DigBoston 10.4.18

DIGBOSTON.COM 10.04.18 - 10.11Z.18

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HOLD THE DARK OUT COME THE WOLVES

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OCT 04, 2018 - OCT 11, 2018 BUSINESS PUBLISHER John Loftus ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone Jason Pramas SALES ASSOCIATES Christopher Bent Victoria Botana FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com BUSINESS MANAGER John Loftus

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 Casey Campbell, Morgan Hume, Daniel Kaufman, Jacob Schick

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DEAR READER RAW DIEHL

Unlike back when I was in my 20s and went months without leaving the concrete jungle, these days I spend as much time and money as I can afford driving or taking buses north, west, and south of the city, whether to visit friends and family members who have been priced out of areas like Somerville and Mission Hill or to simply hunt for rural pleasures like New England cider donuts. I love the foliage around this time of year and basically adore the autumn up and down the seaboard. But these voyages and afternoon adventures also lead to witnessing and sometimes interacting with a different demographic than I typically spent time with back when I lived in landlocked Jamaica Plain with no car.

In the Trump era, exiting city limits means having to encounter his supporters in the sort of public places where conservatives who live closer to downtown are more careful about tucking in their ignorance. By the time you enter Norfolk county heading south on 93, you often might as well be in South Carolina. From the sheer number of voters who actually pulled for Trump in 2016, to more anecdotal horrors such as bumper stickers that pose blatant threats to liberals, it’s hardly friendly territory for a person who, say, doesn’t masturbate to the idea of families getting separated at the border.

In my recent cruises through the suburbs and beyond, I have been horrified but not surprised to see lawn after lawn littered with signs for Geoff Diehl, the Trump-loving Republican state pol who’s challenging Elizabeth Warren for her seat in the United States Senate. What some may see as just another faceless placard with a creatively cliche red, white, and blue campaign logo is actually a whole lot more—it’s a dog whistle for likeminded disgusting anti-immigration bigots, and a semisurreptitious warning sign to neighbors and those driving by who embrace multicultural America: Stay the fuck away from this house. There’s nothing cute about it; your uncle in the ’burbs who tells black jokes at family picnics and supports those who wreak havoc on poor people and women isn’t just some quirky old codger; he’s a menace to our civilized society and should be publicly humiliated or at least kept far away from impressionable children.

This week we have an article about thin blue line flags that are flown in solidarity with Blue Lives Matter, a pro-cop movement born as a reactionary rubber to the Black Lives Matter glue that’s bonded so many Americans of decent conscience. Our news piece does a comprehensive job of digging at the roots of this insanely heinous gesture, and I will add that many Blue Lives Matter flags are hung on houses that are also flanking Diehl signs—I assume as some kind of reminder for lefties and minorities who missed the initial message.

I can’t speak for everybody who opposes every vile idea that a bimbo goon like Diehl has ever cooked up, but I’m not alone in hearing loud and clear the message that they’re trying to communicate.

CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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NEWS+OPINION THIN BLUE LINEAGE NEWS TO US

What’s up with all those flags lining the roads outside of Boston?

BY BRIAN Z. ZAYATZ

If you visited Cape Cod during the tourist season, one of the first things you probably noticed while driving on highways and under overpasses—as well as on bike trails, cars, homes, and businesses—is that blue-stripe flags are taking over.

In the wake of multiple police shootings in Southeastern Mass this year, more and more of these symbols, informally known as “thin blue line” merch, have popped up as citizens seek to signal support for law enforcement officers who they believe are all under attack. Those who disagree beware—a Mashpee man, who allegedly attempted to steal flags from an overpass, was charged with larceny as well as injury to a memorial.

At its most prominent, the meme is seen displayed in front of ice cream shops, car dealerships, and other businesses, from Quincy to Hanover, marking the path of the funeral procession of Michael Chesna, a Weymouth officer who was fatally shot in July. Once only an occasional sighting, these flags, stickers, and other apparel have become increasingly common not just south of Boston, but all across the Commonwealth.

Where did this symbol come from, though? Local coverage of the use (or theft) of flags gives little context of the history or implied meanings, leaving readers in the dark. In one case, the Cape Cod Times described such stolen goods as simply “police-related,” putting the impetus on the reader to figure out what it means.

To help in that regard, here is a brief but detailed history of usage of the symbol and phrase over the last 70 or so years.

Prior to the 20th century, “thin blue line” was mostly used in a strict literal sense, specifically to describe formations of Union troops during the Civil War. The phrase appears to have first been applied to officers outside the military in the 1950s, reportedly by infamous Los Angeles Police Department Chief William H. Parker. A 1992 Los Angeles Times article, written in light of the Rodney King 4

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beating, traced the city’s racist and corrupt cop culture back to Parker’s department and “a crisp, militaristic ‘thin blue line’ [Parker coined the phrase] admired and emulated from coast to coast as it struggled valiantly to protect civilized society from godless communists, murderous thugs and the widespread dangers and decay of modern urban life.”

Parker’s proactive approach to policing essentially meant looking for “trouble” and harassing people of color.

Later in his tenure as chief, the racial implications of the “us vs them” mentality invoked by the thin blue line metaphor, already clearly understood by those directly impacted by it, became more explicit. During the 1965 Watts rebellion, Parker described residents as behaving “like monkeys in a zoo” and went on television to warn white people that “by 1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro.” He continued, “If you want any protection for your home and family … you’re going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don’t … God help you.”

In time, the idea that the thin blue line protects some and not others spread to departments across the country.

A survey of old newspapers reveals that the phrase was predominately used in this way through the ’80s, while also sometimes being deployed to describe queues of cops at police funerals. Notably, in 1981 President Ronald Reagan addressed a gathering of chiefs as “the thin blue line that holds back a jungle that threatens to reclaim the clearing we call civilization.”

The visual symbol—a single blue line over a black background, or in another variation, a monochrome American flag with a single line running across it—appears to have been born in 1993. Blue Line Identifier, a prolific seller of such merchandise and holder of the trademark for the plain blue-on-black version, boasts, “The blue line represents each of us who daily protect this nation. The black background was designed as a constant reminder

of our fallen brothers and sisters. Together they symbolize the camaraderie we all share.” (It’s notable that five years earlier, in 1988, documentarian Errol Morris released The Thin Blue Line; in the film, Judge Donald J. Metcalfe, who presided over the trial of a man who was wrongly convicted for killing a cop, claimed to be strongly influenced by how the prosecutor used Parker’s signature metaphor in his argument.)

While there’s no mention of Parker or his separatist perspective on the website for Blue Line Identifier, other retailers are openly inspired. Flags Unlimited, which sells both the classic bluestripe number and its newer patriotic iteration, marries several possible interpretations in its flag product description [bold emphasis ours]: “The Blue represents the officer … The Black background was designed as a constant reminder of our fallen brother and sister officers. The Line is what police officers protect, the barrier between anarchy and a civilized society, between order and chaos, between respect for decency and lawlessness …”

Considering this history, it is likely that a lot of Massachusetts residents and institutions that display the symbol—and also purchase rings fashioned to look like handcuffs, teddy bears that dance and sing the theme to Cops, and blankets that loudly proclaim, “Feel safe at night, sleep with a police officer”—are unaware of underlying meanings and merely want to show appreciation for police in general while honoring those who have been killed in the line of duty. Contacted for this article, a spokesperson for UMass Amherst said that school flies the flag “from the day of an officer’s death to the day of burial,” adding the boilerplate explainer about how “the flag has different meanings for individual officers but generally signifies the camaraderie and teamwork … ” We also spoke to business owners who display the flag, many of whom said that they have friends or family members serving in local police departments. After learning of the shooting death of Officer Sean Gannon in Yarmouth this year, one proprietor who asked to not be named said that she ordered a flag and encouraged others to do the same. Nearby, a daughter of the owner of another Cape establishment said, “We love police here.”

The whole community, she added, feels “the same way about it.”

A version of this article appeared on the Shoestring. Check it out for alternative news in the Pioneer Valley. Brian Z. Zayatz was born and raised on Cape Cod and now lives in Amherst.

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Pick a time and place that is best for you.

WEEK 1:

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MON. OCT. 22, 9A.M. – 5P.M.

MON. OCT. 29, 9A.M. – 5P.M.

TUES. OCT. 23, 12 – 8P.M.

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Boston City Hall (Downtown 9a.m. - 8p.m.)

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Mildred Ave. Community Center. (Mattapan) Roche Community Center (West Roxbury) Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building (Roxbury) Copley Square Library (Back Bay) Jackson Mann School (Allston)

Perkins Community Center /Joseph Lee School (Dorchester) In order to vote early or on Election Day, you must register to vote by October 17.

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DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

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APPARENT HORIZON

FROM INJURY TO ACTION: A LABOR DAY REMEMBRANCE (PART II)

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

PHOTO BY EKAMELEV. CC0 PUBLIC DOMAIN

In part one (DigBoston, Vol. 20, Iss. 36, p. 6), I related how working a temp factory job at Belden Electronics on assignment for Manpower for several weeks in early 1989 in Vermont led to my sustaining a sudden and permanent spinal injury while walking to my car just after my last shift. At the conclusion of that narrative, I was standing in agony in an empty parking lot outside an empty factory in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. My left arm was essentially paralyzed. I was completely alone.

I staggered the remaining distance to my car. Struggled to get the keys out of my left pants pocket with my good right arm. Unlocked the door. Opened it. Tumbled into the driver’s seat. Pulled the shoulder belt over my numb left arm. Waves of pain coursed through my body. Got the car started.

“Can’t pass out,” I told myself, “Don’t have much gas left, and once it’s gone, the heat goes. I can get hypothermia before anyone notices me in here. Could die.”

It was hard to hold my head upright enough to drive, but I managed it. Harder still was getting the car in gear and then driving stick with only my right arm. In a snowstorm. In the middle of the night.

Drifting each time my hand was on the stick. Nearly braking into a spin each time I approached top speed in a gear while my hand was on the steering wheel. Nearly stalling whenever I downshifted. And, yeah, that busted second gear I mentioned in part one? That was a real problem. It was tricky enough jumping from first to third gear and back when I wasn’t injured. Doing it while badly hurt and trying to drive one-handed on dangerously icy roads for the roughly half hour I figured it would take me to get from Essex Junction to the emergency room at the big Medical Center Hospital of Vermont in Burlington?

“I can get hypothermia before anyone notices me in here. Could die.”

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That was just asking to get put out of my misery the hard way.

But that was what I set out to do. Why? Not sure. I was fairly lucid, but I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly. Still, not much was open after 9 pm in the rural suburbs of Burlington in the late 1980s. Especially with the snow falling harder with each passing minute. My recollection is that, given the route I was taking, the first gas station that was likely to be open was close enough to the hospital that I might as well drive the full distance myself and skip an ambulance ride I couldn’t afford. And I hadn’t lived in the area long enough to know if there were any emergency rooms closer to my location.

The other problem I faced was the the hypnotizing effect of my headlights reflecting off snowflakes as I drove down unlit back roads. To avoid accidentally getting confused, losing the road, and slamming into something solid, I stayed mostly in first gear. So it took longer to get to my destination. Maybe 45 minutes.

Fortunately, I encountered little traffic on the way. And made it to the emergency room.

There I got treated the way people without insurance get treated all the time in America. Like dirt. I sat in the waiting room for over an hour. The bored resident that eventually saw me gave me a cursory examination and sent me for an X-ray. More accurate MRIs weren’t yet common and certainly wouldn’t have been given to patients without coverage at that time. I spent the next couple of hours in an emergency room bay. There was a heroin epidemic in Vermont in that period, so I was offered no pain killers in case I was just another junkie “drug seeker” trying to pull a fast one on the staff for a quick opiate fix.

Finally, the resident returned, and told me that I had dislocated two vertebrae. He gave me a few Tylenol, told me to put heat on my injury, rest for a few days, and see a general practitioner if my arm function didn’t fully return. I was not admitted for more tests or observation.

I was not offered stronger pain meds. I was incredulous, but could do nothing. Naturally, I didn’t pay the medical bill when it arrived.

I shuffled back to my car and drove the mile to my apartment. Down the quite steep and icy hill from the University of Vermont campus where the hospital was located to the Old North End. Still one-handed, although

I was getting some feeling back in my left arm by that time. At least the snow had let up.

It was 5 am. I got the front door open. Closed it. Got a glass of water. Took some Tylenol. Went to my room.

Shut that door. Collapsed onto my futon on the floor of my dingy place that was cheap even by the standards of Burlington in that era. Slept fitfully.

Woke a few hours later to the first day of my new life as a bona fide member of the walking wounded.

It should go without saying that in the days to come both Belden Electronics and the temp service they used to hire me, Manpower, refused to accept responsibility for my injury. Neither company even informed me of my workers’ compensation rights. And I was too young and inexperienced to know much about labor law on my own. So, I proceeded with no money for medical treatment.

Surrounded, as I was, by wide-eyed hippies of the type that Vermont is justifiably infamous for producing, I was strongly encouraged to drop the idea of seeking help from “Western medicine” and seek assistance from one or more of the profusion of “holistic healers” that littered the hills and valleys of my temporarily adopted state like so many locusts. I went with the modality that most closely mimicked actual scientific medicine: chiropractic.

Because, you know, its practitioners like to wear white coats and pretend they’re doctors. Regardless of whether they’re in the small minority of their colleagues that restrict their practice to scientifically proven treatments, or the majority that does not.

Unaware that a) with rest and some physical therapy my injury would probably heal to a tolerable baseline on its own within a few weeks, and b) that the neck twisting employed by less scrupulous chiropractors when “treating” injuries like mine carried a very real risk of inducing a life-ending stroke, I gamely allowed to a succession of chiropractors to twist my neck really fast until its vertebrae cracked. In addition to a fairly random grab bag of similar “treatments.” First once a week and later once a month for the next six years. At $30 a visit to start—up to about $60 a visit by the time I realized my trust in chiropractors was misplaced and stopped letting such charlatans violate my person—the price was significantly cheaper than any medical care I thought I could get without insurance.

So, despite feeling worse after every session than I felt when I walked in, I kept it up for far too long. Which was the goal of too many chiropractors. Whatever brings you in their door, they aim to keep you coming back regularly for the rest of your life. Assuming they don’t inadvertently end it. Or merely hurt you badly.

As happened when my last chiropractor decided to try electro-muscular stimulation near my head and my vision exploded into whiteness, which faded for an unknown amount of time until I awoke with my face on the quack’s chest. Weak. Somewhat confused. And very angry. I walked out and never came back.

But five years later—over 11 years after the initial injury—I discovered that more damage had been done to my spine. No doubt in part from such ungentle and unschooled ministrations. A story for another day.

Part III coming soon… and for more information on why chiropractic is best avoided, check out the ScienceBased Medicine blog (sciencebasedmedicine.org/category/ chiropractic/) and the older Chirobase (chirobase.org).

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

Spiritual Longing

In The Aftermath of Violence Artist Reception with Johnetta Tinker October 10, 2018 Art making workshop | 4:30 - 6:00 pm Artist Reception & Gallery Talk | 6:00 - 7:00 pm Free and open to the public Light refreshments will be provided.

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FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

7

RECORD OF INACTION GUEST OPINION

Millennials should be furious about the lack of climate leadership in Massachusetts

BY JORDAN MEEHAN It has certainly been an eventful summer in Massachusetts politics. Beyond the upsets of the Sept 4 primaries, two other noteworthy events happened in Massachusetts this summer: 1) Boston set new heat records and saw 16 days over 90 degrees, and 2) the state Legislature passed a severely watered-down clean energy bill.

Everyone in Massachusetts should care about both of these. But millennials should be furious about the latter.

We’ve heard the stereotypes about millennials before, but here’s an important truth about our generation: As millennials, we will inherit the worst effects of climate change. We will have to raise our children—and they will have to raise theirs—in a world of higher temperatures, rising seas, more devastating storms, and widespread food and water insecurity.

Recent reports suggest that the effects of climate change in Massachusetts are expected to be far worse than previously indicated. Average annual temperatures in the Northeast could rise between 5 degrees and 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2071, while sea levels around Boston may rise more than 10 feet by the end of the century, which would plunge 30 percent of the city underwater. Furthermore, studies show that the Northeast is warming more rapidly than other parts of the country as a result of climate change.

For our generation, these are much more than numbers. This is our future. And it is a generational outrage.

These times require and demand urgent, activist leadership to combat climate change, and one would expect as much in a state as reliably blue as Massachusetts. After all, California just committed to reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Surely Massachusetts is doing the same, right?

Wrong.

Gov. Charlie Baker and Democratic leaders in the House displayed a stunning lack of leadership on the issue this year. In July the Massachusetts Legislature passed H.4857, An Act to Advance Clean Energy, a profoundly watereddown compromise of the bill that passed the Massachusetts Senate in June. The most egregious aspects of this bill include its failure to raise the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to 3 percent and the failure to lift the caps on net metering.

The RPS, which requires a certain percentage of the state’s energy to come from renewable energy sources, currently increases by 1 percent each year. The Senate bill originally increased the RPS by 3 percent each year. Under that bill, Massachusetts would have reached 49 percent renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent by 2047. The compromise IMAGE VIA CBS BOSTON bill increases the RPS by 2 percent starting in July 8

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2019 and reduces it back to 1 percent in 2031. Under this bill Massachusetts won’t reach 100 percent renewable energy until 2090. This is even more infuriating when you consider the RPS timelines of other states. California and New York, for example, will reach 50 percent renewable energy by 2030, while under this compromise bill Massachusetts will only reach 35 percent by 2050.

Additionally, the Senate bill eliminated the caps on solar net metering and mandated 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind. The compromise bill does nothing to address net metering caps, even though Massachusetts lost 21 percent of its solar jobs last year, and authorizes merely 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind.

While ultimately a small step in the right direction, this bill is an embarrassment for a state that claims to be a global leader on climate change and clean energy, and wildly insufficient to meet the realities of the threat. Gov. Baker, meanwhile, seems intent on slowing the growth of solar power in Massachusetts, as evidenced by his attempt to impose new “demand charges” on residential solar customers and shelving initiatives to grow the solar industry. And let’s not forget about his attempted pipeline tax.

Millennials should be furious about this abdication of leadership. We will inherit a world that is both warmer and less stable, the livability of which remains an open question. Our future is on the line, yet our elected officials refuse to acknowledge the urgency of the threat.

Massive winter storms have brought numerous hundred-year floods this year and left lasting damage to our infrastructure. California’s wildfires are out of control. Hurricane Florence brought destruction to the Carolinas and Puerto Rico is still reeling from last year’s hurricanes. There’s a maniac in the White House hellbent on undoing as many environmental protections as possible.

This is a climate emergency. At a time when the

federal government refuses to acknowledge the very existence of climate change, it is incumbent on states to take the lead. Instead, our elected officials in Massachusetts have intentionally slowed our transition to 100 percent renewable energy.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This kind of anemic response to climate change is not an economic inevitability. It is a political choice our leaders have made and one we can unmake. California has shown us that bold climate action is possible. The only thing holding Massachusetts back is a lack of political courage.

Environmental groups made it clear this year that they will no longer abide a half-hearted response to climate change. Millennials in this state should be just as angry.

Nearly 75 percent of millennials believe something should be done to stop climate change, including 89 percent of millennial Democrats. Approximately 70 percent of millennials believe it will affect them in their lifetime—and they’re right. Furthermore, Boston has the highest concentration of millennials in the country, giving our generation significant political power should we choose to exercise it.

A better future is possible in Massachusetts, but it’s up to us to build it. We cannot rely on tepid Republican governors and centrist Democrats in the State House any longer. It is time for this generation to claim our power and our place in this democracy, and elect a new generation of leadership that understands the urgency of the threat and is not afraid to act boldly and immediately.

Climate change isn’t going to wait. Neither should we.

Jordan Meehan is a political committee member of the Mass Sierra Club, a recent law school graduate, an environmental and political activist, a millennial, and a resident of Allston-Brighton.

Your Trusty Massachusetts Cannabis Newsletter subscribe for free at

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VARIETY PACK BOSTON BETTER BEER BUREAU

Nothing but craft perfection, from the Oak Bar to Waltham

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There’s always way more news brewing inside the beer world than we can dream of digesting. Let alone write about. So before these notes from our past couple of weeks of imbibing go stale, here they are, barely smoothed over and in no recognizable order…

We hope you have been as lucky as we’ve been to catch some Mighty Squirrel Cloud Candy on tap in several places. It’s smooth in ways that the beer’s absolutely perfect moniker merely begins to explain, a rush of citrus IPA straight out of Waltham but with serious potential to turn heads all across the nation. These New England numbers are getting increasingly competitive, and so it’s sweet to see spots like the new Beat Brew Hall pouring so damn many of them.

The Cambridge brew hall is the latest reinvention of the space most recently known as Beat Brasserie, run by the team behind the Beehive in the South End. The bar staff competently led us through a range of thrilling overtures, as did the experts later the same evening at the Oak Long Bar + Kitchen at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, an unlikely utopia for people who like beer as much as Judge Brett Kavanaugh and a preferred hangout for guys who behave and look like him.

Despite being among the most polished joints in Boston, the Cloud Candy is eight bucks at the Oak Bar just like it would be virtually anywhere else. It’s especially worth it here, though, since the taps are made of gold and diamonds. The selections are worth tarring the economy for—we sipped a solid and determined Zero Gravity Little Wolf American Pale Ale, an always-reliable SingleCut Plain Top Pils, and a Virtuoso hazy double IPA from Lord Hobo that won’t stop showing up in our dreams.

We also drank an interesting and worth revisiting Mighty Squirrel Peach Smoovy for $12, which you are able to cop in a can. In all our years reviewing beers, we never thought we would be able to kick it inside the Fairmont Copley and tilt back aluminum, but that’s the modern world we live in. Might as well embrace it.

Finally, with summer ending and another trip to Maine so many months away, we’d like to wave a temporary goodbye to our buds at D.L. Geary Brewing. Their concoctions keep us lit whenever we can make it north, and they must know it. You have to have some serious product to call yourself the first craft brewery in all of New England, and Geary’s pulls it off. The Riverside IPA—which, if you squint while opening a tallboy of it and stick your nose near the chute, feels a lot like smashing your face into an enormous pillow stuffed with oranges—is a case in point.

In fact, make that five cases to hold us over through the winter.

TALKING JOINTS MEMO

MEET THE BEANTOWN GHETTO SHAMAN From Aikido, to cannabis, to ayahuasca, Hub healer looks to holistic alternatives

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 Within 30 seconds of my meetup with the Beantown Ghetto Shaman on the Common last month, he broke down the history of natural Brazilian tobacco and explained how he utilizes it along with tree ash in his healing practice.

Within a minute of our congregation for this interview, he told me that he has a history in martial arts and experience with ayahuasca.

By the 10-minute mark of our chat, it was crystal clear how the Hub’s Beantown Ghetto Shaman, known to friends and family as Duli Wilkins, earned his holisticminded moniker.

Where did this all come from? When did your spiritual journey begin?

It came organically. I used to get teased in school for saying I remember being in my mother’s stomach.

What were some of the practices you picked up? Who are some of your local spiritual heroes?

My father at first, he was a jazz musician. … He introduced us to yoga and martial arts as kids …

I was doing aikido at 12 and 13 with Sensei [Bill] Gleason, who had a dojo up near Brookline. I wanted to continue with that, but my father couldn’t afford the classes.

Eventually, there was this OG in my neighborhood that I had a lot of respect for and who introduced me to tai chi. I started studying at the Roxbury Tai Chi Academy, which is run by Master [Heg] Robinson, who is a Vietnam vet. He really helped me a lot, because I was a very depressed and very angry teenager. I could have gone in any other direction like my friends at the time.

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When did shamanism come into the picture?

Not until later. The traditional definition of shaman would be one who could see in the dark. It would always be one who is a community healer. Also the job is to be one that holds prophecy. There are a lot of different jobs, but essentially they’re masters of trance. Depending on what part of the world you’re in, they have different names for these medicine men and medicine women. Some shamans use [hallucinogens] to get you where you need to go, but all shamans don’t need that. Some use the drum, or the rattle. Or use a dance, there are so many ways to do it.

What does the term mean to you?

It’s a medicine man, it’s one who can be here in the physical world, but can be in other realms of existence as well.

What are some of your preferred tools?

I definitely use the drum, I definitely use the rattle. A part of my service is sound therapy, so I use gongs. I have something right now called back porch remedies— people come to my apartment, I have a nice back porch set up, my massage table is there. I start off with the sacred tobacco and blow it in their nose, then we do a little sound therapy, then natural energy healing, then I end with a massage. It’s a big package. That’s almost two hours. People come out leaving like they’re on cloud nine. I do cannabis massage too.

You also do work with ayahuasca. I know it’s kind of under the radar, but what can you tell us about that?

It’s a lot of different things for different people. …

All I’ve heard about is the tripping part.

It’s about purging. I wouldn’t consider it fun—you’re going to shit and throw up on yourself. … It’s underground. …

One [session] that we did had 30 people. We usually start at nine at night all the way to seven in the morning. We try to find a quiet street, preferably a house. It’s all word of mouth. …

There are churches for ayahuasca in California and Florida, and I’m working with a friend to set up something like that here.

A lot of things you may want to use were criminalized to various degrees until recently. How has that impacted your work? And how is that changing?

Because of the law I don’t sell cannabis, but it’s part of the package, so if people want to have the added service of smoking while [they get a treatment], it’s available.

CBD oil as well. Legalization right now here in Boston is a beautiful thing. People can get medical cards, then dispensaries are right around the corner. We’re living in beautiful times.

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THE REAL FIGHT AGAINST FAKE NEWS FEATURE

Project Censored’s top censored stories of 2018

BY PAUL ROSENBERG

1) Global Decline in Rule of Law as Basic Human Rights Diminish According to the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2017–2018, released in January 2018, a striking worldwide decline in basic human rights has driven an overall decline in the rule of law since October 2016, the month before Trump’s election. Fundamental rights—one of eight categories measured—declined in 71 out of 113 nations surveyed. Overall, 34 percent of countries’ scores declined, while just 29 percent 12

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2) “Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders In March 2017, WikiLeaks released Vault 7, a trove of 8,761 leaked confidential CIA files about its global hacking programs, which WikiLeaks described as the “largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” It drew significant media attention. But almost no one noticed what George Eliason of OpEdNews points out.

“Sure, the CIA has all these tools available,” Eliason writes. “Yes, they are used on the public. The important part is [that] it’s not the CIA that’s using them. That’s the part that needs to frighten you.”

As Eliason went on to explain, the CIA’s mission prevents it from using the tools, especially on Americans.

“All the tools are unclassified, open-source, and can be used by anyone,” Eliason noted. “It makes them not exactly usable for secret agent work. That’s what makes it impossible for them to use Vault 7 tools directly.”

Drawing heavily on more than a decade of reporting

by Tim Shorrock for Mother Jones and the Nation, Eliason’s series reported on the explosive growth of private contractors in the intelligence community, which allows the CIA and other agencies to gain access to intelligence gathered by methods they’re prohibited from using.

In a 2016 report for the Nation, Shorrock estimated

that 80 percent of an estimated 58,000 private intelligence contractors worked for the five largest companies. He concluded that “not only has intelligence been privatized to an unimaginable degree, but an unprecedented consolidation of corporate power inside U.S. intelligence has left the country dangerously dependent on a handful of companies for its spying and surveillance needs.”

Eliason reported how private contractors pioneered open-source intelligence by circulating or selling the information they gathered before the agency employing them had reviewed and classified it; therefore, “no one broke any laws.” As a result, “people with no security clearances … have state sized cyber tools at their disposal, [which they can use] for their own political agendas, private business, and personal vendettas.”

As Project Censored points out, corporate media reporting on Vault 7 sometimes noted, but ultimately failed to focus on the dangerous role of private contractors—with the exception of a Washington Post op-ed in which Shorrock reviewed his previous reporting and concluded that overreliance on private intelligence contractors was “a liability built into our system that intelligence officials have long known about and done nothing to correct.”

3) World’s Richest One Percent Continue to Become Wealthier In November 2017, Credit Suisse released its 8th Annual Global Wealth Report, which the Guardian covered under the headline, Richest 1% own half the world’s wealth, study finds.

The wealth share of the world’s richest people increased “from 42.5% at the height of the 2008 financial crisis to 50.1% in 2017, or $140tn (£106tn),” the Guardian reported, adding that “the biggest losers … are young people who should not expect to become as rich as their parents.”

Despite being more educated than their parents, “millennials are doing less well than their parents at the same age, especially in relation to income, home ownership and other dimensions of well-being assessed in this report,” Rohner Credit Suisse Chairman Urs Rohner said. “We expect only a minority of high achievers and those in high demand sectors such as technology or finance to effectively overcome the ‘millennial disadvantage.’”

“No other part of the wealth pyramid has been transformed as much since 2000 as the millionaire and ultra-high net worth individual (known as UHNWI) segments,” the report said. “The number of millionaires has increased by 170%, while the number of UHNWIs (individuals with net worth of USD 50 million or more) has risen five-fold, making them by far the fastestgrowing group of wealth holders.”

There were of 2.3 million new dollar millionaires this year, taking the total to 36 million.

“At the other end of the spectrum, the world’s 3.5 billion poorest adults each have assets of less than $10,000,” the Guardian reported. “Collectively these people, who account for 70% of the world’s working age population, account for just 2.7% of global wealth.”

“Tremendous concentration of wealth and the extreme poverty that results from it are problems that affect everyone in the world, but wealth inequalities do not receive nearly as much attention as they should in the establishment press,” Project Censored noted.

“The few corporate news reports that have addressed this issue—including an August 2017 Bloomberg article and a July 2016 report for CBS’s MoneyWatch—focused

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANSON STEVENS-BOLLEN

Fake news is not a new thing. With the return of its annual list of censored stories in Censored 2019: Fighting the Fake News Invasion, Project Censored’s vivid artwork (as seen on the cover of DigBoston this week, as well as other alternative weeklies across the country as has long been tradition) recalls the classic War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

The situation today may feel as desolate as the illustration suggests.

But as editors Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff observe in the introduction, “Censored 2019 is a book about fighting fake news.” In the end, they argue that “critical media education—rather than censorship, blacklists, privatized fact-checkers, or legislative bans—is the best weapon for fighting the ongoing fake news invasion.”

Project Censored’s annual list of 25 censored stories, which makes up the book’s first chapter, is among the finest resources that one can have for such an education.

Censorship and fake news are “intertwined issues,” they write.

Project Censored has long been engaged in much more than just uncovering and publicizing stories kept out of the corporate media. Over the years, it has added new analytical categories: sensationalist and titillating Junk Food News stories, for example.

Through it all, the list of censored stories remains central to the project’s mission, which, the editors point out, can be read in two different ways: “as a critique of the shortcomings of US corporate news media for their failure to adequately cover these stories, or as a celebration of independent news media, without which we would remain either uninformed or misinformed about these crucial stories and issues.”

improved. The United States ranked 19, down one from 2016, with declines in checks on government powers and deepening discrimination.

Fundamental rights include absence of discrimination, right to life and security, due process, freedom of expression and religion, right to privacy, freedom of association, and labor rights.

“All signs point to a crisis not just for human rights, but for the human rights movement,” Yale professor of history and law Samuel Moyn told The Guardian the day the index was released. “Within many nations, these fundamental rights are falling prey to the backlash against a globalising economy in which the rich are winning. But human rights movements have not historically set out to name or shame inequality.”

This reflects the thesis of Moyn’s most recent book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World.

Constraints on government powers, which measures the extent to which those who govern are bound by law, saw the second greatest declines (64 countries out of 113 dropped). This is where the United States saw the greatest deterioration, “while all sub-factors in this dimension declined at least slightly from 2016, the score for lawful transition of power—based on responses to survey questions on confidence in national and local election processes and procedures—declined most markedly,” according to the World Justice Project.

The United States also scored notably poorly on several measurements of discrimination.

“With scores of .50 for equal treatment and absence of discrimination (on a scale of 0 to 1), .48 for discrimination in the civil justice system, and .37 for discrimination in the criminal justice system, the U.S. finds itself ranked 78 out of 113 countries on all three subfactors,” World Justice Project noted.

The four Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden—remained in the top four positions. New Zealand, Canada and Australia were the only top 10 countries outside of Europe.

Meanwhile, as Project Censored noted, “WJP’s 2017– 2018 Rule of Law Index received scant attention from US corporate media.”

exclusively on wealth inequality within the United States.

As Project Censored has previously reported, corporate news consistently covers the world’s billionaires while ignoring millions of humans who live in poverty.”

4) How Big Wireless Convinced Us Cell Phones are Safe Are cell phones and other wireless devices really as safe as we’ve been lead to believe? Don’t bet on it, according to decades of buried research reviewed in a March 2018 investigation for the Nation by Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie.

“The wireless industry not only made the same moral choices that the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries did, it also borrowed from the same public relations playbook those industries pioneered,” Hertsgaard and Dowie reported. “Like their tobacco and fossil-fuel brethren, wireless executives have chosen not to publicize what their own scientists have said about the risks of their products. … On the contrary, the industry—in America, Europe, and Asia—has spent untold millions of dollars in the past 25 years proclaiming that science is on its side, that the critics are quack, and that consumers have nothing to fear.”

Their report comes at the same time as several new developments are bringing the issue to the fore, including a Kaiser Permanente study (published December 2017 in Scientific Reports) finding much higher risks of miscarriage, a study in the October 2017 American Journal of Epidemiology finding increased risk for glioma (a type of brain tumor), and a disclosure by the National Frequency Agency of France that nine out of ten cell phones exceed government radiation safety limits when tested in the way they are actually used, next to the human body.

As the Nation reported, George Carlo was a scientist hired by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association in 1993 to research cell phone safety and allay public fears, heading up the industry-financed Wireless Technology Research project. But he was unceremoniously fired and publicly attacked by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association in 1999, after uncovering disturbing evidence of danger.

Carlo sent letters to each of the industry’s chieftains on October 7, 1999, reiterating that the Wireless Technology Research project had found the following: “The risk of rare neuro-epithelial tumors on the outside of the brain was more than doubled … in cell phone users.”

Furthermore, there was an apparent “correlation between brain tumors occurring on the right side of the head and the use of the phone on the right side of the head,” while “the ability of radiation from a phone’s antenna to cause functional genetic damage [was] definitely positive.”

Carlo urged the CEOs to do the right thing and give consumers the information they need to make informed judgments about how much of this unknown risk they wish to assume, especially since some in the industry had repeatedly and falsely claimed that wireless phones are safe for all consumers “including children.”

The Kaiser Permanente study involved exposure to magnetic field non-ionizing radiation associated with wireless devices as well as cell phones and found a 2.72 times higher risk of miscarriage for those with higher versus lower exposure. Lead investigator De-Kun Li warned that the possible effects of this radiation have been controversial because, “from a public health point of view, everybody is exposed. If there is any health effect, the potential impact is huge.”

“The wireless industry has ‘war-gamed’ science by playing offense as well as defense, actively sponsoring studies that result in published findings supportive of the industry, while aiming to discredit competing research that raises questions about the safety of cellular devices and other wireless technologies,” Project Censored summarizes. “When studies have linked wireless radiation to cancer or genetic damage, industry spokespeople have pointed out that the findings are disputed by other researchers.”

While some local media have covered the findings of selected studies, Project Censored notes, “the norm for corporate media is to report the telecom industry

line—that is, that evidence linking Wi-Fi and cell phone radiation to health issues, including cancer and other medical problems, is either inconclusive or disputed. … As Hertsgaard and Dowie’s Nation report suggested, corporate coverage of this sort is partly how the telecom industry remains successful in avoiding the consequences of [its] actions.”

5) Washington Post Bans Employees from Using Social Media to Criticize Sponsors On May 1, 2017, the Washington Post introduced a policy prohibiting its employees from criticizing its advertisers and business partners, and encouraging them to snitch on one another.

“A new social-media policy at The Washington Post prohibits conduct on social media that ‘adversely affects The Post’s customers, advertisers, subscribers, vendors, suppliers or partners,” Andrew Beaujon reported in the Washingtonian. “In such cases, Post management reserves the right to take disciplinary action ‘up to and including termination of employment.’” Beaujon also cited “a clause that encourages employees to snitch on one another: ‘If you have any reason to believe that an employee may be in violation of The Post’s Social Media Policy … you should contact The Post’s Human Resources Department.’”

At the time, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents the Post’s employees, was protesting the policy and seeking removal of the controversial parts in a new labor agreement. A follow-up report by Whitney Webb for MintPress News highlighted the broader possible censorship effects, as prohibiting social media criticism could spill over into reporting as well.

“Among The Washington Post’s advertisers are corporate giants like GlaxoSmithKline, Bank of America and Koch Industries,” Webb writes. “With the new policy, social media posts criticizing GlaxoSmithKline’s habit of making false and misleading claims about its products, inflating prices and withholding crucial drug safety information from the government will no longer be made

by Post employees.”

Beyond that, Webb suggested it could protect the CIA, which has a $600 million contract with Amazon Web Services. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post four months after that contract was signed.

“While criticism of the CIA is not technically prohibited by the new policy, former Post reporters have suggested that making such criticisms could endanger one’s career,” Webb noted.

He added that in 2013, former Post writer John Hanrahan told Alternet, “Post reporters and editors are aware that Bezos, as majority owner of Amazon, has a financial stake in maintaining good relations with the CIA—and this sends a clear message to even the hardestnosed journalist that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career move.”

“Corporate news coverage of The Washington Post’s social media policy has been extremely limited,” Project Censored noted.

6) Russiagate: Two-Headed Monster of Propaganda and Censorship Is Russiagate a censored story? In my view, not exactly.

This entry seems to reflect a well-intentioned effort to critically examine fake news-related issues within a “censored story” framework.

It’s important that these issues be raised—which is one reason I suggested that Project Censored add “fake news” as a new analytical category along with its censored stories list, “junk food news,” and “news abuse.”

What Project Censored calls attention to is important: “Corporate media coverage of Russiagate has created a two-headed monster of propaganda and censorship.

By saturating news coverage with a sensationalized narrative, Russiagate has superseded other important, newsworthy stories.”

As a frustrated journalist with omnivorous interests, I heartily concur—but what’s involved is too complex to simply be called “propaganda.” On the other hand, the censorship of alternative journalistic voices is a classic, well-defined Project Censored story, which suffers from NEWS TO US

the attempt to fit both together.

In April 2017, Aaron Maté reported for the Intercept on a quantitative study of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show from February 20 to March 31, 2017. It found that “Russiafocused segments accounted for 53 percent of these broadcasts.” Maté writes: “Maddow’s Russia coverage has dwarfed the time devoted to other top issues, including Trump’s escalating crackdown on undocumented immigrants (1.3 percent of coverage); Obamacare repeal (3.8 percent); the legal battle over Trump’s Muslim ban (5.6 percent), a surge of anti-GOP activism and town halls since Trump took office (5.8 percent), and Trump administration scandals and stumbles (11 percent).”

Well and good. But is this propaganda?

At Truthdig, Norman Solomon writes: “As the cable news network most trusted by Democrats as a liberal beacon, MSNBC plays a special role in fueling rage among progressive-minded viewers toward Russia’s ‘attack on our democracy’ that is somehow deemed more sinister and newsworthy than corporate dominance of American politics (including Democrats), racist voter suppression, gerrymandering and many other U.S. electoral defects all put together.”

Also true. But not so much propaganda as Project Censored’s broader category of “news abuse,” which includes spin among other forms of “distraction to direct our attention away from what we really need to know.”

To fully grasp what’s involved requires a more complex analysis.

On the other hand, the censorship of alternative journalistic voices is far more clearcut and straightforward.

In a report for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, Robin Andersen examined Russiagate-inspired censorship moves by Twitter, Google and others.

“In the battle against fake news, much of the best, most accurate independent reporting is disappearing from Google searches,” Anderson said.

7) Regenerative Agriculture as “Next Stage” of Civilization The world’s agricultural and degraded soils have the capacity to recover 50 to 66 percent of the historic carbon loss to the atmosphere, according to a 2004 paper in Science, actually reversing the processes driving global warming. A set of practices known as “regenerative agriculture” could play a major role in accomplishing that, while substantially increasing crop yields as well, according to information compiled and published by Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association in May 2017.

“For thousands of years we grew food by depleting soil carbon and, in the last hundred or so, the carbon in fossil fuel as well,” according to food and farming writer Michael Polin. “But now we know how to grow even more food while at the same time returning carbon and fertility and water to the soil.”

Cummins, who’s also a founding member of Regeneration International, adds that regenerative agriculture offers a “world-changing paradigm” that can help solve many of today’s environmental and

As Project Censored has previously reported, corporate news consistently covers the world’s billionaires while ignoring millions of humans who live in poverty.

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THE REAL FIGHT... continued from pg. 13 public health problems. As the Guardian explained: “Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil and, in the process, sequester carbon. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, and grazes animals in ways that mimic animals in nature. It also offers ecological benefits far beyond carbon storage: it stops soil erosion, remineralizes soil, protects the purity of groundwater and reduces damaging pesticide and fertilizer runoff.”

“We can’t really solve the climate crisis (and the related soil, environmental, and public health crisis) without simultaneously solving the food and farming crisis,” Cummings writes. “We need to stop putting greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere (by moving to 100% renewable energy), but we also need to move away from chemical-intensive, energy-intensive food, factory farming and land use, as soon as possible.”

In addition to global warming, there are profound economic and social justice concerns involved.

“Out-of-touch and out-of-control governments of the world now take our tax money and spend $500 billion ... a year mainly subsidizing 50 million industrial farmers to do the wrong thing,” Cummins adds. “Meanwhile, 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70% of the world’s food on just 25% of the world’s acreage, struggle to make ends meet.

“Regenerative agriculture has received limited attention in the establishment press, highlighted by only two recent, substantive reports in the New York Times Magazine and Salon,” according to Project Censored.

8) Congress Passes Intrusive Data Sharing Law Under Cover of Spending Bill On March 21, the 2,232-page omnibus spending bill was released. It passed both houses and was signed into law in two days. Attached to the spending provisions that made it urgent “must-pass” legislation was the completely unrelated Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act of 2018, also known as the CLOUD Act. “The CLOUD Act enables the U.S. government to acquire data across international borders regardless of other nations’ data privacy laws and without the need for warrants, ” Project Censored summarized.

It also significantly weakens protections against foreign government actions.

“It was never reviewed or marked up by any committee in either the House or the Senate,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Ruiz wrote. “It never received a hearing…. It was robbed of a standalone floor vote because Congressional leadership decided, behind closed doors, to attach this unvetted, unrelated data bill to the $1.3 trillion government spending bill.” Congressional leadership failed to listen to citizen concerns, Ruiz added, with devastating consequences: “Because of this failure, U.S. and foreign police will have new mechanisms to seize data across the globe. Because of this failure, your private emails, your online chats, your Facebook, Google, Flickr photos, your Snapchat videos, your private lives online, your moments shared digitally between only those you trust, will be open to foreign law enforcement without a warrant and with few restrictions on using and sharing your information, privacy and human rights,” concluded Greene Robyn Greene, who reported for Just Security.

“The little corporate news coverage that the CLOUD Act received tended to put a positive spin on it,” Project Censored notes. “[A glowing Washington Post op-ed] made no mention of potential risks to the privacy of citizens’ personal data, [and a CNET report that] highlighted the liberties that the CLOUD Act would provide corporations by simplifying legal issues concerning overseas servers.”

Because of this failure, US laws will be bypassed on US soil. Greene wrote that the CLOUD Act negates protections of two interrelated existing laws, and creates an exception to the Stored Communications Act that allows certified foreign governments to request personal 14

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data directly from US companies.

“This exception enables those countries to bypass the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process, which protects human rights by requiring foreign governments to work with the Department of Justice to obtain warrants from U.S. judges before they can access that data for their criminal investigations,” Greene explained. “The version of the bill that was included in the omnibus does include some improvements over the earlier version to help to mitigate the risks of bypassing the MLAT process … two changes [that] are important improvements … many of the other changes to the bill are only partial or ineffective fixes to problems privacy advocates, human rights advocates, and even a former high-ranking official at the U.S. State Department have raised…. Several other concerns have been left entirely unaddressed.”

9) Indigenous Communities Around World Helping to Win Legal Rights of Nature In March 2017, the government of New Zealand ended a 140-year dispute with an indigenous Maori tribe by enacting a law that officially recognized the Whanganui River, which the tribe considers its ancestor, as a living entity with rights. The Guardian reported it as “a worldfirst,” although the surrounding Te Urewera National Park had been similarly recognized in a 2014 law, and the US Supreme Court came within one vote of potentially recognizing such a right in the 1972 case Sierra Club v. Morton, expressed in a dissent by Justice William O. Douglas. In addition, the broader idea of ‘rights of nature’ has been adopted in Ecuador, Bolivia, and by some American communities, noted Mihnea Tanasescu, writing for the Conversation.

The tribe’s perspective was explained to the Guardian by its lead negotiator, Gerrard Albert.

“We consider the river an ancestor and always have,” Albert said. “We have fought to find an approximation in law so that all others can understand that from our perspective treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as in indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management.”

But that could be just the beginning.

“It is a critical precedent for acknowledging the Rights of Nature in legal systems around the world,” Kayla DeVault reported for YES! Magazine. Others are advancing this perspective, DeVault wrote: “In response to the Standing Rock Sioux battle against the Dakota Access pipeline, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin amended its constitution to include the Rights of Nature. This is the first time a North American tribe has used a Western legal framework to adopt such laws. Some American municipalities have protected their watersheds against fracking by invoking Rights of Nature.” “[If the New Zealand Whanganui River settlement] was able to correct the gap in Western and indigenous paradigms in New Zealand, surely a similar effort to protect the Missouri River could be produced for the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River nations by the American government,” DeVault wrote.

The same could be done with a wide range of other environmental justice disputes involving Native American tribes.

Tanasescu described the broader sweep of recent developments in the “rights of nature,” noting that significant problems have resulted from the lack of specific guardianship provisions, which are integral to the Whanganui River law.

“By granting natural

entities personhood one by one and assigning them specific guardians, over time New Zealand could drastically change an ossified legal system that still sees oceans, mountains and forests primarily as property, guaranteeing nature its day in court,” Tanasescu concluded.

“A few corporate media outlets have covered the New Zealand case and subsequent decisions in India,” Project Censored noted. “However, these reports have not provided the depth of coverage found in the independent press or addressed how legal decisions in other countries might provide models for the United States.”

10) FBI Racially Profiling “Black Identity Extremists” At the same time that white supremacists were preparing for the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville, which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer in August 2017, the FBI’s counterterrorism division produced an intelligence assessment warning of a very different—though actually non-existent—threat: “Black Identity Extremists.” The report appeared to be the first time the term had been used to identify a movement, according to Foreign Policy magazine, which broke the story.

“But former government officials and legal experts said no such movement exists, and some expressed concern that the term is part of a politically motivated effort to find an equivalent threat to white supremacists,” Foreign Policy reported.

“The use of terms like ‘black identity extremists’ is part of a long-standing FBI attempt to define a movement where none exists,” said former FBI agent Mike German, who now works for the Brennan Center for Justice. “Basically, it’s black people who scare them.”

“It’s classic Hoover-style labeling with little bit of maliciousness and euphemism wrapped up together,” said William Maxwell, a Washington University professor working on a book about FBI monitoring of black writers.

“The language—black identity extremist—strikes me as weird and really a continuation of the worst of Hoover’s past.”

“There is a long tradition of the FBI targeting black activists and this is not surprising,” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson told Foreign Policy.

A former homeland security official told them that carelessly connecting unrelated groups will make it harder for law enforcement to identify real threats. “It’s so convoluted—it’s compromising officer safety, the former official said.”

“The corporate media [has] covered the FBI report on ‘black identity extremists’ in narrow or misleading ways,” notes Project Censored, citing examples from the New York Times, Fox News and NBC News.

“Coverage like this both draws focus away from the active white supremacist movement and feeds the hate and fear on which such a movement thrives.”

FRI. OCTOBER 12

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

SWIRLIES MUSIC

Shoegaze’s influential band looks back with advice in tow

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN Over the course of the 28 years Swirlies has been active, the shoegaze band hasn’t slowed its roll. Not only is the band still releasing new music, like this year’s new 12” EP Magic Strop: Tonight, and still going on tour—including the tour it’s on right now with Nothing, which stops at the Sinclair this week—but the band is still giving everything else its all on top of it. That ethos is what’s to pinpoint for Swirlies’ massive influence—an impact that continues to grow as time goes on.

The Boston shoegaze band got its start back in 1990 when founding members Damon Tutunjian and Seana Carmody quickly realized the Go-Go’s cover band they intended to start (called Raspberry Bang) couldn’t contain the original music they were drumming up in the process. As students and residents of the area, all the members of Swirlies were embedded in the local music scene. A few years later, they had albums like What To Do About Them and Blonder Tongue Audio Baton under their belt, as well as various record label deals and a steady cult following.

These days, the official Swirlies lineup consists of Tutunjian on vocals and guitar, Deborah Warfield on vocals and guitar, Adam Pierce on drums, Andy Bernick (who can’t head out on tour with them), and Elliott Malvas on guitar. Together, they’re bringing their famed shoegaze sound around for generations old and new to fall in love with it. But their most recent tours have been the result of younger artists reaching out and asking them to go on tour with them. That’s what happened with this current tour, where Philly’s blisteringly loud shoegaze band Nothing reached out to Swirlies to see if they would join them on tour.

As the veteran act has seen a lot in their time on the road, we asked them for advice for younger bands.

The result was a slew of answers that are as much an insightful peek into the early ’90s struggle as they are advice worth framing on your wall to reflect on whenever you hit a musical roadblock of your own.

DON’T LET OTHERS STOP YOUR CREATIVITY “When we were starting out, people were always telling us we were taking the wrong approach,” says Tutunjian. “We stuck to what we wanted to do and never released material we weren’t completely happy with or wasn’t like what we imagined it would sound like. Bands should strive to always release work they’re happy with themselves. Pay attention to the details. Do it the way you want. You don’t have to cave to the suggestions of bigger people, like a studio engineer or a label.”

CHANGE YOUR GEAR “I played one guitar from the band’s inception on through to the early 2000s,” says Tutunjian. “The same guitar. I just never thought to get a new one. That’s great because you learn to get a lot out of it, you know? I had to get creative. But once I tried using a new one way later, I realized how much I had been missing, how many

different sounds you can get just from a slightly different guitar.”

SHAPE YOUR LIVE SOUND TO A T “I’ve known [sound engineer] Dan Gonzales from playing shows at Great Scott [where he runs the soundboard], so it’s cool getting to bring him on tour,” says Warfield. “He’s so great at what he does. One day we decided to ask him to go on tour with us, to make sure we could sound like that every night.”

EMBRACE ONLINE NETWORKING “We used to demo everything on a four-track. Trying to facilitate songwriting over long distance was so hard because of it,” says Tutunjian. “Andy lived far away, so it was tricky to make better use of time to get songwriting done than we do now. It was really important to play shows that had some sort of stature so you could eventually play to a label and maybe get a single out on that label. It was a different type of social networking.

Today, that takes a different shape. The actual shows felt even more important than they do now.”

READ THE LABEL’S FINE PRINT “Be careful signing your rights to a label,” says Tutunjian. “We signed everything away forever to Taang!

They own it all and all of my publishing. I gave it away for maybe $1,000 back then. To be fair, I was 19 and the rest of the band thought it was the best decision. And the label was very supportive at the beginning, too, including certain staffers who put their heart into doing PR, but eventually things change. It’s tricky because the label is taking a chance on you and they want to make a profit off you, so you don’t want to let them down. But you need to set up boundaries. Don’t sign everything away.

But at some point you want to retain ownership of your masters and recordings. Maybe 10 years is fair? You have to think about how long is long enough for a label PHOTO BY BEN STAS to pursue what they want with your music.

What’s a fair timeframe

for them to make a profit? But never give away your publishing rights, because publishing, together with master rights, is a solid source of income. I tell my friends to avoid 360 deals if they can. There are lots of blogs on this that will be way more informative than what I’ve said, but this is my two cents. Just don’t give anything away forever. Try to limit your giveaway periods to a reasonable timeframe.”

IF YOU KEEP PASSING THE TORCH, EVENTUALLY IT RETURNS “The guys in Nothing said that they were really big fans,” says Warfield. “Just being a little bit older and feeling like there’s a gap between generations, sometimes you can feel unseen in a way. But then things like this happen, where they invited us on tour, which is really cool. You have to remember to let things cycle as they do.”

“It’s the first tour in a long time where we’ve gotten to play with bands where every single one wowed us,” adds Tutunjian. “Everyone is incredibly nice and supportive of one another. It reminds me of the early ’90s when we used to play with Velocity Girl and Lilys, or with Boston bands like Madbox and Kudgel. We love being asked to go on tour, because it means we get to play to people who don’t often know our music, and that’s eventually what you need to do. Our audiences tend to be older most times. So this is exciting and flattering, and we’re very thankful.”

>> NOTHING, SWIRLIES, BIG BITE, SMUT. SUN 10.7. THE SINCLAIR, 52 CHURCH ST., CAMBRIDGE. 6:30PM/18+/$16. SINCLAIRCAMBRIDGE.COM

MUSIC EVENTS THU 10.04

FRI 10.05

SAT 10.06

[The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 8pm/18+/$25. sinclaircambridge.com]

[Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm. Ave., Allston. 8pm/18+/$32. crossroadspresents.com]

[Lilypad Inman, 1353 Cambridge St., Cambridge.

10pm/all ages/$12. lilypadinman.com]

OVERLY VERBOSE EMO VETERANS MEWITHOUTYOU + JOAN OF ARC + HURRY

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A BIG VOICE WANDERING CAT POWER + WILLIS EARL BEAL

DIGBOSTON.COM

CHICAGO’S FINEST ART ROCK WEIRDOS NNAMDI OGBONNAYA + OPTIONS + PET FOX

TUE 10.09

EXPERIMENTAL SYNTHS AND PERCUSSION WIZARDRY OREN AMBARCHI + WILL GUTHRIE + RETRIBUTION BODY

[SMFA Anderson Hall, 230 The Fenway, Boston. 8pm/ all ages/$15. nonevent.org]

TUE 10.09

WED 10.10

[O’Brien’s Pub, 3 Harvard Ave., Allston. 8pm/21+/$12. obrienspubboston.com]

[Royale Boston, 279 Tremont St., Boston. 7pm/all ages/$20. royaleboston. com]

FALL IN LOVE WITH SINGAPORE HARDCORE SIAL + ORION + OPTION + CRISIS ACTORS

PUT A LITTLE POP IN YOUR PUNK JOYCE MANOR + VUNDABAR + BIG EYES

WHEEL OF TUNES

GOUGE AWAY

Sugary desserts and spooky experiences

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

PHOTO COURTESY OF GOUGE AWAY The newest album from Florida hardcore band Gouge Away will knock you on your feet from the very first song and keep you sitting there, shocked, until the closing number. To be fair, you shouldn’t have expected anything less from the band.

On this year’s standout Burnt Sugar, Gouge Away hurl themselves hard into all things intense. That doesn’t mean the album is a front to back hardcore record—in various songs, the band turns towards alt-rock riffs or softer production for a less traditional take—as much as it means the band isn’t wasting time. Bandleader Christina Michelle tackles tough topics in her words that leave her lips like tiny threats, each line stacking on top of the one before it to create a menacing sound. It’s angry and uncompromising, the type of record that you want to hear at a time when every news headline makes you want to scream. That’s egged on by the album’s coproducers, Deafheaven collaborator Jack Shirley and Jeremy Bolm of Touché Amoré, who give Gouge Away the glean they’ve earned over the last few years giving it their all at shows.

To get to know the friendly personalities behind the tough exterior that is Gouge Away, we interviewed Christina Michelle for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask musicians questions inspired by their song titles. With Burnt Sugar as the prompt, her answers are vivid and honest—qualities that will make themselves known in her lyrics when the band headlines Hardcore Stadium, AKA the Cambridge Elks Lodge, this Wednesday.

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MASTERCLASS & TASTING

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October 4 Hyatt Regency Boston thewhiskyextravaganza.com

1. “Only Friend”

Who is the one friend you could share a room with and never get annoyed at them?

Whose room would you be sharing: yours or theirs? I’m thinking like a college-style roommate, only now, at your current age and place.

That’s so hard. I have a few people I wouldn’t mind living with in a roommate situation, but sharing a room makes it so much harder! I think probably my friend, Violet. It’s hard to tell because they live in LA while I live in Florida, so maybe they come to mind just because they’re the farthest away out of all my friends haha. Violet has always been someone who’s honest and direct, but in a respectful way, which I love. They are super caring and I don’t think they would ever do anything to bother me or anyone intentionally. I can talk to Violet about anything without judgement, and I don’t think we’d ever want to kill each other.

2. “Fed Up”

What’s something in music or the music industry that you’re currently fed up with?

Being compared to other bands just because they have female vocalists is the absolute worst. We get compared to stuff that we would never be compared to if the vocalists were all men. Walls of Jericho? For real? People assume I’m the frontwoman for so many bands and I’m just like, you realize that we’re not even from the same state, right? There was this huge thing once where even people who liked us thought we were this band No Right from San Francisco. Even worse, is when people try to pit us against each other by having to compare us and decide which band is better. Not only are we compared just for being women, but apparently people need there to be only one female-fronted band instead of us all existing together.

3. “Slow Down”

When you’re in public and are feeling incredibly overwhelmed, what do you do to help yourself calm down?

I’ll hide out in a bathroom. That’s usually my go-to on tour. We’re always having to share small spaces and sometimes we all just need a personal break. When I’m able to, I’ll take my time in the bathroom to get some much-needed quiet time.

Read the rest of the article at Digboston.com >>CULTURE ABUSE, GOUGE AWAY, BITTERMELON. WED 10.10. HARDCORE STADIUM, 55 BISHOP ALLEN DR., CAMBRIDGE. 7PM/ALL AGES/$15. TRIPLEBRECORDS.LIMITEDRUN.COM

experience local art !

Sat & Sun, October 13 & 14, 2018 GALLERIES: » Out of the Blue Too

STUDIOS

14 Harvard Avenue, Allston

noon–6 pm each day

» Extension Gallery

156 Harvard Avenue (ABOVE ORCHARD SKATE SHOP)

119 Braintree Street

Featuring 40+ local artists: Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Photography, Jewelry, Mixed-media, Clothing, Light Sculpture, Graphic design, Candles, Fiber art, Ceramics, crafts AND MORE!

» Casa Caña

1234 Soldiers Field Road, Lower Allston

POP-UP PERFORMANCES: (SATURDAY ONLY)

» The Grove

Public park across from 219 Western Avenue, Lower Allston

Plus, live musical performances

» Ross Miller’s Studio

Designers Circus, 1 Braintree Street

OTHER HAPPENINGS: » Future Forecast: A Slow Fashion Exchange

Connecting women designer craftspeople to women from around the world

107 Franklin Street, Lower Allston

Zone 3, 267 Western Avenue, Lower Allston

» Stingray Body Art SHOWCASING LOCAL ARTISTS 384 Cambridge Street, Allston

» Boston Martial Arts Center MARTIAL ARTS DEMONSTRATIONS

161 Harvard Avenue, Allston and more!

Visit Allstonopenstudios.com NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

THEATER REVIEWS ARTS

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

TWO THINGS WICKED THIS WAY COME Macbeth at Actors’ Shakespeare Project

This new season at Actors’ Shakespeare Project—the first under artistic director Christopher V. Edwards, who took over from Allyn Burrows last year—is a welcome change of pace for the troupe that has of late been presenting, well, mostly Shakespeare.

Edwards seems intent on looking forward, though, and his breath of fresh air is one of the things I’m most looking forward to this season. Opening this winter is Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem, and next summer ASP will present one of the most produced plays of the year, Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice. Sandwiched in between them will be Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a co-production with the Lyric Stage Company, the season’s only true Shakespeare play.

I say “true Shakespeare” because although ASP has just opened its season with Macbeth, it boasts a new modern verse translation by Migdalia Cruz. Commissioned as a part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! festival, which sought to enlist a diverse group of playwrights to adapt 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare into contemporary modern English, Macbeth will run in repertory with Bill Cain’s Equivocation, which opens Oct 11.

The language utilized by this translation is modern by Shakespearean standards but certainly not our own, and it’s still in verse, so don’t expect contemporary dialogue. It isn’t so much a reimagining of Macbeth as it is a tweaking: An estimated 80 percent of the original language remains.

Thus, it never fully registers as anything truly modern or truly Shakespearean. If we are to be seeing a modern verse translation of Macbeth, why not make it truly modern?

(Whether that was a parameter of the festival or of Cruz, I don’t know).

While Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s mission is noble (it has enlisted an impressive number of nonwhite, nonmale playwrights), this Macbeth feels more like an academic exercise in translation and dramaturgy than a worthwhile theatrical experiment.

The verse may be modern, and the cast is wonderfully diverse, but for all that is contemporary about the mission, this production, attractively staged but visionlessly directed by Dawn M. Simmons, doesn’t capitalize on the opportunity to make this a Macbeth for 2018.

A large pentagram made of sticks looms large over the stage (designed by Jon Savage), which is, in this instance, on and around the church sanctuary. It is three witches, after all, whose premonition helps to propel Macbeth and his ambitious wife on their bloody ascent. Although this giant symbol hangs above the action and the witches here are outfitted in what looks to be a kind of tribal pagan garb (designed by Rachel Padula-Shufelt), it never feels bound to the story in any real way, and it never quite seems like something truly evil is working behind the scenes.

The story of Macbeth is not as convoluted as most of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, but I’m sorry to say that I was regularly confused by what was happening, which can be partially attributed to the fact that it is difficult to fully grasp time and place. The lighting (by Laura Hildebrand) shifts a bit between locales and gives the production a whole lot of atmosphere (aided by Elizabeth Cahill’s sound design), but it is otherwise hard to tell exactly where we are.

Adding to the confusion is that some actors play three or four roles, sometimes back to back and with little change in their performance, which is needlessly problematic.

There are good performances, courtesy of reliable Boston staples Steven Barkhimer, Ed Hoopman, and Maurice Parent, but the brutally ambitious Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, played by Nael Nacer and Paige Clark, are inadequately rendered.

Macbeth says a lot about the ways in which ambition can corrode the conscience and about the fine line between

being a leader and a tyrant, two things that Americans know a little something about these days. If only this production knew was it was trying to say.

MACBETH. THROUGH 11.11 AT ACTORS’ SHAKESPEARE PROJECT AT UNITED PARISH, 210 HARVARD ST., BROOKLINE. ACTORSSHAKESPEAREPROJECT.ORG

Jekyll & Hyde at North Shore Music Theatre

The musical theater elite turned their noses up at Jekyll & Hyde when it premiered on Broadway in 1997 and, well, we’re still doing it now two decades later, even if Frank Wildhorn’s poperatic score has become something of a guilty pleasure.

Wildhorn, whose personal motto might be “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try again” (not one of his musicals have ever found financial or critical success), can write a decent medley, but Jekyll & Hyde is bogged down by a lousy book and inane lyrics, both courtesy of Leslie Bricusse.

It’s a campy affair that works best when it doesn’t treat the material too preciously. The original production was ohso-serious, something that the last Broadway revival (which starred Constantine Maroulis and Deborah Cox) totally avoided. Maroulis and Cox both gave credible performances in a production that played up the campiness of the musical at every turn. It played like a rock concert, and although the musical still didn’t quite work, it was damn entertaining.

Maroulis, a Tony-nominated actor and American Idol finalist, is reprising his roles of the driven scientist, Henry Jekyll, and his deranged other half, Edward Hyde, in another all-white production at North Shore Music Theatre directed

by Broadway’s original Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Cuccioli.

It isn’t surprising, then, that Cuccioli’s production adopts more of the original’s seriousness than the revival’s camp. And Maroulis has, in turn, toned down his performance to match.

But Maroulis is still great in the role, and this time he is joined by fellow American Idol alum Diana DeGarmo who, under about 12 pounds of hair, sings the hell out of Wildhorn’s anthemic score. But the musical itself is still rather bad and Cuccioli makes no major gains toward glossing over that.

Kelli Barclay’s chaotic choreography doesn’t help matters, and some of the show’s heart is neutered by Tess Primack, who plays Jekyll’s fiance, Emma, with a now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t accent and a voice that veers too often toward shrill.

Jekyll & Hyde may be many things, but I must admit, it’s never boring. And for all of this production’s clunkiness, there’s a lot to recommend in Maroulis and DeGarmo’s performances.

JEKYLL & HYDE. THROUGH 10.7 AT NORTH SHORE MUSIC THEATRE, 62 DUNHAM RD., BEVERLY. NSMT.ORG

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CHARLESGATE CONFIDENTIAL BOOKS

A multigenerational Commonwealth caper fit for Stephen King

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

It’s weird, I didn’t have a detective wall chart or anything like that, but I did want it to be a crime story—I wasn’t interested in writing a ghost story.

Some kind of big crime that would set everything off in the ’40s, then would reverberate through to the present day.

When I was trying to think of what the biggest crime would be, I thought robbing Fenway Park, and then it dawned on me that it had been done [in Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves, the book later turned into the Ben Affleck movie The Town].

The Gardner heist happened while I was in school here, though. I was going to completely fictionalize it— make up the name of the museum, and the paintings and everything—and then I just thought to pull it out the ’90s and stick it in the ’40s, when security would have been even worse since they didn’t have cameras.

Every five or so years, much media and subsequently general attention falls upon the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or more specifically the priceless works of art that disappeared from the place making for the biggest caper in Hub history. This go-round, the true-crime podcast Last Seen, a joint foray into the case from WBUR and the Boston Globe, is taking a fresh new crack at it, while first-time author Scott Von Doviak took another route completely and imagined the whole saga from scratch.

In his kickass new release on Hard Case Crime, Von Doviak paints pulp tales that are inspired by three eras—the 1940s, the 1980s, and the 2010s—in order to weave a unique fiction about the elusive Gardner paintings. Charlesgate Confidential draws on the writer’s own time in Boston at Emerson College, during which he actually lived in one of the buildings where his story takes place, and uses local lore and culture as a tapestry throughout.

There are many books about this city and its checkered past—fiction and nonfiction, entertaining and otherwise. Von Doviak’s work stands out dramatically, not only for its clever time-hopping, but for its sexy, loaded language and ability to illustrate the city’s underbelly then and now.

We sat with the author at the Little Donkey in Cambridge last time he was in town to ask about this massive rookie feat, which already caught some major props (and a book jacket blurb) from the legend himself, fellow Hard Case writer Stephen King.

Do you have a lot of Boston connections?

I grew up in Maine, then I went to Emerson and studied film. The actual dorm in the book, the Charlesgate, was the dorm I lived in for several years.

It was opened as a hotel in the 1890s, then fell on hard times in the depression when the mob took it over—I ran with that idea.

What were the big rumors surrounding the place back when you were a student?

We were always told that Eugene O’Neill had died in the building. That wasn’t true—he died in a BU

dorm down the street that had been a hotel back in the ’40s. There was a long list of stuff that wasn’t allowed because the wiring was so bad, and also Ouija boards were banned in the dorm—I don’t think I ever saw it in writing, but it was generally accepted that it wasn’t allowed [because the place was so spooky].

Were you writing at the time?

I wrote a little for the Berkeley Beacon, the school paper. I used that in the book too. After that I went out to LA and was pursuing screenwriting, and I just had a series of bad showbusiness jaunts. I moved to Austin, and around the late ’90s I started writing movie reviews for an online site, then this guy at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram saw them and needed another film critic. So I started doing that and did 10 years for the paper.

They usually had me on the movies they didn’t want to do, which was good because you could really hone your writing if you have a bad movie to write about.

How long had you been out of Boston by the time that you decided to write a novel about Boston?

The last time I lived here was 1993. But that period always stuck with me, and the building and the history were interesting to me.

Did you start with the concept of writing in three eras? What’s the preparation for that? What did you do for research?

I found a lot of articles online, but one summer when I was up here I went to the Boston Public Library and dug around there too.

NEWS TO US

What was important for you to get into the ’40s, mindset-wise?

I tried in terms of dialogue for people to speak [the appropriate way], so guys in the ’40s talk like they are in the ’40s. That was the idea anyway. It was a lot of film noir stuff I was drawing on. … I thought that was my strength—somebody else can describe a room for five pages, but not me.

How does a first-time fiction writer land at such a significant imprint? How did it all come together?

I don’t know—the publisher told me that he hadn’t ever done it before. I initially had an agent from my first nonfiction book. I didn’t even know if he remembered me, but I sent it to him and he liked it. He only sent it to the top five publishers, though, then decided that he is out of the fiction game. And so, after trying around with a few more agents, I just sent an email to Hard Case Crime, where I really thought it belonged, and they said, “Yeah, send it to me.” A week later I got a huge long email and they said that they were going to publish it. That was in April of last year.

And how does one get blurbed by Stephen King?

He actually wrote the first Hard Case Crime book. [The publisher] approached him and actually just wanted a blurb [for an earlier book], and Stephen King wrote him a whole book instead. They’re friendly— [King] has since done a second book with [Hard Case]—and they said they were just going to send [Charlesgate Confidential] to him to see if he liked it. And then I’m just sitting at a bar one day and I look at my phone and it says, Stephen King has followed you on Twitter. I didn’t think he followed it to tell me I sucked, and as it turned out he wound up tweeting about it a few times.

It’s all still pretty hard to believe.

Scott will read from Charlesgate Confidential at the Harvard Coop in Cambridge on 10.12 and at Books on the Square in Providence on 10.13. For more information visit hardcasecrime.com.

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ALASKA FILM

Jeremy Saulnier’s latest film (sort of) goes West

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

FROM THE SET OF HOLD THE DARK. IMAGES COURTESY NETFLIX.

The influence of master filmmaker Sergio Leone casts a long shadow over Hold the Dark [2018]. It’s there in the narrative, which like A Fistful of Dollars [1964] and For a Few Dollars More [1965] follows a skilled loner who finds himself caught in the middle of a life-or-death family conflict. It’s there in the film’s thematic interests, which are similarly preoccupied with the varying moral codes held by a selection of stone-cold killers, and with the larger existential implications that come along with them. In visual terms Hold the Dark is once again Leonesque, wide and long, with the landscape ever present, even flanking the edges of the close-ups. And one especially feels the influence in the new film’s structure, which parcels out the introduction of each character one by one, finding them in separate locales before they’re all brought together, à la The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [1967] and Once Upon a Time in the West [1968]. The setting of Hold the Dark is a rural Alaskan community, snowbound, circa 2004, but really it’s stationed right next to Leone’s sand-and-gravel spaghetti westerns.

As for those characters, and those introductory segments: In the first one, we see the landscape, then a pack of wolves, then a young boy, and then his mother, Medora Sloane (Riley Keough). Next scene introduces Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), published author and noted wolf expert, who recently got a letter from Medora—she writes pleadingly, saying her child was killed by the wolves and that she wants Core to come to Alaska and kill them back on her behalf. He travels to her rural locale, they spend a day together, fade out, and then fade back in on the other side of the world, in Iraq, where Medora’s husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) is serving with the US military. The first time he’s on screen, Vernon dispassionately kills a couple of so-called enemies (“You’re a real meat-eater, Sloane”), then happens upon the ongoing rape of an Iraqi woman by a US soldier, a crime that he stops by stabbing the soldier half to death (he leaves the other half for the woman). That last action is preceded by a long buildup, Vernon creeping >> HOLD THE DARK IS AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON NETFLIX. 20

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through fabrics on a clothesline as he prepares himself for the slaughter to follow—an introduction fit for a Lee Van Cleef character, and probably the most explicitly Leonesque note in the movie.

At least that’s how it plays on screen. Hold the Dark originated as a novel by the Boston-based author William Giraldi, one that was decidedly not in thrall to the forefathers of genre cinema; said novel, ecstatically verbose and wretchedly violent, might name Cormac McCarthy its godfather instead. The book was adapted for the screen by Macon Blair and then directed by Jeremy Saulnier, two filmmakers who’ve basically made their reputation on depictions of wretched violence.

Saulnier’s prior films include Murder Party [2007], a satire of Bushwick hipster culture that took great pleasure in the gruesome kills it depicted, and Blue Ruin [2013], a morose sins-of-the-father allegory-slash-bloody revenge psychodrama that staged a bunch of elaborate death scenes while simultaneously tsk-tsking anyone who might enjoy them. Blue Ruin was often compared to another landmark of genre cinema, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple [1984], from which Saulnier’s film might’ve taken its eye-for-an-eye-by-way-of-ironic-twists narrative—but not its sterling wit, nor its note-perfect rhythm, nor its… Anyway, if Blue Ruin lines up with Blood Simple on the Saulnier/Coen scale, I suppose Hold the Dark would be paired with their McCarthy adaptation, No Country for Old Men, and Hold the Dark comes up quite wanting against that Coen joint, much as it obviously comes up wanting next to Leone’s masterpieces.

Saulnier’s feature presents a narrative that’s at once oppressively serious and objectively ridiculous, and he doesn’t possess the sort of sensibility needed to scale those particular mountains.

Yet sometimes imitation is all you need. I did appreciate, for instance, the way Hold the Dark constantly builds outward in unexpected directions. Once Vernon returns, Medora has disappeared, and we learn that their child was killed by a person, not a wolf, and that

leads to a series of sudden-turn developments in terms of both narrative and genre mode. Vernon partners up with his longtime friend Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope), Core partners up with local police Chief Donald Marium (James Badge Dale), and everybody goes in search of Medora, with the former duo killing pretty much anybody who so much as steps in their direction.

Eventually one realizes that Hold the Dark has suddenly taken on the vernacular of slasher horror movies: Vernon begins to don a mask, and various different sequences watch him slowly approach his next victim with knife in hand, usually toying with them for a minute before he cuts them up. If the film’s exterior compositions recall westerns, these interior stalk-and-stab moments are more like Halloween [1978].

Halloween director John Carpenter is of course in the Leone film lineage himself, and Saulnier is by no means the first American filmmaker to bind horror movie language to the western genre. When speaking of that particular mix, one would of course have to mention Quentin Tarantino and The Hateful Eight [2015], which came out just a few months before the release of Saulnier’s best work to date, Green Room [2016]. Tarantino, like Saulnier, has an eye for the visual possibilities of grotesque violence. But Tarantino, like Leone, unlike Saulnier, appreciates the buildup as much as the payoff. A Leone gunfight, it should be said, only spends a few seconds on the gunshot itself—the rest is on the faces, in the music, on the eyes. And yes, it’s terribly unfair of me to be holding a contemporary genre filmmaker up against an enduring master artist, but the comparison reveals a lot about Hold the Dark; much like Hold the Dark reveals a lot about itself by selecting as its centerpiece a nearly 10-minute action sequence featuring Cheeon utterly massacring a group of “very green” Alaskan policeman, raining down on them from the top perch of his home with a machine gun, with the film emphasizing every last squib, every last scream, every single entry wound.

Saulnier’s predilection for on-screen violence is something he’s spoken about openly during interviews for each of his movies, including in one with DigBoston published after the release of Green Room. “My influences are Rob Bottin, and Rick Baker, and Tom Savini,” Saulnier told me, citing the special effects artists behind some of the more traumatizing screen images of the past 50 years. This is more than apparent during that extended shootout in Hold the Dark, where each character’s injuries are mortifying in their specificity and disgustingly tactile in their appearance. The reason I think Green Room is the director’s most successful work is because it revels in this very obsession with flesh on screen for the entirety of its runtime—the film is a punks vs skinheads exploitation movie where randomness and luck reign supreme, and where each horrible injury is covered with close-ups that almost seem entranced by the bloody special effects they document. It makes no apologies for the exact artistic impulses that Blue Ruin seeks to pathologize, and no apologies for the same impulses that this latest film seeks to render grandiose. Hold the Dark isn’t necessarily a bad film, really, more just a bad fit: Saulnier’s not the artist to mythologize animal behavior, for his eye is on the physical, the flesh, instead looking plainly and directly and even leeringly at all the carnage such behavior leaves behind.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

NEEDS & DEEDS SAVAGE LOVE

COMEDY EVENTS

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

THU 10.04 - SAT 10.07

CRAIG SHOEMAKER @ LAUGH BOSTON

Is it even possible for a couple that stopped having sex to start back up again? My girlfriend and I (we’re both women) have been together for four years, and we haven’t had sex for two. I thought the sex was good before it stopped, but apparently she was going through the motions. She’s a sex worker, and it took her a while to figure out she was not being present, and she wanted to stop having sex with me until she could figure out how to change that. I get that and respect it. We have an open relationship, so I started having more sex with other people. And while it’s fun, I do find myself wishing I could have sex with someone I actually care about—and I only care about her. She says she wants to start having sex with me again, but we don’t really know how to do that. Everything is kind of terrifying and awkward. She said it’s hard to go from sex with zero intimacy into sex with the intimacy turned up to 11. We’re very romantic with each other, and there are other forms of physical affection like kisses and snuggling, but no making out or humping. I love her more than I knew I could love a person, and if we never do figure out how to have sex together, I’ll still stay with her. But for two people who are both highly sexual and want to have sex with each other, we sure are perplexed at how to make this work.

Sex Or Romance Dilemma “Let’s cut to the chase: Yes, it is possible for a couple that has stopped having sex to start having it again,” said Dr. Lori Brotto, a clinical psychologist and a sex researcher at the University of British Columbia.

You ended on a note of despair, SORD, but Brotto sees two good reasons for hope: You and your girlfriend are completely open and honest with each other, and you’re committed to staying together whether or not the sex resumes. Your communication skills and that rock-solid commitment—neither of you are going anywhere—are the bedrock on which you can rebuild your sex life.

“There are two aspects of SORD’s question that jump out at me: One, the reference to wanting to be present for sex, and two, the description of the situation as terrifying and awkward,” said Brotto. “SORD’s girlfriend likely perfected the practice of ‘going elsewhere’ during sex while at work, which meant that it became almost automatic for her to do this while having sex in her relationship. This is classic mindlessness, and it is why mindfulness—the state of full awareness to the present moment in a kind and compassionate way—may be a tool for her to consider implementing.”

Mindfulness is the subject of Brotto’s new book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire.

“Mindfulness has a long history in Buddhist meditation, and it allowed monks to sit with their present experience, including pain and suffering, for hours or days—or sometimes weeks and months,” said Dr. Brotto. “In more recent years, mindfulness has been reconceptualized as a tool that anyone can use and benefit from. It doesn’t rely on having a Buddhist orientation or a cave to retreat to.”

So how does this ancient mindfulness stuff work where modern girl-on-girl sex is concerned?

“The practice is simple,” said Brotto. “It involves deliberately paying attention to sensations, sounds, and thoughts in the present moment—and noticing when the mind gets pulled elsewhere and then gently but firmly guiding it back. Mindfulness is also about not berating yourself for finding it challenging or judging yourself for the thoughts you have.”

“Suffice it to say,” she said, “there is an impressive body of research that supports the practice of mindful sex, and people who otherwise may believe that their minds are incapable of staying still can effectively learn to fully engage their attention to sex and the person(s) with whom they are having sex. It doesn’t matter if you are skeptical about whether mindfulness works or not—if you are willing to learn the skills and apply it to sex, you’re likely to benefit.”

Follow Dr. Brotto on Twitter @DrLoriBrotto.

On the Lovecast, are sugar babies sex workers?: savagelovecast. com

Craig Shoemaker is a modern renaissance man, with a show business career spanning over three decades as a comedian, actor, author, writer and producer. He was named Comedian of the Year at The American Comedy Awards on ABC and garnered two NATAS Emmy awards. His 90 minute stand up special Daditude, aired prime time on SHOWTIME Network and was on the front page on Netflix for several months. “Shoe’s” acting credits are extensive and wide ranging. Recently, he co-stars as Bandit in the critically acclaimed movie, Middle Man. He recurred as the character Wilson Gromling on NBC’s Parks & Recreation, and had a five episode run on The Bold & The Beautiful.

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | VARIOUS | $25-$29 THU 10.04

THURSDAY NIGHT SHOWCASE @ THE COMEDY STUDIO

Featuring: Valeria Dikovitskaya, Sean Rosa Donovan, Christa Weiss, Abhishek Shah, Michelle Sui, Corey Manning, Caitlin Arcand, Mike Roy Whitman, & Comic in Residence Laura Severse.

Hosted by Rick Jenkins

1 BOW MARKET WAY #23, SOMERVILLE | 8PM | $15 FRI 10.05

TRACY MORGAN @ THE WILBUR

Morgan has headlined across the country and abroad on various tours and festivals for his stand-up comedy. He was first introduced to television audiences in his role as “Hustleman” on the hit comedy series Martin. He went on to join Saturday Night Live in 1996 where he appeared for seven seasons and created such memorable characters as “Astronaut Jones” and “Brian Fellows.” After leaving SNL, Morgan went on to star in his own comedy series The Tracy Morgan Show and voiced “Spoonie Luv” on Comedy Central’s Crank Yankers. Additional film credits include: Cop Out, the remake of the British film Death at a Funeral, First Sunday opposite Ice Cube and Katt Williams, The Longest Yard opposite Adam Sandler, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Head of State, Son of No One, Why Stop Now and Fist Fight.

246 TREMONT ST, BOSTON | 7:30PM | $50 - $69.50 FRI 10.05 - SAT 10.06

JOSH DOLAN & CHRIS CARPENTER @ NICK’S COMEDY STOP

Join Josh Dolan and Chris Carpenter for a wild, weird and comedic experience. You’ve seen and heard Josh and Chris on stages throughout New England, WAAF, MTV, NESN, Esquire.com and more. Alongside The Queen Bee of Boston Comedy—the incomparable Christine Hurley, the trio promises to deliver a the ultimate Nick’s Comedy Stop takeover.

100 WARRENTON ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $20 FRI 10.05

AGAPÉ COMEDY NIGHT @ AGAPÉ BREWING COMMUNITY

Featuring: Jere Pilapil, Brandon Vallee, Carrie Ross, Terence Pennington, Will Martin, Alan Richardson, & Mark Gallagher.

Hosted by Nathan Burke

40 NEW WAY LANE, GLOUCESTER | 7:30PM | FREE SAT 10.06

SATURDAY NIGHT @ THE COMEDY STUDIO

Featuring: Sarah Blodgett, Reece Cotton, Drew Dunn, Wes Hazard, Andrew Mayer, & Comic in Residence Laura Severse.

Hosted by Rick Jenkins

1 BOW MARKET WAY #23, SOMERVILLE | 8PM | $15 MON 10.08

CITYSIDE COMEDY @ CITYSIDE IN CLEVELAND CIRCLE

Featuring: Katie Hannigan, Courtney Baka (Limestone Comedy Festival), Julia Prescott (Nickelodeon), Jose Mecall (High Plains Comedy Festival), Conor Delehanty (SF Sketchfest), Sam Ike, Anjan Biswas & more.

Hosted by Dan Alten

1960 BEACON ST., BOSTON | 8:30PM | FREE WED 10.10

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

730 MASS AVE., CAMBRIDGE | 8PM | FREE savagelovecast.com

22

10.04.18 - 10.11.18

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DIGBOSTON.COM

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…

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

9.13.19 THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

New Single "Habit" released Labor Day on Mediabase Billboard brianhutsonmusic.com NEWS TO US

FEATURE

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DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23

Bearing Witness A celebration of 10 years of arts and culture for social change Join us for a night of film, music and celebration as we look back on the past decade of the Transformative Culture Project!

All ticket sales go towards our youth and entrepreneur programming!!

Honoring Sarah Ann Shaw Boston's 1st Black Female Television Reporter

October 10th 6-9pm 121 High St. Fl 4 Boston MA 02110 www.bearingwitness.tcproject.org