DigBoston 8.9.18

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EDITORIAL

EDITOR IN CHIEF Chris Faraone EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Pramas MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Dewar MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan THEATER EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COMEDY EDITOR Dennis Maler STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Patrick Cochran, Mike Crawford, Britni de la Cretaz, Kori Feener, Eoin Higgins, Zack Huffman, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus Johnson-Smith, C. Shardae Jobson, Heather Kapplow, Derek Kouyoumjian, Dan McCarthy, Rev. Irene Monroe, Peter Roberge, Maya Shaffer, Citizen Strain, M.J. Tidwell, Miriam Wasser, Dave Wedge, Baynard Woods INTERNS Thomas Ashton (Hampshire College), Endre Joseph (UMass Boston), Abigail Martin-Ryan (Lesley University)

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ROYALE

DEAR READER

279 Tremont St. Boston, MA royaleboston.com/concerts W/ GREG HOLDEN

SOUTHBOUND I am not claiming to be personally responsible for making Somerville cool. Nor am I saying that, if not for the Weekly Dig (what we called our print publication from roughly 1999 through 2007), migrating hipster masses would have skipped over the city altogether and moved straight to Medford and Watertown.

But while Somerville’s apartment boom and destiny was manifest, I do believe that the Dig (as well as my former newspaper, the Boston Phoenix) certainly helped illuminate its cultural edge, in many cases just by shining light on brilliant minds and artists who had lived and toiled there since long before we arrived on the scene. We weren’t trail blazers by any means, but as more and more Dig writers moved (read: were displaced from Boston and Cambridge) there through the aughts, they used their places and voices to cover countless crevices where creativity was cranking, from up-and-coming cocktail spots to obscure basement bashes. Outlets like the Boston Globe and the Improper Bostonian frequently discovered places after we did, and in time, as trends go, so did their readers, eventually transforming a once-affordable hipster outpost into another cosmopolitan playground.

Not all of us moved to Somerville, though. While I have covered that city and several others north of Boston as a journalist, when my rent in the Hub became unmanageable, I slid in the opposite direction on the Red Line, southbound toward Greater Quincy.

This wasn’t something that I ever planned on. I always knew that Quincy was nearby, but it was clear off my writing, drinking, showgoing radar. Until it wasn’t. I can recall the first time I went looking for apartments in North Quincy, only to discover Chinese food joints as authentic (and in some cases owned by the same people as) and amazing as my longtime faves in Chinatown. After moving in, I became a regular visitor and eater of fried fish at underrated Wollaston Beach, while over the past couple of years I’ve enjoyed the arrival of spots like Zed and the Townshend, not to mention standbys like the Fours and Fat Cat. It’s not just food, booze, beer, and pot dispensaries. Just like Somerville in years past, we are seeing lots more artists and their ilk on the Red Line toward Braintree. Earlier this summer, Quincy held its first-ever Pride parade, all while book clubs and progressive meetups thrive throughout the South Shore. Which all brings me to my point—that we are quadrupling down on our presence in Quincy.

This isn’t an entirely new effort, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise. We have dipped south of Dot on numerous occasions; most recently, I interviewed disability rights advocates about the terrible state of MBTA access, among other troubles, in the Quincy area.

What is going to change, though, is that we will make a more deliberate and regular effort to soak it all in south of Boston. And we’ll also soon be placing newspaper boxes by street corners and train stations around Quincy, plus dropping off issues at cafes and restaurants.

If you have ideas for anything from coverage to distro, please hit us up on social media or email our team at editorial@digboston.com.

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

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PROTESTERS GATHER THE MORNING OF TRUMP’S INAUGURATION IN LOGAN CIRCLE, WASHINGTON, DC. CREDIT: MOBILUS IN MOBILI / PUBLIC DOMAIN

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE NEWS TO US

An indicted journalist reflects on conspiracy in today’s America

BY AARON CANTÚ Ed. note: When Aaron Cantú arrived at his new job at Santa Fe Reporter last year, he came with the baggage of a recent arrest. Two months earlier, he spent a night in jail with hundreds of others detained during protests on Inauguration Day in Washington, DC. His actions consisted of walking, wearing black and being a witness to history as a freelance journalist. Yet, a few months later, and despite having no clear evidence of such crimes, federal prosecutors slammed him with eight felony charges including conspiracy to riot and property damage. After nearly 18 months, however, the feds dropped the charges. Cantú is finally able to publicly reflect on the ordeal, and what follows is an essay that puts a real conspiracy into context.

For over a year, federal prosecutors and agents have perused my digital communications, tried to hack my cell phone and possibly collected my social media records.

The chill of seeing the state in possession of your private political discussions is difficult to convey. I’m not being paranoid; this really happened. The feds invaded my life in pursuit of their own conspiracy theory about a raucous protest in Washington, DC, that resulted in eight felony charges against hundreds, myself included.

The overwhelming sense of being watched has abated some since the charges were dropped, but I’m sure people within the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia—the local arm of the Trump Administration’s Justice Department—will read every word of this essay, with an eye for anything they can use to refile criminal charges against me or the 186 people still living under a five-year statute of limitations.

A few weeks after my arrest in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, 2017 (J20), I accepted some painful advice: Don’t criticize the Trump administration publicly. At that point, I was hoping for my charges to get dropped before my eventual indictment in May. The inability to speak freely on social media and in the publications I wrote for drained my confidence; I still reflexively self-censor, often deleting 4

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tweets for no real reason. Even though my charges have gone away, writing this is hard. This pounding in my chest, this trembling hand and sour stomach and sweaty tunnel vision are what it feels like to have your freedom of speech curtailed by the state.

I went to DC with several other journalists to report on Trump’s ascent, following a year of bubbling anti-fascism against his campaign. I currently enjoy the haven of a newspaper willing to hire lawyers who bite back, but last January I was a freelancer using vacation days from my fulltime job to go witness history.

This was a completely uncharted assignment: How violent could this get?

Would American jackboots try to stomp me in the streets?

In the end, it didn’t matter whether I presented myself as a journalist on J20 or that I only carried a sandwich and a notebook; white supremacists wound up messing with me anyway for over a year afterward by working with authorities to prosecute and harass me. I pitched a dispatch soon after getting released from jail, but pulled it for legal concerns.

After 18 months, the actual memories of the half-hour march leading up to my arrest have mixed with dreams and nightmares of the day, as well as descriptions in multiple indictments, trial transcripts and media reports.

My mind’s eye remembers a dark funhouse of corporate

buildings and unusually waifish, Jack Skellington-esque riot cops hemming me into a larger group. Everything looks gray and morose; it may have rained a bit. Police relentlessly deployed sting-ball grenades and pepper spray; the final tally was at least 70 grenades thrown at people blocks away from where Donald John Trump was sworn in as the 45th US president.

Creaks and shatters created by objects smashing glass, including the insured windows of a Bank of America branch and a Starbucks, are more memorable than any destruction my eyes may have seen.

Very, very loud police sirens, punctuated by grenade explosions and screaming, overwhelm everything else. “The inappropriate and extensive use of less lethal munitions suggests the need for increased supervision of officers during mass demonstrations,” said a recent report from the staid Police Foundation, which evaluated the Metropolitan Police Department’s conduct at Inauguration Day protests.

Impossible to forget are the feelings throughout the march: The whole-body nerve rush when I first saw a huge mass of marching people extending at least a whole city block; the panic run as the sting-ball grenades burst near my feet; the euphoria of an ungovernable moment, however frightening and unpredictable, that disrupted

the lawful monotony binding our violently unequal social system together; and the shock when I checked my phone from inside the mass arrest and saw that protests in DC had overtaken Trump’s inaugural speech as the top headline on CNN.com. If protesters weren’t able to stop the actual inauguration, they still marred it in history.

When the first six of over 200 defendants went to trial last November, prosecutors used expressions of apparent excitement, wonder or awe during the march as evidence of a conspiracy to riot.

“I’m fucking blissed out,” photojournalist and acquitted defendant Alexei Wood announced in a livestream from the march that day. The feds later tried to use it against him in court. In an identical indictment filed against all defendants, prosecutors also used randomly shouted phrases like “Fuck it up,” “Fuck capitalism,” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” to transform an adrenal impulse into a criminal agreement among riotous co-conspirators.

The thought that I might be seriously screwed first occurred to me inside the police wagon transporting us to be processed. I sat cramped and bound along with nine other people in one of half a mile’s worth of law enforcement vehicles flashing various hues of light, as if carrying high-priority enemies of the state. I knew then we weren’t going to get off with a simple citation, and that I was probably going to have to tell my mom.

I didn’t expect, however, that I would be charged with eight felonies for the act of attending and reporting on a confrontational protest, or that I would be facing a combined 80 years in prison for these charges.

Months later I not only considered my own future, but the far-reaching political implications of these cases: Why did the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia find it appropriate to hang virtual life sentences over the heads of 214 people after an indiscriminate mass arrest? How could they have so shamelessly gleaned evidence from far-right groups like Project Veritas, a discredited organization known for making deceptive gotcha videos, as well as the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, and still felt they had a legitimate case? Where was the motivation—the conspiracy—to pursue these cases coming from?

Mass arrests at protests have happened plenty of times in cities across the country, including DC in 2002 when hundreds at a World Bank protest were arrested and later lavished with civil settlement money. What appeared new in the J20 case was the attempt to color protesters’ actions as part of a pre-planned conspiracy between strangers to cause mayhem.

By wrapping up distinct actions like allegedly breaking windows, chanting and lighting fireworks at a protest into a single conspiracy, they became one threatening, anti-social act against society, apparently menacing enough to warrant decades in prison. The motive to bust a conspiracy also explains the Justice Department’s initial demand last summer to review 1.3 million IP addresses of people who visited DisruptJ20.org, a website used to organize loosely affiliated masses of protests that took place at the inauguration. Despite an outcry from the media and civil rights groups, the court eventually granted much of the prosecutors’ request, yet they could find no actual conspiracy.

This data-vacuuming extended to the cellphones that all arrestees were

carrying that day. The Metropolitan Police Department used technology from an Israeli security firm called Cellebrite to extract information from all confiscated phones that weren’t sufficiently encrypted. After one anonymous defendant’s phone was raided, the defendant received an 8,000-page dossier containing years of personal data, including “intimate emails to and from my friends and lovers through more than a decade, [late] night political debates over chat apps that helped shape my values and convictions,” and more. The horror of a hostile state downloading a record of your developing identity reaching back to early teen years is a possibility unique to millennials and later generations that grew up on the internet.

To my knowledge, the feds were never able to crack into my phone thanks to strong encryption— though they made clear that they were specifically interested in me, declaring in one motion from last October that they were undertaking SMOKE FROM A BURNING LIMOUSINE AS SEEN HOURS AFTER MASS “additional efforts” to get my data.

ARRESTS ON INAUGURATION DAY. CREDIT: AARON CANTÚ But I was sufficiently terrified by other fishing expeditions, including they went as far as lying in open court to preserve it. subpoenas issued to Apple, Facebook and possibly Twitter This isn’t the first time that authorities in DC have for communications between and among co-defendants. hunted for clues of a conspiracy post-riot. After the city’s I never received a notice from any of these companies Black residents rose up following the murder of Dr. Martin that my accounts had been subpoenaed—though Luther King Jr. in April 1968, resulting in $27 million apparently, they do not have to notify you or can be ($193.4 million today) in damages, the feds wanted to gagged from doing so—but others did, and I still treat my know who, if anybody, had orchestrated the chaos, and online presence as if it’s bugged. whether similar uprisings in over 100 cities had been All this reaching by the prosecutor’s office part of a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the white turned out to be for naught. Although Assistant American system.

US Attorney Rizwan Qureshi mumbled to an Stokely Carmichael, then the leader of the Student unbelieving DC jury at the second and only Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, emerged as a other trial of defendants that there had been primary suspect. Shortly after King’s murder, Carmichael a conspiracy to “destroy your city,” this was told a radio host from Havana, Cuba, that it was “crystal never proven. That trial in May ended clear [that] the United States of America must fall in in acquittals and mistrials, after the order for humanity to live, and we are going to give our first resulted in total acquittals lives for that cause.” But no conspiracy indictment was last December. The pair of failures ever filed against Carmichael, or anybody else. The fact set the stage for the eventual that conspiracy charges were filed for so many in the J20 collapse of the case in its entirety, case after a mere $100,000 in damage illustrates how letting the few dozen remaining much prosecutorial aggression has advanced the last defendants go free. half-century.

The second trial took place Some in radical circles have called attention to the at the DC Superior Court where, white privilege of the J20 defendants, arguing that by in another room, a chief judge virtue of their whiteness (or, for the minority of nonwhite determined that Assistant US defendants, their proximity to that pool of privilege), Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff defendants had access to platforms, sympathy, support had intentionally misled the networks and resources that most low-income and court about the existence of nonwhite defendants lack, and that these advantages nearly 70 videos recorded by Project were hugely responsible for our success. I mostly agree Veritas operatives at protest planning with this analysis. meetings ahead of the inauguration.

It is also true that the entire legal premise The operatives handed over the underpinning the multiple felony charges filed against surreptitiously recorded videos each of us was steeped in the United States’ centuriesto a DC police detective, Greggory long defense of white supremacy. The anti-rioting Pemberton, who would spend an statute under which we were charged, which calls for a entire year investigating the J20 maximum sentence of 10 years if convicted for rioting case. Defense counsel later discovered where serious injury or at least $5,000 in property personal tweets sent out by Pemberton damage occurs, was passed in 1967 by Congress in the indicating his sympathies with the racist wake of Black urban uprisings in that decade. Prosecutors pro-Trump digital underbelly, and used used the new statute against Black DC residents the them to undermine his testimony at trial. following year.

According to a recent filing from former But the connection goes deeper. defendants, the withheld videos “cut against The unifying legal theory of our prosecution was the theory that the … meeting was an that we engaged in a conspiracy, and were therefore exclusive, secretive meeting to plan unlawful each equally liable for all property destruction or injury conduct.” The ’60s-era stereotype of violent that occurred that day. This theory of liability stems leftists whispering clandestine plans was part of the narrative prosecutors tried to create, and ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE continued on pg. 6 NEWS TO US

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ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE continued from pg. 5

PROTESTERS GATHER THE MORNING OF TRUMP’S INAUGURATION IN LOGAN CIRCLE, WASHINGTON, DC. CREDIT: MOBILUS IN MOBILI / PUBLIC DOMAIN from a mid-20th century Supreme Court decision in a moonshining and tax evasion case, but conspiracy law’s modern origins extend to the founding of this country and beyond as a legal weapon of colonialism and counterinsurgency, primarily against Black revolt in the founding of the American state.

At the end of the 1600s, as the population of enslaved Africans in America grew, “the more encompassing category of ‘whiteness’ ascended,” writes Gerald Horne in Counter-Revolution of 1776, where Horne argues that the Anglo-Saxon settlers’ war for independence entrenched slavery. By 1680, one colonial legislature had drafted a bill “to prevent Negroes’ insurrection,” and this was followed by a torrent of similar anti-conspiracy legislation in the colonies over the next several decades in response to planned and executed rebellions by African people and their sometimes-allies: European servants and Native Americans resisting invasion.

One of the most famous pre-1776 conspiracies was the New York Conspiracy of 1741, in which prosecutors accused Black enslaved people and poor whites of conspiring to burn the city and overthrow the colonial governor. The colony’s narrative, as established by a fire-breathing judge named Daniel Horsmanden, was that a multiracial group held secret meetings at a white-owned tavern for months before setting fire to the governor’s home, a church, and horse stables in wealthy white neighborhoods. Four white and 30 Black people were sentenced to death for their alleged role in the plot, and an additional 70 enslaved Africans were exiled from the colony.

At the trial, which took on the sort of puritanical zeal legible in the J20 case, the prosecution coerced witnesses into affirming the judge’s racist belief that the “conspiracy was of deeper design” and “more dangerous [a] Contrivance than the Salves [sic] themselves were capable of.” The most serious transgression, in the law’s eyes, was the conspiracy of comradeship between whites and Blacks against colonial rule. After all, it had only been a few decades since “whites had achieved a sense of race solidarity at the expense of blacks” in some of the colonies around 1700, according to contemporary historian TH Breen.

Elite settlers threatened by the growing population of Africans saw the creation of pan-European solidarity 6

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(ie, “whiteness”) in the colonies as necessary to gird against constant rebellions. Key to the eventual supremacy of the concept of whiteness, Horne writes, was that it not be interrogated too hard, lest “the loose threads of class hierarchy that this racial category otherwise obscured” unravel and ruin the entire colonial project.

This gets to the heart of the matter: In order for the colonies to overcome endless conspiracies to revolt by people they kidnapped, enslaved, exploited and colonized, its ruling elite had to create their own conspiracy—the institutionalization of “whiteness”—in defense of its power.

The Bill of Rights would later implicitly enshrine the three points of power in the new nation, including whiteness, property ownership (wealth) and cis-hetero maleness, consolidating ruling class power through the law. Writing for the Harvard Law Review nearly a century ago, Francis B Sayre wrote that American courts often use conspiracy law as a cudgel, “especially during times of reaction, to punish, as criminal, associations for which the time being are unpopular or stir up prejudices of the social class in which the judges have for the most part been bred.”

It’s more than just prejudice: Today the US elite reaffirms its power through law, war, trade and politics daily, in a coordinated effort to preserve the status quo in all its structural inequality. This extreme and concentrated power is its own kind of conspiracy, one which allows the state to persecute others it considers illegal. There isn’t enough room here to chronicle the ways conspiracy law has been used since the 17th century to criminalize associations of nonwhite people, laborers, immigrants, protesters, revolutionaries and others, nor consider nuanced exceptions, such as mafia prosecutions that rope police and politicians into criminal rackets.

But fundamentally, the difference between a legitimate and illegitimate

conspiracy comes down to power.

It’s ironic that some top Trump cronies involved in the J20 conspiracy prosecution are themselves caught up in their own high-profile conspiracy cases, though not necessarily as defendants.

For example, Roger Stone, the long-ago Nixon ratfucker and more recently a top campaign adviser to his friend Trump, sent far-right spies to inauguration protesters’ planning meetings as far back as December 2016. Stone was referenced in a July federal indictment against a dozen Russian intelligence military officials as a “senior member of [Trump’s] campaign” in direct contact with Russian hackers targeting the 2016 presidential election.

Another is Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the top official overseeing the J20 conspiracy prosecution. In March 2016, Sessions was beckoned in an email sent to Trump campaign advisor Rick Dearborn from Republican activist Paul Erikson, who wanted to arrange a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin. A criminal complaint unsealed in July claims Erickson was manipulated by a Russian state operative named Maria Butina to gain access to top Republicans. In another twist, the J20 defendants may have been saved by prosecutors out of the US Attorney’s Office in DC turning their attention to Butina’s conspiracy prosecution.

To this day, neither Sessions nor any prosecutor from the US Attorney’s Office in DC have spoken publicly about J20. While prosecutors don’t often comment publicly on their cases, especially when they lose, this could have been the perfect chance for this Justice Department to trumpet its law-and-order bonafides, which makes its silence striking. Instead, prosecutors showed their asses in court, just as the authoritarianleaning Trump presidency—which includes the Russia meddling cases, the overt embrace of white supremacy, the attacks on the press, the ultranationalism and everything else—is showing the country’s ass to the world right now.

The power structures animating US life are themselves the result of long-running conspiracies, and to update Horne’s analysis, the American project is being intensely interrogated in this moment. History shows that when a state’s ability to present itself as a stable force for social order wanes, illegal conspiracies begin to sprout. That’s not what happened at the J20 protests, but it would be ahistorical to think it wouldn’t happen somewhere else—or that a journalist wouldn’t be there to cover it.

Thank you to my legal team, the tireless J20 defendant support network, my family, my partner and the Santa Fe Reporter for their support.

GOING BACKWARDS STATE WIRE

Mass to sue EPA to maintain fuel-efficiency standard

BY ANDREA SEARS

MEDFORD - State, city, and business leaders say the EPA’s plan to freeze the fuel-efficiency standard is bad for public health, the environment, and consumers.

After months of wrangling, on Thursday the EPA released its plan to freeze the fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks for six years. It was set to increase to an average of 54 mpg by 2025 but will remain at about 35, the standard set for 2020.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey says the Bay State will be joining 19 other states in suing the Trump Administration to stop the rollback.

“We’ve seen a lot of stupid, harmful decisions by Trump administration and the EPA, but this has to go down in the books as one of the dumbest ever when you think about the harm to the air quality, to the health of our children and communities, the harm of consumers at the pump,” says Healey.

The administration claims freezing the fuel standard will cut more than $2,000 off the price of new cars and result in fewer highway deaths, but opponents contest those findings.

Medford Mayor Stephanie Burke believes the rollback could jeopardize the environment and the health of Bay State residents. She notes that from expanding public transportation and renewable energy to joining the Paris Climate Accord, Massachusetts has put a lot of time and effort into cleaning up the air.

“This would be going backwards,” says Burke. “It’s going the opposite direction and we don’t think that the federal government should be putting us in a worse condition than we are now.”

Burke says after 18 months of attacks on environmental regulations, it’s time for the EPA to live up to its name by really protecting the environment.

“They should look at the big picture and see how it impacts citizens, health, asthma, all of the conditions that we’re experiencing, and to stop and let the states do what they need to do because we know what’s happening on the ground level and they certainly do not,” says Burke.

The EPA plan also would eliminate California’s right to set higher mileage requirements than the EPA. Massachusetts and about a dozen other states now use the higher California standard.

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GREENFIELD BLUES TOWNIE

Homelessness is not just a big-city problem in Mass

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS We don’t get much news about Western Mass in Boston.

And since the population is relatively small in the largely rural western counties of the Commonwealth, it can be easy to miss significant stories. Because the scale of noteworthy happenings is naturally smaller there. Because our diminished metro news outlets have trouble covering the entire state. And because, let’s be honest, Bostonians don’t usually care about what happens west of, like, Brookline.

So at first glance, word of a homeless encampment out in Greenfield isn’t something that would get much attention hereabouts at the best of times. But for a city with a population that fell by more than 500 people to 17,456 between the 2000 and 2010 censuses—with a median household income of $33,110, and 14 percent of residents below the poverty line—it’s an important enough development to warrant a series of articles in the local press. And I think it deserves coverage here in the Hub as well.

Especially when the encampment is on the Greenfield Common, opposite the Greenfield City Hall (better known as the Town Hall prior to a recent change in nomenclature). Something unusual is definitely afoot.

It seems two local homeless people began camping on the common a couple of months ago. A number that quickly grew to 20 regular residents in as many as a dozen tents. According to the Greenfield Recorder, their “de facto spokeswoman” Madelynn Malloy “and others have said previously they are camping on the common because there is no other place that is safe for homeless residents to go and because current city law allows them to stay there day or night. There are no requirements for licenses or permits to be there and the homeless residents’ actions are not considered loitering, but public assembly. The city has an ordinance prohibiting loitering, but it only applies to sidewalks.”

A city count of last January pegged the homeless population at 39, but area charities have said the actual number is significantly higher—as they noted during the brutal cold snap at the end of 2017 when their shelters were so overwhelmed that the Salvation Army put up $1,600 to house people at Days Inn. Since that time, the Greenfield Human Rights Commission and homeless advocates have been pushing for the city to do more.

Meanwhile, the encampment has put a very human and public face on the crisis, and has sparked meetings and debates in local government about how to find housing for the homeless.

Unfortunately, there seems to be at least as much concern from Mayor William Martin to get the city council to pass rules effectively banning camping on Greenfield Common as there is to find ways to house local homeless people. The latter being the obvious policy priority, if for no other reason than to relieve overwhelmed private social service agencies.

Most recently, a breakthrough of sorts—also reported in the Greenfield Recorder—happened when the city council voted to put a port-a-potty closer to the common than the one local churches previously made available.

“According to the Department of Public Works, the cost of a temporary restroom is $150 a month and includes emptying it. The mayor’s office said the first two months of the portable toilet would be paid for by the Interfaith Council and an unnamed local business. There is no plan currently in place for funding after the two months.” The council also voted, apparently contrary to the mayor’s wishes, to decrease “regulations on churches to set up temporary shelters” and open “the former Wedgewood Gardens property on Kimball Drive as a possible site for an encampment.” The mayor then vowed to “attempt 8

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because they got injured in their precarious pseudo-jobs to find temporary housing solutions through a ‘rapid and got put on addictive pain killers by well-meaning re-housing team’” made up of “city officials and social doctors being suckered by criminal conspiracies like service and humanitarian agencies.” oxycontin-maker Purdue Pharma of nearby Stamford, Baby steps perhaps. But it would not do to underplay Connecticut. Or maybe because they couldn’t take the difficult situation Greenfield government finds itself the humiliation of no longer being able to provide in. It’s going to take officials time to find even a stopgap for themselves and their families, and reached for the solution. Large cities like Boston aren’t doing a great job strongest, most reliable, and readily available chemical of dealing with a growing homeless crisis either; so it’s solace. And soon enough, more and more of these folks obviously more difficult for smaller municipalities with end up on the streets. fewer resources to house and provide services for even a Without public jobs programs, new public housing, few dozen people. and cradle-to-grave public healthcare, local, state, and Particularly when, as was pointed out in a DigBoston federal governments will not be able to fix these related op-ed by Lawrence social services executive Joe D’Amore crises. Even if they wanted to. Which they don’t in this in January, many communities in Massachusetts ban era of gangster capitalism. Nor will “private” charities. people from sleeping in public spaces or even “loitering” Many of which already rely on shrinking pools of there. Which merely shifts the burden of dealing with government money to do what little they can do to stem homelessness to more densely populated and tolerant the tide of rising poverty. locales with more social services like Lawrence. Or So it’s critical that people in big cities like Boston— Greenfield. especially press and policy makers—pay careful Hopefully people will retain the right to sleep on the attention to small municipalities like Greenfield. They Greenfield Common overnight when needed, and the are canaries in the coal mine of a political economic city government will cobble together some longer-term system that can only be called failing, the less it is able to housing options for its homeless population before provide for the growing number of people on the bottom winter sets in. of our societal pyramid.

Yet however things turns out in the largest burg in As such, we ignore the Greenfields of our nation Franklin County, the situation is interesting not because at our peril. We must act now to stop the rest of our it is unique… but because it is sadly commonplace. communities, large and small, from continuing their Across Massachusetts and all over America the story is rolling collapse. A task we can best begin by rebuilding the same. Despite claims of a “strong economy” from government at all levels to focus on the human needs Republicans and many Democrats, homelessness is ever of all of its denizens. And stop privileging the schemes more persistent and ever more desperate. of the rich and powerful few over the livelihoods of the To see an actual strong economy in a place like struggling multitude.

Greenfield, one has to look back to the 1950s—when the city was home to major metal-working concerns, the largest being Greenfield Tap & Die. But that plant Townie is syndicated by the Boston Institute for was sold off to a larger company in 1958, and most of Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network its jobs disappeared over decades. The city’s last major director, and executive editor and associate publisher manufacturing business, Lunt Silversmiths, went under of DigBoston. His Apparent Horizon column is winner in 2009 during the Great Recession. of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2018 Best According to the Republican, Lunt had 800 employees Political Column award. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. in 2001. And only “12 to 15” by the end. It’s difficult for even larger cities to recover from that kind of blow to their job base, let alone a small city like Greenfield.

It will thus shock no one that the rise of the opiate crisis tracks closely to this decline in the city’s fortunes. And it’s therefore ironic in the extreme that the former Lunt plant is now home to two drug treatment facilities, Franklin Recovery Center and Northern Hope.

The opiate crisis relates directly to the homeless crisis. And both relate to the ongoing jobs crisis. Increasingly unregulated capitalism, as I often write, is clearly incapable of providing good jobs for our population. As the job base collapses, people in Greenfield, Boston, and around the nation are stuck with lousy parttime, temp, contract, independent contractor, and day labor gigs. Or with no jobs at all.

As these downwardly mobile people see their lives collapsing, GREENFIELD CITY HALL. PHOTO BY TODDC4176 AT EN.WIKIPEDIA [CC BY-SA 3.0] they turn to opiates. Maybe FROM WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

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CRIPPLED EPISTEMOLOGY FEATURE

Boston researchers have spent years helping government agencies plan and simulate operations to troll potential terrorists. Despite controversial practices and lackluster results, the covert operations continue.

BY JONATHAN RILEY Since the 2016 election, social media meddling and influence peddling have become regular subjects of media coverage, especially amidst the ongoing engrossing probes into President Trump’s foreign affairs.

Scoops typically break internationally and have widespread impact. So it may surprise Bostonians that many key developments in America’s online psychological warfare toolkit—internet-era equivalents of “black ops” campaigns waged to disorient enemy troops via deceptive propaganda and other unconventional tactics during World War II—have been grown in their backyard, even over the past decade.

Many of these programs are dreamed up by academics, on college campuses. If you look in local headlines, though, there is one well-known example in which the sort of covert concepts in question manifested in real life, and with fatal consequences. *** Talking on his cell phone from the parking lot of a CVS in Roslindale in June 2015, Usaamah Rahim, a 26-year-old Boston resident, had just informed his brother that he wouldn’t ever see him again.

Moments after, two men approached and ordered him to put his hands in the air.

“Do I know you?”

According to authorities, before cops on the scene could respond to the agitated Rahim’s question, their suspect unsheathed a foot-long knife out of Rambo’s arsenal that he had recently purchased on Amazon, prompting two officers to draw guns and tell Rahim to drop his weapon.

“You drop yours!”

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Rahim replied before police fired three shots, killing him.

Prior to this confrontation, authorities say, Rahim had plotted to murder police officers in a suicide-by-cop scenario. They would know, since they were watching him. Rahim’s shooters, an FBI agent and a BPD officer in plainclothes, were members of the department’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF. Though he may not have recognized them, Rahim may have had a rough idea about their interest. Two years earlier, he complained to friends on Facebook about the surveillance: Damn FBI calling my phone! ... He wanted to meet up with me and ‘Talk.’ HA! I said about WHAT? He said ‘Sir, we have some allegations regarding you ...’ I said ‘REALLY?’ What ALLEGATIONS? He said ‘Well sir, that’s what I wanted to meet up with you about. I came by your house a few times, but kept missing you.’

“He was someone we were watching for quite some time,” then-Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans told reporters following Rahim’s death.

By that point, Rahim had been under 24-hour surveillance for several weeks.

On the day he died, Rahim was reportedly hoping to kill “boys in blue” in the name of the Islamic State extremist group (aka ISIS or ISIL).

Just a few years earlier, though, Rahim and his nephew David Wright—who was recently himself convicted of crimes including plotting terrorist killings related to events that spurred his uncle’s death— wouldn’t have raised red flags.

After graduating from Brookline High School in the mid-aughts, Rahim was preaching to friends about

Scandinavian death metal—not jihad. Wright was collecting Pokémon cards. Yet in time Rahim became preoccupied with extremist internet propaganda and began chatting with like-minded Islamists in the online community Paltalk. As Massachusetts Congressman William Keating, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, put it, “There is a ‘terrorism gone viral’ side” to the Rahim case. In another description, an FBI special agent and member of the JTTF cited the Rahim case as an example of how “in today’s day and age, you could be radicalized by sitting at your computer.”

Though not everyone agrees on the definition of “lone wolf,” according to some criminologists, America has seen an increase in such so-called solo terrorist attacks in recent years. As the popular logic goes, the rise of the ISIS “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria poured gas on the trend.

Yet there are other potential factors in play—say, for example, government agents trolling people who appear to sympathize with violent radical Islamist teachings— that are actually part of larger efforts executed in the name of thwarting terrorism.

The idea that US government agents and federal contractors would collude to create a fake internet sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. That they would then use cyberspace simulations to test methods for flooding the actual internet with fake social media accounts sounds even nuttier. But around the same time foreign meddling in US elections became a regular news topic in 2016, two area companies were involved in such a simulation, with the goal of pacifying potential CRIPPLED EPISTEMOLOGY continued on pg. 12

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CRIPPLED EPISTEMOLOGY continued from pg. 10 jihadists as part of an anti-terrorism effort.

Further details of such ventures have since emerged. And while civil liberties advocates question the strategies behind them, these companies continue working closely with the US military.

The local ties have deep roots, too. Follow them back a decade, and you’ll arrive at a paper, by two Harvard professors, that features strikingly similar language to descriptions of the aforementioned 2016 simulation. Its title: “Conspiracy Theories.” *** In April 2016, two Boston-area companies, Charles River Analytics and National Security Innovations, in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, US Army Special Operations Command, and several other organizations, participated in an exercise simulating online “military information support operations” (MISO)—also known as psychological operations or psychological warfare—against ISIS, its supporters, and would-be supporters.

Both companies have scored national security contracts for over a decade and largely brand themselves around their semiclandestine work. Cambridge-based

THE PARKING LOT IN ROSLINDALE WHERE RAHIM WAS KILLED BY TWO LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS.

CRA’s website, for example, lists products with code names like Minotaur, Crisis, and Spider. One of CRA’s products, Persona, is described as an “easy-to-use graphical tool that allows trainers to rapidly develop and execute sophisticated, interactive behaviors for virtual characters.” (Despite the company’s involvement with the 2016 simulation, in response to an inquiry for this article, a CRA executive noted that their Persona tool was not used in creating the personas for that program.)

At NSI, meanwhile, according to his company bio, founder Robert Popp spent four years at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including a stint as deputy director of its early post-9/11 era Information Awareness Office (IAO). The IAO was defunded in 2003, at least in part due to the public’s perception of its controversial logo, which featured an “all-seeing eye” atop a pyramid watching the globe, punctuated by a Latin phrase translating to “knowledge is power.” Before that, the IAO briefly housed a “Total Information Awareness” mass surveillance program, which has since been revealed to have been reincarnated at the National Security Agency (NSA).

According to publicly documented results, the 2016 test run was carried out “on a synchronous, virtual, and distributed platform called ICONSnet, designed and managed by the University of Maryland.” And it complemented work done in the same realm in late 2015, when researchers fashioned fake “personas” to troll a simulated social media environment for (simulated) potential ISIS sympathizers and to talk them down from supporting Islamist extremism.

The participating parties subsequently published an analysis, “Counter Da’esh Influence Operations: Cognitive Space Narrative Simulation Highlights.” Among the findings, a principal software engineer at Charles River Analytics notes: “While this white paper represents a collaboration between academic and operational communities, most academic research in narrative 12

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science is not as easily transferred to MISO operators and made relevant to their needs.”

Authors of the simulation paper found inconclusive evidence that lessons could be carried over to the World Wide Web. Still, government stakeholders apparently saw promise in the trials—and by extension, in a previous study that seemingly influenced the 2016 white paper in language and substance. *** In 2008, Harvard Law School professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argued for online “cognitive infiltration”—a term they coined—of “extremist groups.” Specifically, their targeted interest was “conspiracy theorists,” particularly those with a “crippled epistemology.” (ISIS, which did not exist in its contemporary form or influence a significant number of American terrorists at the time, was not explicitly acknowledged).

“Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even realspace groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action,” Sunstein and Vermeule wrote a decade ago. (A reworked version of the article appeared as a chapter in Sunstein’s 2014 book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. Vermeule is not credited in the book version; otherwise, the most noticeable change is terminological, substituting “foreign chat rooms” for the simpler “chat rooms.”)

While one track of this scheme would have government agents debunking conspiracy theories “openly,” another calls for their participation in the “cognitive infiltration” effort, “anonymously or even with false identities.”

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald calls the Sunstein and Vermeule scheme “spine-chilling,” noting that the government defines such ops as “covert propaganda.” Unlike truthful, or “white” propaganda, “black” propaganda, to use terminology developed during World War II, is secretive and aimed to deceive.

Sunstein categorically dismisses conspiracy theories as too silly to take seriously. At the same time, he seems to believe some information is dangerous enough that it needs to be fought with disinformation—all while acknowledging theories that have turned out to be factual, and embarrassing to the government.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA did, in fact, administer drugs such as LSD under Project MKULTRA in an effort to investigate the possibility of ‘mind control,’” Sunstein notes in his book. “Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the US Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials (though the plan never went into effect).”

Sunstein shrugs off such anomalies. In his original 2008 paper, he writes that his focus is “on false conspiracy theories, not true ones.”

In both versions of his “conspiracy theories” discussion, Sunstein writes that “cognitive infiltration” means something other than “1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions.” Nonetheless, critics in the world of academia that Sunstein inhabits have compared his plan to FBI efforts to undermine protest movements of the 1960s, known as COINTELPRO. Those knocks notwithstanding, Sunstein has found a receptive audience. In 2009, he was appointed head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Barack Obama, a position he held

through 2012. Until recently, Sunstein was also a member of the “Defense Innovation Advisory Board,” an exclusive group boasting several tech bigs with an interest in Pentagon policy. *** In 2011, US Army intelligence was studying social media “swarming,” mostly in the context of the Arab Spring revolutionary movement that eventually toppled governments in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Social media has “provided a means for individuals and small groups to more effectively synchronize actions, even in the absence of an authoritative leader,” one lieutenant colonel wrote in a report. He also suggested “making every soldier a messenger,” all geared toward helping the US military “[dominate] the narrative.”

The same year, the US State Department created a comparable “Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications” (CSCC), and reports of a US Central Command program called Operation Earnest Voice emerged. Focused on targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East, Earnest Voice reportedly aimed to spread pro-American messages using “sock puppet” social media accounts. In the wake of recent revelations about Russian trolls, it’s worth noting that the Guardian, among others, observed back then that such bold activities “could also encourage other governments, private companies and nongovernment organisations to do the same.”

As Greenwald, a constitutional attorney as well as a reporter, along with other critics of sock-puppetry have noted, the sort of covert propaganda Sunstein has proposed could be “illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ‘propaganda’ within the U.S., aimed at American citizens.” Such restrictions were loosened in 2012, though, when Congress repealed a major domestic propaganda ban.

By 2013, before ISIS became known to most Americans, the State Department had launched its first English-language online propaganda campaign targeting the group, crossing a boundary it previously observed “in part to avoid running afoul of rules barring the State Department from attempts to influence American citizens,” according to the Washington Post.

“But officials also cited another concern: venturing into English would expose the center’s efforts to more scrutiny in Washington.”

The CSCC’s efforts have received little scrutiny— especially relative to the media coverage of propaganda spread by other countries. One reason for the lack of attention may be that, since roughly late 2015, US efforts along these lines have been “in disarray,” according to Will McCants, an ISIS expert at the Brookings Institution and former adviser to the State Department.

Furthermore, the CSCC has been replaced by a socalled Global Engagement Center (GEC) where morale is reportedly low, and analysts have been quitting the “anti-propaganda” team. *** Despite the rocky track record of ISIS fishing, both in simulated training and real implementation, these operations have been bolstered by the Trump administration. After signalling that he would reject further congressionally approved funding for the GEC, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson later approved about $60 million. Less than a year after the Pentagon’s late 2016 announcement that it sought a social media mimicry tool to “emulate the look, feel and the key features of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr,” a new internet simulator that also includes “real and fake news” prompts was being “incorporated into training and wargames by military units all the way up to combatant commands,” according to national security news site Defense One. For his part, Sunstein continues pushing theories from his conspiracy paper and still teaches at Harvard.

His ideas, at first co-opted by the Pentagon and State

Department, have trickled down to city law enforcement units. Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, notes that in the past, the BPD’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) has focused on Black Lives Matter protesters, among others, for social media monitoring. In one case, reporting officers labeled a variety of harmless Arabic expressions as “Islamic Extremist Terminology,” a designation that could get somebody marked for surveillance.

“We are not privy to all the details about how the Boston Police Department used that system, or frankly uses other social media monitoring systems today,” Crockford added. In 2017, Crockford said a public backlash spurred a victory for privacy rights when the BPD ditched plans for a sophisticated new $1.4 million suite of surveillance and investigative tools that would have included the capability to manage multiple social media accounts at once for undercover operations.

These would have been similar to state-sponsored troll operations that have targeted potential terrorist recruits, only for use in day-to-day police work.

As state and city cops wage war with petty criminals online, the nation’s top law enforcers are hunting for bigger bears. In one subversive incarnation, according to reports that were made public in 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is allowed, in certain circumstances, to impersonate journalists. Agents also reportedly “swarm” the web in ways “so pervasive that the bureau sometimes finds itself investigating its own people.”

“You would be in a forum, and you’re like, ‘This person’s way out there,’” an unnamed FBI official told the Intercept in 2017, “and we’ve gone and opened up a case, and sometimes that was a local police department, or a friendly foreign service.

There are still instances of that, and deconfliction is still necessary.”

“You should not have to wonder when you’re on Twitter having a political debate whether the person you’re arguing with is a sock puppet for the FBI,” Crockford said.

“Unfortunately we cannot be sure that that’s not happening right now.” *** “In an environment devoid of trust, the population teams [simulation roleplayers] often rejected [US Government] messaging as lacking a credible voice,” an NSI analyst wrote in a document describing the 2016 drill. “A surprising number of population segments were open to USG’s counter-Da’esh messaging in principle, but wanted to engage in a deeper conversation about how to effect change.”

Early in 2017, an Associated Press investigation exposed the activities of a highly dysfunctional Defense Department online psychological warfare program aimed at potential ISIS recruits—remarkably similar to the kind described in the 2016 report that involved Boston-area companies. Like the simulated operation described in that report, the “critical national security program” in the AP’s description, called WebOps, deploys “fictitious identities” on social media.

According to the investigation, debacles included reported drinking on the job, the falsifying of reports to show illusory progress, and cronyism in the awarding of a half-billion-dollar contract. “[WebOps] is so beset with incompetence, cronyism and flawed data,” the AP reported, “that multiple people with direct knowledge of the program say it’s having little impact.”

Alex Marthews, national chairman of Massachusetts-based privacy advocacy group Restore the Fourth, describes WebOps as an “excellent example” of “security grifting,” in which companies move to quickly profit from a new, little-understood, and often largely imagined threat.

“Everybody, except the citizen and taxpayer, wins,” Marthews explained in an email. “The security grifting company gets seven-figure contracts. The government agency gets to say that it’s doing something to thwart [currently fashionable counterterrorism threat], and their budget goes up in the next round.”

In the wake of such revelations and failures, and with headlines about Russian social media shenanigans still trending daily, it seems that some of the minds behind “Counter Da’esh Influence Operations” and similar studies are rethinking their positions. In a document published in August 2017, this one co-edited by the same NSI analyst who wrote the earlier report’s executive summary, psychological warfare planners strike a decidedly different, almost remorseful tone, emphasizing the need to shift from attempting to “control” adversaries toward simply “influencing” them.

“We must establish an evaluation methodology before relying on any new tool too [sic] completely that, in trying to create new strengths, we do not instead create false-insights that leave us exposed to massive new risks,” the document notes.

The publication of said report came more than half a year after the AP expose on WebOps. The August 2017 paper mentions that program by name, but significantly downplays its apparent failures, noting only that US Central Command needs help to “make better plans and preparations.”

As for the blueprint for those plans, NSI did not respond to a request for comment. Sunstein didn’t either, though the Harvard prof recently gave an interview to the New Yorker. For a piece titled “How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory,” he told the interviewer: “I think it’s my job to put ideas out there.

“If that comes with the risk that someone is gonna do something horrible with it, well, that’s life.”

This article was produced in collaboration with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. To see more reporting like this please consider making a contribution at givetobinj.org.

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END TO END HIKES

On the Blue Hills’ Skyline Trail: big-mountain elevation gains inside Route 128 WORDS AND PHOTOS BY MARC HURWITZ @HIDDENBOSTON You may or may not remember that the last hike looked into here focused on the Thompson Island sandbar, a spit of land that allows you to literally walk across Boston Harbor at low tide. And yes, the sandbar may be spectacular, but if you’re one of those people who lives for elevation gains, that hike ain’t it, as standing on a dictionary would give you more of an elevation gain than doing that walk. Only a few miles away, however, is a trail that will give you the type of climbing more typically found 120 miles to the north in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and the Skyline Trail in the Blue Hills Reservation is indeed used by many to train for difficult hikes up in the Whites.

The Skyline is a mostly rugged and remote path that goes from the Shea Rink in West Quincy westward all the way to the Route 128/95/93 intersection in Canton, cutting through the heart of this 7,000-acre park. Depending on the number of spurs you take for viewpoints—and whether you take the North Skyline or the South Skyline branch as you approach Great Blue Hill, you’ll probably get about 9 miles of hiking in and a total of 2,000 feet in total elevation gain, which is about what you’d get by hiking Cannon or Wildcat in New Hampshire (both of which are serious mountains). Now, you may be asking yourself, “Once I get to the western end of the Skyline, what do I do then?” Well, you could go to the nearby Hillside Pub and drink until they kick you out, but that wouldn’t get you 14

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back to the start. A less fun but better plan would be to spot cars at each end if you’re driving, or Uber it back to the Shea Rink when you’re done (or drink at the Hillside Pub until you no longer feel the need to worry about such things). As an Appalachian Mountain Club leader, I personally tend to go with spotting cars here, so while it’s a bit of a pain driving both cars to the Route 138 park-andride and then piling in one car to drive to the rink, it’s well worth doing unless you feel like hiking 18 miles in one day, which, believe it or not, some people who are a bit off their rocker actually do.

Starting at the Shea Rink may seem a little underwhelming since, well, you’re starting from a rink, but as soon as you hit the trailhead of the white-blazed Skyline Trail, the peace and quiet immediately takes over.

Within a few minutes you’ll walk past the pristine St. Moritz pond, which is where people used to ski jump long ago, then you cross Wampatuck Road and start climbing, continuing to follow the white markers/blazes, soon arriving at Rattlesnake Hill. Now, this hill can be rather frightening, not because of the name—it is unlikely, though not impossible, that you will see a rattlesnake here—but because of the steep drop-off heading down the hill. Just before hitting the drop-off, look for a tiny trail on the left that goes up some rocks and you’ll be rewarded with remarkable views of woods and distant hills from the cliffs and ledges, which basically represent the summit of

Rattlesnake. After dropping to the valley below, you’ll start climbing again, and in a few minutes you’ll find yourself at the top of Wampatuck Hill, which has some nice views mainly to the south, then it’s another steep drop to Chickatawbut Road where it’s time to do a second road crossing into another part of the park.

Crossing the road, you’ll immediately hit another steep climb up a hill with open views, then you drop down again before starting a long stretch of mostly climbing and, approximately three miles from the start, you’ll find yourself at the top of Nahanton Hill. The summit itself has no real views, but at Marker #3103, you should notice a minor trail that forks off a bit to the right. Take this trail for about 100 yards where you’ll emerge at a ledgy area with incredible views of Boston, the ocean, and endless woods and hills in the distance. If this timing is right, this is an excellent place for a lunch/snack break before returning to the Skyline Trail and continuing on, dropping steeply to a major intersection then doing a long climb up to the top of Chickatawbut Hill, which is more than 500 feet above sea level (which is a lot for a hill so close to the ocean). Much of this massive hill is fenced off from the public, but some real wilderness views can be had along the trail as you do a series of drops, including views where you really won’t see any signs of civilization at all. It is at this point—perhaps at the top of the second drop—that marks a good turningaround option if you don’t want to do the entire Skyline.

For those continuing on, the second drop is a doozy and will take you to a low valley and soon, Route 28, which cuts through the Blue Hills.

By now, you’re probably pretty tired, but you’ll need a second wind because the hike from Route 28 up to Buck Hill is a bear of a climb, though it is so worth it once you emerge from the woods and realize that you have a nearly 360 degree view, which is pretty much unheard of in the local area. Here you’ll see Boston, the ocean, and the surrounding hills, including a view looking west along the trail that has a real wilderness feel to it. Leaving the windswept summit, it’s yet another steep drop-off then some climbs and further drops to the base of Tucker Hill. Climbing Tucker is, well, no fun, really, as it is almost impossibly steep, but you’re rewarded with some views from the top before dropping down and crossing Hillside Street at the reservation headquarters. It is at this point, by the way, that you need to make a decision.

As hinted at earlier, the Skyline Trail breaks into a “north” trail and a “south” trail at the headquarters, with the former being a difficult path with some of the best views in the entire park, while the latter is generally easier but is not as scenic. The North Skyline is what we recommend here (sorry about that), and yes, you’ll have to deal with a real leg-burner the minute you leave the headquarters, as the south face of Hancock Hill is really something—a rocky, worn-out path that should not be taken lightly. Once you get to Marker #1172, however, it’ll all be worth it, since the views from here are jaw-dropping and the ledges make for another perfect snack (or lunch) spot. A handful of beautiful trails can be found at the top of Hancock, but they’re often overgrown and pretty confusing, so it’s best to move on unless you really know the area. Staying on the Skyline, you’ll eventually drop down to a pass or notch between Hancock and Hemenway, then it’s an easy climb to the latter, which is about as far from any road as you’ll get in the park, making it a particularly quiet and peaceful place—and with more great scenery, including glimpses of the rapidly approaching Great Blue Hill.

From the third and final ledgy area on Hemenway, it’s another steep drop down to one of the biggest intersections in the park, then a gradual climb up Wolcott Hill, which has no views but does have yet another steep drop-off heading down it. Once at the bottom, you will basically be at the base of Great Blue Hill, with a seemingly endless steep climb getting you to the summit where you’ll find an old stone bridge, a weather observatory, a tower with views of mountains as far away as Western Massachusetts, and lots more. Great Blue is a fascinating place, and at nearly 650 feet in height, it has spectacular vistas from several vantage points, so if you have time, definitely try to do some exploring. The summit, by the way, is where the north and south Skyline trails join up once again, and the now-sole trail drops down a long way to Route 138, with more outstanding views from the top just below the observatory. Crossing Route 138, the path skirts Little Blue Hill, drops down into a wooded area, and ends rather unceremoniously around the Route 128/95/93 intersection. To be honest, unless you really want to say you did the entire Skyline, stopping at Little Blue—and wandering some of the trails there, including up to the open summit—isn’t the worst of ideas, but because there is so little of the trail left after Little Blue, it’s kind of worth it just to knock off the rest before heading back to the park-and-ride and driving back.

The Skyline Trail is by no means for beginner hikers, but for anyone who has done any hiking in the mountains of Northern New England, it shouldn’t really be too bad. There really is no path quite like it in the Greater Boston area, and if you’re into bragging, you can tell people in the bars later on (maybe at the Hillside Pub, though they’ve heard it all a thousand times before) that you climbed ten hills in one day and lived to tell about it—and maybe mention the 9 miles and 2,000 feet in total elevation and all the fictitious bears and snakes you saw while you’re at it.

DIRECTIONS TO EASTERN END OF SKYLINE TRAIL: DRIVING FROM BOSTON—SE EXPRESSWAY TO EXIT 8 IN QUINCY, GO SOUTH 0.6 MILES TO SHEA RINK (WHERE TRAILHEAD IS) AT 651 WILLARD ST. PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION—RED LINE TO QUINCY ADAMS, THEN BUS #238 TO SHEA RINK. MAP OF BLUE HILLS: MASS.GOV/EEA/DOCS/DCR/ PARKS/TRAILS/BLUE-HILLS-TRAIL-MAP-2016.PDF

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NECK MUSIC

Musical matchmaking made in experimental heaven

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Blind dates are the byproduct of desperation, trust, and the idea that paths must be crossed by force. On first glance, it may sound odd that the origin story of Neck, the local experimental folk and electronic duo of Kira McSpice and Bailey Hein, is a blind date. To be fair, it’s more of a platonic musical matchmaking than a blind date. But the blind date threads woven into Neck’s backstory, threads of faith in the friends doing the recommending and hope that something larger than oneself will come out of the meetup, are too prominent to ignore.

Kira McSpice began playing cello at age three after she spotted it in the orchestra pit during one of her mother’s opera performances. In her family’s long line of musicians and artists, McSpice was the devoted cellist by choice, the byproduct of private lessons and 20 years of dedication. Once she hit high school, she tried her hand at “the singer-songwriting thing” by learning guitar and singing. A few recordings surfaced for friends to hear, but McSpice otherwise kept her musical projects to herself. These days, she works at a fancy flower shop in Boston.

Bailey Hein began playing piano at age eight, stubbornly sticking to playing by ear instead of practicing assigned sheet music. Growing up in a particularly religious part of California, she decided to give violin a try once she turned 14 years old and joined her megachurch’s worship band. Intense classical training followed, leading up to her applying to and entering Berklee College of Music in Boston. But when violin stopped feeling like an extension of herself, she became fascinated with Ableton and began exploring the world of modular synths, field recordings, and analog projections. During the evening, she spends her hours working at Cambridge nightclub Oberon.

McSpice and Hein met for the first time at Track Shack—a DIY venue where friends’ bands would often perform—after mutual friends pushed the two together, knowing both women had similar musical interests. It wasn’t long after that they decided to try writing music together. Their first attempt at recording unfolded in a picturesque way: The two swigged bourbon and explored the underside of bridges around the city, trying to capture moving field recordings. Romantic in sentiment but sanguine in reality, the initial musicmaking process didn’t quite yield satisfying results.

Instead, the two found that they functioned best as an alternative folk and experimental electronic duo. Switching to minimalist synth loops and yawning electric guitars sparked new creative inspiration. Neck began working towards creating a more spacious product that could haunt just as easily as it could conjure up a darker sense of beauty. A song like “Baited,” which began as “a vague idea and mess of synths,” felt like a puzzle worth solving under the pressure of deadline anxiety. Others, like the record’s title track, straddled a more emotional breadth after being performed in a massive warehouse. After a few months

of toying around, the duo had the groundwork for I, their debut EP from earlier this year. For McSpice and Hein, creating music together felt both powerful and challenging. The matchmaking made sense after all.

Then comes “Puzzle Factory,” a deeply stirring number about institutionalization and the stigmas surrounding mental health treatment after McSpice’s three-week occupancy in a psychiatric hospital. At the location, dubbed a “puzzle factory” by a fellow patient, there was no one-on-one therapy. There was no time allotted to go outside. There was only the medication they received and the other patients surrounding them.

So during her stay there, McSpice jotted down the words of her neighbors, learning from those who had different diagnoses, different upbringings, and different coping methods but who felt similarly isolated as she did. Neck decided to donate proceeds from the song to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation for grants to aid in the research of mental illness.

“It’s probably my favorite song I’ve ever written,” says McSpice. “The puzzle factory is a psychiatric hospital first and foremost, but to all of us [patients] it was a place of stability and a step away from normal life in order to recover and get help. When I sing the song, I think of all the people it’s written for: my fellow patients and sufferers of mental illness. Singing about my own experience of such a stigmatized and misunderstood subject feels like breaking down some of the walls surrounding it.”

“Early on in the project Kira had sent me an early demo of the song, and that lovely little phone recording was one of the biggest reasons I was excited to start working with her,” adds Hein. “I wanted to make sure my contributions to ‘Puzzle Factory’ would help do the song justice.

When we performed it live it seemed to really leave an impact on people, and I’m so glad the EP version is able to capture and convey so much of those complex emotions.”

That emotional depth is part of what made Neck’s first live show so notable. In midAugust of last year, the duo performed their first set as Neck at the Cloud Club. It was hypnotic and intimate, a deceptively polished and affecting performance—even PHOTO BY KIT CASTAGNE though Hein was hit by a van just a week

prior, changing the way they arranged their songs.

Recording, composing, and performing with others was a new world for Hein, who had previously only done so in a proper orchestral setting, and the latter was the most daunting part of all. “I’ve never been as publicly emotionally vulnerable as when we perform live,” says Hein. “I used to have a straight-up phobia of singing in front of others, so this year was an exercise in facing some lifelong fears.” In that live setting, the nerves of the duo’s debut were invisible—so much so that the two were approached by Tyler Skoglund, who offered to record them and release their music on record label JASS. The duo accepted almost immediately, and Skoglund became the producer for Hand It Over.

If the goal for Hand It Over was to give listeners space to feel vulnerable, then Neck’s upcoming record will be a way of engaging with those emotions on a more tangible level. “The main thing we’re striving for is a more complex arrangement of the songs and to bring in different instrumentalists to make these songs as big as they are in our heads,” says McSpice. “I want the album as a whole to feel like it’s existing in its own strange universe,” adds Hein. Think increasingly experimental audio samples and open-ended studio time to develop their own relationship with the songs, a sound palette that keeps discovering new colors and the scenes those shades can convey. It’s a lofty goal, but one that appears within reach for the duo. Ever since they joined heads, McSpice and Hein have explored musical terrain that their Boston peers leave untouched. For all we know, there’s a whole planet out there that only Neck can see— and listeners are lucky if the duo chooses to share it.

>>THE BAJA BLASTERS, THE DIRTY JUNK, NECK, MONICA BANG. TUE 8.14. O’BRIEN’S PUB, 3 HARVARD AVE., ALLSTON. 8PM/18+/$8. OBRIENSPUBBOSTON.COM

MUSIC EVENTS FRI 08.10

SAT 08.11

[Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. 8pm/18+/$22. crossroadspresents.com]

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge.

7pm/all ages/$17. sinclaircambridge.com ]

SLOWCORE FOR SAD SOULS PEDRO THE LION + H.C. MCENTIRE

16

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INDIE ROCK FROM ARIZONA SUNSETS LYDIA + CHERRY POOLS + FUNERAL ADVANTAGE

DIGBOSTON.COM

SUN 08.12

SUN 08.12

[Great Scott, 1222 Comm. Ave., Allston.

8:30pm/21+/$12. greatscottboston.com]

[House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston.

7pm/all ages/$35. houseofblues.com]

CÓMO MOVER EN ESPAÑOL MOURN + CHASTITY

THE DRAKE-FREE DAYTONA TOUR PUSHA T + VALEE

TUE 08.14

TUE 08.14

[Royale, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 7pm/18+/$40. royaleboston.com]

[House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston. 7pm/all ages/$10. houseofblues. com]

LATE NIGHTS EATING FROM THE CHOCOLATE BOX JEREMIH + TEYANA TAYLOR + DANILEIGH

THE ’59 SOUND: ROUND TWO THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM + MATT MAYS + WORRIERS

LORD HURON WHEEL OF TUNES

Talks traveling to Mars and U2 covering Ol’ Dirty Bastard

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Tacocat are more than a humorous palindrome. All cheery vocals and pure fun on the exterior, the four-piece— guitarist Emily Nokes, bassist Bree McKenna, drummer Lelah Maupin, and guitarist Eric Randall—rocks an inner style that puts the punk back in spunk. Set misconceptions about the weight of their lyrics aside, as the members of Tacocat tackle legitimate PHOTO BY MICHAEL LAVINE issues through their music, from the period-positive menstruation anthem “Crimson Wave” to the taunts mocking street harassment in “Hey Girl.”

The proof is in Lost Time, the band’s third studio album, too. With stories about the first day of menstruation and knuckle-headed GOP ideas, the 2016 album pushes their embrace of everyday female issues into the music without beating the subject matter over listeners’ heads. Every double-backed vocal harmony of sunny guitar line lifts the mood without undermining the topics. Though this album is their most recent record, Tacocat are working on new music, the likes of which fans can catch at their live shows this summer.

“We recorded a bunch of songs and will be playing some of those on this tour,” says McKenna. “We wanted to make a new album, and while we can’t announce anything, I can say we wanted to try these songs out for people. All of our albums have a natural progression. Our first record was a bit more punk, but as we’ve grown it’s gotten more pop while also less simple songwriting.”

To give the personality of Tacocat time to shine, we interviewed Bree McKenna for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask musicians questions inspired by their song titles. With Lost Time as the prompt, her answers are jubilant even when tackling downer subjects—a peek into what the band will flaunt when headlining Great Scott this Tuesday.

1. “Dana Katherine Scully” When was the first time you ever saw an episode of The X-Files?

Oh my god, my first X-Files episode was episode six, the episode the band was named after. I think a lot of people have seen it? Basically, it’s the eve of two and three, well, I guess there’s clones or something? I guess I haven’t seen that episode in forever, but I remember it because that’s what the band got its name from. I was definitely watching reruns of The X-Files in high school and skipped around through the series that way.

2. “FDP” Can you name two of your favorite swearword alternatives?

Let’s see. I have so many good ones for this but can’t think of them! Actually, I’ve been trying to use “ducking” and “duck you” more because my phone autocorrects to it anyways.

3. “I Love Seattle” Which nontouristy activity or place do you always recommend to people visiting Seattle?

For my friends, I usually recommend our house because three of us live together.

I live in First Hill with Lelah and Eric from Tacocat. Also, this is kinda touristy, but there’s a beach called Denny Blaine that we go to a lot. It’s across the street from the Cobain mansion. If you go over there, there’s a bunch of Kurt Cobain carvings into the benches outside of it. There’s a lot of candles and “We miss you, Kurt” messages. We usually swim at the beach, but once in a while we like to bring friends from out of town over there to swing by.

READ THE REST OF NINA’S INTERVIEW AT DIGBOSTON.COM >> TACOCAT, GYMSHORTS, LEOPARD PRINT TASER. TUE 8.14. GREAT SCOTT, 1222 COMM. AVE., ALLSTON. 8:30PM/18+/$15. GREATSCOTTBOSTON.COM

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

THEATER REVIEWS PERFORMANCE ARTS

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

KAREN OLIVO AND AARON TVEIT WITH COMPANY MEMBERS OF MOULIN ROUGE! THE MUSICAL. PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURPHY.

HOW WONDERFUL LIFE IS The World Premiere of Moulin Rouge! The Musical

She’s back and better than ever and all is right with the world.

She shines bright like a rare diamond, glittering and gleaming anew. Promise you’ll never scare us like that again, okay?

Oh, hold on. I’m sorry. You probably thought I was talking about the newly renovated Emerson Colonial Theatre, the theatrical temple that was very close to being turned into a dining hall. Yes—she looks good too.

But I’m referring in this instance to Karen Olivo, an actress of immeasurable talent and spark, who, a few years after taking home the 2009 Tony Award for West Side Story, left New York City for Wisconsin and essentially retired from acting, save for a few short-term gigs with buddy LinManuel Miranda.

But she’s back, making her entrance on a swing, no less, and reminding us all how much we missed her, one of musical theater’s most underused talents.

The occasion, as you might have heard (is there any buzz around this show?), is the world premiere of Moulin Rouge! The Musical, a brand-new, Broadway-bound adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s beloved 2001 film. This hotly anticipated musical, with a book by the great John Logan (Red; The Aviator), is a relentlessly gorgeous and sinfully decadent orgy for the eyes and ears. Alex Timbers, wunderkind director of oddities like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Here Lies Love, is at the helm.

The Emerson Colonial Theatre has been transformed into the Moulin Rouge, the Paris nightclub where creatures of the underworld roam, work, and play, and penniless bohemians rub elbows with the elite. Its main attraction is Satine (Olivo), the greatest courtesan in Paris. The musical’s treatment of Satine is one of its chief departures from the film; Nicole Kidman’s film Satine was a breathy, flirtatious minx whose dreams of becoming a legitimate actress keep her going. Instead of being motivated by dreams, the musical’s Satine is motivated by her fear of being back on the streets (her past is seedier here) and is thereby tethered to whatever it is that’s going to keep the Moulin Rouge open. That’s also one of the musical’s problems: Satine isn’t much of a dreamer, and her attraction to Christian (more 18

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on him in a second) is harder to buy. In the film, they are undeniably kindred spirits, their feet just always a little bit off the ground. Here, Satine’s feet are firmly planted.

The Moulin Rouge is having serious money problems and is nearly on life support. Passionate proprietor and devilish emcee Harold Zidler (the always magnificent Danny Burstein) is relying on the financial support of a rich duke (Tam Mutu) to keep the place going, and Satine is who Zidler is counting on to entice him. But when a young, handsome poet named Christian arrives from America (an incredible Aaron Tveit), he falls instantly in love with Satine.

There, as they say, is the rub.

As Luhrmann did so innovatively in his film, pop music is treated like high art in Moulin Rouge! Present in the film were songs like Elton John’s “Your Song,” DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” and Sting’s “Roxanne”—all of which have survived the screen-to-stage adaptation. But the musical’s score draws heavily from the Top 40 pop hits of the 2000s, resulting in a dizzying and gluttonous array of guilty pleasure earworms that—like it or not—you probably know all of the words to.

Not all songs are performed in their entirety. In fact, most are either mashed up with something else or just stick around for a line or two (Justin Levine deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the music). That’s right—Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Florence + the Machine, Pink, OutKast, Adele, and Beyoncé have finally made it to the stage. I loved every shameless second of it, and my gay heart has still not fully returned to its regular rhythm after the mind-blowing Act II opener, a mashup of “Toxic,” “Bad Romance,” and “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The choreography, by Sonya Tayeh, is fast, ferocious, and fierce.

Karen Olivo is unimaginably terrific and somehow manages to be both desperately broken and alluringly confident not only in the same scene but in the same moment. As the lovesick American poet, Aaron Tveit is just about perfect; there is even heartache in his walk, and Tony Awards have been won for less than his raw, tear- (and spit-) soaked version of “Roxanne.” Sahr Ngaujah (brilliant in Fela!) is heartbreaking as Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ricky Rojas smolders as Santiago, Christian’s two best friends and fellow penniless artistes. The ensemble as a whole—particularly Robyn Hurder, Jacqueline B. Arnold, Holly James, and Jeigh Madjus—who nearly stop the show with their go-hard-or-go-home “Lady Marmalade,” are extraordinary. (And how nice to see a cast of all colors and sizes.)

It is no surprise that Moulin Rouge! looks like a million

bucks. To be exact, $28 million, and that includes Derek McLane’s game-changing set, Catherine Zuber’s costumes, and Justin Townsend’s lighting.

Still, there are some problems to work out. We don’t see Satine and Christian exist together on any human, everyday level as we do in the film, so it is harder to totally buy into their love story. In the film, they were lovesick for one another even when they were lying in bed together, and there is no opportunity for such magnetism in the musical. The audience must root for them to be together.

There is also the matter of a certain illness that the musical treats haphazardly that doesn’t ring true. The outcome of this illness is communicated to the audience in the film’s prologue; it need not be kept a secret for so long in the musical.

Above all else, Moulin Rouge! is about a love so big and eternal that we must ache for it in the midst of all the glitz and glamour. Moulin Rouge! is already the most spectacular new musical in recent memory. With a little retooling, it might also be the most heartbreaking.

MOULIN ROUGE! THROUGH 8.19 AT THE EMERSON COLONIAL THEATRE, 106 BOYLSTON ST., BOSTON. EMERSONCOLONIALTHEATRE.COM

HAROLD WHO? Jennifer Ellis shines in The Music Man

Reagle Music Theatre occupies a vital place in the cultural ecosystem of the Greater Boston Area: It’s the only place you’re likely to see a classic musical with a full orchestra and a cast of more than 50. I love the way that Reagle evokes the summer stock tradition and presents golden age musicals the way they were meant to be seen.

Although the current revival of The Music Man—a perfect musical, if you ask me—brims with enthusiasm, it crumbles under the weight of an inadequate leading performance and, in general, struggles to maintain the glaze of professionalism. After all, what is The Music Man without its music man?

As traveling con man Harold Hill, Mark Linehan struggles with the showmanship required for us to believe that he has convinced an entire town that their sons are all heading down the path of dereliction unless they enroll the youths in a boy’s band. Linehan may be a fine leading man, but his talents do not align with the demands of the role.

Oh, but the town librarian! The impossibly lovely Jennifer Ellis glistens as Marian, the no-nonsense librarian who Harold sets his sights on. It’s a role Ellis was born to play, and her “Till There Was You” is stirring.

Director and choreographer Susan M. Chebookjian has recreated most of Onna White’s iconic, historical choreography, and it is executed admirably. In fact, the able ensemble of dancers is the highlight of this production (Bernie Baldassaro, who plays Tommy Djilas, is the standout).

More than anything, Chebookjian’s production aims to be a faithful recreation rather than a rethought revival and characterization seems to be something that hasn’t been given much thought (Ellis is an exception, as is Daniel Forest Sullivan’s Marcellus and Lori L’Italien’s Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn).

But there’s no denying that Chebookjian knows the territory, and it’s an invaluable thing to pass iconic choreography down to a new generation of dancers. And an entire community coming together to put on a big ol’ musical? Yes, please.

THE MUSIC MAN. THROUGH 8.12 AT REAGLE MUSIC THEATRE, 617 LEXINGTON ST., WALTHAM. REAGLEMUSICTHEATRE.ORG

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS FILM

The debut feature by Ashley McKenzie likes to crowd its characters

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Individual shots in Werewolf [2018] sometimes appear into the throes of addiction, and seems to have nobody he like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, tiny slivers of a larger can turn to other than Nessa herself. Eventually a series whole. After the opening prologue and the title card, the of successive developments—an influx of cash, a new film shifts into a waiting room, where Nessa (Bhreagh place to stay, and some take-home doses of methadone— MacNeil) and Blaise (Andrew Gillis) nervously anticipate coalesce to drive them further apart: Blaise relapses the appointment that’ll allow him to get his methadone once more, while Nessa picks up shifts working at an ice prescription refilled. Writer/director/producer/editor cream parlor and sets herself on the straight and narrow, Ashley McKenzie presents this to us in a series of extreme despite knowing full well that it doesn’t have much to close-ups, setting the rhythm for the film to come. In the offer her past the dead-end grind of workaday life in a first shot, we see only the left side of Nessa’s face, her declining locale. “I’ve seen people who can survive and stringy hair extending below the frame, as she rests on endure, and that’s how I saw Nessa,” explained McKenzie Blaise’s right shoulder. In the second shot, we see a pair in an interview published by mubi.com, the website for of jittery knees that belong to some unidentified person the service that’s currently streaming Werewolf to its sitting nearby. In the third shot we see only the bottom subscribers, “and [I’ve seen] some who can’t and that’s half of yet another man’s face. And in the fourth shot, how I saw Blaise.” we see two more people gesturing nervously—or, more Her film abounds with visual repetitions and accurately, we see their midsections, because the image is metaphors, like the lawns that Blaise and Nessa cut so close-up on them that everything else has been cut off. down, over and over again, and which then grow back, This segment operates as an introduction to the milieu immediately—like the withdrawal symptoms they in which Werewolf takes place: These are people recovering need to ward off every morning, and which then come from substance addiction in Cape Breton Island, Nova back, almost immediately—all of these factors silently Scotia, which like so many places in the United States is a conspiring to keep these characters exactly where they former industrial hub now suffering from slack economic are, incapable of even moving neighborhoods without conditions and high occurences of out-migration. But in totally upending the dependencies on which they’ve come formal terms, this segment operates as an introduction to rely. But McKenzie also keeps every moment of the film to the way that Werewolf communicates as a film: It gives grounded in sensual detail, and in tactile representations you miniscule doses of visual information, in shot after of the various settings, so much so that those repetitions shot after shot, and then forces you to consider those and metaphors seem to arise totally organically from images, details, and textures in light of one another. A the circumstances being depicted. In other words, one viewer might even mistake the man in the third shot for gets caught up in the sights and sounds: the earsplitting Blaise (or the couple in the fourth shot for both Nessa rumble of the lawnmower, the intermittent whoosh and Blaise) if that viewer were not paying attention of cars zooming past these people going nowhere, the to the clothes being worn by each respective person. vaguely distant bloops and bleeps of a video game being I’ve spilled a lot of ink on these pages complaining about the way that contemporary independent filmmakers in North America have devalued the very concept of the close-up. But Werewolf gives purpose to the method, and gives meaning back to the composition, in every one of its obscured frames. It shut me right the fuck up.

Werewolf is 79 minutes long and documents a relatively simple narrative in that timeframe. Both Nessa and Blaise are currently receiving methadone for drug withdrawal symptoms, and we see their “average day” play out a number of times in the film’s opening movement: They go to the pharmacy, where they receive a single dose of methadone; they walk around town with their janky-ass lawnmower, trying to browbeat neighbors into paying them for yardwork (Blaise lazes around while Nessa pushes for them both); and then finally they return to their abode in the woods, where on a good night they might hook up or on a bad night Blaise might run off while suffering from suicidal ideation. Nessa is younger and has WEREWOLF. IMAGE COURTESY GRASSFIRE FILMS AND FACTORY 25. a family she can turn to if things get worse; Blaise is older, deeper

observed by a zonked-out Blaise as he’s nodding off on the nearest couch, or the mechanical whirl of the film’s two all-important dispensers—the one that portions out methadone in the morning and the one that Nessa uses to portion out ice cream at work in the afternoon—which are often granted extended “close-up” shots of their own.

Every object and sound is catalogued the same way the characters’ bodies are framed—with marked patience, occasional fragmentation, and intimate closeness, all arranged in a manner that rewards attentive viewing.

By that I don’t mean “critical viewing” so much as I mean literally close viewing. The film’s most indelible sequence occurs when Nessa is adjusting to the standards of the service industry, a process exacerbated when one customer alleges that she found a strand of Nessa’s hair in her ice cream cone. Soon afterward there’s a profile shot of Nessa outfitted with a hairnet, back at work behind the counter. Unless you’re watching on a portable screen, you’ll probably become intensely aware of the few stray hairs that aren’t secured by that net and that quickly begin to dangle around Nessa’s ear, threatening to derail her new job for no reason other than the whims of nature and luck. McKenzie lets that shot play out at extended length, and in doing so she creates highly specific drama and meaning from a single hair on somebody’s head. So the little jigsaw pieces of Werewolf do align, but not in the way one might expect—the individual shots themselves carry the most weight, the lone strands of hair emphasized above whatever the sociopolitical “big picture” might be.

And in doing that McKenzie’s film captures something utterly vivid about lives being lived on the precarious fringes of stability. She proves herself the rare filmmaker who knows what details are worth looking so closely at.

>> WEREWOLF. NOT RATED. STREAMING ON MUBI.COM UNTIL 8.19 (SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED). ALSO CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ON VOD OUTLETS, INCLUDING VIMEO.

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TICKETS AT TICKETFLY.COM NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

COMEDY EVENTS

GOING GAGA SAVAGE LOVE

THU 08.09

HEADLINERS IN THE SQUARE @ JOHN HARVARD’S BREWERY & ALE HOUSE

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

Featuring: Laura Severse, Anthony Massa, Josh Filipowski, AJ Glagolev, Shiv Patel, & Andrew Della Volpe.

Hosted by Tim King

I’m a 27-year-old woman living on the East Coast. I’ve been sexually active and on birth control since I was 16—almost always on the pill. I recently switched to the NuvaRing, which I had a bad reaction to: I had no libido at all and extreme mood swings/bouts of depression I could not live with. My boyfriend and I decided it would be a good idea to go off hormonal birth control for a while, just to see what would happen. We’ve been together for almost four years, so we agreed condoms would be fine, and I would try the route of no more supplemental hormones. I stopped a couple of months ago, and it’s been a mix of good and bad. The good is that my moods are more even. Another good thing is I feel like I’m having a sexual awakening. My libido came back! But the bad thing is… my libido came back in a way I wasn’t expecting. My sexual appetite is insane. I want to have sex with everyone!

Men, women, friends, colleagues, acquaintances.

My boyfriend has been amazing through all of this. He’s agreed to let us open up our relationship under specific terms. I agree with the terms we placed, but I still feel like my urges are going to get me in trouble. I know not to have sex with friends and colleagues, but a lot of situations come up that make it hard to resist—especially when alcohol is involved. I’m very good with self-policing, and I don’t think I’ll actually act on my urges. My question is one you get a lot: Is this normal? Can removing a cocktail of hormones from my life really change me this much? I used to want sex, but now I WANT SEX. I want a lot of it, and it’s overwhelming.

Suddenly Horny And Going Gaga Isn’t Normal “I’m so glad to hear this woman sees the increase in her libido as positive,” said Dr. Meredith Chivers, an associate professor of psychology at Queen’s University, a worldrenowned sex researcher, and—I’m proud to say—a frequent guest expert around here.

“At the same time, I understand how overwhelming these urges can feel, especially when they are new.”

Luckily for you, SHAGGIN, you’re with someone who’s secure enough to let you feel the fuck out these new feelings. Whether or not you act on them is one thing—DADT agreement or no DADT agreement—but not having to pretend you aren’t suddenly interested in fucking men, women, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances is a real gift.

Another example of your good luck? Dr. Chivers is about to give you the Actual Science download on hormonal birth control—complete with qualifications about what we know, what we don’t know, and areas that require more research!

“It’s difficult to say what is and isn’t normal when it comes to the effects of hormonal contraception (HC) on women’s sexual interest,” said Dr. Chivers. “To my knowledge, researchers have not specifically examined the question of what happens to women’s sex drive after stopping HC.” But lots of women have stopped using hormonal contraception for the exact same reason you did, SHAGGIN: worries about how it might be affecting their libido—and there is some indirect evidence that HC can negatively impact a woman’s desire for sex.

“The NuvaRing is a combined hormonal contraceptive containing synthetic estrogens and progestins (the same as many birth control pills),” said Dr. Chivers. “HC like the NuvaRing works, in part, by raising and stabilizing progesterone levels throughout the menstrual cycle, which helps to prevent ovulation and implantation.”

And it’s those stabilized progesterone levels that could be the culprit.

“Progesterone is one of the hormones involved in the menstrual cycle and pregnancy; levels are highest in the week before menstruation (called the luteal phase) and are also high during pregnancy,” said Dr. Chivers. “A recent, large-scale study reported that women with higher progesterone—women who weren’t using HC—had lower sexual interest, on average. Because using HC is associated with reductions in sexual interest, we could predict that stopping HC, and thus progesterone levels returning to more typical lower levels, could be associated with increases in sexual motivation.”

To learn more about Dr. Chivers’s research, visit the SageLab website (queensu.ca/ psychology/sexuality-and-gender-lab) and follow her on Twitter @DrMLChivers.

On the Lovecast, the kink phenomenon of “sub drop”: savagelovecast.com

33 DUNSTER ST., CAMBRIDGE | 9PM | FREE FRI 08.10 - SAT 08.11

NICK CHAMBERS @ NICK’S COMEDY STOP

Born & raised in Worcester MA, Nick Chambers began performing stand-up comedy on a whim in 2009 and hasn’t been able to stop since. He is a versatile performer whose laid back delivery and conversational tone have quickly led to him becoming a regular performer all over the East Coast. Soon after being selected as “Comic In Residence” at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge, Chambers made his feature film debut in the comedy & “Good Kids” and he also appears in the drama “Hedgehog.”

In 2016, he was a semi-finalist in the Boston Comedy Festival and performed in the Oddball Comedy Festival.

100 WARRENTON ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $20 FRI 08.10

EAST BOSTON KNIGHTS COMEDY FUNDRAISER @ THE POINT

Like 2 Laugh, Stand-Up Comedy is raising funds and a whole lotta laughs for the East Boston Knights. PLUS raffles and a full cash bar. Featuring: Josh Filipowski, Andrew Della Volpe, Amanda Cee, Peter Martin & more.

147 HANOVER ST., BOSTON | 7PM | $20 FRI 08.10

RAW FISH KOMEDY @ KOTO

Featuring: Nick Ortolani, Justin P Drew, Maylin Pavletic, Dylan Uscher, Katie Baker, Tim Oliver, Parvo, & Big D. Music From The Brewin Brass Band.

Hosted by Allison Dick & Nathan Burke

90 WASHINGTON ST., SALEM | 8:30PM | $10 FRI 08.10

THE WEIRD & THE BEARD VARIETY HOUR @ IMPROVBOSTON

Featuring: Rachel Devorah, Kate Procyshyn, Rob Crean, Gilmore Tamny, Terence Pennington, Dot Dwyer, Jonah Connally, Christopher Carmelovich & more.

40 PROSPECT ST. CAMBRIDGE | 10PM | $12 SUN 08.12

LIQUID COURAGE COMEDY @ SLUMBREW

Featuring: Ethan Diamond, Jonathan Tillson, Chris Post, Logan O’Brien, Kathleen DeMarle, Shea Spillane, Steve Halligan, Mike Settlow, & Doug Smith.

Hosted by Stirling Smith

154 MAVERICK ST., BOSTON | 8PM | FREE SUN 08.05

NYC COMEDY INVADES LYNN @ BENT WATER BREWING CO Featuring: Jordan Raybould, Bret Raybould, & more.

180 COMMERCIAL ST, UNIT 18, LYNN | 7PM | $10 MON 08.13

FREE COMEDY @ CITYSIDE

Featuring: Petey DeAbreu & more.

Hosted by Sam Ike & Anjan Biswas

1960 BEACON ST., BRIGHTON | 8:30PM | FREE WED 08.15

LIMELIGHT COMEDY CLUB

Featuring: Alex Williams, Dan Hall, Tyler Swain, Logan O’Brien, & Josh Filipowski.

Hosted by Terence Pennington and Elisha Seigel

204 TREMONT ST, BOSTON | 7:30PM | FREE WED 08.15

8 O’CLOCK AT 730 @ 730 TAVERN, KITCHEN, & PATIO Featuring: Rob Crean, Liam McGurk, & more.

730 MASS AVE., CAMBRIDGE | 8PM | FREE Lineup & shows to change without notice. For more info on everything Boston Comedy visit BostonComedyShows.com Bios & writeups pulled from various sources, including from the clubs & comics… savagelovecast.com

22

08.09.18 - 08.16.18 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

HEADLINING THIS WEEK!

Dan St. Germain Netflix, Conan, Late Night Friday @ 8 PM

Prinze and The Wolf - Live Podcast w/ Freddie Prinze Jr. & Josh Wolf Saturday @ 8 PM

COMING SOON

Dolph Ziggler & Sarah Tiana

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Special Engagement: Weds, Aug 15

Kountry Wayne

Social media sensation Aug 16-18

Kate Quigley

Joe Diaz’s The Church Of What's Happening Now Aug 23-25

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

DeAnne Smith

Last Comic Standing, The Late Late Show Special Engagement: Sun, Aug 26

617.72.LAUGH | laughboston.com 425 Summer Street at the Westin Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23

SHIFT GEARS. GET WEIRD.

featuring

THE VOIDZ CITY HALL PLAZA • 12PM - 5PM • $15

AUGUST 11 BOSTON TH

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