is the master criminal politician. (Read Masha Gessen’s “The Man Without a Face” if you want to be chilled to the bone.)

The emails from Felix Sater—a convicted criminal and informant with longtime ties to Trump and his organization—promising Trump’s lawyer that Putin would help get the Donald elected are only the most recent example of the Trump/Putin nexus of political crime. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen. “I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Sater, who did time for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass, seems to connect the kleptocracies of Trump and Putin, who many estimate is the fucking richest man in the world, with criminally gained money hidden around the world—the other reason Trump loves him.

And the alleged blackmail of the “pee tapes” is precisely the kind of rumor that the Munich Post found essential to the workings of the Nazi party before they gained power.

If we don’t heed these warnings, we know what is coming.

Tips to baynard@democracyincrisis.com

EVERY INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST’S WORST NIGHTMARE HAS BECOME REALITY MEDIA FARM

How the New York Times just hobbled nonprofit reporting incubators nationwide

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

An initial harbinger of coming nightmares hit my team of independent media crusaders at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) last October, when it was formally announced that the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation teamed up with the Boston Globe on an initiative that, according to the newspaper of record around here, “might just serve as a new model for supporting arts journalism.” Here we are, a newfangled nonprofit struggling to fill some of the giant voids left by negligent pro-business outlets, and a beast where several employees make six-figure salaries crashes our free lunch. We’re collecting 10-dollar donations to get off the ground, while the privileged Globe found not just one but three funders willing to foot its bill for… classical music reporting!?!

It was only a matter of time before that line blurred even more, helping to push the likes of BINJ even farther away from the major foundation table, where we already wait like dogs off to the side, fighting for crumbs that shake our way. And so the news on the Friday before Labor Day weekend that journalists like us who work in the trenches for peanuts will now have to compete with a philanthropic appendage of the New York Times—in addition to the university outfits we already wrestle with—was just the latest blow in an excruciating saga.

For anyone who follows media insider happenings closely, it was inevitable that major for-profit players like the Times would run roughshod over the work that many of us are doing in local, independent, and alternative nonprofit journalism. They are by nature followers that masquerade as trendsetters, and not just in the stories that they steal and co-opt from small shops without giving due credit. In this case, the Times hilariously got beaten to the punch by the Guardian, which four days earlier announced “the public launch of theguardian.org, a new nonprofit to support quality independent journalism around some of the most pressing issues of our time.”

If this reads like sour grapes, you’re right. For more than two years, my team has designed a model that could be rolled out across the country in a way that empowers

media makers elsewhere to build their own sustainable ops, and over the past several months, BINJ has helped spawn grassroots incubators in Santa Fe, Little Rock, and most recently Baltimore. Still we have been rejected or ignored by the dozens of foundations we have reached out and applied to, largely due to the reallocation of resources to national initiatives since Donald Trump took office.

When you’re rejected from a journalism grant, just like in any nonprofit area, the form letter will note that there were several worthy applicants that deserved funding, but sadly there’s just not enough to go around.

This is true, and it is also bullshit. I decided to stay classy and not call out specific names of individuals or orgs this time, but if pressed by privileged insiders who respond in haste to this polemic, I promise to explain in detail how the money follows money in this journalism game, as loyalists from places like the Times go on to pull the strings at big foundations and in turn support their own in any number of endeavors. In its most senseless conformation, this revolving door results in money going from major foundations to reporting programs at universities that have plenty of money already.

I am able to say these things, and to preach a gospel that says money should go into grassroots journalism rather than the ivory tower outlets, because BINJ is one of the lucky ones—from our proximity to wealthy liberal enclaves like Jamaica Plain and Cambridge, to the popularity of our events, to the reality show contestant who just won us a serious chunk of money (announcement coming soon about the latter). Furthermore, in the past few months alone, our tireless work on minimal budgets and assistance to others who are starting their own small nonprofits have earned us attention from the likes of Poynter, Nieman Lab, Columbia Journalism Review (twice), Journalism UK, Nonprofit Quarterly, and even the Guardian, which prominently featured BINJ just days before announcing its own nonprofit. All of that considered, and since I have been informed my team’s more or less been blackballed by some of the large foundations because I write things like this, I am more than happy to speak up for frustrated media fundraisers everywhere, many of whom I

NEWS TO US

communicate with regularly.

While people in this industry can be outspoken about various issues, especially journalism, you won’t see many editors or people who move in these circles publicly whining about the kind of greed that’s on display here.

Doing so is sure to get you mean looks from the likes of one Times expat who, in response to my complaining about said newspaper’s nonprofit grab, tweeted, “They’re doing really important work, and market forces still batter them. it’s not about you.” Followed by, “why are there sides? They’re supposed to just stop holding Trump to account because other journos need $?”

It’s insanely disingenuous to say that I implied the Times doesn’t do critical work, or to suggest that market forces haven’t crashed upon the smaller shops in ways that international behemoths couldn’t fathom on their lightest payday. It’s also fraudulent to say the Times can’t hold the president accountable without stepping on those who are toiling to keep all of the other lowlife state and local pols and bureaucrats in check while the goliaths unearth White House improprieties. I’m not sure why those who wish to see BINJ and others like it trampled would worry about partitions or posturing either, since they are on the side with all the money, not to mention that such a predictable response misses the point—that the Times and its ilk should be seeding, not depleting, the scant resources for journalism. To their credit, at least the press release about the Gray Lady’s nonprofit was up front about their milquetoast intentions of sharing any of the largesse they will surely pocket from innumerable readers who want to ensure dinner table bragging rights should they donate to the outlet which topples the POTUS: We also believe that The Times can help with the growing crisis in local news coverage by partnering with other institutions around the country. But mainly, we think there are journalism projects we are eager to pursue that could be more ambitious and have greater impact with outside support.

Finally, while my crew at BINJ spent our two years naively thinking that most major journalism funders really want to see a replicable grassroots model, I now realize that a lot of them are actually afraid of such proliferation. The more independent, small, and ethnic outlets that show up groveling for money, the less there will be for the fatheads who already pull in major salaries from college shops and public radio and television stations. I guess that’s our silver lining, though. The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism—not the New York Times, not the Guardian, and not even the well-established nonprofit veterans at NPR— has an effective selfless model to start baby incubators where they’re needed, and the longer that we wait for handouts from foundations that are predetermined to reserve the whale’s share for the sharks while all us crabs down at the bottom of the barrel bludgeon one another over morsels, the less time we have to do actual reporting and help friends across the country find solutions.

Learn more about BINJ and find out how you can help support independent journalism at binjonline.org, or donate right away in less than 10 seconds at cash. me/$BINJ.

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

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EYES OF THE STORM HURRICANE HARVEY

Dispatches from the independent press in Houston

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON “We’re still running and gunning here with some really tired people—some of whom still can’t get through the floodwaters to get into the office and are working remotely.”

-Houston Press Editor Margaret Downing, from an email last week to editors of other alternative weeklies across the country

If coverage of the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon taught news consumers in these parts anything, it’s that the national press is hamfisted at best when reporting outside of New York or DC. If you want to know what’s really happening when any kind of chaos breaks out, you should always turn to local sources. And if you want to get as close as possible to people who endure the most horrendous suffering in order to hear more about their personal experiences than 20-second TV sound bites have to offer, it’s best to check out independent outlets, where writers tend to come from the communities they cover, or at least have tighter ground-level sources than most mainstream shops.

For reporting on the horrors wrought by Harvey, the independent newspaper of note is the Houston Press, whose editors we heard from last week. Though just a small sample of the remarkable work that the team at the Press has done on the nightmare they’re living through, the excerpted scenes below speak to the heart of what a stalwart alternative with strong native roots can manage on small budgets in such awful situations. The pieces are informative, offering crucial information that Houstonians who may be in distress can use (the Press even dedicated real estate on its home page to run ads which helped lead hungry folks to open food stores), and they are also colorful enough to bring the reader deep into the flood zone where disgusting odors overwhelm, as well as critically investigative, in this case searching for the source of stenches while already slammed with ongoing crisis coverage.

We encourage people from all over to consider donating to the Houston Press GoFundMe campaign, from which “100 percent of the proceeds are going to benefit employees and their families affected by Harvey.”

Also check out their intensive hurricane reporting at houstonpress.com, including the articles highlighted below…

Is Harvey Also a Threat to the Air We Breathe?

BY DIANNA WRAY (8.28.17) Foul smells are nothing new in Manchester—air pollution has laced the fence line community so steadily for so many years that most longtime residents don’t even notice 12

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it anymore, as we’ve reported—and even in the face of Hurricane Harvey and a catastrophic flood in Houston, the main issue is once again something unknown in the air.

So far, Nayeli Olmos and most of the residents of Manchester, a community pressed up against the refineries and works of the Houston Ship Channel, have made it through Hurricane Harvey and the subsequent torrential rains from the tropical storm system, without any significant flooding. The community is lined with deep ditches and being close to the Ship Channel means the water tends to quickly drain off.

They were surrounded by flooding but relatively lucky, she says.

But just before midnight on Saturday night, Olmos, who has lived a few blocks from the massive Valero Refinery for years, noticed a strange odor in the house, as if someone had turned on a gas burner on the stove in the kitchen and blown out the pilot light. Olmos and her family thought it was coming from inside the house until she stepped outside where the smell was even stronger…

When Houston Went Under: Harvey Brings Historic Floods

BY MEAGAN FLYNN (8.30.17) It was 2:30 am, but Samwa David and her husband, Richard, couldn’t sleep, not with the water pouring into their house. They sat at the dining-room table, with their feet propped up on chairs to avoid the growing pool of water in their one-story home in the southwest Houston neighborhood of Westbury. They sat for hours, tuned into the live coverage of Tropical Storm Harvey’s ongoing destruction across Houston, until the TV stopped working. Before the floodwaters had risen over their knees, the couple, ages 66 and 81, had tried to save what they could.

“We were sure it was gonna happen,” Samwa David said of the house flooding, “because we were flooded in 2015. But this time it was much worse. We tried to save our stuff, because we just cleaned the water up two years ago, but we couldn’t. The water was too high.”

It was the story that played out across the Houston area as thousands of people awaited rescue from their own homes. If the empty shelves at the grocery stores and the lines at the gas stations were any indication, Houstonians had been prepared for this outcome, a card in a deck of possible worst-case scenarios. They had seen this before: The Tax Day floods of 2016, Memorial Day floods of 2015, Ike in ’08, Allison in ’01.

Still, even as the rain began falling in Houston well before Hurricane Harvey slammed into the mid-Texas coast late Friday night—boasting winds upwards of 130 miles an hour—a long, deceiving lull between rainstorms Saturday afternoon had many thinking perhaps Harvey wasn’t all it was hyped up to be.

Then they woke up…

Exxon, Other Refineries, Emitted Chemicals Into the Air During Harvey

BY DIANNA WRAY (8.30.17) Residents in Manchester and across east Houston complained of a strange, unexplained smell starting on Saturday night, long before the worst of Hurricane Harvey had even hit. There’s still no official explanation of the odor, which lingered for more than two days, but a slew of reports filed by various area refineries certainly provide some clues as to where it came from.

Essentially, it could have come from any of the dozens of refineries along the Houston Ship Channel, or possibly from all of them.

On Tuesday ExxonMobil, the owner of one of the many refineries along the Houston Ship Channel, filed a regulatory report with the state environmental regulatory agency acknowledging that its Baytown refinery had been damaged during Hurricane Harvey.

The floating roof of one of the tanks at the refinery sank during the storm, unsealing the oil or other materials kept in the massive storage unit, which allowed particularly large amounts of emissions to escape the tank, including volatile organic compounds, chemicals that tend to morph into gases, some of which can have both short-term and long-term negative health effects, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The company also reportedly filed a report with the National Response Center disclosing that the Baytown refinery would release about 15 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen, into the air…

The Victims of Hurricane Harvey: Harris County ME Confirms 25 Deaths

BY MEAGAN FLYNN (9.1.17) The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, the county medical examiner’s office, has released the circumstances detailing briefly how 25 people in Harris County died during Hurricane Harvey.

The 25 are part of at least 44 total deaths reported in Texas so far, from Orange and Jefferson Counties in Beaumont, where at least three died, down to Aransas County in Rockport, where one died after the hurricane first hit. At least three died in Galveston County, two in Montgomery County and two in Fort Bend County, in Fulshear.

The number is only expected to rise as floodwaters continue to recede and first responders begin going block to block, door to door, searching for anyone left behind.

Below, we recount how Harvey took each flood victim confirmed in Harris County and who they were, based on any information about them available so far.

Identifying information is not available for all of them yet, but we will continue to update this story as recovery continues.

On Friday, the Institute of Forensic Sciences is investigating at least seven additional flood-related deaths [including]: Belia Rojas Saldivar, age 81; Manuel Q. Saldivar, age 84; Xavier Adam Saldivar, age 8; Daisy Saldivar, age 6; Devorah Saldivar, age 16; Dominic Saldivar, age 14: The elderly couple’s son was driving a white van, with the couple’s four great-grandchildren in the back, over a bridge at Greens River Drive when the Greens Bayou began to take the van under, ultimately sweeping it away. The driver, Sammy Saldivar, was able to escape through the driver’s side window, and Harris County sheriff’s deputies would find him hanging onto a tree for his life. Deputies retrieved the van on Wednesday, August 31 on the banks of the Greens Bayou, with the six family members found inside.

Unidentified man: A man was found floating in high waters on Claiborne, residential street in a neighborhood just north of Tidwell Road and right behind the Halls Bayou. He was discovered at 10:53 am on Tuesday, August 29.

ICE BUCKETS AND EDIBLES SPECIAL GUEST FEATURE

An exclusive excerpt from ‘Ice Bucket Challenge: Pete Frates and the Fight against ALS’

BY CASEY SHERMAN + DAVE WEDGE

Pete was soon placed on an experimental “compassionate use drug,” an investigative drug that was outside of a clinical trial. In order to receive it, Pete’s doctors had to contact the pharmaceutical company while also submitting an application to the FDA. They also had to agree that their patient, Pete Frates, had no other options.

The drug was in a phase III trial.

It was hope in a bottle for the ALS community but it did nothing to slow the progression of the fast-moving disease.

Pete would have to search for his own remedies. He spent countless hours reading articles, white papers, medical journals and other materials for information about ALS. It was all-consuming. One place his research led him to was medicinal marijuana. Pete had smoked weed in the past but it was not high on his list of vices. He enjoyed his Budweisers much more than a joint, but he also was not judgmental and was fine with people enjoying a bong hit or two.

He learned that medicinal marijuana could have some benefits to ALS patients. Studies have shown marijuana can prolong the survival of brain neurons while the plant’s active ingredient, THC, has antioxidative, antiinflammatory and other neuroprotective effects that can help ALS patients.

Pete knew the science was debatable but he also kne he had nothing to lose and needed something, anything, to help him cope with the rapid, painful changes to his body.

He had been suffering severe anxiety and muscle spasms, which he hoped the pot could help alleviate.

He rang up a friend and asked him if he could bake a batch of edibles for Pete to try. The friend was happy to oblige and baked a dozen brownies for him to eat. Pete did not want to try it alone. There was only one person he trusted enough to sample them with him—his brother Andrew.

Andrew had also quit his job to be full-time caregiver for his big brother. He had put his own future on hold for the brother he had idolized growing up. Pete’s dreams now

The friend was happy to oblige and baked a dozen brownies for him to eat.

became Andrew’s dreams. They both wanted Pete to get better and both strived to find a cure for ALS. Pete and Julie now lived in a handicapped-accessible in-law apartment that was built as an addition onto the Frates’ Beverly home.

All the materials used to build the two-bedroom addition were donated by area businesses, as was much of the labor.

One morning they woke up and Julie had left for the day. Nancy and John also were not home so Andrew and Pete had the entire house to themselves.

Holding the bag of brownies up, Pete said to his brother: “Dude, you want to do these?”

“If you’re doing it, I’m definitely doing it,” Andrew replied.

There was a sense of mischievousness about the whole thing. Their parents were not home and they were about to do something that was against the rules.

They each ate a whole brownie but felt nothing after 15 minutes. Twenty minutes, 25 minutes went by and still nothing. They considered eating another, but then, suddenly, the brownies kicked in.

The brothers started giggling at nothing. They felt warm and happy.

Pete was relaxed and felt fantastic, the woes of his body’s deterioration faded away.

Pete made his way to the stereo and turned on one of his favorites: Iron Maiden. Andrew did not love heavy metal like his brother, but the vibe of the moment was infectious.

Pete banged his head along with the thrashing sounds

of Nicko McBrain, Steve Harris, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith. He wailed along, singing every word along with vocalist Bruce Dickinson, hoisting his hands to the sky in time to the triumphant lyrics.

“Run, live to fly, fly to live, do or die,” Pete shouted along. “Won’t you run, live to fly, fly to live, Aces high!”

Andrew had tears in his eyes and his stomach knotted from laughing so hard as they thrashed around the living room. Soon, Julie arrived back home.

“Dude, Julie’s home. Chill,” Pete said. Like misbehaving little boys, they assumed seats on the couch, trying to hold back the giggles.

But that didn’t last long. They began chuckling at each other.

Julie watched the commotion with a raised eyebrow.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” she asked.

“You guys are up to no good.”

She looked over toward the counter and noticed the bag of brownies.

“Oh my god, you guys are stoned off your asses!” she said, joining them in laughter.

They both giggled in agreement and Pete went back to the stereo and turned Iron Maiden back on. Julie’s tastes were much more subdued, but like Andrew, she too embraced Pete’s heavier side and thrashed along with them.

Half of all proceeds from Ice Bucket Challenge: Pete Frates and the Fight against ALS go directly to the Frates family. Meet Pete and the authors for a book signing this Thursday, Sept. 7 at 1pm at the Prudential Center Barnes & Noble.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

13

HIDDEN EATS

ATWOOD’S TAVERN, CAMBRIDGE Food, beer, and music in a rustic space

boston’s urban winery, intimate concert venue, private event space & restaurant

opening this fall

BY MARC HURWITZ @HIDDENBOSTON

Upcoming SHOWS 10.16 10.17 10.19

MAX WEINBERG’S JUKEBOX INCOGNITO ANDERS OSBORNE & JACKIE GREENE (EARLY & LATE SHOWS) 10.20 RUSTED ROOT 10.20 DORI FREEMAN IN THE HAYMARKET LOUNGE 10.21 AN INTIMATE EVENING W/ RICKIE LEE JONES 10.22 ALBERT CUMMINGS 10.24 QUINN SULLIVAN 10.25 LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III W/ LUCY WAINWRIGHT ROCHE 10.26–27 ART GARFUNKEL IN CLOSE-UP 10.28–29 KRISTIN HERSH & TANYA DONELLY 10.30 CRAIG FINN & THE UPTOWN CONTROLLERS PLUS JOHN K. SAMSON 11.1 RENAISSANCE A SYMPHONIC JOURNEY 11.2 COWBOY JUNKIES 11.2 BLUE WATER HIGHWAY BAND IN THE HAYMARKET LOUNGE 11.3-4 SHAWN COLVIN & HER BAND W/ LARRY CAMPBELL AND TERESA WILLIAMS 11.5 HOLLY NEAR W/ TAMMY HALL & JAN MARTINELLI 11.5 THE WEEPIES COMPLETELY ACOUSTIC & ALONE SECOND SHOW JUST ADDED! 11.7 TALIB KWELI 11.8 LOS LONELY BOYS 11.9 LEFTOVER SALMON EARLY & LATE SHOWS 11.10-12 MARIZA 11.11 ERIN HARPE AND THE DELTA SWINGERS IN THE HAYMARKET LOUNGE 11.12 ANTHONY GERACI & THE HIPNOTICS IN THE HAYMARKET LOUNGE 11.13 DAVID CROSBY & FRIENDS SKY TRAILS TOUR 2017 11.14 PAUL THORN HAMMER & NAIL 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR 11.15 LLOYD COLE 11.16–17 MARC BROUSSARD 11.18 IAN HUNTER & THE RANT BAND 11.19 ROBERT PINSKY’S POEMJAZZ (EARLY SHOW) 11.19 WILLIE NILE 11.21 DOYLE BRAMHALL II 11.24 AZTEC TWO-STEP 11.25 AN EVENING W/ MELISSA FERRICK 11.26 KINDRED THE FAMILY SOUL 11.28-29 RUFUS WAINWRIGHT W/ MELISSA FERRICK 12.1 SUSAN WERNER 12.2 DONNA THE BUFFALO 12.3 KRIS ALLEN SOMETHIN’ ABOUT CHRISTMAS TOUR

city winery Presents

9.15 9.19 9.20 9.21 9.24 9.28 9.29 9.29 10.10

PARACHUTE AT LAUGH BOSTON MASON JENNINGS W/ FRANKIE LEE AT HARD ROCK CAFE BEN OTTEWELL AT RED ROOM @ CAFE 939 DAVID WAX MUSEUM W/ CIARAN LAVERY AT LIZARD LOUNGE CHRIS HILLMAN & HERB PEDERSEN W/ JOHN JORGENSON AT HARD ROCK CAFE JOHN POPPER W/ KATRINA WOOLVERTON AT LAUGH BOSTON DAN WILSON AT THE RED ROOM @ CAFE 939 THE CHURCH W/ THE HELIO SEQUENCE AT THE CENTER FOR ARTS NATICK EILEN JEWELL W/ MISS TESS AT LAUGH BOSTON

&

food Drink 10.21 11.8 11.10 11.11 12.2

BOSTON WINE CLASS SERIES | WINE 101 | INTRO TO WINE BOTANICAL GIN LAB RIDGE WINE DINNER BOSTON WINE CLASS SERIES | WINE 102 | SPARKLING TO STILL TO SWEET BOSTON WINE CLASS SERIES | WINE 103 | WINE AND FOOD PAIRINGS

email eventsboston@citywinery.com for more info

Become a City Winery

VinoFile Member!

Buy tickets before the public, avoid service fees, attend members-only events & much more!

1 canal St. Boston Ma 02114 | (617) 933-8047

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CENTRAL SQUARE CAMBRIDGE

MIDEASTCLUB.COM | ZUZUBAR.COM

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THU 9/7 - 9PM

Phaeleh, Supertask, Saltus FRI 9/8 - 8:00PM

LGP, Capo, Drew Dollar$$ SAT 9/9 - 6PM

McCafferty, Remo Drive, Small Circle, CHEEM SAT 9/9 - 1030PM

Sauce Boston ft. Jackal /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

DOWNSTAIRS

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THU 9/7 - 8PM Perpetual Groove, Matthew Stubbs and the Antigu FRI 9/8 - 9PM

Xmortis SAT 9/9 - 9PM Dance Yourself Clean SUN 9/10 - 7PM Hyukoh (Sold Out)

TUE 9/12 - 7PM Brockhampton (Sold Out)

WED 9/13 - 7PM Griffin Robillard (Album Release)

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

UPSTAIRS

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

THU 9/7 - 7PM

Teenage Bottlerocket, OC 45, Makewar FRI 9/8 - 8PM Marlon Craft, Justin Clancy, TK SAT 9/9 - 6:30PM Cindy Wilson (of the B52’s)

SAT 9/9 - 11PM SOULELUJAH SUN 9/10 - 8PM NE-HI, Honduras, The Owen MON 9/11 - 8PM

Dust Moth, Mustard Gas And Rose

TUE 9/12 - 7PM Jake Clemons, Sam Robbins WED 9/13 - 8PM Walter Etc., Lost Dog, Colbis the Creature BUY TICKETS @ TICKETWEB.COM

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

SOCIAL MEDIA:

@MIDEASTCLUB @ZUZUBAR @SONIAMIDEAST 14

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DIGBOSTON.COM

College students are back in town once again, and many if not most will be looking for places for food, drink (if they can), and live music. The spots that offer all three tend to be along subway lines, so they are pretty convenient for students who more often than not don’t have wheels, but for those who are up for an Uber, cab, bus, or a little walking, one of the better options for a night of grub, booze, and tunes is in a great little section of Cambridge (Inman Square) that’s just a bit off the beaten path.

And with such legendary places as T.T. the Bear’s in Central Square and Johnny D’s in Somerville’s Union Square being history, Atwood’s Tavern on the eastern edge of the square seems to have taken on even more of a role in the local and regional music scene while also offering up some tasty dishes as well as beers that will satisfy even the biggest beer nerds out there.

Inman Square is full of restaurants and bars, and if it were on a subway line, the area would probably be jammed with people night and day. But it isn’t, so it’s typically filled with locals, people with cars, and those who don’t mind one of the options mentioned above, including the 69, 83, or 91 if opting for a bus. Because Atwood’s is just outside of the heart of the square, it is a bit of a hidden spot because there isn’t nearly as much foot traffic as there is further up Cambridge Street where it intersects Hampshire Street. Upon first glance, it is a little difficult to figure out exactly what Atwood’s is—is it a dive bar? An Irish pub? Maybe it’s an upscale watering hole? Well, it’s none of these, really, instead being a good, solid, midlevel place that oozes charm inside, with lots of dark woods, a bar that looks like it has seen its share of history, a small stage in the back that is integrated nicely with the rest of the space, and a hidden side patio that is accessed by a door beyond the bar.

It seems that with some of the big names among clubs now gone, Atwood’s is mentioned more often as one of the best places to hit for live music, but as indicated earlier, this is not just a music club. Much of the food here is quite good, including a cheese plate that comes with sourdough bread, quince jam, dried apricots, and an always-changing mix of cheeses; a hummus plate that is heavy on the garlic and comes with house-made pita chips; a grilled boneless pork chop that’s brightened up a bit by fennel and ginger; a creamy mac and cheese made even better with the addition of bacon; a juicy grass-fed burger made using local beef; a savory wild boar bratwurst sandwich on rye; and for dessert, a Taza chocolate pudding that’s almost too rich (if that’s possible), along with an equally decadent creme brulee.

The beer list at Atwood’s includes some good ones, with regional favorites such as Lawson’s, Notch, Idle Hands, Night Shift, Mayflower, Jack’s Abby, and Castle Island sharing the list with a large number of beers from overseas, while a handful of wines and specialty cocktails are available as well. On the music side of things, you’ll find everything from blues to rock to jazz to R&B to bluegrass and more here, and live acts can be found nearly every night.

To those new and returning students (and others as well) who are looking for more than just a bite to eat when they go out at night, Atwood’s Tavern may not be a crazy place or a meat market, but there are few better options in the Boston area for food, drink, and music. And even though it remains a bit of a hidden spot, it is starting to get “discovered” by more and more people, so it might not be the underthe-radar gem that it once was—and that’s probably a good thing, because Atwood’s is the type of unassuming little place that you definitely want to root for. >> ATWOOD’S TAVERN. 877 CAMBRIDGE ST., CAMBRIDGE. ATWOODSTAVERN.COM

VERY FUNNY SHOWS.

Seven Nights A WWk.

GOT AN EVENT? LIST IT. LIVE MUSIC • LOCAVORE MENU PRIVATE EVENTS 9/07

Blackalicious

West coast hip hop

Use our self-serve listings page to get your event online TODAY!

9/08

The New Review, Evolfo Funk mixed with old school soul

digboston.com/listings

9/10

Dada, The Trews, DJ Carbo, Grant Stinnett Melodic alternative rock music

We offer a free basic listing as well as enhanced and premium listings to really get you noticed.

9/11

Rock & Roll Trivia

With Erin Amar & Brett Milano 9/12

Slaves, Secrets, Out Came the Wolves, PIcturesque Experimental post-hardcore

156 Highland Ave • Somerville, MA 617-285-0167 oncesomerville.com   @oncesomerville /ONCEsomerville

IMPROVASYLUM.COM | 617.263.6887

THE GOODWILL STORE Welcome back students!

Shop Goodwill for your best dorm room finds.

25% off regular priced items with any valid school I.D.* Sept. 1-15

www.goodwillmass.org

MORGAN MEMORIAL GOODWILL INDUSTRIES

*Offer valid September 1 - 15, 2017. Not valid on prior purchases.

Not valid at Goodwill Outlet Store. May not be combined with any other offer, discount or the purchase of gift certificates.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

Follow us @goodwillboston

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

HOW TO WORK WITH J MASCIS MUSIC

Weakened Friends are living the dream and you can too

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

Boston rock is a legend in itself, but nothing comes close to the iconic Massachusettes sound and style of J Mascis.

The frontman of Dinosaur Jr. is known for his stacked tower of amps, that blissfully fuzzy guitar tone, and his howling solos that have been jutting emotional notes into the scene ever since the band formed in Amherst in 1984. His long white hair and deadpan conversations make him an easy person to imitate, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say there are several J Mascis outfits wandering the streets of Allston come Halloween.

So for most musicians, the dream is to work alongside Mascis. He’s got that iconic sound that still sounds fresh after all these years—Dinosaur Jr. is still recording new material that entertains generations young and old, and it’s scheduled to play a two-night residency at the Sinclair in October—and he’s a songwriter who’s honed his tone in an admirable way. But how do you pull that off? It’s a dream that dies for nearly every band, but if you’re Weakened Friends, it can become reality.

The Boston-via-Maine alt-rock act writes satisfying hooks that bleed into the fringes of garage, punk, and pop ever since it formed in 2013. That earned the band’s most recent record, Crushed, a spot on our “Best Local Albums of 2016” list. Now, they’re back with new single “Hate Mail” that sees them in their best form yet—and with J Mascis at their side. It’s a song of snappy drums, elastic guitar, and bright yappy vocals that hits right in the sweet spot, and Mascis’ scissor-sharp guitar glides along throughout the track. If WFNX was still around, guitarist-singer Sonia

Sturino, bassist Annie Hoffman, and drummer Cam Jones would absolutely hear the song blaring on the radio.

So how does a band pull that off? Though Mascis is a native of Massachusetts and still lives here decades after the band formed, he’s notoriously reclusive, quiet, and blunt. Weakened Friends are talented—that much isn’t up for debate, and anyone who wants to argue otherwise just needs to listen to their music—but they aren’t at the level of fame where they could tap any artists to guest on their work. As it turns out, Weakened Friends work with the same management as Mascis, so in the early stages of working with them the company had the band mail a record to Mascis. He dug the album. They dug him.

Next thing they knew, he was playing on their track.

“Those parts were all him. Giving someone like J directions would feel like trying to tame a wild beast, so we let him do his thing, and we’re happy about where it ended up,” says Sturino. “It was really awesome to see where he took the song. It wasn’t what I was expecting as a

musician, but as a fan I was super stoked.”

Sturino’s surprise makes sense. When Mascis sent his contributions, it wasn’t just a guitar solo to be placed halfway through “Hate Mail.” It wasn’t a couple fuzzed-out riffs to tack onto the end. It was a full-blown contribution, one that sees him shredding over the course of the whole song and complementing Sturino’s melodies. It’s a selfless addition that genuinely benefits the song at large.

“When we first got his takes back, his parts were mixed super duper high—naturally loud—and we were all laughing really hard in the van,” says Sturino.

“It’s like up to 11 on stun.”

It’s a big payoff for reasons bigger than the collaboration. Sturino started writing “Hate Mail” over Christmas of last year. She flew to Toronto to visit her parents and found herself digging through her old computer. On it, she found an early acoustic demo where her mother can be heard yelling at her from another room (“Because I’m 27 going on 14,” she jokes). Now, “Hate Mail” was one of the last songs she wrote for their new record, and it sounds significantly different from the demo, in part because she was listening to a lot of Pinegrove at the time and was smitten with their chord progressions.

A few years ago, she was in an emotionally abusive relationship, worked a job she hated, and lived in a town where she felt like a misfit. Eventually, she realized she was being gaslighted, enduring various toxic relationships for the sake of keeping things calm—and she wanted to use “Hate Mail” to remind listeners that they don’t need to fall victim to that. “Everything that should have been fun felt like a total drag,” she says. “The bridge vocals are where it kinda connects that message: ‘I thought it was the best thing / until I found it’s letting me down.’ I think a song like this from a band I liked could have helped me out then and made it feel less lonely. I could only hope that this song is a small bit of advice to anyone in that place that there is a way out.”

Luckily for listeners, this song is just one of many Weakened Friends has to offer. “Hate Mail” comes off the band’s upcoming LP, Common Blah, due out later this year. It’s a taste of hometown pride, from the Mascis feature to its recording roots at Zippah Recording Studio in Brighton, and one worth sharing with anyone looking for an addictive new flavor in music. “I think we’ve really come together as a unit on this new record,” says Sturino. “This song is a taste of that … which probably tastes a lot like Taco Bell fire sauce.”

>> WEAKENED FRIENDS, THE COLOR AND SOUND, HEAVY POCKETS. FRI 9.8. O’BRIEN’S PUB, 3 HARVARD AVE., ALLSTON. 8PM/21+/$10. OBRIENSPUBBOSTON.COM

MUSIC EVENTS SAT 9.09

ROCK’S LOBSTER CINDY WILSON (OF THE B52S)

[Middle East Upstairs, 474 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

6:30pm/18+/$20. mideastoffers.com]

16

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SUN 9.10

RADIO 100 NIGHT OF NONSTOP ELECTRONICA ANDRE OBIN + AVOXBLUE + DJ GRAAVES

[ZuZu, 474 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. 10pm/21+/$5. mideastoffers.com]

DIGBOSTON.COM

SUN 9.10

SEX, DRUGS, AND GLAM ROCK ’N’ ROLL A GIANT DOG + THE DAZIES + BOSTON CREAM

[O’Brien’s Pub, 3 Harvard Ave., Allston. 8pm/21+/$8. obrienspubboston.com]

MON 9.11

PSYCH ROCK LEGEND GONE FOLK ROKY ERICKSON + DEATH VALLEY GIRLS + SALEM WOLVES

[Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. 7pm/18+/$25. crossroadspresents.com]

TUE 9.12

SUPPORT OUR RAP-FUGEES MS. LAURYN HILL + NAS

[Blue Hills Bank Pavilion, 290 Northern Ave., Boston. 6:30pm/18+/$40. bostonpavilion.net]

WED 9.13

LO-FI WHISPERINGS ON DEATH AND LOSS MOUNT EERIE

[Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Ave., Somerville.

6:30pm/all ages/$18. crossroadspresents.com]

STARLABFEST MUSIC

GOT AN EVENT? LIST IT.

The end-of-the-summer party returns with jams, noms, and more

PHOTO BY MICHELE EAGAN

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

The dreaded time has come. Grocery stores stopped restocking Polar Seltzer’s summer flavors, the sunset is lowering earlier each night, and streets throughout the city are still dusty from Allston Christmas. Technically it’s still summer despite the season’s vibe almost vanishing entirely in the cool breeze of the last few days, but boy, does it feel like fall is here. Luckily for you, there’s one last chance to celebrate summer 2017, and it’s an event all your friends can tag along for, too.

On Sept 9, the eighth Starlabfest Music & Arts Festival will go down in all its fanfare. The annual event will take over the Somerville Arts Council’s ARTfarm that Saturday to bring a rousing roundup of music, comedy, food, and arts that lets you escape into the carefree joy of summer one last time. It’s open to all ages and costs a sliding scale of $15 to $25.

This year’s musical acts will lift your spirits one after the other thanks to the beach pop of Baby!, the beery songs of Jeff Rowe, the disco punk of Boston Cream, the straightforward punk of Bundles, the garage rock recklessness of JoJo & the Angry Girls, the twinkling pop of Me in Capris, the polished indie pop of Laika’s Orbit, the noise garage of Black Beach, and the mesmerizing jams of Lyres. It all leads up to New York rock icon Paul Collins Beat who will headline the event. That much quality local music all in a single afternoon? Yeah, we know, it seems too good to be true.

The fine folks of Starlabfest take the entertainment a step farther. This year, comedians Al Park, Xazmin Garza, Peter Martin, and Sam Ike will perform stand-up sets throughout the day. It gives you a chance to lift your spirits, grinning ear to ear, without having to stuff earplugs into your cranium.

Perhaps what’s got us most excited, though, is the flea market. High Energy Vintage is curating a selection of rare finds and cheap scores for you to snag, plus other local vendors will pepper the area. On top of that, there are raffles and games to play, which means you could waltz away with some seriously baller free wins.

Bringing it all home is the gossip-worthy food Starlabfest sets up for patrons.

As always, there’s a surprising stock of beer on-site, as well as wine and cider. Scott Brothers New American Meat Co. will provide free BBQ—including vegan and veggie options!—throughout the day, but it goes fast. Get there early to secure yourself some delicious lunch and a cold beer.

If you’re still waiting for a big reveal, then you got to the best part: The festival is open to dogs too. Be still our hearts. Try not to let all the goodness overwhelm you or else you’ll get too starry-eyed to walk there, and given Starlabfest is the summer party you’ve been waiting for, you’ll want to arrive right on time to maximize the summer joy.

Use our self-serve listings page to get your event online TODAY!

digboston.com/listings We offer a free basic listing as well as enhanced and premium listings to really get you noticed.

>> STARLABFEST VIII. SAT 9.9. ARTFARM, 10 POPLAR ST., SOMERVILLE. 12PM/ALL AGES/$15-25. STARLABFEST.COM

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

FILM

GUIDED TOUR

On the many sights of Columbus, by debuting filmmaker Kogonada

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

One specific visual composition recurs constantly throughout Columbus [2017], a movie that mostly consists of dialogue scenes between one man and one woman.

That recurring shot, in a way, is a three-hander: The man and the woman usually take up the right and the left sides of the foreground—often blocked so that we’re seeing half of their faces or less—while our eyes are drawn to the background, which is populated by the world-renowned modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana. With many thanks due to the funding of American industrialist J. Irwin Miller (1909-2004), the city is a landmark of that movement and plays host to buildings designed by architects including Eliel Saarinen, I. M. Pei, and Robert Venturi, among numerous others. This is a history that the characters in Columbus are quite conscious of—specifically Cassandra (Haley Lu Richardson) and Jin (John Cho), who typically are the man and the woman speaking in that recurring composition. Jin is a translator in Columbus from Seoul because his father, a noted academic, fell into a coma while there to give a presentation; Cassandra—Casey—is a townie “architecture nerd” who works part time at a library (the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei) and who had intended to see Jin’s father speak, before the older man fell ill. Casey and Jin first talk over cigarettes, then start meeting up to visit some of the city’s most notable modernist buildings—and since Casey is giving Jin something like a personalized tour of Columbus’ architectural history, that means she’s giving that tour to us as well. This may be a film of conversations, but you find yourself looking past every one of them.

A film teaches you how to watch it, and Columbus indeed teaches you that we’re not always going to be watching the people. The first scene takes place at Miller House—designed by Eero Saarinen and formerly owned by

the family of J. Irwin— where the film patiently cycles through a series of compositions that document the building’s layout and installations.

During this sequence, a woman (Parker Posey) is pacing through the backgrounds, calling out for a “professor” (Jin’s father, who’s soon to collapse). She does find him, but throughout the scene, the face of Jin’s father is never even visible—and in a couple of these compositions, Posey’s character is literally outside the camera’s focus as well.

When Jin does arrive, to be present at what may be his father’s death, he stays at the Inn at Irwin Gardens (once the childhood home of the same J. Irwin, now a bed-and-breakfast)—and once again we cycle patiently through the design, this time looking at the mansion’s picturesque exteriors. Built and rebuilt from 1864 through 1910, the inn is far removed from modernism, so Jin’s placement in it contrasts with his father’s at Miller. It’s an early aesthetic hint toward a narrative detail: that Jin is distant from his father, not only physically but also intellectually (“I don’t know shit about architecture,” he’ll tell Casey later, though he’s at least halfway lying) and interpersonally (father and son have not spoken in over a year). Columbus is the first feature-length work directed by visual artist/video essayist Kogonada, whose unadulterated passion for these spaces is quite immediately apparent. What’s also immediately apparent, far more importantly, is his ability to find storytelling possibilities, visual texture, and even subtext in these spaces.

Kogonada is also the writer and editor of the film, and with regards to the former craft, his work is what you might call observant. The film’s characters discuss subjects that people in this class and milieu might believably discuss: When Casey’s co-worker at the library (Rory Culkin) attempts to flirt with her, he does so with rambly lectures or with some faux authoritative academic takes (“whatever you do, don’t get an MLS”). What plays less naturally is the dialogue itself, which has a speechifying quality to it; like the work of many first-time writer-slash-directors before it, the dialogue in Columbus can occasionally sound like an artistic manifesto read aloud, much to the detriment of its more artfully textured scenes. Casey slowly cooks her highly dependent mother (Michelle Forbes) a meal,

then speaks about its subtlety and lingering aftertaste in one instance; and Jin chides Casey when her minilectures on works of architecture devolve into lists of factoids, professing that what matters instead is “how do you feel?” in another. These are codes and metaphors and symbols working on the basest level (recall our tour guide—the one townie to see Columbus’ beauty—is a Cassandra, the one who sees). And as with many other scenes in the film, they exude the feeling of a writer using their characters as a vessel for lectures of their own. But for a retort to that point, we can turn to Kogonada himself, speaking in an interview published by Inverse: “You don’t see a lot of Asian men in American cinema who are wrestling with ideas, their parents, their existential crisis,” he noted. “But as an Asian-American male, that’s what Asian-American males are like. We are existential people. We love talking about art and trying to figure things out.”

There is a narrative that bubbles up in the dialogue between Jin and Casey, though it’s not quite as pronounced as a summary might make it sound. As Jin becomes more aware of Casey’s ambitions and intelligence, he begins to try to motivate her to study at an institute of higher education—at which point he becomes aware, through both her words and her suddenly reticent physicality, that she’s bound to this city by her mother, who might struggle to maintain sobriety without the companionship of a family member. As a story, this is something like a bridge between two very different film lineages: On one side, it is written as a rather typical American coming-of-age narrative, complete with hitting-the-road signifiers; and on another, it shares a surface resemblance with the recurring themes in the works of Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), whose movies constantly studied the dependencies that are inherent in the family dynamic (among innumerable other subjects) and who was also a subject of study for Kogonada in his time as an academic (his unfinished thesis was said to “explore the possibility of alternative modernity in the films of Yasujiro Ozu,” which might as well be a jokey film-nerd description of Columbus). This is not to suggest that what’s happening is imitation—what’s happening is probably closer to Columbus’ buzzword, closer to an attempt at “modernization”—but it’s nonetheless worthwhile to consider the ways in which Kogonada’s direction is different. Even the long shots in an Ozu film, for instance, tend to privilege the work of the performer: Their body is kept in full view, or their face remains visible in the frame.

This is hardly true of Columbus, whose visuals can often be as ostentatiously mannered as its dialogue. It is, of course, unmeasurably unfair to compare a first-time narrative filmmaker to one of the form’s greatest masters, even when the work of that first-time filmmaker so blatantly invites the comparison. But it helps us to see where Columbus falls short: Kogonada’s spaces are richly conceived, but they’ve yet to find room for the performances within them.

>> COLUMBUS. NOT RATED. OPENING FRI 9.8 AT THE BRATTLE THEATRE, 40 BRATTLE ST., CAMBRIDGE. SEE BRATTLEFILM.ORG FOR INDIVIDUAL SHOWTIMES. FILMMAKER KOGONADA IN PERSON FOR 4:30PM AND 7:15PM SHOWS ON SUN 9.10.

FILM EVENTS FRI 9.08

NIGHT ONE OF A CHANTAL AKERMAN RETROSPECTIVE AT THE HFA JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES [1975]

[Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Harv Sq., Camb.

7pm/NR/$7-9. 35mm. hcl. harvard.edu/hfa]

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FRI 9.08

COOLIDGE AFTER MIDNIGHT PRESENTS WALTER HILL’S THE WARRIORS [1979] [Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline.

Midnight/R/$12.25. 35mm. coolidge.org]

DIGBOSTON.COM

SUN 9.10

MON 9.11

MON 9.11

THU 9.14

[Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Sq., Somerville.

2pm/NR/$15. 35mm. somervilletheatre.com]

[Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7pm/NR/$7-9.

35mm. hcl.harvard.edu/ hfa]

[Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7pm/NR/$12. brattlefilm.org.]

[Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7:30 and 9:30pm, /PG-13 and NR/$1113. 35mm. brattlefilm.org]

WITH LIVE MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT

BY JEFF RAPSIS SHERLOCK HOLMES [1916]

‘SYNAESTHETIC CINEMA: MINIMALIST MUSIC AND FILM’ BEGINS AT THE HFA KOYAANISQATSI [1982] and EVIDENCE [1995]

THE DOCYARD BEGINS ITS FALL PROGRAMMING WITH THE REAGAN SHOW [2017]

THE BRATTLE’S ‘TILDA SWINTON: WORLD’S GREATEST ACTRESS’ ORLANDO [1992] AND CARAVAGGIO [1986]

Peace

Boston

Edutainment & Production Co.

Joh

nH anc 180 Ber ock Ba keley SHall

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11.1

t.

7@ 6pm

Presents…

HIP-HOP 9.1.1

BLACK SPOTS on my SOUL An Original Play

Come take a journey with Ebony and the Ghosts of Hip-Hop Past, Present and Future!

Proceeds benefit the Peace Boston Youth Arts Scholarship

GET YOUR TIXX TODAY AT: peaceboston.eventbrite.com NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

ARTS

MANIFEST DESTINY, MINUS THE MEN Director Dawn M. Simmons talks Men on Boats at SpeakEasy Stage

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS realizes it because it’s so open that there’s a lot you can do.

I’m happy to see a company like SpeakEasy doing this. This is something that, in years past, might have shown up at Company One or one of the other fringe companies, but to see one of the larger companies take it on is very exciting.

I think it’s exciting for the writer, it’s exciting for me as a director, and it’s exciting for the actors. We’re getting a new story out; we’re getting a different type of storytelling out. [SpeakEasy has] a visibility that will really lift this show, and that’s a wonderful thing because more people need to see it. The more people that see this show, the more we start to cultivate a taste for this kind of storytelling and for the stories of other people.

I can’t wait to see Men on Boats—it was an unlikely hit when it first opened in New York, and now regional productions are popping up all over the place.

All over the place; it’s really interesting. I wish I could see every production—I would love to know how everybody

What is the biggest challenge with Men on Boats?

We have a mixed cast of cis-identifying, gendernonconforming, and trans individuals in this show—so the further we go into it, we really have to start to dig into that and what it means for us to be telling those stories.

The more you mine a seed, the deeper into it you get. We keep exploring and everybody keeps being open; there’s something deeper every time we turn around. Every time we open a page we find something new to explore, whether that’s physicality or whether that’s, “Am I playing this as a man, am I playing this as a woman, am I playing this as somebody who refuses to identify?” What does that look like and what is that story, then, for an audience member? We get there every time we open a new page.

Maybe the most difficult thing is that there’s something around every corner. We’re never done working; we’ve never stopped thinking in this process. There’s not a place where you can sort of veg out. You’ve got to be on 24/7.

Do you anticipate there being some people who just don’t get it?

On many different levels, absolutely. I think there are some people who will be like, “I don’t understand the boats; I don’t understand why they were doing this movement for a boat when a boat moves like this; I don’t know why those are women.” There will be someone who say[s], “Is that a guy?” “Why are there black people in this?” There will be those people who are just like, “Nope, don’t understand it.” And there will be some people who will push through that and maybe not understand it but try. There will be some people who are immediately rooting for it. I think no matter what, you’re going to leave feeling something.

You’re going to leave with a strong opinion, whether you loved it or didn’t love it. It’s not one of those neutral shows where you’re going to come out like, “Eh.”.

You can’t get much more macho white male than Powell’s exploration tale, and now the story is being told by everyone who is not a white man. In your estimation, what is the play saying through its casting?

There’s the idea, for me, that adventure and history is open to all and that we all have a part in it. Putting these different bodies in this particular story—this very male

NILE HAWVER/NILE SCOTT SHOTS

It’s hard enough to imagine a 100-minute play about the 1869 expedition of John Wesley Powell. But how about a play about Powell’s expedition starring zero men, using modern-tinged dialogue, and without a boat in sight?

The result, Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men on Boats, was a surprise hit in New York and now makes its New England premiere at SpeakEasy Stage, where it will run through Oct 7.

Here, director Dawn M. Simmons (whose Saturday Night/Sunday Morning was one of our DigBoston top picks of 2015) reflects on both the challenges and importance of Men on Boats.

You said in an interview a long time ago that when you were trying your hand at playwriting, some of your professors said that what you were writing wasn’t necessarily the kind of play that they were expecting from you; they were judging a book by her cover. And here you are directing Men on Boats, which distorts all of those questions of expectation and ownership. Is there a kind of symmetry here?

It’s the other side of that where we have come—not quite full circle—but we’re entering that new place where people are being allowed to tell more stories. We are giving ourselves, and we are claiming access to, more things.

That interview was a little while ago, and things are changing. Last year I was asked to direct The Real Inspector Hound; that’s a show that I would not have expected somebody to ask me to direct, and it’s not one that I necessarily would have thought of doing. And now this, where the author is very purposefully claiming the story of other people, other bodies, and inserting new people into that story—we’re making space for ourselves, and I think that’s where we are right now.

Instead of asking permission or waiting for somebody to say it’s okay, we’re just doing it.

story—is hopefully a gateway to get people interested in other stories. Whether it’s more of this sort of adventure, male-dominated sense of history or whether it’s “now that I’ve seen this tale told by other people, what’s their history?” Does it open the door for us to be curious about other people and where they actually were at this time and what was going on with them?

>> MEN ON BOATS 9.8–10.7 AT SPEAKEASY STAGE COMPANY, 527 TREMONT ST., BOSTON. SPEAKEASYSTAGE.COM

ARTS EVENTS FINAL WEEKEND! BURN ALL NIGHT

[OBERON, 2 Arrow St., Cambridge. Through 9.8. americanrepertorytheater.org]

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DIGBOSTON.COM

THE 7 FINGERS RETURN REVERSIBLE

[ArtsEmerson at Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St., Boston.

Through 9.24. artsemerson.org]

SCOTT EDMISTON DIRECTS CONSTELLATIONS

[Underground Railway Theater at Central Square Theater, 450 Mass.

Ave., Cambridge. Through 10.8. centralsquaretheater.org]

GREATEST AMERICAN MUSICAL GYPSY

[Lyric Stage Company, 140 Clarendon St., Boston. Through 10.8. lyricstage.org]

LEGENDARY SONDHEIM MUSICAL MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

[Huntington Theatre Company, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston. Through 10.15. huntingtontheatre.org]

ALLSTON: 180 Harvard Av.• 617779-7901 (Green Line @ Harvard) SOMERVILLE: 238 Elm St.• 617629-5383 (Red Line @ Davis Square) BUFFALOEXCHANGE.COM •

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SAVAGE LOVE

COMMON AREAS

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET I’m a lady considering taking on a foot fetishist as a slave. He would do chores around my house, including cleaning and laundry, and give foot rubs and pedicures in exchange for getting to worship and jack off to my model-perfect feet when I’ve decided he’s earned it. Am I morally obligated to tell my roommates? Technically the guy would be in their common space too. I will fully vet him with references and meet him in a neutral location at least once—and anything else you might suggest I do for security’s sake. Though my roommates are not what you would call conservative, I’m not sure they’d understand this kind of arrangement. I would have my slave come over when no one is around, and then my roommates could come home to a sparkly clean common area! My slave would never have access to their personal spaces, nor would I leave him alone in any area of our home until a strong bond of trust had been established. No harm, no foul? Or am I crossing a line?

Man Into Cleaning A Shared Apartment A friend in Berlin has a similar arrangement. This guy comes over to clean his apartment once a week and—if my friend thinks he’s done a good enough job—my friend rewards him with a knee to the balls. It’s a good deal for both parties: My vanilla-but-kink-adjacent friend gets a sparkly clean apartment (which he loves but doesn’t want to do himself), this guy gets his balls busted on a regular basis (which he loves but can’t do himself). But my friend lives alone, MICASA, and that makes all the difference. Or does it?

Time for some playing-games-with-foot-fetishists theory: If you were having sex with a boyfriend in the common areas of your apartment when your roommates weren’t home—let’s say your boyfriend (or even some rando) wanted to fuck you on the kitchen floor—you wouldn’t be morally obligated to text your roommates and ask their permission. But we’re not talking about a normal guy here or normal sex—we’re talking about a fetishist who wants to be your slave. Does that make a difference?

It might to people who regard kinksters as dangerous sex maniacs, MICASA, but a kinky guy isn’t any more or less dangerous than a vanilla guy.

Strip away the sensational elements—his thing for feet, his desire to be your chore slave, the mental image of him jacking off all over your toes—and what are we left with? A friends-with-benefits arrangement.

That said, MICASA, unless or until all your roommates know what’s up, I don’t think you should ever allow this guy to be alone in your apartment.

On the Lovecast, Dan and Jesse Bering chat about your father’s penis: savagelovecast.com.

THE STRANGERER

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

22

08.31.17 - 09.07.17

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