DigBoston 12.27.18

DIGBOSTON.COM 12.27.18 - 01.03.19

COVER

HOMEBOY SANDMAN THE+ EDAN FUTURE IS OFFLINE LOOK AHEAD

MORE GAMBLING +WEED PLUS OTHER RESOLUTIONS

MUSIC: YEAR OF THE EP - MORE NINA CORCORAN FAVES

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BOWERY BOSTON WWW.BOWERYBOSTON.COM VOL 20 + ISSUE 52

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DEC 27, 2018 - JAN 03, 2019 BUSINESS PUBLISHER John Loftus ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone Jason Pramas SALES EXECUTIVES Victoria Botana Derick Freire Nate Homan Nicole Howe FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digboston.com

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, Sophia Higgins, Morgan Hume, Daniel Kaufman, Jillian Kravatz, Elvira Mora, Juan A. Ramirez, Jacob Schick

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ON THE COVER PHOTO OF HOMEBOY SANDMAN + EDAN BY CARL CORNELIUS. YOU CAN READ DIG EDITOR CHRIS FARAONE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE WONDER DUO IN THE FEATURE SECTION THIS WEEK AND CHECK THEM OUT LIVE AT ONCE IN SOMERVILLE ON FRI DEC 28.

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DEAR READER A RESOLUTION

I have one hell of a story to share whenever I meet an art aficionado or collector at a party. The short version goes like this: When I was working as a staff reporter for the Boston Phoenix around 2012, I spent a year identifying several hundred items that have been stolen out of the Massachusetts State House since the cornerstones were laid on Beacon Hill in 1795. I even tracked one of those items down—it’s apparently in storage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—but no one seems to care.

Sounds crazy, right? Why wouldn’t the state want to get the piece back? Frankly, I don’t know. Former Gov. Deval Patrick was allegedly angry with me for writing the critical story, and his minions refused to follow up. His replacement hasn’t been any better; I attempted to alert Gov. Charlie Baker about the situation in his first term, but his team wouldn’t return my emails or calls. Here’s a bit more background, from a follow-up I wrote for DigBoston in 2015: Amateur larceny probably accounts for most of what has vanished from the State House, keepsakes nonchalantly pocketed by lawmakers and legislative aides with sticky fingers. A select few robberies, however, resemble more the work of professional crooks, the likes of whom may have also swiped the bust of early public education advocate Charles Brooks, an ally of Horace Mann who helped modernize American pedagogy. …

The best proof that the sculpture in Los Angeles came from our State House is an auction record dating back to 1992. Though the identities of the seller and buyer are private, a marble bust of Brooks—perfectly resembling the item in question—was auctioned off by the Hub-based Grogan & Company for $6,000 on Dec 9, 1992. The following year, a marble bust of Brooks was donated to the LACMA. …

I compared an image of the work from LACMA’s catalogue to a photo from the 1920s that was snapped at the State House, and they appear to be identical—both with distinct marble characteristics right down to a signature spot on the base beside the subject’s birth year.

Since state leaders, LACMA directors, and even the Beacon Hill auction house that sold the Brooks bust have all stonewalled me over the past eight years, I have resolved to do whatever it takes (so long as it’s legal) to get the bust back for Mass in the new year. My investigation was initially inspired by the search for the stolen Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum paintings, and the excellent recent podcast series by the Boston Globe and WBUR about that heist, Last Seen, has spurred me back into action. I already have a call in to the bust’s LA-based owner, who lent Brooks to the LACMA, and have started trolling the museum on Twitter. On the Boston side, I’m even trying to track down the crook who stole it in the first place; as far as Los Angeles, I’ll be flying out there in the next few months, and I look forward to confronting LACMA officials in person.

Alternatively, they can simply give in now and return the piece of art. Either way, it will be back in the Commonwealth by this time next year.

Or bust.

CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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NEWS+OPINION

2019: WE HAVE 11 YEARS TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE APPARENT HORIZON

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

In last week’s column looking back at “2018: The Year in Global Warming,” I reviewed the dire threat posed to humanity and our environment by climate change, and concluded with the following: The big question for Bostonians and anyone else reading this: How do we go from this grim state of affairs to sparking the biggest social movement in human history to do what is necessary to hold global mean warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels by 2030? Preventing worst-case scenarios from happening to begin with.

This week, I will look forward at the coming year. And take a shot at answering my question.

My short take: I don’t know how we’re going to organize to even begin to build the needed social movement in 2019. I frankly think our chances for doing so by the above deadline are quite slim at the moment.

Still and all, we must try.

Our biggest obstacle to bringing such a social movement into being is the fact that most people in the advanced industrial nations responsible for global warming in the first place aren’t yet willing to change our daily lives in any significant way to stop the already inevitable warming from rising past 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Which is not to say that most individuals are responsible. We’re not. Members of the ruling class that controls the commanding heights of politics and the economy in advanced industrial societies are. They’re the ones who run the multinational corporations and governments responsible for burning most of the carbon—oil, coal, and gas—that has led to global warming. And they’re the ones who are profiting handsomely from that environment-despoiling burning.

Those powerful people have created the unsustainable culture that residents of countries like the US enjoy (to one degree or another depending on our position in the pyramid of class, race, sex, caste, and gender), and that many other people in poor countries now aspire to.

Be that as it may, it’s not going to be enough for just those those powerful people to act to stop global warming. It’s got to be all of us. The genie is out of the bottle. Everyone on the planet must act together. Rich or poor. Regardless of identity or social position.

Meaning that people in the advanced industrial nations of the global north are essentially asking billions of our less fortunate fellows the world over—who have not yet even made it to the economic level of a typical poor American—to forgo the many pleasant but carbon positive technological advances that have made our lives easier in the last many decades. Having never really enjoyed them before.

Yet here in the United States—and I think this is also true of other powerful countries like the UK, France, Germany, or Japan—the proverbial belly of the climate change beast, most of us have no intention of meeting people in such countries in the middle. Simplifying our lives, and making do with less stuff in the process. [China is somewhat of a different story. It’s a large and powerful nation, and is acting more strongly than other large countries to curb global warming. But it’s also currently the largest producer of greenhouse gases—and still has a long way to go to bring its population up to first world living standards. Putting it kind of on both sides of the fence I’m sketching here, so I’ll have to return to discussing its problems and promise another day.]

It’s tough enough that vast numbers of people will have to band together to force global elites to stop pushing political economic policies that kill the biosphere 4

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by 2030. But we’re also going to have to make significant sacrifices ourselves. Starting with getting rid of our carbon-burning vehicles and carbon-burning power plants. Yet who in countries like the US is going to be willing to do that? And who in the majority of humanity that has not yet had a chance to live their lives the way we’ve been living in advanced industrial economies since the 1960s is going to be willing to join us?

As Meena Raman, coordinator of the climate change program at Third World Network and honorary secretary of Friends of the Earth Malaysia, put it in a recent interview with Democracy Now: For the poor of the world, who had no contribution to emissions—for instance, large amounts of people in India are denied any access to energy—now they are being told that they have to reduce their carbon emissions. Now, these are people who emit nothing. They have to survive. They have to eat. They have to go to school. They have to have healthcare. But all this is not possible, because they don’t have access to energy. Now, we are saying that these people, who have very little contribution to any emissions, they are being asked to contribute to reducing emissions. I mean, it’s hypocritical, because the United States does not want to acknowledge that it is the largest historical emitter in the world. Now, you don’t have enough carbon space to allow countries like the United States to continue to emit.

You need the survival emissions for people who actually are able to transition and develop. And this is what the big fight is about.

So we can’t even talk about how to solve the innumerable problems involved with building a social movement that will be able to hold global warming to 1.5 C by 2030 without grappling with these fundamental issues. Despite the certainty that time has run so short for human civilization to act on climate change that we have to do both tremendously difficult things at the same time: change the culture of all the advanced industrial nations to accept living without the benefits of burning carbon, and then actually organize all the nations of the world to stop burning carbon within 11 years.

Now what exactly can a political columnist in one midsized city in the United States of late 2018 suggest that readers should do to extricate our entire species from that little puzzler?

I know what I’m supposed to say. I mean, heck, I say it all the time: “Do these five things to get the desired outcome.” Then: “Join this group or that group”... pointing to a couple of grassroots political organizations that are doing the Lord’s work on whatever issue I’m writing about in a particular week. Then, conclude on a hopeful note: “The groups may not be super great, but they’re the best we have. We will have to muddle through. Etcetera etcetera.”

But you all must understand that global warming is a terminal crisis orders of magnitude larger and more complex than any popular organization (or network of organizations) that currently exists can handle. And the way things are going we may not even be able to hold that warming to a global average of 3 C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century let alone 1.5 C by 2030.

Which will be nowhere near good enough to ensure that our civilization—let alone our gene pool—will survive very far past 2100.

This is not an instance of despondence or loss of faith on my part to discuss our predicament in such stark terms.

It’s just that people need to take our ecological situation more seriously immediately. There’s no more time to waste. And there is no way to sugar coat things: We need a culture shift in rich countries to prepare our populations to live more simply while continuing to advance technologically. And then we need humanity to move forward collectively to safeguard the future of the planetary environment and our species. Within a bit over a decade.

I’ll pick up this thread in the new year. But I’d like everyone reading this to think over what I’m laying on you. If you want some homework until I circle back to this subject, you all are welcome to help me think about: a) some activities that individuals can do to help push the desired cultural shift, b) some visionary organizations and incipient social movements people can imitate or join that look like they’re moving in some kind of right direction, and c) some wholly unrealistic policy prescriptions for those organizations and movements to strive for.

Because practical groups and realistic goals absolutely will not get us where we need to go.

My email, as ever, is execeditor@digboston.com.

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OUT COLD STATE WIRE

Boston has one of nation’s highest homeless rates

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New research shows that while homelessness in the United States may be down overall, it’s still rising in the most expensive rental markets. And Boston has one of the highest homeless rates.

Christopher Glynn, assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, is one of the lead authors of the national Zillow-sponsored study. The researchers analyzed how people’s share of spending on housing in each market correlates to homelessness—and Glynn said they found a specific economic tipping point.

“The thing that surprised us most was that, when a community exceeds 32 percent of its median income on its median housing cost, you see a sharp increase in the expected homeless rate in that community,” Glynn said.

They found that troubling combination of high housing costs and high rates of homelessness in Boston, among other places. The National Alliance to End Homelessness said on any given night, more than 6,000 people are homeless in Boston—and 17,000 are homeless statewide.

Glynn described the cities and regions with the highest homeless rates: “Communities on the West Coast and the four major metropolitan areas on the East Coast—so Boston; New York; Washington, DC; and Atlanta,” he said.

He pointed to Houston, Texas, as a model city for addressing housing needs, by combining housing with other social services.

“Houston has been very successful in reducing its homeless population for the last six or seven years,” Glynn said. “Houston has put a lot of emphasis on a program called Housing First. And they’ve been working to coordinate all their efforts across the city to be able to reduce the homeless population.”

The study was conducted in partnership with Zillow, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

A HART-LESS APOLOGY OPINION

On homophobic rants and the toxic hypermasculinity of black manhood

SAVE THE DATE 2019 Winter Gateway Speaker

APRIL RYAN

BY REV. IRENE MONROE While I will continue to argue that the AfricanAmerican community doesn’t have a patent on homophobia, it does, however, have a problem with it.

And comedian Kevin Hart is another glaring example of the malady.

Just days after taking the coveted post to host the 91st Academy Awards this month, Hart stepped down rather than offer an apology for his 2011 homophobic tweets.

“I chose to pass, I passed on the apology,” Hart said in a home video made for the public. “The reason why I passed is because I’ve addressed this several times. … I’m not going to continue to go back and tap into the days of old when I moved on and I’m in a completely different space in my life.”

As one who has purportedly evolved on LGBTQ issues, Hart squandered his elevated profile to educate the public about how his evolution came about. Although he’s now a crossover phenom, he still plays largely to a black audience—a demographic group, young, old, church, or unchurched, that’s still not completely woke to the deleterious effects of trans/homophobia on its community. It’s not easy for any person of African descent to be LGBTQ in our black communities, but our transgender brothers and sisters might feel the most discrimination.

The black trans death rate appears to be as meaningless to the larger black community as it is to the larger society. According to the Human Rights Campaign, the flagship organization for LGBTQ rights, in 2017, “advocates tracked at least 29 deaths of transgender people in the United States due to fatal violence, the most ever recorded.

These victims were killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers.”

Many trans people reside in black and Latinx communities, and their lives are in as much danger for “walking while trans” as they are for “walking while black or brown.”

While many in these communities will take to the streets in protest when a young unarmed presumed heterosexual African-American male has been shot and killed, people go dark when a trans death has occurred. And forget about their churches honoring the Transgender Day of Remembrance, an international event memorializing transgender people murdered because of their gender identities and expressions, like they do MLK Day or Black History Month.

It’s troubling that Hart chose to walk away from hosting the 2019 Academy Awards as an aggrieved victim rather than offer an apology, and it’s evident that he gleaned very little, if anything, from a similar incident that his pal Tracy Morgan instigated.

In 2011, Morgan went on a homophobic rant during a performance in Nashville, with “intended” jokes about LGBTQ people coming off as insulting jabs. Unlike Hart, Morgan publicly expressed his mea culpas as part and parcel of his forgiveness tour and even spoke out in support of LGBTQ equality.

Hart, like Morgan and many of us who are from communities of African descent, cannot escape the cultural, personal, interpersonal, and institutional indoctrinations in which homo/transphobia are constructed in our very makeup of being defined as black. The community’s expression of its intolerance of LGBTQ people is easily seen along gender lines; for example, sisters mouth off about us while brothers get both verbally and physically violent with us.

These homophobic rants are about a toxic hypermasculinity of black manhood.

I ask my brothers cultivating images of strong black men: Can the brotherhood also include the diversity of their sexual orientations and gender expression?

Some feel there’s a double standard when it comes to homo/transphobic statements blurted out by certain public figures and how the reactions to those compare to the outrage around seemingly similar racist statements. For example, who could forget the 2006 rant by Seinfeld star Michael Richards, whose repeated use of the N-word on stage basically cost him his career?

At the same time, many black comedians point out a double standard when it comes to white comics who make jokes that are homophobic with no backlash from the public. In defense of Hart, Nick Cannon reposted homophobic tweets from Chelsea Handler, Amy Schumer, and Sarah Silverman.

Some of us who live at the intersections of these communities will choose between standing with our black homophobic brothers and sisters versus standing with our racist white LGBTQ ones. I, however, choose to do neither. Not only to free myself from these “isms,” but to also give them the challenge to free themselves.

Correspondent and author April Ryan will visit Northeastern University as the third annual Winter Gateway Speaker to meet and talk with students, faculty, staff and members of the community.

Free and open to the public!

Friday, February 8, 2019 Northeastern University RSVP: northeastern.edu/ crossing For more information: 617-373-2555

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GRASS VEGAS TALKING JOINTS MEMO

From celeb nugs to LED light shows, we glimpsed the future of cannabis on our Mango Tango fandango

BY AIDEN GADGE I was barely one step out the door of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas when I saw a taxi wrapped in a MedMen ad zip away. I knew I had arrived.

The Los Angeles-based company splashed into Sin City in July of this year, and they’ve been advertising so much that your old Aunt Patty, fresh off her annual Vegas trip with the ladies, probably knows what’s up.

My driver’s only comment: “I don’t see a dime of it, so I don’t care much.” I suggested that he rent space on his clothing, like a NASCAR driver, but he scoffed. (Other drivers are in on the gambit and get a percentage or a flat-fee kickback for the business they deliver, like with strip clubs and casinos).

There’s signage everywhere; after all, this is Vegas.

Still, considering the prudish quarrels over billboards and such that unfolded in Mass before the first gram of legal pot was even sold here, it is a sight for stoned eyes.

Comparing legal cannabis in Nevada to what we have in Mass at this point is like comparing a heavyweight title fight to a brawl in a schoolyard; though the former only opened up for business in July 2017 (six months before Mass was supposed to start selling, a year before the rescheduled start date, and 18 months before our first rec dispensaries opened, for those keeping track), it’s already quite the boom state, with cannabis sales breaking records and passing projected estimates.

Having already checked out MedMen in LA a few months prior, I decided to see how other spots measure up. One driver suggested Reef Dispensaries, the behemoth by the strip that also operates more locations in Arizona and Nevada. According to Lyft, Reef is one of the most visited places in Vegas by their passengers, and they don’t seem to be kidding—as we approach the massive building, there’s a pickup/dropoff lane outside the business. It’s like an airport and apparently as busy, but with no security gates or machine gun-toting guards like I’ve seen at a lot of California dispensaries. I actually feel comfortable.

Once through the front doors, I got my ID checked by a jovial security duo and pointed to a queue for the budtenders. Posted at the front of the line was Martha, a rep from Shango Brands who gave me information on the company along with stickers and a Shango-branded Clipper lighter, my favorite. Shango, by the way, is the exclusive grower of Tommy Chong’s Choice buds, and this is something Mass consumers should prepare for— among other celeb items, I saw display cases with brands such as [Wiz] Khalifa Kush, which is grown by Reef’s grow op, Tryke.

The budtenders are there to dazzle you with smells and information and help you see what you’re going to bring home. I went with a few grams—one from each of the various pricing tiers. As it turns out, Khalifa Kush (at $25/gram including tax) turned out to be exceptional, what with its sweet-and-sour lemony pine taste and hard-hitting buzz. It kept me going, not heading for the couch, which is what you’re looking for in Vegas. Testing at 22.04 percent THC and packing significantly strong terpenes, it’s what Reef refers to as a diamond-tier bud.

I suggest it for anyone looking for serious flavor, though you can still get some quality nugs on a budget.

We passed through Planet 13, the new player aiming to eat the lunch of spots like Reef. Touted as a destination dispensary, with the interactive LED flooring, laser graffiti, and a flying colored orb show among other draws, the place is built to bring in tourists. There’s even a soon to be consumption-friendly cafe being built up front and a nightclub in the back awaiting expected to pass legislation.

After dropping my crew off at Planet 13, our driver pulled off to a separate area to collect his kickback while we stared at the big red branded globe. It’s all right in 8

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the shadow of Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, almost as if the decor is giving an enormous middle finger to the orange presidential turd it’s named for.

We then walked through the glass doors and into a gorgeous lobby, where we were greeted by a couple of receptionists who took our IDs. In Grass Vegas, by the way, your ticket doubles as a souvenir.

Thanks to Ivan, the gentleman who greeted us inside the retail area, I learned some of the Planet 13 backstory and got a whole bunch of questions answered about their extensive product selection. The setup is that of an Apple store to Reef’s Best Buy, with a lack of formal lines and open flooring full of beautiful displays to show off offerings from various growers and brands.

I went big on flavor, and once informed about my preferences, budtenders recommended Mango Tango (from Greenway Las Vegas), XJ-13 (from the aforementioned Shango), and Silver Hawks Haze (from Green Therapeutics).

Later on, I found that the XJ-13, perfectly cured with a dense flower and minimal stem, crumbled nicely but not into dust. Inhaling it was like receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from a conifer tree, in a good way. I also dug the Mango Tango, with its whopping 12.97 mg/g of the terpene B-myrcene (the same found in actual mangoes) that made for a heady and focused experience, but I wasn’t so sweet on the Silver Hawk Haze. The latter had enticing earthy tones and a nice citrus

aftertaste, but we were spoiled by then, and simply wanted some more Mango Tango.

For edibles, I picked up some delicious Dutch Girl caramel stroopwafels at Planet 13 on the rec of a budtender who told me they’re a good morning pick-meup. He wasn’t kidding. It’s important that these places produce solid products to ingest; some hotels like the Cosmopolitan are weed friendly, but most people are left to smoke in the shadows cast behind the strip, where you run the risk of getting caught and fined. Frankly, I was pretty disappointed with the pre-roll situation, so people who don’t roll their own may want to take it easy on the flower while in Vegas. Which shouldn’t be much of a problem with a million other ways to get extremely stoned and spend your money.

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HUMBLE PI FEATURE

Homeboy Sandman, Edan, and the genesis of hip-hop’s most dynamic all-star dyad

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 “He only lives a 45-minute walk from me.”

Homeboy Sandman is describing his commute to Edan’s lab in Brooklyn where the duo baked its brilliant 2018 EP, Humble Pi. “Edan is a special talent, and for me, 45 minutes ain’t no thing. I write a rhyme there and back. A lot of the rhymes for the record I would be crafting while walking there. I can always write a rhyme in my head; I was watching Papillon the other day, and if they locked me away [on Devil’s Island], I’d come out with a big chest from pushups and a couple of records.”

Sandman knows how to identify unique talent.

He’s a rhyme diamond himself, and as a stalwart solo artist for the vaunted Stones Throw Records, the Queens native has spent his career dropping creatively adventurous recordings with a rainbow coalition of producers and MC accomplices.

“It isn’t mandatory to know people that good,” he says, “but I think people that I’ve done whole entire projects with—Mono en Stereo … Aesop Rock, Paul White—these are people that I’ve spent time with on a personal level getting to know them, and who I appreciate as people.”

In this most recent case, Sandman first met Edan in a New York bowling alley.

“Peanut Butter Wolf introduced me right after I first signed up with Stones Throw in like 2011,” he says.

“Little did we know then that it was the genesis. I had probably heard some of his stuff, but it wasn’t until later on that a friend of mine—named Genesis— showed me that [Edan] had this crazy live show, and I followed up on that.”

Edan heard similar tunes about Sandman, and went to check out his storied call-and-response party in person.

“I saw him live [at Southpaw in Brooklyn, RIP] and it was refreshing,” Edan recalls. “He’s somebody who doesn’t play around—great stage presence. Since that time, he’s been putting records out, and people would talk about him and praise him. And then eventually I was doing a DJ set and he introduced himself, and it was just natural after that.”

The pair finally made something happen in 2016, five years after they first crossed paths, with the Edanproduced “Talking (Bleep)” showing up on Sandman’s sixth solo outing, Kindness for Weakness. It was an exciting moment, particularly for fans and reviewers (ahem) who sweat everything that either of these exceptionally clever cats claw. But none of us expected very much; while a young Edan performed with Insight, Moe Pope, Dagha, Raheem Jamal, and Anonymous in the Boston rap supercrew Electric while living in Allston and attending Berklee in the early aughts, he hasn’t been much of a team player in the time since. His only proper release since the brilliant Beauty and the Beat debut in ’05 was the artistically audacious Echo Party acid trip he dropped with a companion movie four years later.

So nobody was really waiting for this effort. Except for Sandman.

He kept walking. And waiting. And writing. And walking…

“It was his dedication and coming through [that made the project actually happen].” Edan speaks highly of the only artist he has ever split billing with. “I’m less enthusiastic about the cyber collab—I don’t want to live my life that way. So just the fact that he was down to make the trek repeatedly and be here, and even be here

in those instances when I’m looking through records, he was patiently just around. And he could appreciate that—the whole process of, Do you like this? It’s just a more gratifying way to do everything if you come by and make the music.

“Reflecting on the process in all these interviews, I think one of the major things was his willingness to sit through all that. Without that sort of willingness, this project doesn’t happen.”

One joint led to two, which led to three, which led to more than music.

“We talk hoops,” says Edan, “but mostly Sand is just a positive influence overall. I’m trying to get more into fitness, and he’s already daily with it. Anything that I’m aspiring toward, I can just hang out with him.”

“We meditated in the studio,” Sandman chimes in.

“I’m generally on board with the Sandman lifestyle,” Edan adds. “I appreciate him a lot.”

That dynamic and mutual respect bled deep into the beats and bars, and ultimately begat Humble Pi, a sevensong stone soup with contributions showcasing the superhuman talents of both chefs.

“The whole thing is very organic,” says Sandman.

“There wasn’t any groupthink. It was just hopping in the booth and we see what happens.”

One thing that happened: Edan picked the mic back up. In interviews he acts like this is no big deal, but for Beauty and the Beat junkies who sadly came to accept it as an unfortunate (though unconfirmed) rap fact that he would never rhyme again, the development was tantamount to learning that your favorite Trump official is getting out of his prison sentence.

“I rap, so why not rap a little?” Edan says. “I don’t always write as swiftly [as Sandman]—it’s more challenging to me.

Sometimes, listening to a track like “The Gut,” it just felt like, PHOTO BY CARL CORNELIUS You know what, maybe I should throw a little

>> HOMEBOY SANDMAN + EDAN. ONCE, 156 HIGHLAND AVE., SOMERVILLE. FRI 12.28. 8PM/$17-$20.

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voice in there and add that.

“I like to collaborate,” Sandman says, “and there isn’t any Edan substitute out there. The payoff was always so rich.”

As for all the walking. And the waiting…

“Any time that I put into [commuting on foot],” Sandman says, “it’s paid off in dividends.”

The proof, according to the mumble-free Humble Pi duo, shows up on every stage in every swamp and city they perform.

“For the majority of my career, it’s just been me up there rapping with my DJ,” Sandman says. “I love that—I was always able to do a lot with two turntables and a mic. But Edan is capable of doing so much up there that there are so many other options.

“I’ve always had fun rocking, but it’s never been anything like this.”

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DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

11

RESOLUTION #19 FEATURE

How we pledge to be better Bostonians in the new year

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON

12

Don’t worry, we aren’t here with jokes about people who sign up for gym passes in January and quit working out after Valentine’s Day. We are they and they are we, and so instead of trying to get ripped next year, we have some far more sensible ideas for how to improve our city, selves, and community while having loads of fun. Here are 10 mandatory items we are scheduling on our 2019 agenda …

Speaking of our trusty food and hike finder, we also need to make it out to several of the spots beyond Hub city limits that Hurwitz has recommended—from Brothers in Brookline, to Grape Leaf in Newton, to Italo in Medford, to Chili Square in Quincy, to Bates Bar and Grill in Weymouth Landing, where the Cuban sandwich and elote (grilled corn) alone are worth the commuter rail ride.

First of all, we are going to put more copies of the Dig on the street every week. As well as in your favorite coffee shops and bars and gyms and markets. Not just in the usual cities of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, but also farther into the North Shore and South Shore markets. If you have a corner or establishment where you would like to see us drop some issues, please send us an email at info@digboston.com.

We’ll also return to Route 1 on the North Shore, where a herd of us paid homage to some legendary haunts back when the Hilltop Steakhouse served its last steak and potato four years ago. That place has been leveled and replaced by notably less delicious apartments, but there are plenty of other places worth visiting, from Kowloon to wherever readers direct our drunken caravan.

We will complete at least one of the hikes that Marc Hurwitz has laid out for Dig readers this past year. From his informative Blue Hills meanderings, to instructions on how one can snowshoe through New England, to tips on how to navigate the coastline, we have everything we need except the energy to do the walking.

Back in Boston, we pledge to make more pilgrimages to Biddy Early’s. The last of an essentially otherwise deceased breed, the Hub’s best dive bar still faithfully packs heads in daily, and will outlive countless bourgeois drink holes that arise in the immediate area. As long as we can continue to be a part of that, we must. Maybe

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consider doing the same with a neighborhood joint near you.

Since we’re doing lots of drinking, we’ll have to spend more afternoons and evenings in the Harpoon Beer Hall. Fine, we’ll spend a lot of time in beer halls—from Lamplighter in Cambridge to several others all around New England for our Boston Better Beer Bureau series.

Still, it always helps to commit an entire day to visiting the seemingly perpetual festival that rages at Harpoon in South Boston, whether it’s one of their official events or just Wednesday.

This next one may additionally sound like it’s way too much fun to be a resolution, but please let us explain. We resolve to purchase legal cannabis at every recreational dispensary that opens in Mass, and to review it. Not because they need our patronage—they’re doing just fine with the throngs of people waiting outside of their stores. Rather, we will endure this task in service to Dig readers, all in the name of continuing to lead cultural coverage for Commonwealth cannabis consumers. We’re also turning our Talking Joints Memo newsletter into a standalone site, so keep an eye out for

that.

We will support community access stations. Which, as award-winning Dig columnist Jason Pramas recently noted, “are the heart and soul of grassroots democratic public broadcasting in the United States,” from the Somerville Media Center, to Cambridge Community Television, to Brookline Interactive Group, to Malden Access Television, and Boston Neighborhood Network.

We will buy books locally, and only locally. We will purchase them at all our favorite independent destinations, from Somerville to JP, as we cherish and adore them all.

Of course some greats with daily speakers stand out, like Harvard Book Store and the Brookline Booksmith, but we love the lot and encourage our readers to let us know in advance when they see that their favorite authors are scheduled for upcoming events.

And of course we need to get to all those bookstores, so we pledge to bike a whole lot more (and to write about cycling around here even more than we already do). Want to join us but don’t have wheels yet? Let us recommend a few friends, depending on where you hang your helmet. We dig Bikes Not Bombs and Ferris Wheels in JP, Somervelo (as well as its Allston sister shop), Cambridge Bicycle, and Urban Cycles downtown.

Finally, we will learn how to gamble better before the casino opens, and we will educate our readers so that they can do the same. No one wants to be that jackass at the blackjack table who doesn’t know basic strategy and etiquette. To those ends, as a paper we will visit tournaments and card rooms all around New England in preparation for the mid-year grand opening in Everett, and bring you the gaming coverage you want.

Best of luck in the new year. You’re gonna need it.

We asked a few of our favorite local nonprofit organizations how they plan on putting their best efforts forward in 2019. Here’s what they told us …

BARCC: Help create a world free from sexual assault and harassment (barcc.org) The Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) envisions a society free of all forms of oppression, including sexual violence. Imagine a world where people only engage in sexual activity with their full will, happiness, and consent; where everyone is free to go about their daily lives knowing that their bodies, identities, minds, and spirits will always be valued and respected. That’s the world BARCC works toward every day.

In service of this vision, BARCC’s New Year’s resolution is to leverage our expertise, experience, political influence, survivor speakers, and community partnerships to advocate passage of two key pieces of state legislation: the Healthy Youth Act, which would require school districts to provide medically and age-appropriate health information to students along with the skills they need to develop respectful and consensual relationships; and the Campus Safety bill, which would require institutions of higher education to conduct biennial sexual misconduct climate surveys and develop comprehensive policies and procedures for reporting, addressing, and preventing such misconduct, including sexual violence, dating violence, domestic violence, gender-based violence, violence based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and sexual harassment on the campuses of institutions of higher education.

BOSTON, MA MARCH 22-24

Tickets on sale Nov. 12th, 2018

SPRINGFIELD, MA JUNE 21-22

Tickets on sale Mar. 1st, 2019

MASSCreative: Our goal? Bringing people together. (mass-creative.org) MASSCreative New Year’s resolution is to continue to build a Commonwealth where arts and creativity are an expected, recognized, and valued part of everyday life, and where the arts bring people together. Our policy platform aims to ensure access to and participation in creative expression for all residents; safe and vibrant communities filled with cultural exchange and creative, inclusive spaces; healthier, happier people connected by shared creative experiences; a robust creative economy and trained creative workforce; and arts education for all students so they can develop into the next generation of leaders, innovators and contributors to their communities.

MASSCreative will do this by, among other initiatives, continuing to organize our 400-plus member organizations to advocate for the adequate and equitable distribution of state and municipal funding for arts, culture, the humanities and sciences and fostering cross-sector partnerships to advance racial, gender and ethnic equity. We’ll work to integrate the arts and creative experience into programs related to social well-being such as health care, veterans’ services, elder care, the juvenile justice system and addiction treatment. MASSCreative will demand more affordable housing for creative workers and their families and advocate for a living wage and fair market value for creative work. And we’ll advocate for an education system that includes sequential arts education for the Commonwealth’s students.

TCP: Get the word out through youth media (tcproject.org) Transformative Culture Project is excited to be partnering with Haley House for monthly screenings and youth media and community dialogue about issues happening in our neighborhoods. Our first event on December 12 about gentrification in Boston was standing-room only, and the crowd hung around in 20-degree weather outside to keep the conversation going. This cultural organizing work is an important part of our organizational history that we’re excited to be bringing back.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

13

DEVOURING 2018 (PT. 2 : THE OUTLIERS) EATS

A look back at some dining and drinking faves for 2018

BY MARC HURWITZ @HIDDENBOSTON

the morning on a Saturday, you’ll have no problem getting it here.

Where the Hell Are We? B.C. Baking Co., Readville - There’s hidden and there is hidden, and this bakery tucked away in a residential neighborhood of Hyde Park is not a place that you’ll find if you’re getting from Point A to Point B. It’s a shame that so few know about it, as the Sicilian pizza, baked goods, and pastries are pretty impressive, with the pizza actually rivaling some of the best in the city.

The random delicious regional sampling continues …

Cheap Eats Machu Chicken, Somerville - There are few things tastier than charcoal-roasted rotisserie chicken, and this quiet little spot in the heart of Union Square offers an inexpensive version of it along with other cheap eats, including a variety of delicious Peruvian and other South and Central American street food options such as empanadas and tamales.

For College Students T. Anthony’s, Boston - A fave among students for a long, long time, this pizzeria and sub shop is big among those who go to BU, though some from other colleges find their way here as well. Highlights include outstanding thin-crust pizza and a steak and cheese sub that includes chunks of steak rather than shaved steak.

Offbeat Spot Nappi, Medford - It feels odd going to a restaurant that has no menu, but this Italian eatery in East Medford makes it work, telling customers what it has available each day. One note—Nappi is BYO, so unless you’re looking to drink soda or water, it’s something to plan for in advance (or go to the nearby liquor store once you get there).

Seafood Out of the Blue, Somerville - There aren’t too many Sicilian seafood restaurants in the Boston area, which is really a shame since Sicilian (and Italian) seafood dishes can really be something special. And this Davis Square spot is certainly a special place, with incredible takes on such items as fried calamari and grilled swordfish.

For Meat Eaters Oliveira’s, Somerville - Say “Brazilian buffet” to a meat eater and chances are their eyes will light up, as 14

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these types of restaurants generally have every kind of meat under the sun. Oliveira’s is no exception, and it has the added benefit of having lots of room and a slightly upscale feel overall.

Dive Bar Casey’s, Somerville - It has been said that a true dive bar does not have good food (or any food at all, really), but an exception can be made for this East Somerville watering hole. Servers writing orders on Keno tickets is a sure sign of a place being a dive, but Casey’s also happens to offer tremendous takes on both pizza and steak tips, which could jeopardize its dive bar status in the eyes of some.

Beer Bar Deep Ellum, Allston - One of the oldest gastropubs in the Boston area, this local fave remains one of the best as well, with above-average pub grub and excellent cocktails, and if you’re a beer nut, you’ll probably go wild over the menu here, which includes some of the best local and national craft brews in the area.

Cocktails Ashmont Grill, Dorchester - Last year’s favorite restaurant pick has a lot going for it, including upscale takes on comfort food, an attentive waitstaff, and a hidden back patio, but one thing that isn’t as wellknown is the fact that the mixed drinks here rival those of some of the better-known Boston bars. Some of the drinks can also be a bit heavy on the pour, too, which can be a very good thing.

Late-Night Dining Victoria’s Diner, Boston - The Boston area has very few options for dining deep into the night, and even fewer 24-hour places, unfortunately. And while this diner on the Roxbury/Dorchester line is only open 24 hours a few days each week, if you need a plate of eggs at 3:30 in

Favorite Boston-Area Restaurant for 2018 Tampopo, Cambridge - Always a tough category, but this extraordinarily good dining spot is also one of the smallest in the region, being in the middle of the Porter Exchange food court and looking slightly bigger than a walk-in closet. The tempura, curry, katsu, shumai, and other items are mind-blowingly great here, and you can get a meal for little more than pocket change.

Favorite Boston-Area Bar for 2018 Atwood’s Tavern, Cambridge - Cozy, moody, and a bit on the quirky side, this Inman Square drinking spot has it all, in a way—decent food, a great beer list, live music from local bands, and in the warmer months, a secret side patio. It may not be known all that well outside of the square (and outside of music circles), but it really should be, considering how special a place it is.

Favorite Restaurant Outside of the Boston Area for 2018 Worthy Kitchen, Woodstock, Vermont - Last year, Worthy Burger in South Royalton was the pick here, and now, its sister restaurant a short distance to the south makes the grade. Worthy Burger may have the advantage when it comes to atmosphere and location (it is on a rail line deep in a wooded valley), but Worthy Kitchen has more food options to offer and it’s in Woodstock, which is a charming town with a lot of sights nearby.

Favorite Bar Outside of the Boston Area for 2018 Fastnet Pub, Newport, Rhode Island - Don’t tell anyone about this place, but this watering hole just outside of the more touristy section of Newport is the type of spot that you’ll never want to leave, as its dark rooms, wood stove, funky music selections, terrific pub grub, and array of Irish and British beers will have you falling in love with the place almost immediately.

Read Marc’s whole list at digboston.com

BMW of Cambridge 1098 Massachusetts Ave.

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DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

THE BEST LOCAL EPS OF 2018 MUSIC

Lilith, Boogie Da God, Firewalker, mmph, Billy Dean Thomas, and more top the list

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN If you felt overwhelmed by the 30 records that appeared on our Best Local Albums of 2018 list, you’re in luck.

We’ve gone through every EP, double-sided single, and smattering of songs we could find to highlight the best of Boston’s miniature releases.

If you’re ready to point out how your favorite EP isn’t on the list, take a moment to review how many other records we considered and how many were our runnerups. For one, Lost Dog got lost in drawn-out drone rock on Precious Stuff. Then Raavi & the Houseplants untangled some laid-back knotted guitar on the moody And I Miss You Already. Temporary Eyesore dropped a selftitled EP that flashed back to Unrest and the Rondelles.

If Mitski’s earlier material made you feel empowered, give Coping by Lydia Deetz a listen. Disco punk got a face-lift thanks to Boston Cream and their long-awaited debut EP MINE. Butch Baby merged sax riffs with loose punk energy on Stoned Butch Blues. Spelling put a little grunge back into alt-rock with Waiter Malone. Banana threw down some sludge pop on Die Alone pt. 2 for all your venting needs. Somerville group Leopard Print Taser put post-punk to the test by filtering it through wild hooks on Teeth Are Not Bones. Pushflowers embraced the brightest corners of indie pop on Wish U Would/ Dreamshapes. Elephants threw some indie pop confetti with Birthday and Noble Pedro wrote a straight-up emo twinkle throwback with Letting Go. Meanwhile Brown Lasers was wreaking havoc in the gritty basement rock world with Kitty Cat. Kevin Klein released a handful of whispered acoustic numbers on Matter of Time. My Deer Friends gave melodic emo a try on This Could Happen To Anyone. Kathy Snax reminded us how simple synthpop like The Spooks EP could cure the most bitter heart.

Trash Girl released several songs and an EP this year, all of which sounds like the hushed work of Brittle Brian.

The Water Cycle channeled their inner collegiate Mac DeMarco for The Water Cycle Falls in Love. And then there was Converge, who kept things on brand with Beautiful Ruin as expected.

Below are our picks for the 15 best local EPs that Boston-based artists had to offer. By highlighting some of our favorites, we hope we inspire you to do some more digging. Boston’s a goldmine of good music, and most of these picks exemplify how much unsigned talent roams free within reach. Last week, you got to read our 30 favorite local albums of the year list, and this week you get a similar sample of our city’s music scene—this time in bite-sized form.

Lilith I’ll Come Over / In Real Life Disposable America Nothing feels as good as a perfect pop hook. Over the last two years, Lilith have casually proved not only how good they are at writing them, but also at decorating those hooks in pitch-perfect vocal melodies. On this year’s short two-song cassingle, I’ll Come Over / In Real Life, the trio calls out faux-woke feminists and lazy exes.

Lilith use these two songs to introduce themselves to those unfamiliar, flaunting why they’re ready to follow in Liz Phair and Veruca Salt’s footsteps.

MUSIC EVENTS FRI 12.28

THEATRICAL ROCK THAT’S GOT BOSTON ON LOCK DOOM LOVER + OOMPA + ATLAS LAB + MORE [Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. 8pm/18+/$12. crossroadspresents.com]

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FRI 12.28

R&B TO GROOVE TO BAD RABBITS + STL GLD + HAASAN BARCLAY

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

DIGBOSTON.COM

Neck Hand It Over JASS Records There’s something about the worn, lived-in look of haunted houses that makes them alluring despite their eerie undertones. On five-song EP Hand It Over, local duo Neck embody that particular mood. A fuzzy blend of experimental electronics, barren violin, and twinkling omnichord, Hand It Over plays like part dream, part fears.

The more Kira McSpice and Bailey Hein recount their time in a psychiatric hospital or an anxious pastime, the closer you lean in, hypnotized by the way it all swirls around you.

Boogie Da God It’s Been Real Self-Released Despite the cool jazz trumpets or upright bass notes mellowing out behind him, Boogie Da God never loses the heat of his lyrics on It’s Been Real. The Roxburybased rapper updates the classic sound of street rap by pushing his lyrics to embrace honesty—not just about the world, but about his life. Instead of embellishing details for the sake of a good story, Boogie Da God finds ways to rap about his life and the lessons he’s learned with truth that sounds vivid because of the details he uses. It’s Been Real is a standout record in the Boston music scene if only because of how seamlessly Boogie Da God pulls it all off.

Firewalker ALIVE Pop Wig Records If only getting yelled was as motivational as it feels when Firewalker’s the one doing it. The four-piece hardcore band tears its way through three short songs on ALIVE, yet listening to them on repeat never seems to lessen their effect. From whining guitar lines to Sophie Hendry’s guttural growl, it’s songs like these, especially “Cyanide,” that make you feel invincible when you need to puff up your chest and tell someone to go to hell already.

DEWEY Culdesac Self-Released There’s a lot DEWEY has going for it as a three-piece indie rock band, but it’s Annie Melden’s vocals that steal the show. Like a splitting image of Laura Stevenson, she uses her voice to skip from one emotional pang of a falsetto to the next, even when detailing a recent venture into online astrology stalking. Culdesac is that well-produced, warm, slow type of indie rock that’s instantly comfortable because of how familiar it feels— and we mean that as the highest compliment.

Kadeem The Game Is the Game Self-Released Take a trip back to the ’90s with Kadeem. Selfdescribed as “black as hell, cute as fuck,” the Bostonbased rapper makes a hell of a name for himself on his seven-song release The Game Is the Game. His songs fit into day-to-day life: “Destiny Calling” is for a slow-mo flashback, “2nd Hand Lessons” is for a couch makeout,

SAT 12.29

PUT A LIL SPARKLE IN YOUR SKA THE MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSSTONES + BEDOUIN SOUNDCLASH

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

7pm/all ages/$27. houseofblues.com]

MON 12.31

A 2018 FAREWELL WITH FOLK & FRIENDS THE FELICE BROTHERS

[Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston. 9pm/18+/$30. crossroadspresents.com]

and “Unrivaled” is for a blunt-passing chill-out. With production that sounds straight out of Dr. Dre’s funkier days and the soft enunciation of MF Doom midramble, Kadeem knows how to weave his voice throughout the music without losing the spotlight, all while giving his verses room to breathe.

Mint Green Headspace Self-Released Summer will never end as long Mint Green is playing in the background. Ronnica, Daniel Huang, Frank Price, and Brandon Geeslin return with Headspace, their punchy take on pop punk after a big year preceding this one. The band’s early influences of groups like Paramore shine bright here, especially on “Foggy,” a flurry of drum fills and belted-out choruses. From the guitar solo on “Pool Party” to the explosive downbeats of “The Siren,” Headspace is the sound of Mint Green pushing themselves to successfully tighten up their sound without losing the initial spritely joy that makes them so fun to listen to.

Photocomfort Understudy Self-Released Justine Bowe’s musical project Photocomfort sounds like it could be on the radio as early as tomorrow. Like a blend of Alt-J and Fever Ray, she stirs her pot of smooth synthpop until it bubbles with an edgy undercurrent. It’s an exploration of all things ominous turned beautiful, where a single song, like “Rose Colored Glasses,” will transform from a friendly warning to a welcoming dance. But above all else, it’s Bowe’s polished vocals that give the music on Understudy its professional feeling.

Let’s just say Kate Bush would be proud.

Kármán Voh If Only Apart Self-Released If you told me Kármán Voh was made of magic, I’d believe you. Like some kind of shooting star-speckled wonderkind, the music they make, especially on If Only Apart, skates through downtempo electronics, shoegaze guitars, and searing vocals like it’s guided by some ethereal entity. The final product sounds like the more stunning and elegant songs in Deerhunter’s catalog or B-sides to Thom Yorke’s The Eraser—massive comparisons, and yet they’re incredibly apt nonetheless.

Elizabeth Colour Wheel Queen Tired Midnight Werewolf Records It’s been four years of Elizabeth Colour Wheel outdoing whoever shares a bill with them—like, say, Cloakroom and Have a Nice Life—and yet technically the doom-lovin’ shoegaze band still hasn’t broken into the national consciousness. Three EPs, a few singles, and dozens of shows deep, the band celebrated its first label release this year thanks to Midnight Werewolf, who released the explosive Queen Tired. With harrowing, intense vocals, creeping bass, and truly thrashing drums, the EP delivers on everything the band is known for: a loud, distorted, and bewitching experience that will leave you slack-jawed and heart-eyed.

MON 12.31

WED 01.02

[ONCE Ballroom, 156 Highland Ave., Somerville.

8:30pm/all ages/$20. oncesomerville.com]

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

8:30pm/18+/$10. greatscottboston.com]

THE WILDEST NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY IN TOWN MDOU MOCTAR + GUERILLA TOSS + MORE

ED BALLOON’S HI SERIES ED BALLOON + MAEKO + WINONA AND THE RIDERS

HOP ALONG MUSIC

Therapeutic journals and zip line accidents

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

mmph Dear God Tri Angle Records This year saw one of Boston’s most underrated and hidden talents—Seoul-born, Boston-based producer mmph—set sail for Los Angeles. While the terse Serenade or its remix EP don’t count as Boston releases because of said move, Dear God does, as it was released at the start of the year. What 24-year-old Sae Heum Han creates on it is a groaning, soothing, experimental world of electronica, where frail wind chimes and syncopated drumming patterns fade in and out of his larger sample-driven sound.

Dear God is at once surprising and comfortable, poising mmph as the unofficial protégé of Arca and Nicolas Jaar.

Tuft Whoever Gets You in the End Self-Released Sometimes it’s the bittersweet songs that sting the most. On Whoever Gets You in the End, duo Tuft navigate a world of heartbreak and simple comforts through the lens of bummer rock. Jessica Hesse and Daniel Radin never seem to raise their volume above a modest four over the course of the EP, but their honesty speaks loudly.

Imagine the type of emotionally stirring numbers Katie Ellen writes, and then strip them back a bit. That’s Tuft, a band you will fall in love with through this EP. Billy Dean Thomas Rocky Barboa Self-Released The Queer B.I.G. is too busy thriving to focus on the past, and you’re welcome to join them in doing so. After all, Billy Dean Thomas has found a way to embrace themselves in their music and behind the scenes, which explains why both cross paths so consistently on Rocky Barboa. With electronic-flecked samples backing their raps, Thomas calls out flaky friends, self-love, and body positivity without ever stopping for a breath. It’s a fast-paced record that showcases Thomas’ speed as well as their word choices, both of which hint at what’s to come in the future: “I’m on to bigger things / Now I start to pop up.” Don’t say they didn’t warn you.

Innocent Power Is Violence Side Two Records On their second demo, Innocent return with another onslaught of heavy D-beat hardcore. This time around, though, singer Samantha tackles political idleness, disguised bigotry, and silence as a powerless act. While she lets loose with her trademark sharp notes, the rest of Power Is Violence leans heavily on the first wave of US hardcore. Innocent seem to get tighter as a band as they go, to the point where you swear the drummer’s sticks should have snapped in half by now from sheer force. ozlo Sorry Charlie Self-Released Between the addicting hooks of alt-rock and the inventiveness of math rock lays ozlo, a trio that’s both heavier and catchier than they let on. On their recent EP, Sorry Charlie, the three challenge themselves with their most wiry and sporadic instrumentation yet. So by the time “Grand Prix” hits in the middle of the record— there’s a cascade of guitar licks, plus some heady concluding rhythm section—it’s clear Sorry Charlie isn’t just a couple of kids jamming together, but rather the work of a trio who wants to go beyond what’s easy to build music that’s as deceptively complicated as it is fun.

Anyone who’s ever received a mixed CD from a friend in the 2010s has probably heard Hop Along before. The beloved Philly four-piece has been a staple in the indie rock scene for everyone who keeps a finger on the pulse of what’s passionate and gripping. What began as a solo project for Frances Quinlan back in 2004 later developed into a more confrontational, honest, and moving full-band project with her brother and drummer Mark Quinlan, bassist Tyler Long, and guitarist Joe Reinhart by her side.

On the band’s fourth studio album, Bark Your Head Off, Dog, several changes surface quickly. For one, the album loosens its grip on guitars to welcome softer, almost folk-like instrumentation, including string quartets and quiet acoustic strumming. Lyrically, Quinlan questions how she’s structured her life up until this point, often returning to the phrase “Strange to be shaped by such strange men” over the course of the album.

While the album doesn’t revolve around hooks as clearly as past releases or venture into bold solos (though some do appear), it’s a grower, one that will slowly weld itself to you, arguably forming a deeper emotional music connection that any of the band’s other records. But in Hop Along’s eyes, it’s still taking a while to get comfortable with the songs for them, too.

“We’re only going to understand these songs in new ways as we keep playing them, but I feel a lot less troubled by that than I used to,” says Quinlan. “I like to quote Nina Simone a lot about how an artist should reflect the time they’re living in. It’s not journalism, but it’s certainly not existing separate from the world we’re living in. I am thinking considerably more about my lyrics. We don’t celebrate single women the way that we do single men. Just think about the concept of the spinster versus the bachelor.

A man can be a bachelor his whole life. But a woman after a certain age is referred to as a spinster. Even just being a woman in my 30s! We elected someone right out of pop culture to run the country. Someone with no experience! Not to get political, but a lot of us don’t want to admit how we’re influenced by pop culture, myself included.

Unfortunately, I think it all swims together and it’s hard to separate the ways in which we find ourselves being governed, whether it’s by our literal government or our own families or what’s shoved in our faces on a screen.”

To get to know Hop Along better, we interviewed Frances Quinlan for a round of Wheel of Tunes, a series where we ask musicians questions inspired by their song titles.

With Bark Your Head Off, Dog as the prompt, her answers are inquisitive and full of life—qualities that will bubble up in the band’s music when it headlines the Paradise this Saturday.

1. “How Simple” Looking at the objects in your home, which simple item holds the most significance to you?

Hmm. An object in my home. Well, I’m a creature comfort kind of person, so there are so many objects I use everyday that are like this. Lately, my kettle. I use it so much.

I could say my laptop but that just really bums me out. I have a shelf full of journals.

Every morning, I try to write a little bit in my current journal and I always put the kettle on. That’s also so corny. It’s for coffee, not tea. Coffee. I use a V60 ceramic thing. Don’t want people to think I’m a tea person.

The journal notes all flow together. Over the last year, I finally got myself a planner.

I know everyone puts their calendar on their phone, but I’ve always been attached to physical items. I used to love making lists. Now I don’t because every day I fail the list. I never accomplish everything. So I had to come up with a new way to do it. I don’t want to look at a journal and see that I have an email to write, you know? So I keep the two separate. Journals include thoughts throughout the day, maybe my dreams—although I do tend to keep those separate, as dreams can get long and ridiculous but part of me thinks I should document them. I heard recently they’re part of therapy. So it’s journals, and with those I tend to have lines that turn into lyrics, but it’s never intentional. A lot of my lyrics have come from journals three or four years back. The journals are a hodgepodge of thoughts that I think are worth putting down. That can include the day to day. I’ve lost a couple, but I have journals that go way back.

Let’s see. The ones I have here in Philly go back to 2005. I was 19 and I’m 32 now. I think I only lost one. Clearly it’s really stuck with me that I did. I have a diary with a cat on it from when I was in junior high, but I’m not going to include that. I’ve had diaries since I was 10, but those aren’t really the same thing. I remember burning a candle and PHOTO BY TONJE THILESEN listening to Jewel while writing in my diary. Nobody needs to read that, including me.

For Nina’s complete interview check out digboston.com NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

ANXIETY AND THE EQUATION BOOK REVIEW

It’s not a textbook, but there’s “something you can learn from it”

BY MAX CHAPNICK @MAXCHAPPY Ludwig Boltzmann was an excruciatingly anxious person and also one of the best scientific minds of his generation.

Boltzmann’s revolutionary work on entropy paved the way for Einstein’s quantum revolution of the early 20th century, and yet he still spent hours, late into the night, cramming to teach the most basic introductory physics lectures.

In Anxiety and the Equation: Understanding Boltzmann’s Entropy, Eric Johnson offers no easy definitions. His book, delightfully, presents as many contradictions as it does answers. Half history, half science, the book’s form pushes against the too staid, too unwieldy genres of literary biography and popular physics: “This book is not a textbook,” Johnson writes in the introduction, “but there’s a chance that you learn something from it. It’s not really a biography, though it has a lot to say about a man named Ludwig Boltzmann.”

Was Boltzmann the stereotypical white-coated, absent-minded scientist: unkempt hair with a well-kept brain? Not quite: Though his mind was exceptional, it was disorganized; his writing was circuitous, untrimmed, and unfocused, like a “bulldozer.” And though Boltzmann’s beard was messy, most of his life was well in order— happy family, good quiet job, admiring students, a love of good beer.

That is, until a prestigious job offer came Boltzmann’s way. Then, “the most badly bungled job negotiation in this history of the academy,” full of unbearably awkward letters and a rescinded invitation to one of top universities in Europe, “forever changed his life.”

Boltzmann quickly fell into a downward spiral of anxiety, until finally, at age 62, Boltzmann killed himself.

But to tell you that Boltzmann took his own life does not give away the end of the book, merely the book’s beginning. Johnson’s first chapter starts: “It was an inelegant death. Hanging there. He was a fat man.”

Likewise, to tell you that Boltzmann invented the modern concept of entropy does not spoil the scientific revolution: Boltzmann’s famous entropic law, the second law of thermodynamics, S=klogW, adorns the book’s cover.

Johnson is not a psychologist or a historian—though he is a chemist—Johnson is first of all a teacher, an explainer. This is a book of revelation not through biographical plot but through the careful discovery of causes: How did Boltzmann go from a bumbling yet happy professor at an obscure Austrian university to that self-defeating spiral; how do we understand the symbols and numbers that describe entropy, especially for those of us many years removed from high school math?

Johnson writes pedagogically, but not pedantically. He is charming and colloquial. He uses (maybe a few too many) parenthetical asides.

The book barely tops 150 pages, with short chapters switching easily between history and science; it’s a book that can be read lightly and in a weekend.

Psychology buffs or math enthusiasts may be disappointed by the simplified, even rushed, 18

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treatment of important ideas like bipolar disorder or factorials. But in reworking and relearning quite simple concepts, Johnson imparts considerably more knowledge than one might expect, both about human behavior and about math.

The statistical concepts that Johnson explains in this book start deceptively simple—two particles of gas in an empty room—and finish with pleasurable complexity— numbers larger than can be written in simple forms.

Likewise the questions he begins with seem so obvious as to be ridiculous: Why is the temperature of the room constant from one side to another, why does ice melt on a warm day, or why don’t puddles refreeze on warm days?

But if probabilities describe the universe: why not? Maybe one room out of many will have a very weird temperature distribution. What mathematical principles prove that those strange scenarios won’t come to pass?

Methodically, and endearingly, Boltzmann teaches.

Starting with that sparsely populated room of two particles—or two bedbugs, his other frequent, but gross, example—Johnson steps toward increasingly large numbers. He shows that nature tends, statistically, toward the even distribution of energy: It’s much, much more likely for a room’s atoms to have relatively equal kinetic energies, resulting in an even temperature, than for there to be an uneven distribution of kinetic energy and for one side of the room to be much hotter than the other.

Johnson illustrates these principles literally, with helpful charts and graphs. He’ll include a few equations along the way despite Stephen Hawking’s warning “that each equation cuts a book’s sales in half”—Hawking’s A Brief History of Time “included just one,” according to Johnson, “and that equation was E=mc^2 (which maybe should have been considered a gimme).” But instead of obfuscating, the equations come alive—for those who forgot what “logarithm” even means, the term transforms from obtuse math word into a magical prediction for how the universe behaves.

Similarly, the book’s psychology is simultaneously learned and casual. In chapters like “Postmortem Psychiatry” and “A Case for Anxiety,” Johnson discusses Boltzmann’s discernible mental symptoms. “Conventional wisdom asserts that he suffered from bipolar disorder,”

Johnson summarizes. But Johnson disputes the diagnosis.

“Was he depressed? Yes. Was he excitable, irritable, and maybe even hypomanic? Fair enough. But each of these symptoms was likely not so much a cause as it was an effect. The underlying cause of instability was likely anxiety. Boltzmann was a nineteenth-century victim of a twenty-first century disease.”

Nestled in the middle of the book are two short, revealing chapters. The first, “The Night Before,” describes Boltzmann’s paralyzing anxiety: Here he is, one of the brightest physicists in the world, spending hours preparing for a first-year lecture. “It was nonsense,” Johnson writes, “Rather than enjoying the success that he had earned over the course of his career, he was worrying about the tasks that he had already performed a thousand times before.” The image of the old man, sweating, frantic, hunched over his notes, is pathetic.

Then Johnson suggests a beautifully wrought addendum: “The Next Day.” After an awkward start the professor “settled in” to his role. He transforms into a virtuoso, a teacher par excellence. It’s not a stretch to hear Johnson describing himself, and his own book, when he praises Boltzmann’s “remarkably casual, even modern” tone or, more broadly, any teacher at the top of their game: “He was methodical in his approach, attentive to every detail and to the needs of his students.

He anticipated potential misunderstandings and welcomed their questions. He imparted meaning to the mathematics. These symbols refer to something real.”

Boltzmann never actually came up with the equation on this book’s cover, S-klogW. One of the students of Boltzmann’s writings, Max Planck, distilled dozens of Boltzmann’s inelegant pages into that elegant formula. But if nothing else, Boltzmann, like Johnson, is an explainer, a teacher. Besides Planck, Boltzmann’s student Paul Ehrenfest would become a major figure in quantum mechanics and his student Lise Meitner would help discover nuclear fission. After the lecture, Johnson imagines Boltzmann, as he “surveyed the now empty room, admired what he had managed to somehow create on those blackboards.” Just as importantly, what he had sparked in the minds of his students.

ARTS

REVISITING A FAR CRY

THE BLOW EVAN GREER + MORE

With new grant, Boston’s guerilla chamber orchestra plots future

BY CASEY CAMPBELL

SAT, JANUARY 19. 8PM MILKY WAY / BELLA LUNA TICKETS ON SALE NOW

IMAGE COURTESY OF HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY

Michael Unterman is a professional concert cellist, but his morning routine is decidedly computer-based.

Most days, the musician goes straight to his laptop to answer emails and write blog posts and program notes. As a member of the Boston chamber orchestra A Far Cry, Unterman’s job is far from the norm.

A Far Cry stands soundly as one of Boston’s most niche live classical music destinations. The group’s 18 musicians, who style themselves “The Criers,” can be heard performing in their native Jamaica Plain, as well as the Gardner museum, Jordan Hall, and St. John’s Church (to Unterman, St. John’s is their Fenway; “the pews stand in for bleachers”). They maintain a steady presence in Jamaica Plain with their storefront rehearsal space, which, during said rehearsals, is open to the public.

And it was recently announced that A Far Cry are up for two 2019 Grammy Awards—for Best Engineered Album, Classical and Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance—for their Visions And Variations project.

As such national props go to show, despite their small number and local setting, the self-conducted group packs diverse approaches and viewpoints that click beyond Boston. They’re versatile, willing to play “traditional” classical numbers, but also not afraid to infuse classic country in the form of “Red River Valley,” or even to unfold a fresh orchestral spin on some Daft Punk.

“It’s a kind of situation that I wish more people could experience,” Unterman said.

“It’s one where you’re compelled to embrace a huge diversity of ideas from people on equal footing.”

This unique spirit helps to differentiate the cluster from other, more conservative and antiquated (read: elitist) orchestras in the area. And it factors into why they were selected as one of the 29 recipients of a coveted Barr-Klarman Arts Initiative grant back in October. The initiative has raised $25 million and will be disbursed to the selected organizations over the next six years.

“The philosophy behind the Barr-Klarman Initiative is a bit counter-intuitive, but brilliant,” Unterman explained. “Most grants provide money to complete a specific project or goal. Sometimes, though, it creates a situation where, when the funding ends, the organization finds itself back at square one, or worse, has to scale back.”

The Barr and Klarman Family Foundations realized that a large number of arts groups were critically undercapitalized, with insufficient funds to work with.

The grant also allows for the spread of communal art, which is something that A Far Cry have already had their hands in for some time now. They’ve been engaged in a three-year partnership with Project STEP (a program that provides string instrument training to children and youth from underrepresented communities) and are working with local schools to promote the study of music, as well as issues of diversity.

“We’ve had programs based around themes of leadership, philosophy, food, ecology, mathematics, immigration, and feminism or that bring various musical styles into the mix, different types of fiddling, world music, rock, rap, jazz.”

With a $300,000 boost from Barr-Klarman, A Far Cry can continue playing on to Grammy pastures—with stops from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to as far away as California—with confidence that things are okay on the homefront.

“A lot of arts organizations,” Unterman said, “are essentially one mishap or, for a performing arts organization, one ill-timed snowstorm away from serious trouble.”

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

THE YEAR IN FILM (PART II) FILM

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN

match between Art Macknight and Sugar Ray Leonard (the footage of which is now lost) via narration from Macknight himself, whose commentary is laid over footage of a “ring girl” (Lydia Hicks) walking through locations in Mansfield, Ohio, where both Macknight and Everson were raised (“I wanted to do [a] film quietly about recreation because I usually do all films about labor,” Everson told The Daily Progress, following a recent screening of Round Seven at the Virginia Film Festival. “When I was young, in Mansfield, Ohio, the black neighborhoods were called the basketball courts. So you say, ‘Now where do you live?’ ‘By the King Street courts.’ So I wanted the ring girl ... to be in these recreational areas.”) The program at Mubi.com, in contrast, gave wider online premieres to a number of Everson films dated prior to 2018, including Ears, Nose and Throat, a monumental ten-minute piece which considers a woman’s recollection of a man’s violent death within the context of a routine medical examination; much like Round Seven, it exemplifies the filmmaker’s exceptionally rare ability to bring human physicality, physical landscapes, and historical facts into profound alignment.

FROM SUPPORT THE GIRLS, COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES Following last week’s rundown of the second tier, here follows my ten favorite American motion-picture works released to the general public during 2018, listed alphabetically.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, directed by Travis Wilkerson. Currently available on DVD and most video-ondemand outlets.

First presented as a live performance and soon after refashioned as a more traditional nonfiction film, Did You Wonder… follows Wilkerson’s attempts to research and further unveil a racist murder that was committed by his great-grandfather, a white man named S.E. Branch, in Dothan, Alabama in 1946. While heavy on interviews with local civil rights activists and Wilkerson’s own narration, the film’s larger structure revolves around “loops”, which include among them the scant extant footage of Branch himself (repeated ad nauseam), shots of the road leading towards Attala in Alabama (where civil rights activist William Lewis Moore was killed by a white supremacist in 1963), and the use on the soundtrack of protest songs both old (a Phil Ochs’ song titled “William Moore”) and new (Wondaland Records’ “Hell You Talmbout”). The rhythm of the film becomes a chant of its own, one with sounds and images that you may anticipate or internalize just as you would a verse. But that shape, the movie’s very form, is a tragic one—a work about white supremacy in America during the past eight decades, and its structure is quite rightfully not about progress but repetition instead.

The 15:17 to Paris and The Mule, directed by Clint Eastwood.

The 15:17 to Paris currently available on home video and VOD; The Mule currently playing in various Boston-area movie theaters.

More on both these films in the very near future, via a feature on The Mule we expect to publish in the next few weeks.

First Reformed, written and directed by Paul Schrader.

Currently available on home video and VOD. Monrovia, Indiana, directed by Frederick Wiseman.

Currently in the midst of an ongoing theatrical run, including showings at the Brattle Theatre on Sunday, Jan. 13 at 4:30 and 7:30PM. The film is also expected to be made available next year via PBS, home video formats, and the Kanopy streaming platform, see zipporah.com for updates on that.

It was Wiseman’s desire, sometime during or after the 2016 election, to make a movie about “a small town in the 20

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Midwest” that led him to Monrovia, a solidly red-voting farm town with a population below 1,100. This is his 42nd nonfiction feature, and the longer sequences include a wedding (where the officiant presides over a ludicrous ritual involving a plastic-looking cross—“the bride’s piece of the unity cross represents the beauty, and the many other capabilities, of the woman”), three different town council meetings (one of which has the all-white members of the council deeply concerned about changes in Monrovia’s “demographics”), a ceremony held at a Masonic lodge (which critic Richard Brody cited as having “a ritual pomp more apt for a funeral”), and finally, in the film’s last scenes, a memorial and a funeral (which critic Ben Sachs, a longtime student of Wiseman movies, recently said has “got to be one of the least interesting speeches Wiseman has ever included in a film”). At times elegiac, at others utterly pathetic, the scenes and images here, in the context of this moment in American history, are surely among the most rorschachian in the director’s monumental catalogue. How can you laugh at this? How can you not?

The Other Side of the Wind, written and directed by Orson Welles. Currently available on Netflix.

The base of this rambunctious and radical feature depicts a party being given in the honor of aging Old Hollywood filmmaker Jake Hannaford (John Huston), and is mostly shot with 16mm cameras in a manner that recalls both underground cinema and mainstream television; the rest of the film depicts “Hannaford’s movie”, this one shot in 35mm, in widescreen, in full color, and in a manner clearly influenced by the canonized Euro-cinema of the 1960s. So Welles’ movie, in turn, is constantly shifting from color to black and white, from 35mm to 16, from widescreen into a square ratio, then all back again.

Concerning not just “Hollywood” but the very shape and standards of narrative movies, The Other Side of the Wind presents a stunningly astute record of the formal advances being made in motion-picture art of the late ’60s and early ’70s—and probably would’ve moved some things forward itself, had it been finished and released in its own time.

Round Seven; Ears, Nose and Throat; and other works directed by Kevin Jerome Everson. Round Seven not currently available; Ears, Nose and Throat on VOD via Amazon.

Perhaps the most revelatory film experiences I had in 2018 came via retrospectives dedicated to artist/filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, including one at the Harvard Film Archive, and one hosted online via Mubi.com. The program at Harvard included a few short films literally dated 2018, among them Round Seven, which recreates a 1978 boxing

Support the Girls, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski.

Currently available on home video and VOD. Bujalski’s sixth feature charts the workday at an independently operated Texas-based faux-Hooters restaurant from open until close. Yet Support the Girls is not exactly what you’d call a realistic film (at least not on the subject of “the workplace”), nor a particularly “dramatic” one for that matter—more accurate to call it a commercial American ensemble comedy, and one directed in a manner that recalls the classical form of that genre (at its best it brings to mind Lubitsch and Capra). For that, credit goes to Bujalski’s exceptional screenwriting, which continues to match keenly observed verbal tics up with dialogue that’s truly fucking funny (“I love being professional,” via one girl trying to get a job, “that’s always, like, huge for me”), but credit also to his actors, particularly Regina Hall and Shayna McHayle, who not only keep up with but also get ahead of the script’s whiplash tonal shifts (the most ostensibly comedic moment is pointedly turned sour by the way that Hall reacts to it, a minor shock which leaves heavy implications that complicate the rest of the movie). A low-budget indie on the subject of labor, Support the Girls has fittingly been made with rigorously unshowy craftsmanship from cast and crew alike, and is probably my favorite movie I saw all year.

Unsane, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Currently available on home video and VOD. A woman is stalked from Boston to Pennsylvania, or at least that’s what she thinks she just saw out of the corner of her eye, which leads to an voluntary appointment with a mental health professional at a shady facility, and soon enough the woman is locked up, involuntarily, until she’s “no longer a danger to herself or others”, but really just until her insurance won’t pay the facility’s bills anymore.

Soderbergh’s latest effort crafts a psychological portrait of a character ravaged by what some might call “social issues”, and does so by plumbing from a number of noted subgenres, including the “paranoia thriller”, the prison movie, and the slasher film. Like so many prior works from those disreputable traditions, Unsane was made on a shockingly brief production schedule, filmed at relatively low costs (it was shot with an iPhone 7 Plus), and employs a number of the oldest compositional archetypes one can ascribe to horror cinema in general (long tracking shots leading through darkening hallways, fades and double exposures to indicate loopy minds). An old poverty rowstyle potboiler shot through with a texture of present-day digital weirdness, Unsane plays as both old-fashioned and ultramodern, and finds something of the best of both worlds.

VOL 11

Saturday • January 12 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Art by JAM Sketches

Grove Hall Branch of the Boston Public Library 41 Geneva Ave • Dorchester 02121

Comics In Color is a safe space where you can come and nerd out about illustrated stories by and about people of color.

THIS MONTH! Featured Guest:Charity Everett

Charity will talk about her Augmented Reality story telling project “Go Back and Fetch It”

Discussion: Is Digital Publishing the future of Comics?

• All-levels comics making activity • Samples of Black Comics • SNACKS! All are welcome but this is an event focused on comics by and about people of color.

COMICSINCOLOR.ORG

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

SAVAGE LOVE

TWO BREAKUPS, ONE BRAKE ON

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET

I’m a thirtysomething straight woman married for 16 years. Eighteen months ago, I met a man and there was an immediate attraction. For the first 15 months of our relationship, I was his primary sexual and intimate partner, as both sex and intimacy were lacking in his marriage. (My husband knew of the relationship from the start and is accepting for the most part.) After my lover’s wife found out about me, she suddenly became very responsive to my lover’s sexual and emotional needs. My lover has told his wife that he will not let me go. He has also told me that he is not willing to let his wife go. She isn’t happy about being in a triad relationship, but she allows him to continue seeing me with limitations. I am no longer his primary sex partner, and I have been relegated to the back seat. He claims to love us both, yet his wife and I both struggle knowing the other exists. Recently while out shopping, my lover asked me to help him pick out a Christmas gift for his wife. I got upset because I am in love with him, and I have made him my priority (over my husband), but I am not his priority. I love this man, and we feel we are soul mates. My lover has said that if we fall apart, he will have to find a new secondary partner because his wife can never give him the soulful fulfillment he needs. Should I continue in this relationship?

Soul Mate Avoids Choice Knowingly You complain about being relegated to the back seat, SMACK, but it’s your husband whose existence only comes up in parenthetical asides. You also describe this relationship as a triad when there are four people involved (you, your lover, your lover’s wife, and your husband), which technically makes this a quad. And from the sound of things, only one member of this messy quad seems happy—your lover, the guy who refuses to make you a “priority” over his wife.

And while you’ve convinced yourself that your lover feels as strongly for you as you do for him—“we feel we are soul mates”—it kindasorta sounds to me like you may be projecting, SMACK. Because in addition to asking you to pick out Christmas gifts for his wife, your lover and alleged soul mate regards you as expendable and replaceable.

And he’s told you as much: He intends to “find a new secondary partner” if you two part because his wife doesn’t “give him the soulful fulfillment he needs.” That’s not how people talk about their soul mates, and it’s certainly not something a guy says to someone he regards as his soul mate. Soul mates are typically told they’re special and irreplaceable, but your guy sees you as one of many potential seconds out there, and therefore utterly replaceable.

Here’s what you ought to do: You aren’t interested in being your lover’s secondary partner (nor are you much interested in being your husband’s wife), so you’ll have to call your lover’s bluff. And the only card you have to play—and it’s a weak hand (all hands with just one card are)—is to dump your lover unless he leaves his wife for you. Success rests on the outside chance your lover was bluffing when he said he’d replace you, but I suppose it’s possible he regards you as the irreplaceable one and only said those hurtful things to make you think he wouldn’t choose you when you are the one he would’ve chosen all along. If it turns out that this was the case, SMACK, you’ll wind up with your soul mate… who happens to be kindasorta cruel and manipulative.

Calling your lover’s bluff—ending a relationship that, in its current form, brings you no joy—is your only hope of having this guy to yourself. But the likelier outcome is that you’ll be left alone (with, um, your husband).

My boyfriend and I met at a bondage party a year ago. He’s not into bondage (he tagged along with a kinky friend). We hit it off in the chill-out room and started seeing each other. He told me it was okay for me to keep going to bondage parties and seeing some guys I play with one-on-one. Then right after we moved in together, he said he doesn’t want me playing with anyone else because we are in love. Which means I can’t get tied up at all anymore because he has zero interest in bondage. He can’t see why I’m upset, and I’m not sure what to do.

Boy In New Drama

COMEDY EVENTS THU 12.27

A TOAST TO BOSTON COMEDY LEGEND TONY V AT LAUGH BOSTON

Raise a glass for Boston Comedy Legend, TONY V! Tony V has been a staple to the Boston (and national!) comedy scene for FOUR decades. Showtime named him “The Funniest Person in Massachusetts.” He has appeared on countless television networks, shows, and movies like: Comedy Central, MTV, Seinfeld, Dr. Katz Professional Therapist, Late Night, The Town, and so many more!

100 WARRENTON ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $20 FRI 12.28 - SUN 12.31

MARK NORMAND @ LAUGH BOSTON

Mark Normand is known for his “relentlessly punchy writing and expert delivery” (The Laugh Button) that has made him an internationally known touring comedian.

He has had return appearances on Comedy Central’s INSIDE AMY SCHUMMER and TBS’s CONAN. Previous television spots include a Comedy Central HALF HOUR special, Showtime’s SXSW COMEDY WITH W KAMAUL BELL, MTV Other’s INSIDE JOKE, and the TruTV series, WORLD’S DUMBEST.

425 SUMMER ST., BOSTON | VARIOUS | $28 FRI 12.28 - SAT 12.30

DON ZOLLO @ NICK’S COMEDY STOP

Don has is a veteran of the Boston and LA comedy scenes and has performed all over the place in between. You may recognize him as pitchman for Dunkin Donuts or as costar of Superbowl champ Julian Edelman’s viral video series DDTYME. Don’s comedy is centered around story- telling adventures based on his experiences as a “Boston guy” adapting to the world outside of New England as well as everyday experiences, girlfriends and some out of the ordinary like playing football with Tom Brady or hanging with gang members in South Central LA.

100 WARRENTON ST., BOSTON | 8PM | $20 SAT 12.29

CLEAN COMEDY SHOWCASE @ IMPROVBOSTON

Featuring: Jeremiah Broderick, Richard Bowen, RA Bartlett, Jai Demeule, Andrew Della Volpe, Deadair Dennis Maler, & Joe Buckley.

Hosted by David McLaughlin

40 PROSPECT ST., CAMBRIDGE | 7PM | $12 MON 12.31

CITYSIDE COMEDY @ CITYSIDE BAR

Featuring: Brendan Eyre, Killian McAssey, Sam Pelletier, Micaela Tepler, Sam Ike, Anjan Biswas & more.

Hosted by Jere Pilapil

1960 BEACON ST, BOSTON | 9PM | FREE

Lineup & shows to change without notice. For more info on everything Boston Comedy visit BostonComedyShows. com Bios & writeups pulled from various sources, including from the clubs & comics…

RUTHERFORD

BY DON KUSS DONKUSS@DIGBOSTON.COM

So now that you’re in love, and now that you’ve signed a lease, and now that you’re trapped, BIND, now—NOW—your vanilla boyfriend yanks back the accommodation that convinced you to date him in the first place? There’s only one thing you can do: DTMFA.

Find Savage Love swag at savagelovecast.com/shop!

savagelovecast.com 22

12.27.18 - 01.03.19

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DIGBOSTON.COM

“Waiter, I cannot drink this toilet water, it has not been properly decanted”

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

HEADLINING THIS WEEK! Toast to Boston Comedy Legend Tony V Thursday @ 8 PM

Mark Normand Tuesdays with Stories, Comedy Central Dec 29-31 (NYE SHOWS!)

COMING SOON

New Year’s Eve Showcase

Ft. Dan Boulger, Kelly MacFarland + more Dec 31 @ 10 PM THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Helen Hong

Showtime, Inside Amy Schumer Jan 3-5

Ramy Youssef

Special Engagements: Sun, Jan 6 (TWO SHOWS!)

Addicts Comedy Tour Special Engagement: Weds, Jan 9 OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Samuel J. Comroe America’s Got Talent Jan 10-13

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

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

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DECEMBER 31