Boulder Weekly 2.04.21

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news:

The phase-out of GMOs on County open space includes a program that could help grow local, sustainable ag practices

by Matt Cortina

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lab notes:

Drifting in space and time

by Travis Metcalfe

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adventure:

Taking an avalanche safety course in the middle of a pandemic

by Angela K. Evans

buzz:

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drink:

29

weed between the lines:

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Releasing a new single, Joel Ansett talks about his vision of God, the limitations of Christian music, and learning from Bowie

by Caitlin Rockett

Mountain Sun holds off on Stout Month, but there are plenty of local versions of the style to tide you over

by Matt Cortina

In counties with more cannabis dispensaries, there are fewer opioid deaths, new research shows

by Will Brendza

departments 5 7 18 19 20 22 23 24 25 27

The Anderson Files: Can democracy survive if political violence is normalized?

Letters: Signed, sealed, delivered, your views Events: Beekeeping, murder mysteries, theater from your living room, and more to do when there’s ‘nothing’ to do...

Podcasts: ‘Build For Tomorrow’ proves that no problem is new Art: Remembering Polly Addison Words: ‘unequivocally’ by Jeffrey Spahr-Summers Savage Love: Quickies Astrology: by Rob Brezsny Film: Criterion renews a 20th century classic with ‘The Ascent’ Food/Drink: Barbacoa Nachos @ Nopalito’s

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Publisher, Fran Zankowski Editor, Matt Cortina Circulation Manager, Cal Winn EDITORIAL Senior Editor, Angela K. Evans Arts and Culture Editor, Caitlin Rockett Contributing Writers, Peter Alexander, Dave Anderson, Emma Athena, Will Brendza, Rob Brezsny, Michael J. Casey, Sarah Haas, Jim Hightower, Dave Kirby, John Lehndorff, Rico Moore, Amanda Moutinho, Katie Rhodes, Leland Rucker, Dan Savage, Alan Sculley, Ryan Syrek, Christi Turner, Betsy Welch, Tom Winter, Gary Zeidner SALES AND MARKETING Market Development Manager, Kellie Robinson Account Executives, Matthew Fischer, Sami Wainscott Advertising Coordinator, Corey Basciano Mrs. Boulder Weekly, Mari Nevar PRODUCTION Art Director, Susan France Senior Graphic Designer, Mark Goodman CIRCULATION TEAM Dave Hastie, Dan Hill, George LaRoe, Jeffrey Lohrius, Elizabeth Ouslie, Rick Slama BUSINESS OFFICE Bookkeeper, Regina Campanella Founder/CEO, Stewart Sallo Editor-at-Large, Joel Dyer

February 4, 2021 Volume XXVIII, Number 25 As Boulder County's only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism and thought-provoking opinion writing. Free every Thursday since 1993, the Weekly also offers the county's most comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. Read the print version, or visit boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you're interested in writing for the paper, please send queries to: editorial@ boulderweekly.com. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper.

690 South Lashley Lane, Boulder, CO, 80305 p 303.494.5511 f 303.494.2585 editorial@boulderweekly.com www.boulderweekly.com Boulder Weekly is published every Thursday. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. © 2021 Boulder Weekly, Inc., all rights reserved.

Boulder Weekly welcomes your correspondence via email (letters@ boulderweekly.com) or the comments section of our website at www.boulderweekly.com. Preference will be given to short letters (under 300 words) that deal with recent stories or local issues, and letters may be edited for style, length and libel. Letters should include your name, address and telephone number for verification. We do not publish anonymous letters or those signed with pseudonyms. Letters become the property of Boulder Weekly and will be published on our website.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Can democracy survive if political violence is normalized?

by Dave Anderson

W

hen White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the Georgia GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, she declined to offer any comment, saying that she didn’t want to “elevate conspiracy theories.”

What could she say? That President Biden isn’t a member of a Satanic cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles?

That there’s no evidence that a California wildfire was caused by Jewish bankers using a secret laser from space?

That the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School really happened and weren’t phony publicity stunts with actors to promote gun control? The Republicans just appointed her to the House Education Committee.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said that a number of conservative childhood friends who live in his I

small Oregon hometown recently asked him if liberals were plotting to round them up and put them in “re-education camps.” They heard that on Fox News. A Wall Street Journal columnist asked, “If you were an enthusiastic Donald Trump supporter, are you ready to enter a reeducation program?”

Kristof told his friends that wasn’t going to happen, and he was “stung that they felt greatly relieved to hear it.”

Think about it. They weren’t kidding around. His old friends were genuinely frightened. They were also told that they didn’t have to worry about the coronavirus and that mask mandates were a step toward tyranny. That Trump was re-elected by a landslide.

What would you do if you believed all of that? Maybe you would pick up a gun and...

Kill someone? Rep. Greene has supported the murder of prominent Democrats in speeches and on social media multiple times. That makes a lot of her fellow lawmakers somewhat nervous. Unfortunately, she isn’t a unique Republican lawmaker.

This situation is new. Are many Republicans now willing to normalize political violence to get their way?

The party already benefits from a number of undemocratsee THE ANDERSON FILES Page 6

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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ic structural advantages such as the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the filibuster. Republicancontrolled state legislatures have also passed laws that suppress the votes of people who tend to vote for Democrats.

As a result, Democratic presidential candidates have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections but have become president only five times. Both the Democrats and the Republicans currently each have 50 votes in the Senate (with Vice President Harris having the tiebreaking vote), but the Democrats represent 41 million more voters than the Republicans.

“We’re not a democracy,” Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah tweeted in the middle of last year’s vice-presidential debate. He said: “The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic...” Hours after the debate, Lee tweeted: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

In an essay on the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill insurrection, Yale historian Timothy Snyder said that the biggest group of Republicans are people he calls “the gamers” who work the system with voter suppression, gerrymandering and dark money.

Now there’s a smaller faction made up of people like Trump, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who he calls “the breakers” who are willing to 6

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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come to power by brazenly dictatorial means such as mob violence and overturning an election and lying about it.

Snyder said: “Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative.”

But when Trump said he had won the election, it was a big lie.

Snyder explained: “To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Many on the right consider a one-person-one-vote democracy to be a threat. At a gathering of evangelicals in 1980, Paul Weyrich, a GOP strategist and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, asked, “How many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo syndrome’?

Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Colorado prioritizes oil and gas Gov. Polis and most Colorado leaders continue to prioritize a bankrupt industry, responsible for 70% of Colorado’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, over my health and safety. A recent report from 350 Colorado, a statewide environmental advocacy organization, found that the oil and gas sector is currently responsible for 70% of Colorado’s GHG emissions in comparison to the state’s estimation of just 17.3%.

And while Polis’s release of Colorado’s GHG Roadmap’s HB 19-1261 seemed promising, it actually allows for a 61% increase in GHG emissions. This report proves that the state has been severely underestimating Colorado’s GHG emissions. Thus, the state’s plan to increase oil and gas production while still meeting GHG emission reduction targets is an unconvincing illusion.

Even when following the Roadmap’s assumed reduction in oil and gas, it is not enough. We need a complete phase-out of oil and gas by 2030, which can be achieved through a 10% per year reduction in GHG emissions. The use of oil and gas cannot continue, and any plan trying to save Colorado from climate devastation that still accounts for large amounts of oil and gas by 2030 is not a good one.

Colorado could lead the global, just transition from fossil fuels to renewables if it used honest data on actual GHG emissions to influence policy decisions, not assumed and self-reported data from the oil and gas industry.

Coloradans are tired of watching our forests be burned, our waters be poisoned, and air be toxined. A just transition from fossil fuels to renewables, one that supports energy workers and prioritizes frontline communities, is not only possible but is what we deserve.

Megan Neufeld/Lyons

small-donor matching funds, end gerrymandering, and restore transparency in our government. LWV of Boulder County joins with voting rights groups around the country in our enthusiastic support of this transformative bill.

Even though Colorado has already taken many steps to improve our election process and voter systems — such as restoring voting rights to previously incarcerated community members, and

putting in place anti-gerrymandering processes for drawing congressional district maps — we need action to make these and other changes on a national level. The bill also includes campaign finance provisions. For example, a small-donor public-match financing process would help first-time election candidates, including those from underrepresented populations; funds for the public match would

come not from taxpayers, but from a nominal surcharge on criminal and civil penalties assessed against corporate wrongdoers.

If passed, this legislation will enshrine into law what all Americans know: that everyone deserves a voice in our democracy.

Elizabeth Crowe, co-president, League of Women Voters of Boulder County

Improving elections The For the People Act, the first bill introduced this year in Congress, will improve American elections by making our election system more free, fair and accessible to all eligible Americans. This legislation will restore the Voting Rights Act, improve automatic voter registration, modernize the public financing of elections through BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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Planning for the future

County claimed. Despite pressure from the community, the Commissioners decided to extend the phase-out — GM corn to 2021 and GM sugar beets to 2025 — and hire local agriculture group, Mad Agriculture, to help farmers plan a successful transition.

That brings us to today. Part of the County and Mad Ag’s transition plan calls for field trials of non-GM crops, and it sets aside part of the $823,000 transition budget toward subsidizing some of the risk for former GM farmers to try new crops.

The funds, which get progressively greater over the three years of the trial, can be used to purchase seed, freight and other expenses one might not expect, says Cassandra Schnarr, agricultural resource specialist at Boulder County Parks and Open Space.

“Think of it like this: Say I’m a farmer and I’m used to growing 100 acres of one crop. It’s one crop that gets into my planter or drill, and I can just keep refilling the hopper on that and keep going on that all day.

If I’m experimenting with three different varieties [of crop], I’ve got to stop, clean the bins; it takes a lot of extra time and then more to harvest,” she says.

While some of those community members who opposed extending the GM phase-out may bristle at the idea of taxpayers subsidizing this work, there is, concurrently, a silver lining that may encourage farmers on all sizes of land to experiment with new, sustainable crops and practices.

“The issue with the local food system and getting it to work is we are always putting the risk on the farmer, and the farmer is running a business,” says Brian Coppom, executive director of the Boulder County Farmers Markets (BCFM). “They can’t afford to take all the risk for our social benefit, and so part of the challenge in our food system is how do we start to have public investment that de-risks some of this innovation in agriculture?”

That’s where the field trials aspects of the phase-out plan comes in. Farmers grow non-GM crops on a progressive scale, starting small, with help from the County to lower costs and find markets. Jules Van Thuyne, a farmer, has been growing pinto beans for several years, and as part of the transition program, recently grew 40 acres of the crop, producing close to 100,000 pounds of beans, which are now for sale through BCFM and have also been sold to area institutions that could use a shelf-stable, healthy high-pro-

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

The phase-out of GMOs on County open space includes a program that could help grow local, sustainable ag practices

by Matt Cortina

D

ried beans are not the sexiest food to be found at the farmers market. (It’s chard, actually.) But the humble bean is at the center of Boulder County’s ongoing debate over genetically modified (GM) crops grown on County open space, a practice scheduled to be completely phased out within the next four years.

As part of that phase-out program, which was, contentiously, extended in 2019, farmers are receiving financial and market assistance from the County to sell non-GM crops, and dried beans are the first major offering from that work. The program has the potential to provide a blueprint for other communities transitioning away from GM crops, as well as to provide the necessary support for farmers to try new, sustainable crops without the financial risk associated with doing so.

And so the question for a community that overwhelmingly spoke out against GM crops is: Is this 8

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aspect of the program a silver lining, or is it too little, too late?

Let’s go back. In 2011, the Board of County Commissioners voted to allow the growth of GM crops on County-owned (and –leased) farmland. In 2016, with two of the three Commissioners who voted to approve GM use replaced, the Commissioners voted to phase out the use of GM crops — corn by 2019 and sugar beets by 2021.

“I truly believe that transitioning away from GMO sugar beets and corn is a move in the right direction, but I feel we need to do so in a way that works in close partnership with our farmers and helps remove barriers that might stand in their way to successfully farming on open space lands,” County Commissioner Deb Gardner said at the time.

Then, in 2019, the Commissioners met to decide whether to extend the phase-out — farmers were reluctant to try new crops and lamented the pressure to transition away from GM crops, the FEBRUARY 4, 2021

tein food like dried beans.

Essentially, “Boulder County derisked the growing of them,” Coppom says.

“About 20,000 pounds [of Van Thuyne’s beans] were purchased by food pantries in Colorado,” says Tessa Hale, healthy beverage and food advisor at Boulder County Public Health. “We’ve just been working to facilitate getting these beans into institutions, organizations and schools.”

A big selling point of the program is not only that it helps in the transition away from GM crops, while also serving the soil well (beans, for instance, add nitrogen back into the ground, and other nonGM crops reduce the use of harmful chemicals), but being able to provide affordable plant-based protein helps improve the health of the community, particularly for those who are food-insecure, Hale says.

“I was really interested in looking to how we could increase the healthfulness of foods provided to individuals in the county who are food-insecure and getting meals on the free and reduced public health program, or people receiving food from food pantries,” she says.

So far, farmers have tried planting non-GM crops like sorghum, corn and garbanzo beans, in order to see how well they grow (the chickpeas did not do well), how much it cost to grow them, and how much the farmers would have to sell them for to make ends meet.

And last year, the County worked with farmers to run a wheat trial, which is particularly interesting in the context of a greater movement toward reviving heritage and heirloom grains. Part of the trouble of reviving the grain chain, as it’s called, is the fact that the unique infrastructure to harvest and process grain had to be built from scratch — though if you’ve been to Moxie, Dry Storage or had the chance to stop by Black Cat’s mill house, you know people are working diligently to turn healthier, tastier varieties of wheat into flour and baked goods at a relatively affordable price.

For the time being, Hale says the County and its participating farmers are “just kind of working through barriers” like the infrastructure question and, for instance, trying to figBOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

ure out what the market is for beans, heritage wheat and other foods that might end up in subsequent trials.

Hale adds keeping an eye on consumer habits and market trends may play a part in future iterations of the program.

“That’s definitely a huge part of the vision, of having a more local and sustainable food system. Shifting away from commodity crops and getting to more direct-to-consumer

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kinds of foods,” she says.

And there’s hope the program, or a similar iteration, may continue in the future, because the County has heard the concerns from community members about the need to transition to an eco-friendly, sustainable form of agriculture on open space, Schnarr says.

“The County, from the Commissioners on down, is very invested in sustainability, and part of

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

sustainability is carbon sequestration,” Schnarr says. “Part of carbon sequestration is soil health, trying out different crop rotations, the order in which you plant the crops, whether you plant the crops and then have a fallow period. … So I think moving in those directions of soil health and sustainability issues, the County’s gung-ho and excited about it. I’m sure there’s going to be funding.”

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BOULDER WEEKLY

MARIORDO VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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n 1916, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted ripples in the fabric of space known as gravitational waves.

Just as accelerating electrons create electromagnetic waves, some of which we can see as visible light, gravitational waves are created by accelerating concentrations of matter like black holes.

The existence of such ripples in space was first confirmed in 2016 by several large physics experiments, for which researchers were awarded a Nobel Prize the following year. In mid-January 2021, a team of U.S. researchers announced the first hints of a new detection of gravitational waves using the remnants of exploded stars that are sprinkled across the galaxy.

Stars that are much bigger than the sun end their lives in supernova explosions. For very massive stars, the only thing that remains after these spectacular events is a black hole, a concentration of matter so dense that not even light can escape its gravity. For slightly smaller stars, the remnant of the explosion can be a pulsar, an object with more mass than the sun packed into a volume comparable to Manhattan. Pulsars spin as fast as a kitchen blender, and emit radio waves in a beam that sweeps around the galaxy like a cosmic lighthouse. In many cases, the radio pulses received at Earth are as regular as the most stable atomic clocks, so pulsars can be used as a sort of GPS for the solar system.

When two black holes are orbiting each other, they slowly lose energy to gravitational waves and eventually merge. At the moment of the merger, they produce a burst of gravitational waves in a fraction of a second, sending ripples out into the fabric of space like a pebble tossed into a pond.

Galaxies can also orbit each other, and if each of them has a monster black hole at their center they will also eventually merge. For merging galaxies, the process takes much longer to play out. The resulting gravitational waves are more like swells in the ocean than ripples on a pond, and these gravitational swells might take years to pass through our neighborhood.

Drifting in space and time

by Travis Metcalfe

BOULDER WEEKLY

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“What is really happening is that space is getting stretched and squeezed along different axes.

So the pulsars in one part of the sky have their pulses arrive a little bit sooner than we expect, while the pulsars in another part of the sky arrive a little bit later than we expect,” says Joseph Simon, a postdoctoral researcher at CU Boulder.

Simon grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and went to graduate school in Wisconsin before landing a postdoctoral position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL) in California. He was hired to help interpret observations from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a large collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2005, the NANOGrav team started making regular measurements of pulsars all around the sky using some of the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world.

The focus of Simon’s work at JPL was to try and identify the background of gravitational waves from monster black holes at the centers of merging galaxies, the swells that take years to pass by.

“I’ve been leading this project on behalf of the entire collaboration for the better part of the last three years, but this result is the culmination of over a decade of work by over a hundred scientists at all levels from undergrads to emeritus faculty,” he says.

Simon came to Boulder last August to start a postdoctoral position with the local experts in galaxy mergers. At a recent online meeting of the American Astronomical Society, he presented the FEBRUARY 4, 2021

first results from his analysis of NANOGrav pulsar measurements. The idea was to look for tiny changes in the arrival times of radio pulses from pulsars all around the sky. Due to the warping of space by a slowly passing gravitational wave, the pulses were expected to arrive ahead of schedule in some directions and behind schedule in others. From the first 12.5 years of observations, Simon and the NANOGrav team did find significant evidence of the expected changes in pulsar timing.

However, it will take at least a few more years of measurements to be able to conclude definitively that the changes are caused by gravitational waves.

Unfortunately, the work of the NANOGrav team took an unexpected hit in early December when the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed. The giant radio dish, which had been built into a natural sinkhole in the 1960s, suffered major damage earlier in the year. It was already scheduled to be dismantled for safety, but before the job could be finished some cables snapped and the instrument platform crashed down onto the dish below.

“The science legacy of the Arecibo observatory is really great, and we are incredibly saddened by the collapse,” Simon says. “Luckily, we have been able to continue using the (West Virginia) Green Bank Telescope (GBT), and in the near future we hope to be able to increase the amount of time that we use on the GBT to at least partially compensate for Arecibo’s loss.”

It’s wild to think that the Earth is constantly drifting through ripples and swells in the fabric of space, created by merging black holes across the galaxy and throughout the universe. Several teams around the world have been making measurements similar to the NANOGrav team, so it may be just a few years before researchers can announce a new confirmation of Einstein’s predictions.

Travis Metcalfe, Ph.D., is a researcher and science communicator based in Boulder. The Lab Notes series is made possible in part by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

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CAITLIN EGGIMAN

Point taken Taking an avalanche safety course in the middle of a pandemic

by Angela K. Evans

ABOVE: The author skins to Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

RIGHT: Digging a snowpit to test the snowpack is a large part of avalanche safety.

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t’s typically windy in Rocky Mountain National Park. On this January Friday, however, it’s relatively calm and warm. With temperatures eking into the high 40s by the afternoon, there’s hardly any snow on our drive to the Bear Lake parking area around 8 a.m. As we start skinning up to Emerald Lake, what little snow there is on the “southerlies,” or south-facing aspects, shows signs of small wet slides, roller balls of snow moving down the hillside. As the sun warms the surface, water starts percolating down, weakening the strength of the snow. It’s typical of late spring avalanche conditions, where a season’s worth of snow starts to do the same with the potential to release large slides that can bury and kill a person within minutes.

The north side has much more snow — the angle is steep, but the trees are thick, making an avalanche unlikely. Every few hundred yards, we stop and look around and above us, assessing every pillowy slope, comparing it to the maps on our phones, using a slope angle to measure areas of steepness above 30 degrees — avalanche terrain.

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

If it sounds like I’m new to the backcountry, it’s because I am. I’ve been putting off the switch to splitboarding — a backcountry snowboard that splits into two ski-like planks in order to skin up terrain but connects back together at the top in order to ride down — for a few seasons. Weekends spent at resorts don’t hold the same thrill as they did more than a decade ago when I first started. I search for more and more challenging and untracked terrain, largely dependent on everdiminishing snow conditions, due at least in part to climate change, as the crowds keep getting bigger and bigger.

Until this year, one thing always stopped me from forsaking resorts for the backcountry: avalanche risk.

Colorado has a notoriously avalanche-prone snowpack, earning a reputation for the most dangerous backcountry state for skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers, even snowshoers and hikers.

Of the seven avalanche fatalities so far this winter in the U.S., four of them have happened in Colorado, and all in December. As of press time, three more skiers are still missing between Silverton and Ophir after being burI

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

ied by a slide on Feb. 1. Compare that to a total of six avalanche fatalities across the state in the 2019-20 season (only one in December 2019) and the outlook this year looks grim. In the week of Jan. 25-Feb. 1, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) recorded 261 avalanches around the state, more than 60 of which were human-triggered.

“Taking the broad perspective of the season thus far, we essentially built a pretty terrible snowpack structure in terms of its ability to produce avalanches,” says Brian Lazar, deputy director of CAIC. “It’s about as bad a snowpack as we’ve seen since 2012.”

At the same time, all signs are pointing to increased backcountry use this season after years of steady growth. Many resorts have implemented some sort of reservation system as part of their pandemic response, even as more people want to be outside, where social distancing is easier. As more and more people start exploring the backcountry, the number of avalanche incidents could easily increase.

In preparation, CAIC has expanded its education resources page to help direct folks to more learning opportunities. It’s invested in avalanche signage to post at trailheads and in backcountry huts, mailed brochures through partner organizations hoping to get the word out, and upped its social media game to draw the attention of potential backcountry users. Even the Colorado Tourism Office has redirected its winter budget away from luring out-ofstate skiers and toward avalanche and responsible recreation education for locals.

It’s hard to know exactly how many people are touring the backcountry but, anecdotally, Lazar says he expects more users if backcountry gear sales and enrollment at avalanche safety courses give any indication.

According to reporting from The Economist, sales of backcountry touring gear more than doubled between 2016 and March 2020, from $39 million to $79 million, and that’s before the surge later in 2020 when many retailers reported selling out as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered ski resorts around the world. Between August and December, research from The NPD Group, which tracks retail sales, shows sales of Nordic and alpine touring equipment, splitboards, snowshoes and backcountry accessories including beacons, probes, skins and avalanche shovels grew 76% compared to the same time period in 2019.

After ordering my bindings online in midNovember, I was told they wouldn’t be available until July 2021. Thankfully, after a quick call to the company, the sales rep found some for me at a BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

store in Vermont — the last pair in the flagship store. In December, it took the local outdoor shop eight full days to trim my skins and wax my splitboard.

Still skeptical of the backcountry, I refused to go out on my new gear (apart from skinning up resorts) until I could take a recreational avalanche safety course. But the first available opening with Colorado Mountain School (CMS) in RMNP wasn’t until the end of January.

“We sold out all the December courses in the beginning of November, which is just unheard of,” says Jason Maurer, the CMS avalanche program director. “What I’ve heard is we’re up like 600% right now.”

When three people canceled on a mid-January

ment on as we make our way up to Emerald Lake on Friday.

The same happens on Sunday in Hidden Valley. It’s another clear and sunny day, starting out frigid before warming up in the afternoon. Taking the day off to trip plan, we’re lucky enough to miss the Saturday storm, which only brought in a couple of inches to isolated parts of RMNP but had high wind gusts — maybe as much as 80 mph, according to our instructor, Mia Tucholke.

A ski, rock and ice climbing guide with CMS, Tucholke has also been teaching avalanche education since the early 1990s. Starting at age four, she grew up skiing in Europe before moving to Colorado in 1985. Her first job was with a heli-ski operation in Summit County before becoming an instructor at Breckinridge, where she was also a ANGELA K. EVANS ski patroller for a time. She’s currently working toward her International Federation of Mountain Guides Association (IFMGA) certification, with plans to take the final exam this summer.

If she passes, she’ll become one of only 15 IFMGA certified women in the United States.

“It brings me so much joy to share the mountain environment with folks,” she says. “I constantly learn new things from being out there and from the people I teach.

It is extremely rewarding.”

After eight hours of online coursework the week prior (replacing historical classroom teaching due to the pandemic), Tucholke begins our field education at the Bear Lake Trailhead on Friday. We discuss the day’s weather and avalanche forecasts, review our gear and run through a WEARING A beacon beacon test to ensure everyone’s course last minute, Maurer says there were can be the difference 26 people on the waitlist. CMS has doubled transceivers are running properly between life and death avalanche educators and ski guide staff since in the event of an ava- before we start making our way lanche, but only if you toward Emerald Lake, stopping to last season, even bringing in guest guides and your skiing partand internationally certified guides who observe the topography around us. ners know how to use can’t travel overseas right now, he adds.

At one point, we scurry off the trail them.

Pandemic aside, Maurer says CMS has into the wood to dig snow pits, an seen “a slow uptick” in avalanche education internationally universal process for course enrollment for several years. studying the snowpack in avalanche “I definitely have seen it becoming more poputerrain. lar,” he says. “I would say folks wanting to get that Although the snowpack isn’t that deep, it’s easy education before going out is big, and then wantto see the weak and unstable layers of snow undering to get that education because their backneath the cohesive slab of newer snow on top, percountry partners that have it already require fect conditions for Colorado’s notorious avalanche them to. There’s some like accountability now, I problem — persistent slabs. guess, for getting into the backcountry.”

“As the name implies, it means that once we Of the six people in my course, a few people develop those weak layers, they stick around for are new to Colorado, another one has been riding awhile,” Lazar from CAIC says. “And they have a in the backcountry for several years but is the last couple of nefarious characteristics. One of which person in his friend group to get certified. The being that they may allow you to trigger avalanches friend I’m taking the course with has more experifrom a distance, or even from below on flat ground. ence than me. Five out of six of us are on splitsee AVALANCHE Page 14 boards, something other guides and groups comI

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ANGELA K. EVANS CMS GUIDE AND INSTRUCTOR MIA TUCHOLKE holds a section of wind slab after digging a snowpit in Rocky Mountain National Park.

TOP LEFT: Tucholke points to Dragon Tail Couloir, a popular backcountry descent in the spring when avalanche conditions have improved.

AVALANCHE from Page 13

And because our weak layers are particularly bad this year, we were seeing a lot of that type of remote or triggering from a distance early in the season. It’s dropped off quite a bit in the last couple weeks, but it’s still something we have to think about.”

Tucholke, who also studied hydrologic engineering at Colorado School of Mines, pulls out a magnifying loupe to show us the weak, crystalized, faceted snow that makes up the weakest layer.

We dig pits again on Sunday in Hidden Valley, this time noticing wind slabs — areas of cohesion due to wind moving and compacting snow in certain areas. But that’s after spending the morning practicing avalanche rescue, searching for buried beacons with our transceivers, using our probes to determine exact locations, and working as a team to shovel them out as quickly as possible. At most, someone can survive for 15 minutes after being buried in an avalanche. That is if they survive the violent trauma that causes the majority of avalanche deaths as they tumble across landscapes full of rocks and trees.

Lazar says avalanche education is crucial to CAIC’s efforts to manage and mitigate avalanche dangers around the state. “It’s one of the three main pillars that we try to emphasize,” he says.

First, get the forecast. Second, travel with a minimum of beacon, shovel and probe, and with a partner whenever possible. “Then that third leg is get some recreational avalanche education because it 14

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teaches you not only how to better use the forecast to develop trip plans appropriate for the conditions, but it teaches you how to use and practice [rescues] so you can become more proficient with that rescue gear in the event something goes wrong.”

Tucholke has seen plenty of avalanches run from afar while out in the backcountry and has traveled through her fair share of recent avalanche debris. In her decades of skiing and guiding, though, she has never been in an avalanche herself.

She credits this mostly to her ability to say no — to back off a trip, turn around, listen to “the little dude” on her shoulder telling her it’s not safe.

And in all her years teaching avalanche safety and rescue, she’s only been in one rescue. It was sometime in the late 1980s, she says. She was skiing with a client in the sidecountry (terrain just outside ski area boundaries) when four people triggered an avalanche nearby. She had her rescue gear with her and immediately started searching, although none of the buried skiers were wearing beacons. She spent the next eight hours on a “probing mission,” essentially scouring the debris FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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field, probing the snow until they found all four bodies.

“You have your whole life to ski or board, so make sure you can do it your whole life,” Tucholke says at the end of the course.

Every avalanche fatality can be traced back to some sort of human error, she adds, which makes continuing avalanche education, tracking avalanche conditions and meticulously planning multiple trip options

prudent.

“I think it’s good to take a long-term view of all this because it helps you put any kind of decision you make in a larger context,” Lazar says. “I would start by really easing into it. Take some classes, spend some time digging into the snow and looking at snowpack structure and only very gradually ease into steeper terrain as you get a sense for how different the snowpack can be.”

Point taken.

In some ways, I’m more suspect of traveling in the backcountry now, after taking the avalanche safety course, than I was before I started. It’s not because I didn’t learn anything; it’s because I learned just enough to realize I don’t know anything. I now look at features all around me and realize almost everything — at the right angle and in the right conditions — could release a slide, whereas before I was blissfully unaware of what dangers lurked right below the surface. For now, the best way for me to avoid avalanches is to avoid suspect conditions entirely.

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JON COSPITO

A bigger God Releasing a new single, Denver-based songwriter Joel Ansett talks about his vision of God, the limitations of Christian music, and learning from Bowie

by Caitlin Rockett

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f Joel Ansett’s 2019 album, A Place I Knew Before, was an ode to searching — for meaning, for forgiveness, for peace — then it seems only fair that his most recent songs are an invitation to rest.

The Denver-based singer-songwriter is set to release a new single, “Just Fine,” on Feb. 5, a sibling to his late 2020 single “Ease.” The two tracks detail living with different types of chronic pain; emotional and physical — both unseen, both exhausting.

“I should get some rest / But I don’t know how,” Ansett laments about himself in “Ease,” an acoustic guitar-driven track with an unassuming beat cradling the chorus. “See it in my eyes / When I spiral down / Self-aware to self-absorbed / Can’t escape the back and forth.”

For “Just Fine,” he steps into a groovier, atonal beat to transmit a friend’s experience with multiple sclerosis-induced pain: “Nobody can see this fight I’m fighting / When it’s all inside / And you look just fine.”

“I had this title written in my songwriting journal for a long time: ‘But you look so good.’ That was the [name of a] support group that my friend [with MS] told me about,” Ansett says. “MS attacks the protective covering around your nerves, so you’re over-feeling everything. Physically [my friend] looked great. She just looked like anybody else you'd see; there was no external evidence of the pain. And she told me about this support group where she and her friends with MS commiserate that the intense pain they are under is invisible.”

The sense of carrying on through exhaustion was familiar for Ansett, a man with a soft voice and a tendency to verge toward gentle exclamations

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like, “oh my goodness.” Anxiety is a familiar foe. “[Invisible pain] feels like a theme I'm going to be writing about for my whole life,” Ansett admits with a laugh.

But Ansett is a man of faith, a music and arts director at St. Patrick’s Presbyterian Church in Denver. “[The idea of rest is] faith-inspired, really,” he says. “In the Bible there’s this paradox, that to take a day off is actually more productive. It kind of bucks up against the American notion of identity via productivity. It's almost bragging rights to be on the grind and to be working long hours. It’s this badge of pride that I think is hurting us more than we realize.

“Ultimately, for me, the source of any good thing is actually not me, it’s actually relying on a higher power.”

With a catalog of R&B-inspired folk songs that address depression, self-awareness, nostalgia, love and loss, Ansett’s music takes an abstracted approach to addressing his faith.

“I think the way the quote-unquote Christian music industry has approached the arts points to a smaller God than I believe in,” he says. “I

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want to sing about [God] in a way that is vast and beautiful LISTEN UP: and mysterious and glorious. It just pains me that when you “JUST FINE,” a new single by Joel say the words Christian music, the first thing in people's Ansett, drops on minds is maybe a very specific sonic style with some kind of Friday, Feb. 5 wherpre-packaged, catchy Christian phrases and a metaphor ever you get your music. Learn more about the ocean. I just want to sing about a bigger God. ” at joelansett.com Ansett’s not alone. A “sex-positive and LGBTQ-affirming Christian” blogger by the name of Valentine Wiggins (most likely a pseudonym taken from the Ender’s Game sci-fi series) expressed nearly similar feelings in a 2019 Medium post: “I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s Christian music is generated by an algorithm rather than a human songwriter,” Wiggins wrote. “If you have a piano or a guitar, a basic pop beat, a mention of overcoming a vague struggle, and a reference to water, you have a Christian song.”

Lyrically, Ansett escapes the cliches by removing the separation between the sacred and the secular.

“If Christianity is true, if God did become a man and actually walked this physical earth, it was a declaration that it is all sacred and it is all meaningful,” he says. “And so for me, as a songwriter, to write a song about an Aspen tree, a relationship, a friend’s pain, I would view all that as sacred songs, Christian songs.”

He deviates sonically by collaborating with other musicians who have helped him open his sound up from the singer-songwriter-guy-with-a-guitar format that comes naturally to Ansett. Like his work with LA-based producer John Joseph, who gave Ansett’s last album its pop luster and ushered in the hypnotic beat that subtly drives “Just Fine.”

“I have a loose relationship with really the sonic qualities of a song,” Ansett says.

“My focus is on songwriting. I want to be a great songwriter and that's what I'm going to spend almost all my time on. … With John, I got the sense immediately that as much as I care about songs, he cares about production. That's his language.”

Ansett’s gentle tenor and accessible lyrics have obviously struck a chord: fans donated more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to fund his second album, A Place I Knew Before, and last year, one of his songs was placed in the Marvel-based TV show The Punisher.

“David Bowie has this amazing quote about creativity that I try to live by,” Ansett says. “It’s like you’re walking out into the ocean and when your tiptoes can just barely touch the bottom, you’re just about in the right creative space — not drowning, but taking some risk.”

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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PLAN

‘SCROOGE: BAH HUMBUG!’

events

If your organization is planning an event of any kind, please email Caitlin at crockett@boulderweekly.com.

Through March 14, Jesters Dinner Theatre, 224 Main St., Longmont. Price: $25$43, jesterstheatre.com COVID may have postponed but it can’t stop this musical version of the holiday classic A Christmas Carol, which Jesters has been performing annually for more than 20 years. Audience seating will be limited. Masks are required when not seated at your table.

TARA HIGH SCHOOL PRESENTS: ‘PRIDE AND PREJUDICE’ BY JANE AUSTEN, ADAPTED BY JON JORY.

BOULDER PUBLIC LIBRARIES PRESENTS BEECHICAS: INTERESTED IN BEEKEEPING?

Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 6 and 7. Tickets are $15, tarahighschool.org/tickets.html Please join Tara High School’s 11th grade theater students in this visually innovative, characterdriven adaptation of Jane Austen’s beloved novel of manners, first impressions and the art of changing one’s mind. Recordings of both casts’ performances will be streaming online from Saturday, Feb. 6 at 2:30 p.m. through midnight on Sunday, Feb. 7.

Tickets can be purchased for the streaming via Eventbrite, and a link will be provided.

4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 10, via YouTube or Facebook Live, calendar.boulderlibrary.org/event/7450963 Drop into this round table conversation for a quick look at what it would take to get started in beekeeping. The BeeChicas will discuss time commitments, cost and how to find a mentor. Set attainable goals like signing up for beekeeping classes, reading three beekeeping books and joining a local bee club.

‘MURDER 1974: FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES,’ AN INTERACTIVE VIRTUAL MYSTERY.

7 p.m. Feb. 4, 6, 25 and 26.

Price: $30 (one ticket required for one computer, no limit on viewers), rockymountainmurdermysteries.com Gerald Ford is president, and the dust of Watergate has begun to settle. The American involvement in Vietnam has ended, and things are returning to “normal” in America — or are they? What evil presence is murdering the guests of the Bluebird Lodge? Perhaps some ancient creature of darkness has arrived on Gold Hill? Join your family or friends across the continent for a romp through the 1970s, solving a crime story, unraveling a whodunit and competing with others to figure out the secrets that unfold in ‘Murder 1974: Fangs for the Memories.’

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JULIE MACFARLANE — ‘GOING PUBLIC,’ WITH SASHA BRIETZKE

5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 10, via Zoom. Tickets are $5, boulderbookstore.net.

In this clear-eyed account, Julie Macfarlane confronts her own silence and deeply rooted trauma to chart a remarkable course from sexual abuse victim to agent of change. Going Public merges the worlds of personal and professional, activism and scholarship.

Drawing upon decades of legal training, Macfarlane decodes the well-worn methods used by church, school and state to silence survivors, from first reporting to cross-examination to non-disclosure agreements. Macfarlane describes the isolation and exhaustion of going public in her own life, as she takes her abuser to court, challenges her colleagues and weathers a defamation lawsuit. Macfarlane will be in conversation with Sasha Brietzke for this virtual event.

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

LISTEN

What to listen to next

PODCASTS

The podcasts Jason Feifer can’t get enough of

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n upcoming episode of Jason Feifer’s podcast Build For Tomorrow was inspired after he ordered a to-go cocktail from Rosetta Hall in Boulder on New Year’s Eve. “It just got me thinking: How did that happen?” he explains over the phone. “Like, how did we go very quickly from not being able to get to-go alcohol to being able to get to-go alcohol? And why was that illegal in the first place?”

‘RICHARD’S FAMOUS FOOD PODCAST’

Richard Parks III — a James Beard Award-nominated writer, filmmaker and cookbook author — hosts this Gastropod-meets-Rickand-Morty project. A running narrative between anthropomorphic pickles weaves between the histories of foods and culinary trends.

“There’s no way to explain it,” Feifer says. “Just go listen — it’s amazing.”

New problems are better than old ones

‘Build For Tomorrow’ proves that no problem is new

‘EVERYTHING IS ALIVE’

by Caitlin Rockett Feifer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, is “obsessed with how change happens.” It’s the driving quest behind Build For Tomorrow, where Feifer uses historical documents and expert interviews to dig deep into humanity’s history of fear-mongering and mythmaking. Sifting back through time, Feifer proves again and again that almost no problem on Earth is new: We’ve always feared new technology (“A bicycle is dangerous,” the New York Times declared in 1880; 22 years earlier the paper claimed the telegraph was “too fast for the truth”); our delirium over substance use long predates prohibition of alcohol or marijuana (coffee was banned and bad-mouthed by kings, sultans and businessmen across the globe for 500 years out of fear that it stimulated radical thought); every election is the “most important election of our lifetime”; and nostalgia has long clouded our vision of when, exactly, were “the good old days” (incredibly, Thomas Jefferson felt wistful for the age of Anglo-Saxons who roamed Earth 700 years before he was born).

“Modern human behavior (abstract thinking, art, blade tools) began 50,000 years ago, and we think we are so special that the small fragment of time in which we all are alive is the time in which everything changes,” Feifer says. “I suppose it’s possible, but it is statistically unlikely. So what is happening here? Why are we doing this? Why do we

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think every new technology will end civilization and that every new generation is worse than the last? And, more importantly, are we harming ourselves by constantly thinking that there’s danger where there’s no danger? And the answer I found is yes, it genuinely slows innovation.”

But all is not lost. Hope is the overall message Feifer wants to send, which is part of why the podcast recently rebranded after a number of years under the moniker Pessimists Archive, a collaboration with digital archivist Louis Anslow.

“We had to do what we’re always preaching about,” Feifer says, “and that’s change.”

Without stooping to tired cliches or preaching to the choir, Build For Tomorrow suggests that fear and uncertainty don’t have to be never-ending loops into each other — with some focus (and maybe a few history lessons), we can embrace change and find paths to opportunity.

“The stories that we tell ourselves about progress are often incorrect,” Feifer says. “A lot of the things that we think are totally unique to us are not unique to us, and despite whatever challenges you see and experience, you have an opportunity to create something better out of that.

But that has to start by having a real, clear-eyed, sober understanding of the problems in front of you instead of the problems as you’re told they are.”

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Former Fresh Air with Terry Gross producer Ian Chillag created this much beloved show that interviews inanimate objects.

“They do just the most exquisite job of thinking through what the perspective on life would be if you were a bar of soap or a subway seat,” Feifer says. “It’s just charming and thoughtful and weirdly human. I can’t get enough of it”.

‘STARTUP’

Alex Blumberg documented the creation of his internationally successful podcast company Gimlet for the first season of StartUp. “He recorded stuff that you just never hear,” Feifer says.

“He recorded his conversation with his co-founder about their equity split, he recorded their very uncomfortable fumbling pitches with their investors. I’ve never heard anything like it.” see EVENTS Page 20

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EVENTS from Page 19

ART

‘CLIMBING THE MAIDEN,’ BY POLLY ADDISON

In memoriam: Mary K. (Polly) Addison (1935-2021) Local artist supported the Dairy from the beginning

by Caitlin Rockett

P

olly Addison, local artist, CU Boulder alumna and namesake of one of the Dairy Art Center’s galleries, died on Jan. 11.

Addison was involved with the Dairy since it formed in 1992, helping with fundraisers, working on the visual arts committee and serving on the board.

“A few months into our board term, I found Polly outside the Dairy picking up cigarette butts and other trash,” Deborah Malden, who served with Addison on the board, wrote in a statement for the 2019 exhibit The Unknown Polly Addison. “I asked Polly what she was doing. After all, the Dairy had paid staff who surely could help keep the place clean. Polly shared that, ‘If board members failed to treat the Dairy as we would our own homes, how could we expect the rest of the community to support it?’”

When the Dairy had trouble paying a bill in the early days, visual arts curator Jessica Kooiman Parker says Addison stepped in to pay.

“She was known for things like that,” Kooiman Parker told Boulder Weekly in 2019.

Addison curated what was likely the Dairy’s first exhibition of “new media art” in the early 2000s.

“Some of the shows she curated were really cutting edge,” Kooiman Parker told BW. “Net Art was all based on work created about the internet, and this was in 2003, fairly early for technological art to be highlighted. I think that’s really telling about her and her character and how contemporary she was.”

Addison’s own work ranged from hyper-realistic pen and ink drawings to whimsical oil paintings and pastel studies that highlight the artist’s technical proficiency across a range of media. Her art often captured familial bonds and histories in unexpected, thought-provoking ways.

To read more about the life and work of Polly Addison, revisit the BW article detailing the 2019 show in her honor (Arts & Culture, “The name on the wall,” June 6, 2019), and visit the Dairy’s website: https://bit.ly/3j8Vhu1

ARTAROUND THE COUNTY

WHAT’S NEW FROM SHARK’S INK.

Through March 31, 15th Street Gallery, 1708 15th St., Boulder, 15thstreetgalleryboulder.com An exhibition featuring recent work by distinguished artists, such as Enrique Chagoya, made in collaboration with master printer Bud Shark, of Shark’s Inc. in Lyons. Call the gallery to schedule a viewing time: 303-447-2841.

LYUDMILA AGRICH.

Through Feb. 28, R Gallery, 2027 Broadway, Boulder, rgallery.art Sometimes what’s most important in art is what’s not there, the so-called negative space around and between the subject of an image. R

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PAULA GASPARINI-SANTOS, PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE (DETAIL), ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 2019, 36” X 48”. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

ELIZABETH MORISETTE: FIBER ART FROM UPCYCLED MATERIALS, PRESENTED BY HANDWEAVERS GUILD OF BOULDER.

10 a.m. Monday, Feb. 8; 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9, via Zoom. This event is free. Please email programs@handweaversofboulder.org for Zoom access information.

Elizabeth Morisette has been exhibiting her weavings and sculptures for 25 years, often featuring repurposed materials. Morisette will discuss her basketry work, as well as her community engagement work.

Feb. 5-March 5, Smith Klein Gallery, 1116 Pearl St., Boulder, smithklein.com Using an impasto style (thick application of paint), Lyudmila Agrich has developed her own impressionistic style, with entrancing textures that create mesmerizing optical illusions.

‘USE OF NEGATIVE SPACE.’

Gallery is currently displaying a diverse collection of artwork that utilizes negative space in unexpected ways.

‘FROM THIS DAY FORWARD.’

Feb. 11- May 31, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), 1750 13th St., Boulder, bmoca.org This exhibition, guest curated by Tya Alisa

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Anthony, is an invitation to consider the exhibiting artists’ responses to our current reality.

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art encourages visitors to move through the galleries while thinking critically about where we see ourselves going. FROM THIS DAY FORWARD questions systemic injustice and suggests new ways of thinking about creating an inclusive, thoughtful society.

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unequivocally

by Jeffrey Spahr-Summers he wakes from his morphine mist looks up to see my sisters and my mother and me all standing around in a room suddenly thick with panic am i dying? all eyes turn swiftly to me of all people like my mother likes to say being what it is that it is in moments like this above all others where the truth is all we really need yes, you are.

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers is a poet, writer, photographer and publisher, who can be found at jeffreyspahrsummers.com.

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BOULDER WEEKLY

Keep Supporting Local Restaurants

BY DAN SAVAGE Dear Dan: I’m a 30-year-old straight woman in a three-year relationship with my live-in partner, who is also 30. I love him and he loves me and he wants to make a life with me. However, in this pandemic, the stress is so great that I have lost all desire to have sex. I don’t want anyone touching me right now, not even myself. I feel like I’m in survival mode. I lost the career I love and I’m working four different jobs to make up for it. I have also been coming to terms in therapy with a sexual trauma I suffered, which is making me want to be touched even less. He’s been extremely patient, and says that we can work through it, but I’m really worried that this is the death knell for our relationship. I’m really trying to figure out ways to get myself back in good working order, Dan, but honestly I’m just trying to survive every day right now. Help?

— Witty Acronym Here Dear WAH: First, you’re not alone. So many people have seen their libidos tank in response to the overlapping stresses of lockdowns and job losses that sex researchers are talking about (and documenting) a “pandemic sex recession.”

So what can you do?

You have a long, hard slog in front of you, personally and professionally, and you need to carve out enough time and space for yourself to get you through this. And to do that you’re not just gonna need to reset your partner’s expectations for the duration of the pandemic and/or until you’re back on your feet again professionally and emotionally, you’re going to need to take his yes for an answer. If he tells you he’s willing to tough/rub it out until you’re less stressed out, less overworked and less overwhelmed, and he’s not being passive aggressive about your lack of desire, then you should take him at his word. If he’s not trying to make you feel bad about the sex you aren’t having right now, WAH, don’t make yourself feel bad about it.

There’s no guarantee your relationship will survive this (the pandemic), that (your crushing workload), or the other thing (the trauma you’re working through in therapy). Any one of those things or some other thing could wind up being the death knell for your relationship. But the only way to find out if your desire for your partner will kick back into gear post-pandemic, post-career-crisis, and post-coming-to-terms-with-past-sexual-trauma is to hang in there, WAH, and reassess once you’re past those posts. Will you two still BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

be together once you’re out of survival mode? Survive and find out. Good luck.

Dear Dan: I’m a 34-year-old straight woman dating a 32-year-old straight man.

When we first met, we had both recently relocated to our hometown and were living with our parents. When we first started dating, things were great, however, the sex wasn’t mind-blowing. Foreplay was limited and he always jumped out of bed afterward. I thought this was probably due to the fact that while we had privacy, we were having sex at my parent’s house, which isn’t particularly sexy. We finally moved in together nine months ago and now it feels like we’ve been married for decades. He almost always turns my sexual advances down. And when we do have sex, it lasts about five minutes and I do all of the work and get ZERO satisfaction out of it. He will hold my hand on the couch but if I ask him to cuddle he acts like I am asking for a huge favor. I’ve explained to him I need to feel wanted and to have some kind of intimacy in this relationship. And yet, despite the multiple conversations about how sexually, physically and emotionally unsatisfied I am, he has put in little effort. Otherwise, our relationship is great. We have fun together, I love him, I want to be with him, and we’ve talked about marriage and kids, but I also can’t live this way for the rest of my life. What can I expect from a man who is emotionally and physically unavailable?

— Intimate Needs That Involve Making A Team Effort

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Dear INTIMATE: A lifetime of frustration.

You wanna make the sex and physical intimacy work because so much else is working — it sounds like pretty much everything else is working — but you can’t make the sex and intimacy work if he’s not willing to work on it. And even if he was willing to work on it, INTIMATE, even if he was willing to make an effort sexually, there’s no guarantee that working on it will actually work. Some couples work on this shit for decades and get nowhere. Opening the relationship up might make it possible for you to have him and sexual satisfaction too — by getting sexual satisfaction elsewhere — but opening up a relationship also requires effort, INTIMATE, and effort clearly isn’t his thing. DTMFA.

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Send questions to mail@savagelove. net, follow Dan on Twitter @fakedansavage and visit ITMFA.org.

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LIBRA

SEPT. 23-OCT. 22: Author Marguerite Duras

BY ROB BREZSNY ARIES

Call 720.253.4710 All credit cards accepted No text messages

MARCH 21-APRIL 19: Herman Hesse’s novel

Siddhartha is a story about a spiritual seeker who goes in search of illumination. Near the end of the quest, when Siddhartha is purified and enlightened, he tells his friend, “I greatly needed sin, lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and the most shameful despair, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, with any perfection that I think up; I learned to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.” While I trust you won’t overdo the sinful stuff in the coming months, Aries, I hope you will reach a conclusion like Siddhartha’s. The astrological omens suggest that 2021 is the best year ever for you to learn how to love your life and the world just as they are.

“If we want to solve a problem we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”

That’s always good advice, but it’s especially apropos for you in the coming weeks. You are being given the interesting and fun opportunity to solve a problem you have never solved before! Be sure to leave the door to the unknown ajar. Clues and answers may come from unexpected sources.

GEMINI

SAGITTARIUS

a faint star, we must avert our eyes away from it just a little. If we look at it directly, it fades into invisibility.

(There’s a scientific explanation for this phenomenon, which I won’t go into.) I propose that we make this your metaphor of power for the coming weeks.

Proceed on the hypothesis that if you want to get glimpses of what’s in the distance or in the future, don’t gaze at it directly. Use the psychological version of your peripheral vision. And yes, now is a favorable time to seek those glimpses.

the Yoruban Lucumi tradition. She wrote a book called Jump Up: Seasonal Celebrations from the World’s Deep Traditions. “Jump up” is a Caribbean phrase that refers to festive rituals and parties that feature “joyous music, laughter, food and dancing.” According to my reading of the astrological omens, you’re due for a phase infused with the “jump up” spirit. As Teish would say, it’s a time for “jumping, jamming, swinging, hopping and kicking it.” I realize that in order to do this, you will have to work around the very necessary limitations imposed on us all by the pandemic. Do the best you can. Maybe make it a virtual or fantasy jump up. Maybe dance alone in the dark.

CANCER

JUNE 21-JULY 22: If the apocalypse happens and

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you’re the last human left on Earth, don’t worry about getting enough to eat. Just find an intact grocery store and make your new home there. It’s stocked with enough non-perishable food to feed you for 55 years — or 63 years if you’re willing to dine on pet food. I’M JOKING! JUST KIDDING! In fact, the apocalypse won’t happen for another 503 million years.

My purpose in imagining such a loopy scenario is to nudge you to dissolve your scarcity thinking. Here’s the ironic fact of the matter for us Cancerians: If we indulge in fearful fantasies about running out of stuff — money, resources, love or time — we undermine our efforts to have enough of what we need. The time is now right for you to stop worrying and instead take robust action to ensure you’re well-supplied for a long time.

LEO

JULY 23-AUG. 22: “Judge a moth by the beauty of its

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candle,” writes Coleman Barks in his rendering of a poem by Rumi. In accordance with astrological omens, I am invoking that thought as a useful metaphor for your life right now. How lovely and noble are the goals you’re pursuing? How exalted and bighearted are the dreams you’re focused on? If you find there are any less-than-beautiful aspects to your motivating symbols and ideals, now is a good time to make adjustments.

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021

OCT. 23-NOV. 21: Author Karen Barad writes, “The past is

APRIL 20-MAY 20: Taurus physicist Richard Feynman said,

MAY 21-JUNE 20: When we want to get a distinct look at

V - D A Y

SCORPIO

never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package or a scrapbook; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.” I agree. That’s why I can’t understand New Age teachers who advise us to “live in the now.” That’s impossible! We are always embedded in our histories. Everything we do is conditioned by our life story. I acknowledge that there’s value in trying to see the world afresh in each new moment. I’m a hearty advocate of adopting a “beginner’s mind.” But to pretend we can completely shut off or escape the past is delusional and foolish. Thank you for listening to my rant, Scorpio. Now please spend quality time upgrading your love and appreciation for your own past. It’s time to celebrate where you have come from — and meditate on how your history affects who you are now.

TAURUS

O U R

wrote these words: “That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one’s passion.” I am spiritually allergic to that idea. It implies that our deepest passions are unavailable unless we’re insane, or at least disturbed. But in the world I aspire to live in, the opposite is true: Our passions thrive if we’re mentally healthy. We are best able to harness our most inspiring motivations if we’re feeling poised and stable. So I’m here to urge you to reject Duras’s perspective and embrace mine. The time has arrived for you to explore the mysteries of relaxing passion.

Select two situations in your world that really need to be reinvented and let every other glitch and annoyance just slide for now. Then meditate with tender ferocity on how best to get the transformations done. Summoning intense focus will generate what amounts to magic!

P.S.: Maybe the desired reinventions would require other people to alter their behavior. But it’s also possible that your own behavior may need altering.

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NOV. 22-DEC. 21: Luisah Teish is a writer and priestess in

CAPRICORN

DEC. 22-JAN. 19: “Perhaps we should know better,”

wrote poet Tony Hoagland, “but we keep on looking, thinking and listening, hunting that singular book, theory, perception or tonality that will unlock and liberate us.” It’s my duty to report, Capricorn, that there will most likely be no such singular magnificence for you in 2021. However, I’m happy to tell you that an accumulation of smaller treasures could ultimately lead to a substantial unlocking and liberation. For that to happen, you must be alert for and appreciate the small treasures and patiently gather them in. (P.S.: Author Rebecca Solnit says, “We devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.” I say: The small bites of heaven you devour in the coming months will ultimately add up to being dramatically measurable.)

AQUARIUS

JAN. 20-FEB. 18: Aquarian author Alice Walker writes, “In

nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.

Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” In the coming weeks, I hope you’ll adopt that way of thinking and apply it to every aspect of your perfectly imperfect body and mind and soul. I hope you’ll give the same generous blessing to the rest of the world, as well. This attitude is always wise to cultivate, of course, but it will be especially transformative for you in the coming weeks. It’s time to celebrate your gorgeous idiosyncrasies and eccentricities.

PISCES

FEB. 19-MARCH 20: “Though the bamboo forest is dense,

water flows through it freely.” I offer that Zen saying just in time for you to adopt it as your metaphor of power. No matter how thick and complicated and impassable the terrain might appear to be in the coming weeks, I swear you’ll have a flair for finding a graceful path through it. All you have to do is imitate the consistency and flow of water.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Such great heights

Criterion renews a 20th century classic with ‘The Ascent’

by Michael J. Casey

G

ON THE BILL: ‘The reat movies don’t require a signature shot, but it helps Ascent,’ now with when they have one. What would Vertigo be without extras on Blu-ray that dizzying dolly zoom? The Godfather without the and DVD from The door closing on Kay? The Graduate without Benjamin Criterion Collection.

Braddock trapped in the crook of Mrs. Robinson’s leg?

They are brief moments, but they distill the film’s aesthetic and narrative qualities into a moment of visual poetry that lingers with us long after the plot and the character’s names have faded from memory.

In The Ascent, a 1977 Russian World War II drama newly restored and released from The Criterion Collection, director Larisa Shepitko gives us her signature shot 45 minutes into the story of two Byelorussian soldiers trying to survive the subzero winter of 1942. Nazis have captured the soldiers and are transporting them via horse-drawn sled to the nearest occupied town for trial and execution. While in transit, Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) fantasizes about escape and swift death at his captors’ hands but lacks the agency to act. His comrade, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), tried to kill himself as a way out but couldn’t go through with it; now he peacefully lies on the sled as the world pulls by. Shepitko and cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov keep the camera tight on the men’s faces, letting their weary mugs fill the frame. But when Shepitko cuts to Sotnikov, the camera glides upward and floats just above him. The camera pulls focus to the background — nature, life, all rushing by without a care to the men on the sled — then back to Sotnikov, a shadow across his face as the camera settles back down. It’s as if his soul rose six inches and took a look around.

For the remainder of The Ascent’s 109-minute running time, the camera will remain tethered to Sotnikov’s face, basking in his kind eyes and soft features. He looks like a Byzantine Christ, and though he expounds no teachings, his demeanor throughout capture and interrogation is sublime. He even amasses a small following of disciples with a village elder (Sergey Yakovlev) taking on the role of Peter and Demchikha (Lyudmila Polyakova) as Magdalene. Portnov (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), a Soviet collaborator, dons the robes of Pontius Pilate, and poor Rybak plays Judas.

It’s a remarkable work, and The Ascent became Shepitko’s most powerful film. But before all that, she had to hide the religious parable from Soviet censors, painting Sotnikov as a solid Soviet peasant. Then when the movie came out, a fate of good fortune — rhapsodic praise from Pytor Masherov, a high-ranking government official — kept the film in the graces of the Communist regime. And when The Ascent took home the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival, the USSR submitted it for Oscar consideration. The Academy chose not to nominate the film. Neither the first nor the last time the Academy failed to reward excellence.

Tastes change, nations rise and fall, yet movies remain. And with its stunning black and white cinematography, harsh realism and humanist portrayal, The Ascent has found new life in the 21st century as a bona fide masterpiece, one you can now own on Bluray or DVD from The Criterion Collection. The set includes a new 4K digital restoration (which looks spectacular); select scene commentary from film scholar Daniel Bird; contemporary interviews with Polyakova and Shepitko’s son, Anton Klimov; a 1967 short film from Shepitko, The Homeland of Electricity (reviewed favorably in BW’s Home Viewing, Oct. 15, 2020); Larisa, a 1980 tribute from husband and fellow filmmaker, Elem Klimov; an archival interview with Shepitko; two Russian television programs about Shepitko; and an essay by poet Fanny Howe.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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BOULDER WEEKLY

BOULDER WEEKLY STAFF

Try this week: Barbacoa Nachos @ Nopalito’s

NOPALITO’S. 2850 Iris Ave, Suite H, Boulder.

720-502-4015. nopalitosboulder. com.

NOPALITO’S IS A HIDDEN gem. It’s on the south side of the Boulder driver’s license plaza — go past the old Sports Authority until you see a big, welcoming patio and a banner for $4 happy hour Modelos. Choose from a menu of flautas, burritos, bowls, tacos and much more, all with customizable proteins and fix-ins. We opted for the barbacoa nachos on a recent visit, and would recommend you think about ordering the same from Nopalito’s if you need something to eat during the Super Bowl. Crispy tortilla chips are topped with cilantro-lime rice, pinto beans, pico de gallo, shredded cheese, black olives and, of course, barbacoa — tender, juicy, pulled beef.

On the side is a big cup of spicy queso, which is flat-out irresistible.

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1 Valentine’s Day Meal from Blackbelly BLACKBELLY IS OFFERING a Valentine’s Day weekend make-at-home meal kit with some wildly delicious offerings included. The fourcourse dinner ($95/person) includes preparation instructions. You’ll get a housemade charcuterie plate to start and each person can choose one option per course. For instance, start with scallop ceviche with fennel, tangerine, yuzu gel and tarragon, then move on to pork tenderloin with purple potato gnocchi, romanesco, allium and chermoula. Wrap it up with sticky date cake, a cinnamon coffee cake and Fortuna chocolate bar. You can also add on a $25 flower bouquet from local flower shop A Florae. Blackbelly’s also offering a five-course tasting menu available for dine-in on Feb. 14 (reservations required). Email marni@ blackbelly.com to preorder your at-home meal, and visit blackbelly.com/special-orders for the full menu.

BOULDER WEEKLY

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Wine and chocolate TWO LOCAL PRODUCERS are teaming up for a classic Valentine’s Day pairing. Boulder’s Settembre Cellars is pairing some of its wines with DAR Chocolate products for a suite of offerings on Feb. 14. Choose between a pairing of Settembre’s 2017 rosato (a dry rosé) with DAR’s “dark and passionate bar,” made with dark chocolate and passion fruit; or Settembre’s 2012 reserve cabernet sauvignon with a dark milk chocolate bar loaded with cinnamon and clove. Each is available for $31, but feel free to order both if you feel like indulging. Preorder at secure.settembrecellars.com/tasting/valentines-day-chocolate-wine, and you can pickup your pairing(s) on Feb. 14 from 5-6 p.m. at Settembre Cellars in North Boulder.

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Stouts at home

Mountain Sun holds off on Stout Month, but there are plenty of local versions of the style to tide you over

by Matt Cortina

T

he South Boulder outpost of Mountain Sun Pubs & Breweries is right across the street from Boulder Weekly’s office, and so we’ve spent many a February dipping in after work, sometimes taking long lunches, to sample the variety of stouts on hand during Stout Month. But with all of the brewery’s locations on a hiatus until the spring, we can’t indulge in one of the best local beer events this month.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other stout options from local breweries to bring Stout Month into our office and homes. From the classic to the bizarre, there’s plenty of variety in the local stout game to mimic — if not fully replicate — the pleasures of Stout Month.

Here are a few to get started with.

got strong notes of vanilla and caramel imparted from the whiskey barrels in which it’s aged for three months.

Avery’s brewers have almost two decades of barrelaging experience, and it’s evident in the Night Warden. Fullbodied from a heaping dose of roasted malt, the flavors imparted from the barrel are well-balanced.

LEFT HAND’S PEANUT BUTTER MILK STOUT

Sure, you could go for Left Hand’s classic Nitro Milk Stout, or one of its unique stout varieties, but the Peanut Butter Milk Stout is a terrific expression of what’s becoming a common stout style. Left Hand takes its classic Milk Stout and brews it with peanuts, creating a rich brew with a nutty and dry finish.

A strong malt bill that includes oats and roasted barley provides a velvety backbone for the earthy, nutty and salty notes from the peanuts. It’s not too sweet, either — just a great juxtaposition of chocolate and peanut, like an adult Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

FINKEL & GARF’S OATMEAL MILK STOUT

Start with one of the best locally produced stouts: the Oatmeal Milk Stout from Gunbarrel’s Finkel & Garf.

This beer took home gold at the Great American Beer Festival in 2017, and for good reason. It’s a pure expression of an oatmeal stout, silky smooth with a hint of sweetness and loads of chocolate, cream and coffee.

Finkel & Garf brews the Oatmeal Milk Stout with milk sugar (lactose) and oats, creating a luscious mouth feel, but one that has just a hint of crispness to keep it interesting.

This is an all-year stout, but a good first foray if you’re planning a tasting flight.

UHL’S BREWING CO. – THE COFFEE ROASTERS IMPERIAL MILK STOUT

You can’t have a make-your-own Stout Month without a coffee stout in the mix. For that, turn to Uhl’s The Coffee Roasters Imperial Milk Stout. Brewed in collaboration with local artisan coffee roasters, the brew jolts with java, and puts coffee on a pedestal. If you’re craving Mountain Sun’s Java Porter, here’s a good fill-in — rich with a hint of crispness, and the aroma and taste of coffee that’ll have you sneaking a sip in the morning.

AVERY’S NIGHT WARDEN

This whiskey-barrel aged stout packs a punch, clocking in at 8.2% ABV, while remaining exceptionally drinkable. It’s

Boulder Beer returns

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t was a little over a year ago, in January 2020, when Boulder Beer announced it would close its taproom on Wilderness Place. With the help of Sleeping Giant Brewing, a contract brewing firm in Denver, we were still able to get Boulder Beer classics in area liquor stores, but it all felt like a massive loss in the local craft brewing scene.

But, 2021 brings good news: Boulder Beer is undergoing a redesign and relaunch. According to the brand’s Instagram page, Boulder Beer is coming back with a “new look, new energy and new beers.”

Classics like the Hazed & Infused IPA, SKO gold beer, Boulder Shake Chocolate Porter and Mojo IPA have gotten redesigns, and a “bubbly” IPA has been added to the mix.

Check boulderbeer.com, and Boulder Weekly, for updates as they become available.

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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Flowers for an opioid crisis

and of patients avoiding opioids outright because they have access to alternative medication.

When it comes to hard data on that question, though, the available research has been inconclusive. One previous study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, concludes that “if such relationships do exist, they cannot be rigorously discerned with aggregate data.” Another study, from Injury Epidemiology, suggests that “it remains unclear” whether or not any such relationship exists, and even goes as far as to say the medical benefits of cannabis legalization might not outweigh its impacts on “mental health and traffic safety.”

But there are also research papers suggesting that there is a significant effective correlation between the two drug markets; that legalizing cannabis has a notable and important impact on both opioid usage and overdose deaths. Those studies, however, are very broad and only explored the question at a state-level, Kovács says.

“The data has been really mixed so far,” he says.

That’s why he and Hsu designed an epidemiological study of their own to try to find out whether or not opioidrelated overdose deaths rose or fell in states with medical and recreational legal cannabis, and if so, by how much.

In their study, they looked at data from 812 counties across 23 states (every U.S. county that allowed legal cannabis dispensaries to operate by the end of 2017).

In counties with more cannabis dispensaries, there are fewer opioid overdose deaths, new research suggests

by Will Brendza

L

egal cannabis isn’t just raking in tens of millions in tax revenue every month. It isn’t just helping ease the suffering of patients with anxiety, depression, chronic pain and sleeplessness; and it isn’t just fun to use recreationally. Legal cannabis in Colorado and elsewhere in the U.S. may actually be reducing mortality rates.

That’s according to new research from Greta Hsu and Balázs Kovács published in The British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Specifically, the researchers found that legal weed seems to be associated with fewer opioid overdose deaths in counties across the country that have legalized cannabis. It could be a consequential discovery, as the U.S. opioid crisis reaches unprecedented levels.

It’s a finding that adds to a growing litany of research at the intersection of cannabis and opioid usage. And it could help researchers better understand the complex supply-side of related drug markets — like those for cannabis and opioids.

“There’s this idea of a substitution effect, where people shift to using cannabis instead of relying on opioids,” explains Kovács, an associate professor at the Yale School of Management.

Anecdotal evidence shows that people make this trade-off: stories of people kicking pills in favor of flower

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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They then used weedmaps.com to compare the number of physical dispensaries in those counties with their corresponding opioid mortality rates from the Department of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to their findings, legalizing medical marijuana results in an 8% reduction in opioid-related mortality rates — and legalizing it recreationally results in a 7% reduction.

“Higher medical and recreational storefront dispensary counts are associated with reduced opioid-related death rates, particularly deaths associated with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl,” their study concludes.

While that cannot be assumed to be causal, Kovács says, it does suggest a potential association between more cannabis dispensaries and fewer opioid mortalities.

Which opens up a host of other questions: Is that because people are more likely to get hooked on opioids if they don’t have an alternative? Or because cannabis users are just less susceptible to opioid addiction? Or are users in legal states simply getting safer weed than those in prohibition states?

“Where I live in New Haven, (Connecticut), there’s a lot of fentanyl overdose cases because the marijuana in black market cannabis joints is laced with fentanyl,” Kovács explains, which could account for the more statistically significant reduction in deaths from synthetic opioids, he says.

Kovács is the first to admit that the study has limitations, though. Foremost among them is the fact that the only figures they compared dispensary numbers against were the worst-case scenario: opioid-related mortality rates. Other, more nuanced effects aren’t reflected by these numbers, and are very challenging to pinpoint through aggregate data.

“There could be a lot of things under the surface we don’t see with this data,” Kovács says. “Like people who don’t die, for example, we don’t see [in this data].”

Nevertheless, this apparent relationship between legal cannabis and lower opioid-related deaths seems extremely hopeful, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020, which saw the highest number of opioid overdose deaths in U.S. history — over 81,000. Having an alternative medicine that could potentially curb that dark trend is more important now than it’s ever been.

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