DIGBOSTON.COM 02.01.18 - 02.08.18
POLITICS
MR. POPULAR
GOV BAKER DODGES TRUMP’S STENCH
DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS
FEDS FUMBLE ON FENTANYL PLUS: A SHORT HISTORY OF HEROIN IN BOSTON
NEWS TO US
STONEWALLED
TRYING TO SECURE HARASSMENT RECORDS
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FEB 01, 2018 - FEB 08, 2018 BUSINESS PUBLISHER Marc Sneider ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone John Loftus Jason Pramas SALES MANAGER Marc Sneider FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com BUSINESS MANAGER John Loftus
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FUCK MY FACE(BOOK) Dear Reader, Last week I dedicated this entire column space to spanking and impaling Facebook for the latest changes that the social media behemoth has made to its algorithm. As a reminder, chief developers announced, among other things, that news feeds will be “showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation,” which means we’ll see “less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.” I was hardly alone in complaining. Countless critics from the journalism space have spoken out about the devastating impact this abusive relationship has had on both newsmakers and readers, particularly since Facebook spent a lot of time last year explaining how it hoped to help the public cut through bullshit and fake news. I had front row seats for the hoodwinking; last October, I sat in an audience of hundreds of small and independent publishers at an industry conference in Chicago, where the Facebook journalism helpers explained all the ways the platform was assisting such outlets in connecting with their audiences. I’m sure that some of their tips remain useful, and I don’t believe that they knew back then that the plug would be pulled on the overall strategy to link people with factual info. Nevertheless, this algorithmic sea change has been even worse than I imagined. As an editor, I do my best to see the world from the consumer’s point of view. Which has been an awfully depressing perspective for this past week since, and I’m really not exaggerating, my Facebook wall has become absolutely unrecognizable. While articles from hard news outlets I rely on and frequently read have disappeared almost entirely, I am suddenly bombarded with short video snippets and happy-go-lucky poppycock. A quick flip through my feed while reporting this column cruelly exposed me to: an individual who calls herself the Truth Bomb Mom who had a moment with her 10-year-old that “she’ll never forget”; sappy clips galore from the likes of Humankind Stories and Love Stories; paid ad upon paid ad; pro-charter school propaganda from something called Hall Pass; nostalgia-mongering from a pandering outlet called Who Remembers?; an installment of 60 Second Docs about how to make your own bath bombs; and right-wing vitriol from something called Here’s the Deal, which no semicompetent computer should ever mistake for something that I wish to view. There is also Rick Lax, a web celeb who I had never heard of until last week. Up until that point, I had been finding lots of articles on Facebook about #MeToo, including many that proved extremely helpful in following the movement’s ongoing developments. Those have since been replaced with pranks by Lax and his sophomoric friends, whose offensive and hacktacular antics, such as “Stopping Short with Girl in Car” and “How To Get Rid of a One-Night Stand,” are to Jackass what mumble rap is to Wu-Tang. I usually say to each their own. But since my feed is filled with garbage that I never indicated wanting to see in the first place, I figured that I was within my right to gripe.
CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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NEWS+OPINION
SHIRLEY, YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS NEWS TO US
A reporter’s fight to learn more about harassment in a small town’s police department BY MAYA SHAFFER OF CRITICAL MASS Months ago, it came to light that several ranking police officers in the town of Shirley, located about 45 miles northwest of Boston in Middlesex County, have been harrassing and discriminating against a female officer. Lt. Alfreda Cromwell has been filing complaints since 2015 describing abuse dating back to 2014, but the department and town seemingly ignored her grievances for almost two years. I posited that if the Shirley police internal affairs system failed a woman who was in a position of power, relative to people on the street who interact with these officers, there is little chance that the system works for citizens who run afoul of cops who are known to be abusive towards women. It appears that I am right, but the town of Shirley has successfully avoided full disclosure on the matter. In November 2016, Cromwell was suspended and fired a week later by the Shirley Board of Selectmen based on the word of the then-Police Chief Thomas Goulden, against whom she’d been filing complaints. The local Nashoba Valley Advocate reported that Goulden was later removed, in part over the handling of Cromwell, due to a grassroots movement in the town. An external investigation into her claims by a thirdparty employment specialist later substantiated several of Cromwell’s accusations. Cromwell received her job back with a promotion, but two of the officers found to have harassed her remain with the department. The investigation found that while he was police chief, Goulden once ordered an officer to drive him past a house where Cromwell was staying—possibly on multiple occasions. According to the officer, whose name is redacted in the report, Goulden questioned him as to why Cromwell’s car was in the driveway and not hidden in the garage. Officer Laprade, about whom there are multiple
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citizen complaints alleging rudeness and harassment, was found to have been unprofessional on multiple occasions, including being degrading about Cromwell’s sexuality and calling her a bitch. His behavior was seemingly trivialized in the report as being “old school.” The report lists two redacted names who characterize Laprade’s communication style as “crude and sexualized.” On Oct 19, I made a request for all citizen complaints about Goulden and about Officers Peter Violette and Craig Laprade, who were also named in Cromwell’s complaints for the time period of Cromwell’s complaints as well as all corresponding IA files. Over the course of the last two and a half months, the town of Shirley has been stonewalling. First it failed to respond, then it sent some records with no explanation. Later came an incomplete response. In November, I reported that I had won an appeal I made to Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin’s records division, which oversees the public records law. It ordered the town of Shirley to provide a detailed response to my request. Instead of complying with the order, a lawyer named Tim Zessin sent me an email from a private account assuring me that he had spoken with the Shirley police records access officer (RAO), who told him that I already had the records. I explained that I needed a proper response from the town. He refused, and no one from any town email contacted me. Given that I never received anything directly from the town, I requested that Galvin’s office send order to the attorney general for enforcement. On Dec 27 Galvin’s office ruled that it wouldn’t enforce the order because the lawyer claims the town’s RAO said he could answer for the town. The office then ordered the town to respond again, but this time it didn’t put a deadline in the order.
The lack of a deadline is a disaster. Even though the state of Massachusetts does not enforce records orders, the deadlines still serve a purpose. When the deadline in an order has passed, the agency ignoring the order is breaking the law, something I often highlight when writing articles; additionally, it could be used in a records lawsuit as evidence. The lack of deadline means the town can now simply claim to be in the process of following the order until the end of time without violating the law. There is no reason to believe the records I sought will ever be turned over. Because the town won’t tell me if there are records it is holding exempt in their entirety, I cannot conclusively report that it has been failing to investigate citizen complaints. What I can accurately report is that there is no evidence that the Shirley police followed up on complaints about its officers. Additionally, it provided no evidence that Cromwell’s complaints were filed with internal affairs, or that it conducted an internal investigation related to Cromwell’s complaints. Lastly, the town provided no record that the two remaining officers, who harrassed their coworker for years, faced any consequence or even have the incident on their files. The December ruling on my appeal is an absolute disaster for records access. It has allowed a town to keep the details of abuse and the failure of the police department’s internal affairs under a shroud. Galvin’s office has set the precedent that third parties can privately respond to records requests from accounts that are not subject to the records law, and the lack of a deadline on the order is a sneaky backdoor way to absolve an RAO of their legal responsibility to produce records. My email questioning the open-ended order received no reply from Galvin’s office.
NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
5
EDITORIAL
DIGBOSTON JOINS MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS News weekly feels the threat of cataclysmic war is grave enough to warrant direct action BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS DigBoston—and this should be obvious, but it bears stating plainly—is against the US or any nation, organization, or individual having nuclear weapons. Because the longer anyone has them, the more likely it is that they will be used. And if one is used, there is a very significant chance that many or even all of the nukes will be used. Lest we forget that when the US had the first two atomic bombs in existence, and used one, it was very quick to use the second. That’s why last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists who “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work,” moved the hands of its famed “Doomsday Clock” up from “two and a half minutes to midnight” to “two minutes to midnight.” The clock has not been so close to “midnight”—meaning nuclear war—since 1953. Shortly after both the US and the former Soviet Union tested their first outrageously destructive hydrogen bombs at the height of the Cold War. The journal’s reasons for taking this alarming step are many, and can be read on its website, thebulletin.org. But at base, it is dangerous changes to US nuclear policy under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump that threaten to overturn treaties that have led to decades of reductions to the global stockpile of nuclear warheads—from over 65,000 in 1986 to about 15,000 today—coupled with Trump’s escalating war of words with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that led to the clock being dialed forward. Behind the bluster is the world’s largest military: America’s. Which for the last few months has been positioning conventional and nuclear forces within easy striking distance of North Korea. So when, according to the Wall Street Journal, some of the less sane Trump administration figures like National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster support the idea of giving the growing North Korean nuclear weapons program “a bloody nose” with a military strike using “small,” “tactical” nuclear weapons, the world takes notice. And the Doomsday Clock continues its unnerving march toward midnight. Lest readers think such concern is overstated, Business Insider just reported that the US has deployed B-2 stealth bombers to Guam—joining B-52 bombers already stationed there. Both planes are capable of delivering nuclear weapons. Including the new B61-12 gravity bombs that, while not slated to be deployed until 2019, are supposedly able to take out deep bunkers with a minimum of damage and fallout. Which, together with their adjustable yield setting down to a fraction of the Hiroshima bomb, makes them more likely to be used, according to peace activists and defense officials alike. And a fraction of a bomb that destroyed and irradiated an entire city is still much more dangerous than the largest US conventional weapons. Not to mention the Pandora’s box problem. Since once the US opens that figurative box by using nukes in battle, there’s nothing to stop other countries from doing the same. Least of all North Korea. Russia and China have been frantically trying to
And the Doomsday Clock continues its unnerving march toward midnight.
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get the US to pursue a diplomatic path to peace with North Korea, but to no avail. At a time when the US no longer has any nuclear disarmament negotiations in progress with Russia, a nation with 7,000 nuclear warheads—the most of any nation—and tensions are rising with China, which has 270 warheads, that is most disturbing news indeed. Because the path from the “bloody nose” of a few “smaller” nukes like the B61-12 dropped on North Korean nuclear weapons sites—or sites that Pentagon planners assume are nuclear weapons sites despite having been wrong before due to poor intelligence on North Korea—to a global conflagration is crystal clear. Since the ironically named “Demilitarized Zone” between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified place in the world. And 35 miles south of the zone is Seoul, the capital of South Korea. If the US nukes North Korea, then Kim Jong Un would have every reason to nuke American targets that North Korean missiles are probably capable of reaching in the Pacific basin—and even Seoul itself in retaliation. Followed by other nuclear strikes, using precisely the same “use ’em or lose ’em” strategy that the US has followed since the dawn of the Atomic Age, according to Daniel Ellsberg—who recently released a book about his decade as a senior American nuclear strategist prior to his leaking the Pentagon Papers and helping end the Vietnam War. Once nukes are flying, therefore, there’s nowhere to go but down. North Korea has somewhere between 10 and 60 warheads—depending on whether you believe the lower estimates by peace groups like the Nobel Prizewinning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons or the higher estimates by US government sources—and its quest to figure out how to miniaturize nukes to fit on its short-, medium-, and now long-range missiles has been a precipitating factor in the current crisis. The US, for its part, has about 6,800 warheads overall. About 1,800 of which are deployed, according to 2017 data from the Federation of American Scientists. The American military would be dropping nukes on direct orders from a president with all the powers of his predecessors to use them at will with no check from any other branch of government. The weapons would strike a very small country that shares borders with Russia and China— two rival
superpowers with huge armies and thousands more nuclear weapons between them. A couple of miscalculations involving unexpected fallout yield or an errant strike due to a jammed guidance system or any number of other unforeseen occurrences with incredibly dangerous nukes and it’s bye-bye Vladivostok and adieu Yanbian. An unauthorized US flyover of Russia or China or the entry of a US fleet to their territorial waters during attacks on North Korea could also result in a nuclear response from either country—especially should the US lower the bar and start using nukes in combat again. And North Korea, with nuclear weapons that are hardly the most accurate or stable, could easily make mistakes that would draw Russia or China into a shooting war. Even though North Korea has stated that it is “only” targeting the US with nukes, according to Newsweek. The possibilities for error are endless in a conventional war, let alone one involving nuclear exchanges. So it’s easy to see how any use of horrific weapons of mass destruction can quickly put the entire world on the fast track to Armageddon. For these reasons, and many more besides, DigBoston cannot stand on the sidelines and remain silent while the threat of a war that would exterminate the human race rises by the day. To do so would be an abrogation of our moral and ethical responsibilities—not only as journalists, but as human beings. And if the planet is destroyed, journalists like us aren’t going to be able to report the news anymore, now are we? Nor will our audience have any use for it in the hereafter. As such, this publication is joining the swiftly reviving movement to abolish nuclear weapons. We plan to participate in the following ways: 1) Open our pages wide to opinion articles calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, as we continue to editorialize about same. 2) Produce an ongoing series of columns, features, and investigative reports in the public interest exposing Massachusetts institutions involved in developing, producing, and/or profiting from nuclear weapons. 3) Work directly on campaigns to abolish nuclear weapons with local, national, and international peace organizations—adding the name of our publication to the growing list of civic, social, religious, professional, and business organizations in tandem with the 56 nations that have already signed the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in saying that the only sane nuclear weapons policy is to mandate a world without such weapons. 4) Help organize our colleagues in the news industry to join us in the fight to abolish nuclear weapons. We’ll talk about more specifics over the coming months, but anyone with questions about our stance is welcome to email us at editorial@ digboston.com. Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston.
FOR EVERY REACTOR
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ORAL HISTORY COVERING 50 YEARS OF ANTI-NUCLEAR PROTESTS IN NEW ENGLAND
DROPPING IN JANUARY 2018 BOTH ONLINE AND IN LIMITED STANDALONE PRINT EDITION WRITTEN AND RESEARCHED BY
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FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
7
PATIENTS VS. PROFITS GUEST TALKING JOINTS MEMO
Medical cannabis consumers concerned about recreational rollout BY MICHELLE NOVACK HERMAN @MISHMISHMEDICINALS @BOSTONLEAF With the recreational rollout expected in July, many patients are worried that their needs will be forgotten in the rush to turn a profit. The state may be rushing too fast to generate its needed tax revenue. With more than 60 percent of patients currently utilizing the dispensary system to obtain their medicine, it is concerning to many in the medical cannabis patient community that the Cannabis Control Commission’s proposed regulations do not include any safeguards on the patient supply. While the CCC worked very hard to separate medical from adult use at the point of sale in the proposed regulations, it did not include much in the way of protections for the medical marijuana patient supply. This needs to be addressed. According to the registered qualifying patient advisor to the CCC, Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance (MPAA) advocate Michael Latulippe, the state does not regularly keep track of the amount of product dispensaries are producing versus the ounces that they sell. Latulippe explained, “The Department of Public Health currently only collects data on the amount of ounces that are sold to patients and does not regularly audit the cultivation centers on what they are actually producing.” In other words, the department does not regularly keep track of how much the dispensaries are producing in their cultivation centers versus how many ounces are sold to patients. Without these data points, the CCC will have no idea what stock exists when adult use sales begin in July. This could imperil the patient supply. Michael Latulippe continued: “We at the MPAA are advocating to see temporary safeguards put in place on the medical marijuana patient supply so that patients do not run out of their supply when adult consumers begin purchasing from co-located facilities in July. These temporary safeguards would only be put in place by the commission at times the amount of supply could not meet demand such as in July of this year when adult use sales begin.” We aren’t talking about the Gap running out of size 4 skinny jeans for a week. We are talking about medicine that allows people to function and sometimes even to live. 8
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Patients are still waiting on some sort of guarantee that their medicine won’t be taken when there are shortages for adult users. When Nevada started selling cannabis recreationally, it had shortages within a week and even declared a state of emergency. Other states, like Oregon, have all but gutted their medical programs in favor of the more lucrative recreational market. While the medical marijuana program in Mass isn’t devoid of problems, regulatory changes finally implemented by the DPH in December gave many patients hope for the future. Many important issues still need addressing, though, including the lack of knowledgeable doctors who will see cannabis patients, the lack of a true hardship program, and the lack of state incentives for incoming doctors to learn about the endocannabinoid system. There’s also the continued difficulty getting a card, a lack of reciprocation with other medical states, and issues in the pediatric program. Until last month, a pediatric patient needed two doctor recommendations, one of which had to be a pediatric doctor or specialist. Under normal circumstances, that is totally understandable—but not when there is just one doctor for these patients in the entire state. Dr. Eric Ruby in Taunton is the only pediatric doctor allowed to recommend cards for the growing number of pediatric patients. To make matters worse, Dr. Ruby has been wanting to retire for a number of years. What will happen to all these kids when they no longer even have a Dr. Ruby? With a lot of push from patient advocates and the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance (MPAA), the DPH has finally made some changes. Some are encouraging: allowing institutional caregivers; allowing prices to be published online; and the best one, allowing licensed certified nurse practitioners (CNP) to recommend patient cards, including for pediatric patients. So now pediatric patients may have a CNP as their second provider. Nonetheless, the problem remains that none of this has been announced in a way that has reached the average patient. Mothers are still begging online for some information about where to get their child’s card renewed. With the closing of Integrity 8, a former provider, many
pediatric patients lost their doctors and are now struggling to get cards renewed. With not enough doctors or CNPs to renew cards for these sick and dying children, Mass is setting itself up for a health emergency. For some of these kids, it’s life-threatening to miss a dose. At this time, Mass has 19 licensed medical dispensaries that have opened for patients, while 105 additional medical dispensaries have been granted licenses but have yet to even break ground. Those who have held on to these licenses not only get priority for the recreational licenses but also potentially block other operations that want licenses to open sooner. To complicate matters further, the CCC released a timetable for sales and licenses that does not include general applicants. Any small business or craft co-op that plans to compete with the established “big guys” will have to wait to request a license, as these dates have yet to be announced. We are now waiting on several work groups to hash out the details. On the other hand, the previous dispensaries and other big recreational shops will have priority licenses given to them in April. Since it takes time to secure land, grow, and process, it is unlikely new entrants to the industry will be able to be ready for legalization. With recreational cannabis set to launch in July, patients fear for what will happen to their meager supply of medicine. Are we going to lose our medical program over higher profits with recreational? Is a budding craft cannabis industry about to be shut down before it’s able to start? Is it time to think about pushing off this July deadline until everything is straightened out? What’s more important to the community: patients, or profits? To help ease all of this confusion, the MPAA is hosting an event on all the regulatory changes on Feb 7 in Boston. Check its Facebook page for details. The CCC will be having listening sessions in the month of February all over the state. Residents are encouraged to voice their opinions. Check mass.gov/orgs/cannabiscontrol-commission for more details.
TALKING JOINTS MEMO
FEVER DREAMS AT THE CCC
Here’s where the proposed Mass regulations fall short BY ANDY GAUS ANDYGAUS@SPRYNET.COM
OCTOBER 2017 PHOTO OF CCC PUBLIC HEARING AT BOLLING BUILDING IN ROXBURY | BY CHRIS FARAONE
The draft put forth by the state’s Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) of its proposed regulations for the industry is a nightmarish vision: stoners who smoke through a lid every three days, robbers lurking in the shadows around stores and dispensaries, delivery drivers making a stop at the local junior high school before driving off for parts unknown. With two weeks of public hearings coming up in which the public will help drill down the specifics, here are some highlights from the standing proposal:
• Trees and bushes outside marijuana businesses must be trimmed so that nobody can hide behind them. (Surprisingly, dumpsters outside those businesses are not required to be made of transparent materials.) • Deliveries must be made by two-person teams in an unmarked van with video cameras front and back and a GPS unit in a locked compartment, the key to which must remain back at the store, where someone must monitor the drivers’ location at all times. Upon reaching a delivery address, one person must stay in the truck to hold off attackers while the other rings the customer’s bell empty-handed and demands to be shown an ID before trudging back to the truck to get the goods. • Marijuana businesses must have two alarm systems installed by different companies as well as video cameras in both storage and sales areas. Businesses that sell both medical and recreational pot must have a “physical barrier” between the two sections to prevent—what exactly? They can only sell you an ounce at a time, and they must have literature available warning customers that weed is illegal on the federal level and advising them on how not to get too stoned. This literature must be available in any language spoken by their customers— potentially some 140 languages—including versions for visually impaired and hearing-impaired customers. (What special printed materials are needed for the hearing-impaired?) All employees, not just owners, must apply to the state for certification and submit to a background check. • Businesses offering on-site consumption must prevent you from taking any cannabis home, effectively pressuring you to keep consuming when you feel you’ve had enough. They may not allow you to smoke on the premises before October of this year, presumably to avoid starting fires during a long summer drought. • Hemp must contain less than .3 percent THC so it won’t be sold as marijuana to ditch-weed-loving consumers. Marijuana must not contain a level of contaminants that would harm the average user, who is presumed to be sick and consuming 10 grams (a little more than a third of an ounce) per day. Who will wake the CCC from these fever dreams? You will. Email the CCC at cannabiscommission@state.ma.us or attend one of the hearings between now and Feb 13 at various locations around the state to tell it what you think of this nonsense. Your pot-smoking future may depend on it. Andy Gaus is a longtime cannabis advocate and a member of MassCann. Boston CCC hearing dates: Thurs Feb 8 at 1 pm at the McCormack Building (Beacon Hill) Tues Feb 13 at 6 pm at the Bolling Municipal Building (Roxbury) NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
9
DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS
DRUG CHECKING AS SELF-HELP HARM REDUCTION
With doofus drug czar and vindictive DOJ, citizens left to address opioid crisis on their own BY BAYNARD WOODS @BAYNARDWOODS In October, Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, claiming that more than 64,000 Americans had died from opioid overdoses the previous year. Fentanyl is responsible for a large part of that number. But aside from his attorney general’s attempts to ramp back up a tough-oncrime drug war that will recriminalize weed, the administration hasn’t done much. Trump hired a 24-year-old MAGA frat-boy doofus as drug czar. Taylor Weyeneth, the recent college grad who has never really worked anywhere except the Trump campaign, recently resigned amid questions about his resume. Meanwhile, local jurisdictions are passing “druginduced homicide” laws in order to incarcerate more people for longer periods of time for drug offenses. So, around the country, advocates of a harmreduction approach to the drug overdose crisis are taking matters into their own hands. That’s why Tino Fuentes is in a Baltimore warehouse apartment with a bunch of drug-testing strips. Fuentes, a recovering addict and former heroin dealer from New York, might not be the most obvious advocate for drug testing. Single-use Rapid Response drug-testing strips are supposed to be used to test people’s urine for the presence of drugs, but Fuentes puts them to a different use—one that may save lives. Instead of using the strip to monitor the activities of employees or parolees, Fuentes and others use the strips to test street drugs for fentanyl. Drug checking rather than drug testing. “After you suck it dry, put your shot to the side, add water to the cooker. All you’re looking for is the residue,” he says to a number of users or former users who are still involved in Baltimore’s opiate community. “You don’t have to waste the drugs at all. Just the residue.” Insite, a safe injection facility in Vancouver, first developed the technique of using drug testing strips to test for fentanyl. “It was just trying to find a solution because there are other drugchecking methods that are used— primarily actually in communities like night-life and festival communities— but the kind of tests used in that community are not sensitive enough to pick up fentanyl, which is really active in small doses,” said Stefanie Jones of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). “That’s why using those test strips came about. It was a process of trial and error of how to get it to work most effectively.” A recent study in Vancouver showed that 86 percent
“I’ve tested 11 Xanax pills that look just like a bar, like it came from a pharmacy. They were pressed illegally and they were positive for fentanyl. I tested MDMA, positive for fentanyl. In Atlanta, crystal meth, positive for fentanyl,”
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of the drugs and 90 percent of the heroin they checked had fentanyl. Users who knew fentanyl was in their dope changed their behavior—they were more than 10 times more likely to reduce their dose. Washington DC’s City Council has adopted emergency legislation that would allow organizations to distribute the strips and allow individuals to use them without fear of legal consequences. It is technically illegal for Fuentes to check the drugs in Baltimore—when he is testing he is legally in possession of the drugs; in some places the strips themselves are considered paraphernalia—but the weathered and grizzled old New York Puerto Rican with the leather jacket, the flat old-man golf hat, and a pair of glasses perched on his nose like Ben Franklin doesn’t give a fuck. That’s why, although he consults with some cities, he doesn’t operate as a 501c3 or any other legal entity. Sometimes ethics—saving lives—is more important than the law. But there are places that recognize the need for these harm-reduction strategies. “I’m not going to sit back and wait for the law to change or the government to help, because they ain’t never helped me and the law ain’t either,” he says to the group. “That’s why I do what I do.” “We take it and dip it in there for 15 seconds, right,” he says to a group of five harm-reduction advocates from the community as he dips the strip into a small tin votive candle holder that some people use to cook their opiates. “Then you put it up like that, as you see it start getting pink, that’s sucking up the water.” In a few seconds, lines start to stand out on the strip. If there’s one line, then your dope has fentanyl in it. And if there are two lines, it probably doesn’t. The test only covers 12 fentanyl analogues, including the even stronger carfentanil—but new varieties are developed nearly every day. And the tests can’t check the strength of a drug, only its presence. So even if it tests positive, it may not kill you.
It’s more difficult to mix fentanyl in the black tar heroin that comes up from Mexico, but in many places, heroin is powder and almost all of it has fentanyl. Some of what is sold as heroin is nothing but fentanyl. “When I went to Ohio I didn’t find anything, anything at all with heroin in it. Everything I bought was fentanyl,” Fuentes says. And it’s not only heroin. Fuentes has found fentanyl in cocaine, crystal meth, and even Xanax. “I’ve tested 11 Xanax pills that look just like a bar, like it came from a pharmacy. They were pressed illegally and they were positive for fentanyl. I tested MDMA, positive for fentanyl. In Atlanta, crystal meth, positive for fentanyl,” he says. “Always test every batch,” Fuentes says. “Don’t assume because the last batch.” He calls it the “chocolate chip” effect when the drugs aren’t cut well and the fentanyl is not well distributed. William Miller started using heroin in the 1960s, and he has seen it all. But he hasn’t seen anything like fentanyl. He can’t even begin to count the number of people he’s known who died because of the drug. As a result, he’s gotten clean and is now out here working in his community to spread the word. “Doing it like this, it spreads out among communities,” Fuentes says. “I’ll leave some strips, do what you do on your own. Figure it out, go into your neighborhoods or wherever you think it’s deemed necessary and see how it works for you.” “No matter how you feel about people that use, people are gonna get high and this fentanyl thing, man, it is killing people,” Miller says. Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis. Email baynard@ democracyincrisis.com; Twitter @baynardwoodszz
HEROIN DAZE DIRTY OLD BOSTON
An abridged trudge through Boston’s long, repetitive history of opiate abuse BY PETER ROBERGE
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From January to September of 2017, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) confirmed 932 opioid-related deaths. While such reports are increasingly unsettling, Massachusetts and especially the city of Boston are no strangers to such plagues, as our complicated and disheartening history with hard drugs spans more than a century, dating back to the inception of synthetic heroin and prescription opioids in the early 1900s. The media first started reporting on the prescription opioid crisis before the term heroin was coined in this country. Journalists also caught on long before 1912, when laws were put in place to imprison those distributing the drug for up to 17 years with an additional fine as high as $5,000. While the rules were meant to curb the spread of pain-relieving drugs like morphine and other pain-relieving drugs, officials were caught off guard when the “new vice drug” heroin hit streets. Though initially described by manufacturers as the ideal drug for a number of disorders, and first marketed as a nonaddictive, by the mid-1910s, people were discovering its extremely addictive potential. Sound familiar? In time, laws would prove to serve little good, especially at stopping those working within it. Numerous doctors were caught over-prescribing heroin, with a disturbing number found guilty in criminal court of selling opiates outside of their practice. One particularly disturbing case involved one Dr. Herman, a Back Bay practitioner caught with distributing up to 20,000 heroin tablets through street dealers in the Back Bay area in 1916, all while working out of a place called the Norway House. On the prevention front, the Boston Watch and Ward Society, which formed in 1879 and notoriously worked to censor and ban works of literature in the city (members were known to harass librarians at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square), also became one of the region’s most important allies in the struggle against a growing heroin epidemic. Specifically, they raised public awareness about Boston’s “Heroin Square,” a notorious nook in the South End, near the corner of Columbus and Warren avenues, where dealers roamed free and operated with little to no interference from law enforcement. That area, of course, has an ugly legacy. Methadone Mile, or the stretch of Mass Ave that intersects with Melnea Cass Boulevard in Roxbury, is essentially the city’s epicenter for the opioid crisis, in large part due to numerous addiction clinics and shelters surrounding Boston Medical Center. This is only a few blocks away from the old Heroin Square that was active in 1914. Though hard drug use has fluctuated through the decades, news coverage has mostly come in fits or not at all. For the most part, newspapers in the earlier part of the 20th century strictly depicted addicts as impoverished fiends. The media is still largely asleep on the job, but if there’s any compassion coming through these days, such sentiments were first reflected during the Vietnam War era. Take the case of Jim Hannon, a veteran who received an honorable discharge for his injuries, returned home to Mass, and received opioid treatment for the pain caused by shrapnel in his back. Due to a formed addiction, he eventually turned to heroin after the end of his legal treatment. Hannon was charged with heroin possession in 1971, and his trial in Plymouth County saw an unprecedented number of reporters and protesters, many of whom were veterans, outside the courtroom. Opioids had been a problem in Mass and elsewhere for generations up to that point; still, the case brought some of the first widespread attention to the drug’s pervasive reach. Yet here we are, nearly 50 years later… This throwback is a collaboration between Dirty Old Boston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and DigBoston. For more throwbacks visit facebook.com/ dirtyoldboston and binjonline.org.
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NAVAL AIRCREWMAN (HELICOPTER) 2ND CLASS NICHOLAS GLASS OF HELICOPTER SEA COMBAT SQUADRON 22 (HSC 22) LEADS RESIDENTS TO AN MH-60S SEA HAWK HELICOPTER FOR EVACUATION FOLLOWING THE LANDFALL OF HURRICANE MARIA. (U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 3RD CLASS SEAN GALBREATH/RELEASED)
THE HURRICANE CONTINUES SPECIAL FEATURE
As Puerto Ricans face uncertain future, an enormous struggle for those sheltering in Mass BY MICHELLE SANTIAGO CORTÉS All the instruments and teaching materials have been pushed aside to make room for cases of bottled water, Goya cans, suitcases, tables, and chairs. Two young parents take turns entertaining their toddler, and their older relative paces around their table, while a volunteer discusses housing options in Brookline. A pair of middle-aged siblings find their way to the back to wait for a volunteer. Near the door, a young mother pushes a stroller back and forth to soothe her son, a baby with fat cheeks that spill over the collar of his jacket. (“A parachute, that’s what he looks like!” she says to the father). The volunteer assigned to them is making a call. It’s pouring rain outside of Sociedad Latina in Roxbury, the site of one of the three pop-up centers that opened the week after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. People come here to find places for their displaced families to live. Luisa Mercedes, 53, is from Aibonito, a mountain municipality in Puerto Rico haunted by a local myth involving a llorona (Spanish for “crier”). She paints an apocalyptic picture of a world ravaged by wind and water: “We saw the cars under water where we were staying. We
She saw the baby crying and then asked us what happened and we told her.
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saw a light post ripped out at the root.” She’s wearing jeans and a puffer jacket zipped up to her chin. Luisa is in Boston with her 19-year-old son, her daughter-in-law, also 19, and their 11-month-old son, the parachute baby. After the hurricane left her and her family homeless, they lived in a house near Aibonito that belonged to a friend from Chicago for the past month, but the homeowner’s family will need the house during Christmastime, she explained. Boston became a solution because she has family here. Nearly a month after her house was destroyed, Luisa and her family arrived at Logan Airport. “We got here and we didn’t have anyone to pick us up, so we were adrift,” she recalls. “There we were, crying, and this woman walked by to get a taxi. She saw the baby crying and then asked us what happened and we told her.” They spent the night at the woman’s home, and she brought them to Sociedad Latina the next morning. As of early November, more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans have fled the island of about 3.4 million residents, escaping the wrath of Hurricane Maria. A survey of 6,000 Puerto Ricans that have left the island found that over half of them don’t know if they will return, 19 percent have made the choice to stay stateside, and 30 percent say they plan to go back when they can. DUCK, DUCK, HURRICANE To quote the US Supreme Court, Puerto Rico and its
people are “foreign in a domestic sense.” Even in a state that has more than 300,000 Puerto Ricans, about 30,000 of them living in Boston, this sticky mess of legal ambiguity means that Luisa, a US citizen, faces the same challenge as many foreign immigrants: She doesn’t speak English. But unlike immigrants, she’s lived on US soil her entire life. She doesn’t have to worry about a visa, but this is only the second time she has ever set foot on the mainland. The Jones Act imposed US citizenship on island residents 100 years ago. Since then, a passport just as blue as any Florida or California native’s has helped Puerto Rican residents avoid (or survive, depending on whom you ask) the island’s hardest times by moving to the 50 states and paying visits to the island at will. There’s always something to throw the budget out of whack: the economic depression of the early ’50s, the ’70s, the 2007 recession, and now, Maria. Duck, duck, hurricane. Although the headline-worthy lack of water and electricity is Puerto Rico’s new normal, the resulting mass migration isn’t. Most Puerto Ricans on the island have family or know someone in the States. If they haven’t lived stateside themselves, they at least know somebody who has. It’s like small-town ennui, the colonial edition: a national rite of passage. Island residents ask themselves, “Here or there?” It’s thrown around as an accusation, “You want to stay here?” or “So, you going to just leave?” For some it’s a declaration: “I’m out!” or “I was born here and I’ll die here!”
Luisa was #YoNoMeQuito (#IDontGiveUp). She always saw herself as the “us” that stayed. She planned to always stand her ground. Like many, she thought the best thing any Puerto Rican could do for her country was stay. But everything changed after the wind blew the roof from over her head. “What happened with Maria was a matter of circumstance. But it’s hard, getting up and trying to work,” Luisa admitted. “I [heard] my kids [say], ‘Mom, we don’t have this for the baby. Mom, there isn’t any–’ I suffered, I cried. I cried so much watching my kids suffer.” For now, Luisa is just working on finding a job. Sociedad Latina’s pop-up center has received hundreds of people from all over Puerto Rico—southern cities, suburbs, mountain townships, and beach towns. Meanwhile, as more are expected to come, with the pattern of Puerto Rican migration cycling in waves that brings islanders to mainland shores, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is now making the process even harder, if not impossible, for many of those families that are suffering. As the Boston Herald reported just last week: “Hurricane Maria survivors who fled the devastation in Puerto Rico are being dropped by the federal program that was set up to keep a roof over their heads, leaving them scrambling for shelter and praying for help.”
catching up with the shop owner roasting coffee beans behind the counter. Her husband is Puerto Rican, so they shared updates on the island’s status to make some kind of sense out of the rubble. The island’s uprooted cell towers and uncharged cell phones were flooded with calls with Florida, New York, and Massachusetts area codes, desperate for a 787 response. “I consider myself to be Boricua,” Cruz says. Boricua, the word Puerto Ricans use to refer to themselves, comes from the Native American name for the island, Borikén. “Even though I was born here, por herencia de mi padre, yo soy boricua.” “So I feel like I’m part of that island. So there’s a connection, a personal connection.” In Spanish, he inhales the “s” sounds at the end of his words and scrapes the “r” against the back of his throat, as Southern Puerto Ricans often do. ADOBO TO INJURY Otoniel Figueroa, 45, rolls his daughter’s stroller through his office door. He points at the Puerto Rican flag on the wall. “¿Qué bandera es esa? ¿De dónde es?” he says, asking, What flag is that? Where is it from? English and Spanish are the official languages of his homeland and household. His English accent is Puerto Rican regional—not an accent of Spanish busting through English seams, but an accent born on and of a bilingual island. A life in the States was never his plan. Figueroa studied labor relations at the University of Puerto Rico, a campus that has fueled generations of intense student activism. (A recent example: students holding signs that read “¡nuestras vidas no son tu teatro!,” our lives are not your theater, during Lin-Manuel Miranda’s visit to announce a Puerto Rico staging of Hamilton.) Figueroa finished his master’s degree in Madrid and returned to Puerto Rico to help his sister take care of their sick mother. Then moving meant moving away. He arrived in New York four weeks before 9/11 and has lived in Jamaica Plain for the past four years. He makes a living as the director for the commercial division for a property service workers’ union and says he’s been exposed to the selfidentified Puerto Rican diaspora—children of earlier waves of migration. When the governor of Puerto Rico declared that the island’s public debt was “un-payable” in 2015, Figueroa looked to Boston’s network of Boricua organizations for
A CONNECTION “You ask folks, how are you? And you get, ‘I’m OK.’ That means that they’re alive. The person that tells you they’re OK, they just lost their house,” Boston policeman Luis A. Cruz explained. “They just lost everything … That’s gotta be someone who is very resilient and proud because they’d be devastated to lose everything.” Cruz flew into San Juan on Oct 7 with seven other BPD officers from LLEGO Boston, a social group made up of Latino law enforcement officers. More than 25 members have given two weeks of their time in Puerto Rico. “I was one of the idiots who looked out the window,” Cruz said. He knew that the eye of Hurricane Maria tore through his father’s hometown, Yabucoa. Cruz also knew the view from the plane would be different this time and that he would be flooded by a different wave of feelings, but he still looked. While in Puerto Rico, Cruz and his colleagues were assigned to accompany local police on patrols. He felt they weren’t being put to good use, so his colleagues found a shipping container full of food and water. “So we just started taking the boxes and taking the water.” They had a bus for a few days to get to and from the ship that they used to transport these goods to wherever they were assigned. Cruz says the trip wasn’t humanitarian—it was personal. It’s an island they know through the stories of others and through memories that they have inherited. “My father passed all that stuff down to me,” Cruz says. “How he grew up, how he was raised. I was close to my grandfather, el abuelo mío.o.” As a child in Boston in the ’70s, Cruz says his father played “that jíbaro music,” traditional folk songs from the mountains, around the house. That same music came to life during Christmas. “We used to do parrandas here when I was a kid, in like 20 below zero.” A parranda is like surprise caroling with a live band, rum, and food. Cruz’s family regularly visited Puerto Rico to see relatives, but his life has always been in Boston. While he says that it gets harder to pass down the culture to the next generation, he still participates in word-of-mouth journalism. The day PHOTO VIA U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION Maria made landfall, he was at Recreo
answers. In time they formed a supergroup of Boston Boricuas that included Inquilinos Boricuas in Acción CEO Vanessa Calderón, former City Councilor Félix Arroyo Sr., and activist and veteran Jaime Rodríguez. They discovered that Mass Mutual in Springfield was a holder of Puerto Rico government bonds through Oppenheimer Funds and wrote a letter to CEO Roger Crandall requesting him to refrain from promoting austerity measures. They organized a small rally and brought drums to his speech at the Boston Chamber of Commerce’s annual event. The history of Puerto Rico is written all over Boston, and Boston’s history has a few pages in the history of the island of the “rich port.” Right behind the specialty tea shops and concept stores of the South End, Aguadilla and San Juan streets serve as fortresses for the Villa Victoria housing complex—a Boricua triumph over late ’70s gentrification. In the ’60s, Puerto Rican migrant workers took over the low-wage jobs earlier generations of Southern blacks and European immigrants abandoned. New England agriculture needed Caribbean migrant workers, and Boston capital was directed toward the gruesome mechanization of Puerto Rico’s sugar industry. “Seven weeks after Maria, we called a meeting at the offices of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción,” Figueroa says. “Two hundred and seventy-five people showed up. It was an emotional meeting.” Figueroa adds that he’s not burdened with survivor’s guilt, because he channels all his energy back into organizing. “We opened singing the national anthem, the Puerto Rican anthem, and En Mi Viejo San Juan,” he says. “People were emotional, crying. It was a way to get together, to vent, because everybody was, ‘I don’t know where my father is,’ ‘I don’t know where my grandma is, my sister, I haven’t talked to them.’”
‘I don’t know where my father is,’ ‘I don’t know where my grandma is, my sister, I haven’t talked to them.’
Café in West Roxbury, where Cruz was
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FADED BLUE POLITICS
There’s a Democratic wave sweeping the country, but will it reach Beacon Hill? BY PATRICK COCHRAN
Last November, rank-and-file liberals picked up a muchneeded and long overdue morale boost in the form of sweeping electoral victories for the Democratic Party in New Jersey and Virginia. Phil Murphy (NJ) and Ralph Northam (VA) exceeded expectations in dominant gubernatorial wins while the Dems made gains in each respective lower chamber. (Democrats came just a hat draw away from erasing a 32-seat deficit in the Virginia House of Delegates.) Pundits were already saying that election was a harbinger of the 2018 midterms when the unthinkable happened — Democrat Doug Jones won the Alabama special election to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the US Senate, ending a quarter century of Republican dominance in the state’s upper-chamber delegation. For the blue team, who fared far better electorally through the first year of President Trump than Republicans managed through 2009 — Obama’s first year in office — the narrative was set: 2018 will yield watershed moments for the motivated opposition. It’s pointless at this juncture to debate whether a national wave will materialize. What’s more important is to scope the state and local pieces. In Massachusetts , the so-called East Coast liberal epicenter, what’s to come of popular Republican Gov. Charlie Baker? Despite a public backlash against the larger Republican Party, Baker remains a hot item— he’s famously the most popular governor in the country. In a state where nearly 70 percent of voters rejected Trump in 2016, an excess of 70 percent approve of Baker’s performance. In hypothetical matchups against any of the three candidates vying for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination — former Newton Mayor Setti Warren, Deval Patrick-administration veteran Jay Gonzalez, and environmentalist Bob Massie — Baker blows the competition out of the water. According to the latest WBUR poll, Warren has the best shot of the trio, with a 34-point deficit. (It should be noted that these numbers are certain to move in favor the Democratic candidates as their name recognitions increase. A majority of responders to the WBUR poll were unfamiliar with the candidates. That will change as we get closer to the conventions in June and the primary in September. But even so, the preliminary numbers are damning.) What’s worse for Baker’s challengers is that the governor’s margin of approval has actually widened through Trump’s first year. Baker has done an exceptional job of wading through the repercussions his party has felt on the national level. 14
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He was an early critic of Trump’s candidacy, opposed the anti-Muslim travel ban and ACA repeal, projected negative takes on the tax cuts, and supported Jones over his Republican counterpart Roy Moore in the Alabama election. In short, Baker has maintained the not-so-difficult feat of being both a member of the Republican Party and a member of the #resistance. And Bay Staters have rewarded him. Baker’s challengers have taken aim at the governor’s relatively watered-down conservatism. As Setti Warren has said, “He’s a Republican, he’s going to do Republican stuff … Surprise, surprise.” Gonzalez has said of Baker’s perceived decency, “When did the measure of if a governor’s doing a good job [become] that ‘he’s nice’ and ‘he isn’t crazy’?” SEEING PURPLE Of all the special elections across the United States through the first year of Trump’s presidency, Massachusetts was just one of three states to feature a Democrat-to-Republican seat flip, on the strength of Republican Dean Tran winning a state senate election in the Fitchburg area. Tran, while certainly a far cry from the mainstream conservatism of national Republicans, is to the right of Baker on abortion and LGBTQ issues. Still the minority party in the state Senate, Republicans now control more seats in the upper chamber than they have at any other time since the 1990s. Meanwhile, in the Commonwealth’s major 2018 statewide race, progressive champion Sen. Elizabeth Warren will face a tougher path to re-election than Baker, according to polling. While holding a strong and steady lead over a significant field of GOP rivals, Sen. Warren’s 26-point advantage over Trumpaligned state Rep. Geoff Diehl is narrower than the gap between Baker and any of his opponents. And Baker has history on his side. Despite controlling both houses of Congress for decades, Democrats have struggled to maintain occupancy of the corner office. Since 1960, Republicans have won eight of the 15 elections for the governorship and have owned the executive branch for 34 of the last 58 years. (While party membership and ideology is always shifting, the 1960s is widely considered the definitive point of modern party alignment.) THE FAVORITE The biggest boon to the Mass GOP’s re-election efforts is that it appears all but certain that the Democrats won’t run their best candidate for the biggest office. Attorney General Maura Healey was popular even before
Trump took office. On the same night that Baker won the governorship by less than two percentage points, Healey won the Mass AG job in a landslide, picking up nearly 62 percent of the vote (and over 200,000 more votes than Baker). Her star has only shone brighter as she’s repeatedly taken on the Trump administration, both rhetorically and legally. In limited polling, Healey’s the only Democrat in legitimate striking distance of Baker. At a recent Democratic candidates forum in Brookline, the only statements from any of the men on stage to garner unanimous applause were attacks on Trump and references to Healey. “She’s suing Trump every five seconds,” Gonzalez said to the roaring crowd. Massie even claims Healey jumping into the race would “clear the field.” “The only A-level candidate I’ve heard of is Maura Healey, who’s obviously not in the race,” state Rep. Russell Holmes of Mattapan told the Boston Globe last March. The AG has denied that she will seek anything other than reelection to her current post in 2018, and while it’s not too late for Healey to jump into the race, her candidacy will likely face a messier road to the nomination if she declares after local caucuses elect their delegates to the Democratic Convention. This all points to the bigger speculative question of whether the Dems believe this is a race worth competing in. In other years, it would be a fair and reasonable position to concede that your moderate opponent is simply too popular. (Think Bill Weld’s re-election blowout in 1994, when the socially liberal Republican won with 71 percent of the vote.) But this isn’t other years. This is the age of Trump, and Democrats want blood—even if the president’s name isn’t on the ballot in 2018. WEAKNESSES Despite the governor’s soaring approval ratings and seemingly unending piles of cash, there are some signs of vulnerability. Tran’s victory in the December special election reflected Baker’s popularity and power as a campaigner in the Bay State, with Republican State Leadership Committee President Matt Walter stating the win “again shows that Republican candidates can be successful in traditionally blue states when they run on common-sense, fiscallysound legislative solutions.” “With popular governors like Charlie Baker, Republicans can continue to win tough races and flip legislative seats in states throughout the country,” Walter said in a statement. But you can’t win the governorship by barnstorming one purple district, and the last time Baker campaigned on anything statewide, he was delivered a resounding and devastating defeat. Question 2 — the ballot initiative proposing to expand charter schools in Massachusetts — became Baker’s prime target in an election cycle drowned in one of America’s most bizarre presidential contests. As a popular governor refusing to get behind his party’s unpopular presidential nominee, Baker traveled the Commonwealth supporting charter expansion, opined in local papers, and even flooded the airwaves in a TV ad encouraging voters to support the ballot question. In the end, more people voted against the initiative than voted for Hillary Clinton on election day. That same election, Baker came out against the ballot question to legalize recreational cannabis. That initiative passed. The defeats in the 2016 election show at least one thing: that Baker lacks the star power to win over Massachusetts voters on ideas—and that will likely be the opening the Democrats need to make this election competitive.
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BEDBUG MUSIC
How a Boston bedroom pop artist unified a larger community BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN fi” mics to “nicer” mics, from thinking about how to record after writing songs to thinking about how to record while writing them. Songs like “Lilies” or “Rainy, Time of the Year” capture the perfectly imperfect bedroom pop that Citron builds. They sound simple, all warbled keys and softly thudding bass drum, but that type of warped, soft, warm instrumentation feels too articulate to recapture, especially because of how the segues line up. These are songs that capture what it feels like to become overwhelmed with feeling. In that, Bedbug writes songs that help listeners feel less alone. Maybe that’s because Bedbug got a little help in the process, too. Over the course of I’ll Count to Heaven, Citron is joined by a handful of friends, some rooted in music and some not. “I spend most of the recording process holed up in my room for hours just experimenting with all of my toys until I find the right sounds I like,” says Citron. “The entire thing would be a complete blur if it wasn’t for the breaks in the process to get other people in to record snippets of vocals.” Each snippet lines up perfectly. Brooklyn-based poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva, who met Citron when he asked to collaborate after seeing her read, delivers two hard-hitting poems on tracks specifically dedicated to her. Boston-based hip-hop artist Pink Navel, who met Citron as mutual fans of each other’s work, raps over the halfway point “(Interlude)” with a mesmerizing flow. Philly-based singer-songwriter Samantha Stoakes, who met Citron at house shows years ago while living in Boston, sings at the end of that same track. Those artists are the tip of the iceberg—not just on the album, but in Bedbug’s artistic circle—and their collaboration deepens the memories Citron captures as Bedbug. Most remember when they first heard these songs because of exactly that. “I did a really corny thing and listened to the music while looking at the Charles River on my lunch breaks at the Harvard Book Store,” says Lozada-Oliva. “Listening to the beginnings of this album helped put a lot in perspective for me about ephemerality. It helped me articulate this desire we all have to put everyone we love into one glass we can sip from forever. This is a longwinded way to say that I loved the place Bedbug put me in, even if I couldn’t be in it forever.” When Stoakes visited Boston last October, Citron slipped headphones over her ears to play her “Outside the Air Is Getting Thinner, But…” for the first time. It immediately submerged her in similar feelings of friendship, roots, and platonic love. “I was so excited and proud and emotional to finally hear the new finished material, but it really hit when Sami [Martasian]’s voice kicks in,” she says. “I burst into tears—one of those intense, ugly, embarrassing cries. Something about hearing my close friends’ voices, and hearing this beautifully actualized creation of Dylan’s, just made my heart snap. That was the moment I knew this record would be something special in
every sense.” All of these special moments are what allowed Bedbug to sign to DIY-favorite label Joy Void. Citron chalks it up to luck—“I love being a part of a music community, and making an impact on music in Boston, but it also makes it hard to really be explicit about striving for things while avoiding just using people as props for your own growth.”—but that balancing act is part of what separates Citron from other Boston music higher ups. On top of this, Citron hosts events at his house to bring musicians together. Instead of sticking to genre-organized shows the way most hosts do, he keeps the bills varied. Rappers open for folk acts. A rock band plays a strippeddown set before a poet. As such, it allows various music bubbles to overlap, putting new ears in front of old sounds and vice versa. “Dylan’s living room venue has done a whole lot for the scene when it comes to shows featuring acts that aren’t just rock bands,” says Pink Navel. “My first time playing there was also my first time seeing a proper noise set. Later, I booked a show there with a rap mentor of mine, Safari Al, and our friend Wing Vilma. The show went off—so many different styles and not a guitar in sight! It really does a lot for the sonic diversity of our scene.” Above all else, Bedbug just brings people together— and often it’s done so simply and innocently that no one realizes it in the moment. It’s effortless and homey. That’s the way a community should be. In song and in person, Bedbug just makes that happen. “Someone recently told me that the magical thing about art scenes in Boston is that they don’t have ego,” says Lozada-Oliva. “I’m not sure if that’s always true, but I do feel that with Bedbug. Bedbug reminds me of why I want to create, and that’s basically just to feel a connection, however brief, with something or somebody. Whether through a song that’s call and response with the audience or through lyrics that are all at once hilarious and sad, Bedbug just brings people together.”
FRI 02.02
MON 02.05
TUE 02.06
[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 10pm/21+/$15. greatscottboston.com]
[ONCE Somerville, 156 Highland Ave., Somerville. 7pm/18+/free. oncesomerville.com]
SKETCH COURTESY OF SQUISHY SANDWICH ART At first glance, lo-fi musician Bedbug seems like one of those tiny voices hidden in the general mix of a crowd, like an overlooked classmate who has a story to tell but is too shy to tell it. The closer you look, though, the Boston-based musician begins to transform. Dylan Citron, the person behind the Bedbug moniker, turns the sound of music into something that exceeds the normal obligations of music. It comforts and reminds, even if those two actions seem to be at odds on the regular. Perhaps that’s because it was a secret outlet. Growing up, Citron would wait for his parents to leave the house before he began playing piano, frantically cramming in as much rehearsal time as he could, and, upon their return, flung himself in front of the TV as a disguise. He began releasing music under moniker Fairweather Currents at age 14. Once 2015 rolled around, he began using Bedbug as an outlet for lighter, sentimental songs. What began as a hidden voice becomes one that’s all-encompassing, and as every vagueness becomes a familiar tale, Citron happens to welcome more friends, artists, and listeners into the intimate allure of his work as Bedbug. For a handful of listeners, Bedbug is a modest but present force in Boston’s local music scene. For others, it’s a new name that they welcome warmly because his new album, I’ll Count to Heaven in Years Without Seasons, makes it easy to do so. It’s a record of youthful moments, memories, and feelings—“Just tryin’ to write the album I needed when I was 16,” reads the Bedbug bio on Bandcamp—that exemplifies why his meek but affecting songwriting skills resonate so powerfully with listeners. It also sees changes from Bedbug’s last album: switching from a cassette recorder to pencil microphones, from “lo-
Bedbug’s new album, I’ll Count to Heaven in Years Without Seasons, is out now on. It’s available to purchase via Joy Void and Bandcamp.
MUSIC EVENTS THU 02.01
A SAMPLE OF BOSTON’S FINEST INDIE FUNERAL ADVANTAGE + TEENENDER + DEEP SECRET + LADY PILLS [Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston. 8:30pm/18+/$10. greatscottboston.com]
16
02.01.18 - 02.08.18 |
POP SOUL FROM AN AUSTRALIAN-ARAB POINT OF VIEW WAFIA + JAIRA BURNS
DIGBOSTON.COM
PROTO GOTH PSYCH ROCK DYR FASER + EDGE PETAL BURN
MON 02.05
LOVE YOUR PARENTS TOUR BROCKHAMPTON
[House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston. 7pm/all ages/$50. houseofblues.com]
GRUMMY GARAGE ROCK FOR BROS BRUVS + BLACK HATCH + SOCIAL DISPUTE + TAMPA HOMELESS
[O’Brien’s Pub, 3 Harvard Ave., Allston. 8pm/21+/$8. obrienspubboston.com]
WED 02.07
SYCOPHANTIC NEO-SOUL BILAL
[City Winery, 80 Beverly St., Boston. 6pm/21+/$25. citywinery.com]
OPEN MIKE EAGLE WHEEL OF TUNES
L.A. rapper talks b-ball trophies, airport bars, and mafia-style weddings BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Open Mike Eagle may live in Los Angeles now, but his Chicago upbringing will stay with him no matter where he moves. The rapper has been on the rise ever since he released his first solo album in 2010. He’s collaborated with everyone from Kool A.D. to Aesop Rock over the years, but it’s his narrative pieces in the alternative side of hip-hop that showcase what he’s best at. And on his newest record, it took prying into his childhood days to give his verses their strongest impact yet. On Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, Open Mike Eagle focuses on the Chicago South Side housing project Robert Taylor Homes, specifically its neighborhoods and communities that fail to get proper, rounded coverage in pop culture. The buildings were there when he was growing up. By the time he left for college, they were demolished. To capture the real personality of its old residents, he decided it was time to be upfront about his album narrative for once. “The biggest takeaway with that was to put human faces and emotions onto a tragedy that a lot of people were distanced from,” he says. “I wanted have people walk away thinking about how tens of thousands of humans that lived in this place and then it got demolished. Just like that. I spent some time in there because I had relatives there. It was a community and you knew people on different floors, so you would sometimes go to their apartments, and they were completely different in terms of how they were decorated. Apartments were an extension of those people’s personalities. This was early in the ’80s, so there were a lot of late-’70s-style decorations: hanging beads, velvet paintings, plastic furniture, and all sorts of ornate, everyday items.” To help explore Open Mike Eagle’s backstory a bit more before he performs at the Sinclair, we interviewed him for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask bands questions inspired by their song titles. True to his album, the answers bring anecdotal words to life with flair. 1. “Legendary Iron Hood” What’s the heaviest weight you’ve ever seen someone lift? I just watched a guy on Monday night lift the cab of a big rig over. He came from one of those strongman competitions, though, so I don’t know how rigged this was. They made it look pretty realistic. But that’s my jam. I watch wrestling every week. I like the fake drama.
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upcoming shows
2/01
Amateur Athletes, The Face Guitars, Birdgang Skatanic sounds 2/02
2nd Annual Groundhog Day Bash
JANUARY 25
JANUARY 26
Howie Day
the posies
JANUARY 27
JANUARY 28
The Black Lillies
Brandy Clark
JANUARY 30
JANUARY 31
TALIB KWELI
JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE
FEBRUARY 1
FEBRUARY 7
Feat. Chandler Travis Philharmonic, Jennifer Kimball, Corporate Punk & more 2/03
Eddie Japan, The Devil’s Twins, The Grownup Noise Ultra-melodic pop 2/05
Dyr Faser, Edge Petal Burn (free show) Ethereal indie-pop 2/08
Abraham, Lithic, the Cotones
w/ H.C. MCENTIRE
Thoughtful pop rock
156 Highland Ave • Somerville, MA 617-285-0167 oncesomerville.com @oncesomerville /ONCEsomerville
bilal
sierra hull w/ phoebe hunt
FEBRUARY 10-11
FEBRUARY 11
2. “(How Could Anybody) Feel at Home” Where is your home away from home, the place you feel most comfortable that isn’t technically your own? The airport bar at, like, any airport. My favorite one is in Minneapolis. It was the first one I went to where you order your drink on an individual iPad rigged into the bar seat. You don’t have to talk to anybody. You just pay and press a button. People bring you stuff. It’s very modern. Lately, I’ve been getting whiskey sodas.
Ian Hunter & The Rant Band
Peter Bradley Adams
FEBRUARY 14
FEBRUARY 16
3. “Hymnal” Were you religious growing up? Yeah, I was heavy into church. I was an acolyte. I used to wear the white robe and light candles and sing in choir. I liked some parts of it and others were very weird. But it was just part of life growing up in the situation I grew up in.
griffin house
Eleanor Friedberger
special events The Champagne Experience
1.29
stump trivia
4. “No Selling (Uncle Butch Pretending It Don’t Hurt)” Which family item has been passed down to you that you would never sell? My kid’s trophies. They’re for basketball. He plays in a couple leagues.
prizes for top three groups!
2.6
E S D A Y CITY WINERY theT URiedel BOSTON champagne experience
TICKETS $110
6:30 PM
FEB. 6, 2018
In this Riedel Comparative Tasting, experience for yourself the difference which the shape and size of a glass can make to your wine drinking experience. Featuring the fine champagne of Besserat de Bellefon.
Besserat de Bellefon Cuvée des Moines
Brut NV - 92 pts, Wine Spectator
Besserat de Bellefon Cuvée des Moines Brut Rosé - 92 pts, Wine Spectator Besserat de Bellefon Cuvée des Moines
- 91 pts, Wine Spectator
3.21
City Winery and american airlines Present
City Winery and american airlines Present
australian wine dinner
5. “Happy Wasteland Day” Which item are you the least resourceful with? I can’t cook, and that’s a big problem. Like, if things go bad in the world, I’m out there all alone [laughs]. I never cook, or mostly never. The last thing I made was a turkey burger because it’s one of three items I can make. Really, I’m awful.
Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru
2.27
THIS IS A FREE EVENT!
R S V P: I N F O @ W I N E S E L L E R S LT D. C O M
greek wine dinner
Get Married in Urban Wine Country
6. “Daydreaming in the Projects” Do you remember any of your childhood dreams? I used to have dreams where I wanted to jump off tall buildings, not in a suicidal way. I would think, “I’m up here and I’m scared, but it’s the only way down.” I’d be standing on the tippy-top of these sky-rises. Just falling slowly. Those were the dreams I had at night. My daydreams were mostly about cartoons, like Transformers and BraveStarr.
email eventsboston@citywinery.com for more info
80 beverly st. Boston Ma 02114 (617) 933-8047 |www.citywinery.com/boston
FIND THE REMAINING TRACKS FROM NINA’S PIECE AT DIGBOSTON.COM NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
17
NEW SCREEN, OLD TRICKS
FILM
Mosaic places classical film aesthetics inside a new delivery system BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Mosaic [2017/18] was first released last year as an iOS/Android application, and if you watch it via that application, then it begins with a scene that recalls the opening of various Alfred Hitchcock movies: A high-class blond woman, Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone), encounters a charismatic man with an explicitly shady past, Eric Neill (Frederick Weller). But if you watch Mosaic as a television miniseries, which is how it aired on HBO last week, then it begins with a scene more akin to the finale of various other Hitchcock movies: Summit, Utah, police detective Nate Henry (Devin Ratray) tersely confronts Joel Hurley (Garrett Hedlund) about the murder of Olivia Lake, a crime which has already occured and for which Joel is now the prime suspect. The TV edit of Mosaic includes six episodes and runs for roughly six hours; in contrast, the application iteration is separated into 15 chapters, which usually run between 20 and 40 minutes and are laid out on a vertically arranged “story map”—when one chapter ends, you’re given at least two options for which chapter to watch next, and those branches split further as you move from the top of the map (where it begins) to the bottom (where it ends). The hook offered by the app is that each chapter is centered around one specific character, so as you select your path, you’re basically editing both the structure and perspective of the program itself: You can “finish” the application in as few as five chapters (comprising about two hours of footage, and just a few perspectives), or you can view all 15 (which would add up to well over seven hours). So if you do watch most of the footage hosted on the app, then you end up seeing certain scenes on multiple occasions—first from the perspective of one character, then from the perspective of another. And it’s exactly that sense of repetition that makes the Mosaic application such an idiosyncratic experience: Its greatest pleasures often result from seeing old images through a new angle. The 15 chapters are split among the perspectives of six individuals, with some characters being the center of just one, and others being the subject of three or four—for instance, you honestly could use the app to shift Mosaic into a roughly two-hour movie that primarily stars Garrett Hedlund, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. “Chapter One” regards Olivia (the author of one hypersuccessful children’s book but little else in the 26 years since), while the remaining chapters focus on various characters adjacent to her life in Summit, Utah. Those characters include Joel, who’s the latest in a long line of handsome young men invited to stay at the Lake estate (dooming him to a “prime suspect” position); Eric, a lifelong criminal and con artist who’s hired to manipulate Olivia, but then falls in love with her (Or Does He?); Nate, who accepts some crucial lies during the initial murder investigation; and Eric’s sister, Petra (Jennifer Ferrin), who eventually gains reason to believe that her brother truly was innocent of any major crimes, at which point she heads to
Summit herself to agitate the police on her family’s behalf. When the footage is aligned this way—by character, and by chapter—then there’s an element of discovery to even the smallest detail—we might hear one side of a phone call in a Joel chapter, for instance, and then finally hear the other half of the call much later in a Petra chapter. Mosaic’s hard-line use of that perspective-based approach is what justifies the repetitions—even when you see a particular scene for a second or third or even fourth time, there’ve usually been some changes made. Alternate shots are used to illustrate different eyelines depending on which “version” of a scene is playing, and the sound design is often changed as well, with certain sentences or remarks being emphasized in the mix are depending on who the chapter’s main character is (in some cases, the emphasized sentences or remarks weren’t even present when the same scene played out earlier, further suggesting that every scene is being seen with an untrustworthy subjectivity). Every conceivable formal tool, down to and including subtitles, is utilized toward the application’s purpose. When a character uses their phone in somebody else’s chapter, the camera doesn’t look at what they’re doing—but when a character uses their phone in their own chapter, then most of what they type is superimposed over the frame. Mosaic is directed by Steven Soderbergh, who’s been dedicated to finding new angles of his own. After a brief “retirement” from cinema, he returned with an eye toward shaking up established methods of distribution across different forms of media. With regard to the theatrical market, he’s founded Fingerprint Releasing for the purpose of self-distributing his films on a wide scale (its first
release was Logan Lucky [2017], and its next will be Unsane [2018], in March). For the television market, he’s partnered with media tech company PodOp for the purpose of creating at least three of these application/miniseries hybrid programs, Mosaic being the first (its screenplay, for the record, is by Ed Solomon). And in at least one sense, their application does legitimately cut against what’s fashionable in television right now: While most want you to binge uninterrupted, Mosaic offers a constant stream of deliberate interruptions. In addition to its 15 chapters, the app also includes roughly 30 “discoveries,” which are layered into the chapters themselves and can be called up whenever you click on them—in some cases the “discovery” is a short scene from another chapter; in other cases it’s a PDF of a contract or a criminal file, a link to a “local news website,” a voicemail, or yet another form of media not yet mentioned here. In practice, you rarely get through 10 minutes of footage on the Mosaic application without being prompted to click on something or other—to view or not view a new discovery, or to choose among the two options for your next chapter, or just to click back toward the story map, so you can figure out how much of the program you’ve got left. At its basest level, the project fuses motion pictures with online spaces—another “old image seen from a new angle”: television with hyperlinks. MOSAIC CAN BE DOWNLOADED FOR FREE ON IOS OR ANDROID DEVICES. ADDITIONALLY, THE APPLICATION CAN BE ACCESSED VIA WEB BROWSER AT WATCHMOSAIC.COM. THE SIX MINISERIES EPISODES ARE CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON HBO’S ONLINE PLATFORM (SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED).
FILM EVENTS THU 02.01
THE BOSTON FESTIVAL OF FILMS FROM JAPAN BEGINS AT THE MFA WITH YOUR NAME [2016]
[Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. 7:30pm/PG. Also screens on 2.7 @ 8pm. 2.1 screening is free—for info on obtaining tickets, see MFA.org.]
18
02.01.18 - 02.08.18 |
FRI 02.02
PREMIERE ENGAGEMENT OF ROBIN CAMPILLO’S BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE) [2017]
[Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 4, 7, & 10pm/NR/$9-11. Through 2.8-more info, see brattlefilm.org.]
DIGBOSTON.COM
FRI 02.02
AGNES VARDA’S THE BEACHES OF AGNES [2008]
[Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 9pm/NR/$7-9. 35mm. hcl.harvard.edu/ hfa]
SAT 02.03
FREDERICK WISEMAN’S THE STORE [1983]
[Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 7pm/NR/$7-9. 16mm. hcl.harvard.edu/ hfa]
MON 01.05
TUE 01.06
[Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 2pm/NR/$12. 16mm. Note: running time of film is 358 minutes. hcl. harvard.edu/hfa]
[Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline. 7pm/R/$12.75. 35mm. coolidge.org]
DIRECTOR FREDERICK WISEMAN IN-PERSON TO PRESENT NEAR DEATH [1989]
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON’S THERE WILL BE BLOOD [2007]
Gregory Csikos, CPA csikoscpa.com TAXATION ACCOUNTING PLANNING I’m a Boston-based CPA here to provide a full spectrum of accounting and tax services to meet the needs of individuals, small businesses, start-ups, and non-profit organizations. My clients get more than an experienced and dedicated accountant, they get a problem solver. I thrive on breaking down complex issues into practical steps, allowing you to focus your energies on what matters most to you. From helping you keep accurate books to the filing of your tax returns, I handle the numbers while you focus on handling your life. Call to find
out more at 857.636.1694 NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
19
THEATER REVIEWS ARTS
BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS
PIECE OF HER HEART: A NIGHT WITH JANIS JOPLIN ON TOUR
Something tells me that the hordes of baby boomers piling in to A Night with Janis Joplin aren’t there for the writing. Nor is it very likely that, on the drive home that night, they’re going to be discussing the merits of the piece as a theatrical work of art. If A Night with Janis Joplin, which opened last week at the Boch Center’s Shubert Theatre, were presented merely as a concert performance, it might be more successful than this meandering and unfocused celebration not only of Janis but of the women who inspired her. The successful parts of the evening are entirely musical, which is no great surprise, but the show is overburdened by the haphazard hand of creator-writer-director Randy Johnson. (This production had a brief run on Broadway in 2013 and has been on tour for the last two years.) Set at a concert two weeks before her death, Janis (played here by a brilliant Kelly McIntyre) addresses the audience between songs, recounting not only her childhood in but eventual escape from Port Arthur, Texas. The evening starts off promising enough, and it’s both fascinating and entertaining to hear about her early influences (the Chantels) and how music had always been a part of her life (she adored her mother’s stockpile of Broadway cast recordings—who knew?) But the show isn’t only a Janis Joplin concert, and that’s where its identity crisis begins. As she shares with the audience the profound influence that the blues had on her style, the iconic singers that she references—Odetta, Bessie Smith, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, two unnamed blues singers—materialize on stage and sing a song. Janis interacting with her influences infuses the show with a beyond-the-graveness that would be more fulfilling if it weren’t purported to have taken place two weeks before her death.
KELLY MCINTYRE AS JANIS JOPLIN. PHOTO BY RANDY JOHNSON.
20
02.01.18 - 02.08.18 |
DIGBOSTON.COM
About half of the first act—which is relatively tight and polished—focuses on these performers rather than Janis. Somehow, though, it works. They sell it. But when the same conceit is repeated ad nauseam in the overlong and messy second act, the effectiveness of the first act is greatly diminished. Still, despite the clunkiness, the four women who double, triple, and quadruple up on these roles are extraordinary. Ashley Tamar Davis’ “Summertime,” Aurianna Angelique’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and Jennifer Leigh Warren’s “Today I Sing the Blues” offer some of the most musically rousing moments I’ve seen on any stage this year. Speaking of rousing, Kelly McIntyre’s Janis is a sensation. It is a performance of uncommon ferocity and bewildering might—both vocally and otherwise. She manages to rise above the show’s feeble writing and often pointless ramblings in a totally euphoric way. And yes, she sounds a great deal like Janis—especially that perfect rasp—though I cannot help but worry about what toll it might be taking on her vocal chords. So while the show should actually be called A Night with Janis Joplin and Friends and would be far more persuasive as an intermissionless celebration of music, there are moments throughout of near perfection. And you can’t argue with four midshow standing ovations. >> A NIGHT WITH JANIS JOPLIN. ON TOUR THROUGH 2.18. ANIGHTWITHJANISJOPLIN.COM
AT CENTRAL SQUARE THEATER, PROOF DOESN’T QUITE ADD UP
By the time that David Auburn’s Proof closed on Broadway in 2003 after over 900 performances, it was the biggest nonmusical hit in two decades, a record it still holds today. (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time came close, racking up 800 performances in its two-year run.) Brimming with rich characters and good old family drama, Proof was beloved by audiences and critics alike, winning both the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It’s also loaded with scenes that are at once compulsively watchable and—for the actors—insatiably actable. Proof has been frequent fodder for acting classes from the instant the script was published, and it’s not hard to see why. But for all of its accessibility and entertainment value, it is also an alluringly nuanced work that requires nuanced direction. For it to succeed and be persuasive, its characters must be filled out gently
with varied brushstrokes, never resorting to obviousness. Proof must also unravel like a mystery, all the while never abandoning the stark fragility of the central character. Unfortunately for the current revival playing at Central Square Theater, which will run through Feb 18, it doesn’t have any of those things. This Nora Theatre Company/Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT production, under the indifferent direction of Michelle M. Aguillon, misses the mark on nearly every conceivable level, which is in itself an achievement given that Proof is so well-constructed that it’s generally a plug-in-and-go type of play. Catherine (Lisa Nguyen) is left listless, confused, and brutally depressed following the death of her father, Robert (Michael Tow), a brilliant, renowned mathematical genius whose final years were marred by madness. Catherine inherited a great deal of her father’s mathematical ability, but at present she’s more concerned with whether or not she also inherited his madness. Having put her own education to the side so that she could care for her father, she has no idea what comes next for her. Her older sister, Claire (Cheryl Daro), has flown in from New York for the funeral and to help wrap up her father’s affairs—but there’s a lot of sisterly resentment to work out, particularly since Claire was nowhere to be found when their father was deteriorating. Certain that Catherine cannot take care of herself (did I mention she’s a mess?), Claire wants to take her back to New York so that she can take care of her. There’s nothing left for Catherine in Chicago, Claire thinks, especially since she’s already decided to sell their father’s house. Hal (Avery Bargar), one of Robert’s students, has been helping to sort through the piles of notebooks he left behind, just to make sure that nothing extraordinary has been overlooked. There’s also something brewing between him and Catherine, and after they spend the night together she finally trusts him enough to give him a key to a locked drawer in her father’s desk. What he discovers is a proof that is—if verified— historic. But when Catherine proclaims herself and not her father to be the author of the proof, neither Hal nor Claire is convinced, something from which an already broken and tormented Catherine may never fully recover. It is easy to play Catherine as a weepy depressive, and thankfully that’s something that Nguyen avoids in her portrayal. But she also misses all of the fragility, brokenness, humor, and flirtatious magnetism that makes Catherine one of the great enigmas of the last 20 years of American drama. Nguyen barely scratches the surface, and all of her line readings feel perfunctory rather than organic. But in the play’s final scene, she is remarkable, which suggests that her bland performance is a question of poor direction rather than ability. Michael Tow and Cheryl Daro imbue Robert and Claire with a similar laboredness that feels artificial, keeping the audience aware at all times that they are acting. Only Avery Bargar’s Hal is convincing. Flawlessly natural and awfully funny, it’s the only truly professional-grade performance on stage. Still, there is some merit to this production. Nora Theatre Company artistic director Lee Mikeska Gardner should be commended for opting not to revive Proof with another all-white cast, as is almost always the case. She has opted for the family here to be portrayed by actors of Asian descent as well as hiring an Asian director. At a time when representation is vital and whites are overwhelmingly given more work in the theater, it’s a refreshing and necessary thing. >> PROOF. THROUGH 2.18 AT CENTRAL SQUARE THEATER, 450 MASS. AVE., CAMBRIDGE. CENTRALSQUARETHEATER.ORG
Shaun King Feb 9, 2018 • 11am-12:30pm
Northeastern University welcomes activist and writer Shaun King to discuss how dialogue and awareness are an indispensable for extending crucial conversations about social justice and equality. Info & RSVP: northeastern.edu/crossing or 617-373-2555
NEWS TO US
FEATURE
DEPT. OF COMMERCE
ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT
21
SAVAGE LOVE
COMEDY EVENTS
LESBORAMA
BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET I’m a lesbian, and my partner recently reconnected with a childhood friend. At first I felt sorry for him, as he was having a health crisis. But he’s better now, and his pushy behavior really gets to me. He texts her at all hours—and when he can’t get in touch with her, he bugs me. When I refused to go on a trip with him and his husband, he guilt-tripped me for weeks. He constantly wants us to come to his house, but they’re chain-smokers. I’m going to Los Angeles to interview a celebrity for a project, and now he’s trying to insert himself into this trip because he wants go starfucking! He also wants to officiate at our upcoming wedding! My partner won’t stand up for me when I say no to this guy. How can I get my partner to listen to me or get her jackass friend to leave me be? Can’t Think Of A Clever Acronym Burn it down, CTOACA. Call or e-mail your partner’s old friend and tell him you think he’s a pushy, unpleasant, smelly asshole and that you don’t want to hang out with him—not at his place, not on a trip, and not at your wedding, which he not only won’t be officiating but, if you had your druthers, he wouldn’t be attending. That should do it. You can’t tell your soon-to-be wife who she can’t have as a friend— that’s controlling behavior—but she can’t force you to spend time with someone you loathe. I’m a 40-year-old lesbian in Alabama, and I work with a woman I find impossible to resist. The catch is she’s 66, straight, and has two children. I love her deeply, she loves me, but we don’t have sex. She has given me a pass to sleep with whoever I like, but I’m one of those weirdos who requires an emotional connection to sleep with someone. The odd thing is that she vacillates between heavily making out with me every time we are alone together and saying, “No, I can’t, I’m straight!” Why does she do everything but sex if she’s straight? Feeling Really Unsure Since This Remarkably Amazing Temptress Entered Domain That nice straight lady from work is making out with you because she likes it (the thirst is real), FRUSTRATED, or she’s making out with you because she wants you in her life and believes—perhaps mistakenly—that this is the only way to hold your interest/fuel your obsession (the thirst is faked). If she likes it, then she’s a lesbian or bisexual but so invested in her heterosexual identity that she can’t “go there.” (Alabama, you said? Maybe she doesn’t feel safe being out in your community.) If she’s making out with you only because she’s lonely and values your friendship and/or enjoys the ego boost of being your obsession, then you don’t want to keep making out with her—for her sake (no one feels good after making out with someone they’d rather not be making out with) and for your own sake (those make-out sessions give you false hope and prevent you from directing your romantic and erotic energies elsewhere).
On the Lovecast, the art of the consensual dick pic: savagelovecast.com
THU 02.01 - SAT 02.03
YANNIS PAPPA @ LAUGH BOSTON
Yannis’ Half Hour Comedy Central Special aired in 2014 & is available on Amazon, iTunes, ComedyCentral.com & whenever Comedy Central re-runs it. Yannis was also the co-host of MSG’s sports fan show, The Bracket & the host of ABC’s Fusion Live on the Fusion Network. He has also been featured on AXS TV’s Gotham Comedy Live, TRUTV’s How To Be a Grown Up, VH1’s “Best Week Ever”, Good Morning America on ABC.
425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | 8 & 10PM | $20-$25 THU 02.01
RIOT SHUFFLE: CHALLENGES @ THE RIOT THEATER
Featuring: Kathleen DeMarle, Zachary Fisher, Suzi Berlin, James Huessy, Brian Higginbottom, Alan Richardson, & Gary Petersen. Hosted by Angela Sawyer
146A SOUTH ST., JP | 9PM | $5 FRI 02.02 - SAT 02.03
ELIOT CHANG @ NICK’S COMEDY STOP
Eliot Chang has been seen on 2 of his own Comedy Central Half Hour specials, E!’s “Chelsea Lately,” & Showtime. His viral videos have received millions of views at http://www. YouTube.com/EliotChangOfficial.
100 WARRENTON ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $20 SAT 02.03
BERT KREISCHER @ THE WILBUR
Bert Kreischer is a standup comic who performs to sellout crowds across the country. He is the host of the Travel Channel’s Trip Flip & Bert the Conqueror, & previously hosted Hurt Bert. He is a regular guest on The Joe Rogan Experience & The Rachael Ray Show & has appeared on Late Night With David Letterman & Jimmy Kimmel Live. His one-hour special Comfortably Dumb appeared on Comedy Central & his book Life of the Party, Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child shares the hilarious & outrageous stories that define his comedy & exemplify what has made him one of the best storytellers of his generation.
246 TREMONT ST., BOSTON | 7 & 9:45PM | $29.50 SAT 02.03
NYC COMEDY INVADES BOSTON @ 730 TAVERN
Featuring: Jordan Raybould, Will Poznan, Bret Raybould, & more.
730 MASS AVE., CAMBRIDGE | 9PM | $10-$15 MON 02.05
SMOKE & SHADOWS @ THE ROCKWELL
Featuring: Burlesque from Striker Posie out of NYC, Dancer Jolie LaVie, Rock & Roll from Madeleine Fontaine, & Comedian Nonye Brown-West. Hosted by Elsa Riot
255 ELM ST., SOMERVILLE | 7:30PM | $15 MON 02.05
COMEDY NIGHT IN THE SUPPER CLUB @ CAPO Hosted by Will Noonan
443 WEST BROADWAY, BOSTON | 7PM | FREE TUE 02.06
COMEDY IN THE ELLIS ROOM @ MAGNOLIA SMOKEHOUSE
Featuring: Sean Sullivan, Katie McCarthy, Jere Pilapil, Laura Severse, Janet McNamara, Liam McGurk, & Pamela Ross. Hosted by Ellen Sugarman, Brett Johnson, & Rick Jenkins
6 HARVARD SQ., BROOKLINE | 8PM | FREE WED 02.07
COMEDY NIGHT @ SEAPOINT IN SOUTHIE
savagelovecast.com
22
02.01.18 - 02.08.18 |
DIGBOSTON.COM
Featuring: Mike Roy Whitman & more. Hosted by Chris Kinback
367 E. 8TH ST., SOUTHIE | 8PM | FREE
Lineup & shows to change without notice. For more shows & info visit BostonComedyShows.com
WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM
HEADLINING THIS WEEK!
Yannis Pappas
Comedy Central, The Tonight Show Thursday - Saturday
COMING SOON Jared Freid’s The JTrain Podcast Live!
Special Engagement: Weds, Feb 7 THE WAY WE WEREN’T BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM
Jenny Zigrino
Bad Santa 2, Comedy Central Feb 8-10
Jon Stetson
America’s Master Mentalist Special Engagement: Sat, Feb 10 OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET
The Anti-Valentine’s Day Show
Featuring: Will Noonan, Dan Boulger, Tricia Auld + more Weds, Feb 14
617.72.LAUGH | laughboston.com 425 Summer Street at the Westin Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District NEWS TO US
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