DigBoston 5.23.19

DIGBOSTON.COM 05.23.19 - 05.30.19

MUSIC

LIFE FEATURE

WITHOUT PAROLE

WILL MASS END THE ‘OTHER DEATH PENALTY’?

BOOKS: RADICAL SUBURBS - DIG EVENT NEXT WEEK W/ CITYLAB

2

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

VOL 21 + ISSUE 21

MAY 23, 2019 - MAY 30X, 2019 BUSINESS PUBLISHER John Loftus ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone Jason Pramas SALES EXECUTIVES Victoria Botana Matt Riley 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, Morgan Hume, Jillian Kravatz, Olivia Mastrosimone, Juan A. Ramirez, Jacob Schick, Sydney B. Wertheim

DESIGN

DESIGNER Don Kuss COMICS Tim Chamberlain, Pat Falco Patt Kelley, Don Kuss, Cagen Luse DigBoston Phone 617.426.8942 digboston.com

ON THE COVER GAS TANK ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE HALEY OF SOUTH END TEXTILES. VISIT SOUTHENDTEXTILES.COM FOR T-SHIRTS AND OTHER MERCH FEATURING THE HAPPY GAS TANK AND OTHER SWEET DESIGNS BY JESSE.

©2019 DIGBOSTON IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION CAN BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. ONE COPY OF DIGBOSTON IS AVAILABLE FREE TO MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

DEAR READER

BEYOND ENGAGEMENT

I have come to give you a report from the front lines of reporting in the future. The battlefield is ravaged, with limbs of stubborn old-school hacks blown all about; still, there is light in independent media, for we have come to understand that competition is a lock while cooperation is key.

Such soothsaying was possible last week in Philadelphia, where DigBoston co-publisher John Loftus and I joined more than 150 change agents who take pride in pushing buttons and envelopes. Hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey, the gathering showcased the potential of not only journalists working with other journalists and outlets, but also of reporters connecting with nonprofits, activists, and an increasingly participatory public.

There’s a lot of hope out there. We heard from Free Press and Authentic City Partners about their teaming with Grace & Glory Yoga in Atlantic City to mine that community for stories.

And from Akoto Ofori-Atta, managing editor of the Trace, about how that platform recruited more than 200 student writers to memorialize the killings of young people by guns in this country.

Since we drove down in search of tips on how to cover a field of approximately 65 Boston City Council candidates and counting, we especially enjoyed explainers from the Detroit Journalism Cooperative, which brought together grassroots operations and larger public media to cover their last gubernatorial race. Also helpful in that regard was a session held by Chi.Vote, which brilliantly linked nearly a dozen outfits to centralize info on 200-plus hopefuls in Chicago’s last municipal election.

Almost everything we saw could be applied to issues and reporting in Boston. In our ongoing efforts to document the prison and parole gauntlet in Mass, we will be looking at the work done by Resolve Philadelphia in its excellent Reentry Project. Of course we already collaborate with the Cambridgebased MuckRock, which presented in Philly and whose new crowdsourcing tool we used to collect info for our recent gun investigation, and we’re thrilled to have finally hooked up with the Granite State News Collaborative, which is doing awesome things right next door in New Hampshire. It’s funny that we had to go to Pennsylvania to make that connection, but now that it’s been made, I’m sure that it will bear some fruit.

For icing on the cake, Rachel Glickhouse, who helped manage ProPublica’s tremendous Documenting Hate project, announced that her organization is launching a new tool for crowd-powered collaborations. Which is another win for small fries like us, who could never afford to develop such resources on our own but will enthusiastically take advantage of their open source inventions.

Finally, the sprinkles on the icing came from Darryl Holliday, a co-founder of City Bureau in Chicago. Always a force for people-driven progress via grassroots journalism, Holliday gave a keynote titled, “Don’t Just Engage, Equip,” noting: Engagement can lead to a variety of positive outcomes like social media engagement, listener-driven questions, attendance at your events and new relationships between your newsroom and the public, among others.

Equipping, however, is about agency. It’s about providing access and opportunities for public participation and production. Equipping is about teaching and interconnected learning. It’s about exchanging skills and resource. It’s a redistribution of power between institutions and individuals.

And it scares the hell out of people in power.

I couldn’t agree more. If you feel the same way and want to see more of these ideas implemented in Boston, be sure to follow us at binjonline.org, and if possible, please support our efforts at givetobinj.org.

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

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

3

NEWS US APPARENT HORIZON

CAMBRIDGE COUNCILORS CAN STOP UNDEMOCRATIC COURTHOUSE DEAL Four votes against the proposed leasing of city parking spaces should do the trick

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

immunity from local zoning laws to open what is universally considered to be a 22-story brutalist concrete eyesore in 1974. Bankrolling it with its own funds—which likely played a role in the county’s eventual insolvency and its abolition by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1997.

Abutters and the neighborhood at large were not consulted about the building. And the almost immediate protests by the same generation of locals that defeated the infamous “Inner Belt” plan that would have driven a major highway right through Cambridge fell upon deaf ears. That turned out to be merely the first act of a saga that has dragged on to this year and has seen East Cambridge residents repeatedly ignored and abused by the city, county, and state governments that are supposed to represent the people’s will.

Unsurprisingly, the courthouse was poorly built, and by 2008 state government—having inherited the structure in 1997 and refusing to properly repair it or to remediate the massive amounts of toxic asbestos found within—decided to move the Middlesex Superior Court staffers who had worked there to a new facility in Woburn. Leaving over 200 prisoners in the top four floors to languish there, nearly forgotten, until 2014, according to the Cambridge Chronicle. The Commonwealth then offered the building to the City of Cambridge.

COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS PREPARE TO CANVASS EAST CAMBRIDGE. Here was an opportunity for PHOTO BY JASON PRAMAS. democracy to reign at last. East Oftentimes when covering a public meeting, journalists Cambridge activists encouraged the like myself will feel like we’re in the same boat as the city to buy the courthouse, pay to remove the asbestos, rest of the audience. Because much of the discussion is level it, and then pursue new public development on the new information for everyone. So we don’t feel like total site with proper community input. But instead, on May 25, outsiders.

2010, both the powerful unelected City Manager Robert But that was not the case when I attended the “Town Healey and the less-powerful elected City Council declined Hall Meeting relative to the disposition of the stateto buy the courthouse from state government, according owned Sullivan Courthouse” at Kennedy-Longfellow to the Boston Globe. Never giving serious thought to the School in East Cambridge last Thursday evening. The good the city could do by taking the site over. Yet another specifics of the matter at hand were fairly new to me. nail in the coffin of the myth of the supposed “People’s Yet for many of the 125-plus neighborhood residents Republic of Cambridge.” Believed these days only by that showed up, the event was like going to a bad horror suburban reactionaries that rarely set foot in the city. movie for the 20th time. They’d heard everything under This led the Commonwealth’s Division of Capital Asset discussion before. And wanted nothing so much as to Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) to put out a never have to attend such an affair again. request for proposals from commercial developers to State Rep. Mike Connolly (D-Cambridge) called the purchase the building in November 2011. In February 2012, meeting. But explaining why he did so will require me to eight developers did so. In March 2012, DCAMM rejected all run readers through a fast review of one of the longest the proposals on vague grounds, according to the Boston policy battles in Cambridge history.

Business Journal. The agency then put out another call for bids. This time seven were accepted. The most popular What has gone before of which was fielded by HYM Investment Group—the East Cambridge residents never wanted the Edward J. developer of nearby Northpoint, led by former Boston Sullivan Courthouse. It was dumped on them by the nowRedevelopment Authority honcho Thomas O’Brien—and defunct Middlesex County government, which used its 4

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

called for a mixed-use building that included a good deal of housing.

However, in December 2012 DCAMM accepted the proposal by Leggat McCall Properties (LMP) that called for the entire structure to be used for office and commercial space, according to the Boston Business Journal. And unlike the HYM proposal that had promised to take four floors off the top of the building, the LMP proposal did not. This caused a huge uproar in East Cambridge. Which saw repeated actions and meetings involving hundreds of people throughout 2013 and much of 2014 aimed at stopping or modifying the winning bid.

Neighborhood activists appealed to every government body they could think of without success—up to and including then-Gov. Deval Patrick, who rebuffed them in April 2013, according to the Boston Business Journal.

In the first few months of this period, LMP tweaked its initial proposal to include 24 units of housing and make a number of cosmetic changes to the building facade.

Meanwhile, the developer had already signed a purchase and sale agreement with DCAMM on Jan 16, 2013, and an important license agreement on March 11, 2013.

Then in 2014, according to the Cambridge Chronicle, former State Rep. and longtime City Councilor Tim Toomey formed a working group “with 18 representatives from both the Neighborhood Association and the Planning Team, along with abutters and business owners to work with Leggat McCall on mediating their concerns.” The group succeeded in convincing LMP to remove two floors from the top of the courthouse and make more changes to its design.

One major issue in all the negotiations was that neither LMP nor DCAMM would tell anyone—elected officials like Toomey or Councilor Dennis Carlone, journalists from publications like the Chronicle, or community groups like the East Cambridge Planning Team—how much the developer had offered the state for the contested property. Leading a number of those parties to file public records requests with the Commonwealth.

LMP had indicated that building out its proposal would cost it $200 million, but neither party to the deal would indicate what its bid price was—or what DCAMM’s specific process for choosing LMP over other developers was.

Despite this lack of critical information, both the state and the city steamrolled the process along. According to a city manager’s order of Oct 7, 2013, the City Council voted that day—at the behest of City Manager Richard Rossi, as indicated in his letters to the council of Oct 7, 2013, and March 24, 2014—to “make available for disposition a longterm leasehold interest to Leggatt [sic] McCall of fourhundred twenty (420) parking spaces and a portion of the ground floor retail space at the City-owned First Street Garage.” A move that was made specifically to provide LMP the parking spaces it needed to legally complete the courthouse deal. Another point where more thoughtful action by Cambridge city government could have resulted in the restoration of public control of the Sullivan site.

This began the “parking disposition” process, which has yet to be resolved. According to city ordinance 2.110.010 (Disposition of city property), section F. “The disposition of City property shall require a 2/3 vote of the City Council.” Stick a pin in that fact for a moment. The fate of the entire LMP proposal now rides on that council vote.

DCAMM “EVALUATION MATRIX”

For much of 2014, the Cambridge Planning Board issued the necessary series of special permits to allow LMP to start work on its courthouse project—over vociferous protests by East Cambridge residents.

The first attempt to issue the final permits came on July 29, 2014, at a special planning board meeting at the Kennedy-Longfellow School auditorium. So many people showed up to testify according to the official transcript (Page 210)—overflowing the space’s capacity—that the public comment period went on too long for the board to discuss the matter and it postponed its decision for two months.

Finally, at a Sept 30, 2014, meeting at the same location, the Cambridge Planning Board approved the last permits, according to the Cambridge Day. Just a few days later on Oct 3, 2014, according to a document on Councilor Toomey’s website, after Toomey appealed to the secretary of the Commonwealth to force DCAMM to produce public records pertaining to the LMP courthouse deal—including the sale price for the facility, and “the bid selection process and criteria that were used

by DCAMM in selecting Leggat McCall Properties as the developer for the courthouse”—the supervisor of records ordered the agency to release them.

By Oct 23, 2014, Toomey had all the records and put them on his website. They showed that LMP had bid $33 million for the property, that the main criteria for DCAMM’s selection of the LMP bid was that it had offered more money than the other six developers, and that community concerns were not factored into DCAMM’s “evaluation matrix” (see accompanying graphic) at all.

Infuriated neighborhood activists followed through on their threat to file a lawsuit in Land Court to stop the LMP project—on the grounds that the government immunity that Middlesex County had used to build a courthouse and jail was now void, and that normal zoning restrictions should be applied. Which would kill the deal. That court shot down the suit in 2015. The plaintiffs then took their case to the Massachusetts Appellate Court. And were defeated there in 2017, according to the Boston Herald.

In 2018, the city returned to the long-stalled parking disposition process to give LMP a 30-year lease to the 420 city parking spaces—out of a total of 1,100, over 500 of which are already leased by other companies (a big sticking point with the community)—that it needed to complete the project.

On Oct 30, 2018, the city called a meeting at the Multicultural Arts Center to discuss moving forward with the parking vote by the City Council. And a massive turnout against the project convinced Rep. Connolly to call last week’s meeting.

Two ways forward Said meeting made one thing quite clear to me: The neighborhood is sick of the courthouse fight. To the point where some residents who fought hard against the LMP proposal are now willing to go along with it. If for no other reason than to ensure that the abandoned building— that’s apparently been without power for weeks, and not for the first time—doesn’t fall further into disrepair.

With potentially significant environmental and health consequences.

However, if the cheering (and often, quite pointed jeering) by the various factions—LMP detractors, LMP supporters, and people who just want something to be done with the building fast as long as it doesn’t remain the way it is—is any guide, the activists against the current courthouse plan remain in the majority. And it was to those people and fence-sitters that Rep. Connolly tailored the event.

Together with longtime neighborhood activists who provided ample historical context, the representative presented a proposal for a very different—and far more democratic—development process than anything that has gone on in East Cambridge since the courthouse was forced on the community a half-century back.

Connolly’s office produced a 10-page document for the meeting entitled “Toward a Community-Driven Framework for the Public Reuse of the Sullivan Courthouse Site.” It’s available online at tiny.cc/CommunityDrivenFramework.

The goal of the framework, as presented and debated at the meeting, is to essentially hit the restart button on the entire courthouse development initiative.

As Rep. Connolly explained his thinking last Thursday and reiterated to me in a subsequent conversation, everything hinges on the City Council vote on the disposition of the 420 parking spaces in First Street Garage.

Which may (or may not) happen as soon as June.

If the council fails to get six out of its nine members (two-thirds as per the above cited disposition ordinance) to vote in favor of granting a 30-year lease of those spaces to LMP, then the entire courthouse deal with the developer likely falls apart. Because the facility only has 92 parking spaces onsite and needs 420 more spaces within 1,000 feet for the LMP plan to move forward. Four votes therefore are probably all that are needed to defeat both the parking lease and the overall plan.

According to the framework document, “From there, the City, working in partnership with residents and state officials, would want to advance, further refine, and formally adopt a Community-Driven Framework that would establish development objectives, implementation options, and a process for negotiating with DCAMM and the Baker Administration for either the direct acquisition of the Courthouse site or a new bidding process subject to community-driven objectives.”

This can happen because the latest extension to the January 2013 purchase and sale agreement between DCAMM and LMP expires in December. In all these years, LMP has never actually closed the sale on the courthouse and paid the state the full promised $33 million—although they have paid a few million in deposits and fees. There are project supporters currently insisting on social media that a purchase and sale agreement is somehow sacrosanct. But such agreements expire all the time. So that doesn’t seem to be a very strong argument.

Once the clock runs out the agreement, the hope of Connolly and project opponents is that DCAMM will follow through on what its staffers told him last fall after the Oct 30 public meeting, and “re-evaluate the current process and look to begin a new disposition process.”

During which Cambridge could have a shot at negotiating with the state for the “public reuse” of the courthouse site. Project supporters online have also talked to DCAMM officials. Who look to be trying to walk back their earlier statements to Connolly—which he entered into the city record by emailing them to the council, city manager, and city clerk immediately after talking to DCAMM. But those NEWS TO US

officials have not yet denied that renegotiation of the deal is a possibility. Unsurprising, since they’ll have to revisit the deal one way or the other if LMP can’t get the parking spaces it needs.

Naturally, if the council votes to approve the First Street Garage parking disposition, then the hotly contested courthouse plan will be built at last. And still-strong community opposition be damned.

LMP, for its part, aside from mounting a last-minute charm offensive by opening a PR office for the project on Cambridge Street and planning to canvass the neighborhood in support of its bid for the First Street Garage lease, is doubtless putting pressure on city councilors behind the scenes to vote its way. I visited the office just prior to writing this column, and spoke to two nice young staffers who told me that the company has no plans to hold its own community meetings. I also took the project handouts on offer and noted that LMP now brags about the very changes to its proposal that it was pushed to accede to by community action in 2013 and 2014.

Given the choice between the highly compromised and undemocratic business-as-usual option in the form of the LMP project, and the democratic Community-Driven Framework for the courthouse proposed by Rep. Connolly and East Cambridge activists, I think the choice is clear: Cambridge readers should call or email every city councilor immediately and tell them to vote against the First Street Garage parking disposition—allowing the CommunityDriven Framework a shot at finally giving East Cambridge residents the courthouse project that they deserve.

One fully in keeping with the intent of developer Andrew Craigie 206 years ago, according to the 40thorndike.org website, when he gave the contested site “‘to the people’—for the ‘sole purpose’ of building a courthouse, a ‘gaol,’ and other buildings that promoted a public, civic use, and ‘for no other purpose whatsoever.’”

At the moment, two councilors are likely to vote against the First Street Garage lease: Councilor Dennis Carlone, a longtime opponent of the LMP project who attended last week’s meeting, and Councilor Quinton Zondervan, who sent an aide to the meeting with a statement saying “We have an opportunity to say NO, and I am committed to doing so when the parking disposition reaches the council.”

Only two other votes are needed to defeat the parking disposition vote, and I suggest that neighborhood activists and allies focus their lobbying efforts on Vice Mayor Jan Devereux, an environmental and community activist who is pretty good on development issues, and Councilor Sumbul Siddiqui, who was endorsed by the Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (and that’s your cue to act now, Boston DSA!).

For Cambridge residents who believe developers and multinational corporations have far too much power in the city, and that public land should be dedicated to public uses, this is a rare opportunity to win a major development deal for the people. To build desperately needed public housing and community spaces that the city is absolutely rich enough to afford. Or at least sell the property on much better terms for the neighborhood—not allow government agencies to auction it off for short money and tax levies far smaller than the vast treasure that will be made by those same companies when they flip the property for easy gain.

Which LMP would be stupid not to do. Since, given recent giant real estate deals in Cambridge like last week’s leasing of three Osborn Triangle properties by MIT for $1.1 billion (at over $1,600 per square foot), according to the Boston Globe, it could take the $250 million or so that it will ultimately end up spending if the courthouse deal goes its way and can then sell it to another company for upward of $500 million. Imagine what kind of good that money could do if it was in community hands.

Democracy or oligarchy. It’s your choice, Cambridge residents. Here’s hoping you make the right one, and push your councilors to vote against leasing the First Street Garage parking spaces to Leggat McCall Properties.

Affected residents, organizations, labor and business leaders, and government officials are encouraged to send comments or opinion article submissions of 500-700 words on the Sullivan Courthouse situation to editorial@digboston.com FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

5

THE SUMMIT: PART V SOMERVILLE

Residents vent on issues related to trees and the environment

BY BOSTON INSTITUTE FOR NONPROFIT JOURNALISM @BINJREPORTS As a major initiative for 2019, the team at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), in collaboration with partners at DigBoston, Somerville Media Center (SMC), and various other outlets, is focusing on identifying and reporting critical stories in the City of Somerville.

To that end, we have been leading journalism workshops at SMC, including some with high school students, and in February BINJ turned out more than 100 Somerville residents and active community members to the ONCE ballroom on Highland Ave to converse with area journalists about issues they think need more coverage. The information these participants provided has already seeded articles and will continue to bear fruit over the coming months.

In addition to our follow-ups, we have transcribed all of the presentations given at ONCE. It’s a lot to chew on, so for the purpose of reporting back we parsed sentiments of the participating Somervillians into the following categories (many of which overlap at multiple intersections):

• Neighborhoods, transit, and accessibility • Union Square and other development • Low-income residents and affordable housing • Immigrant communities • Trees and the environment • Arts, artists, and artisans In addition to reports that stem from the February meetup, over the coming weeks we will also publish words and ideas that stood out at the summit. This week, we get into excerpts from various testimonies related to trees and the environment.

Chris Dwan (Somerville Resident)

I got radicalized about a year and a half ago when they cut down all the trees on Beacon (Street). I started organizing and writing letters and talking to people and making friends. … The news here is that the city has just [written] a demand letter for $38,000 to the contractor that did that to us. That took a hell of a lot more work than it should have.

We have lost approximately 10% of the trees in the city last year between GLX [Green Line Extension], the high school, [and] the various street projects. None of these is just a maniac running around with a chainsaw, this is the way the city does things. We introduced [along with Somerville city councilors] an entirely new tree protection ordinance that will provide an organization that will allow us to coherently protect city trees, state’s trees, and trees on private property. I would love it if that was a community discussion so we have effective, sensible well-balanced legislation.

None of these is just a maniac running around with a chainsaw, this is the way the city does things.

Renée Scott (Climate Coalition of Somerville) We are a coalition of advocacy and activist groups collectively invested in driving environmental sustainability in Somerville. In 2014 Somerville was among the first cities in the country to set the goal of 6

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

being carbon neutral by 2050. What has the city achieved since then and what big decisions still need to be made? The parts of the city most vulnerable to flooding from the bigger storms we expect in the future happened to be the neighborhoods that are seeing the biggest developments—it’s too late to build a resilient Assembly Square and it might be too late for a resilient Union Square. Can Brickbottom and Boynton Yards be developed with more forethought? Did you know that the infill of plastic blades and artificial turf fields migrated into the surrounding waterways PICTURED: SOMERVILLE BIKE PATH and are microplastics by size but we do nothing to prevent this of a better term, to establish some of those baselines, pollution? so who are those communities? How much of each of The city’s proposed new zoning code is an important these communities is already gone? Since when? Why tool that will incentivize builders to construct more are they leaving? Is it things related to increases in rent? sustainable buildings using techniques such as the Development? passive housing standard. Several developers have Over time we’re also going to see climate change and taken note and presented sustainable buildings to the extreme weather events. How that’s going to change public, but the state’s Board of Building Regulation and [Somerville]? I think it’s the role that you can play to Standards holds the real key to sustainable buildings establish some of the information now, and then be through the building code and will be instrumental not watching that for the community over time and sharing only to whether Somerville achieves carbon neutrality, it would be awesome. but also whether the state can fulfill its obligations under Another way to do that would be through storytelling. the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2008.

Some of the long-term residents here, what are some of Somerville currently has over 200 active gas leaks, the barriers they may be facing to potentially stay here? which continuously emit methane and toxic chemicals Again, who’s intentionally measuring some of these found in fracked gas. They pose a public health and safety changes and demographics over time? threat because of the risk of explosion. There’s minimal One of the things that we support is something called accountability and the state Department of Public depavings.

Depavings is an initiative that was actually Utilities gives utilities no incentives to address the issues through Somerville Climate Action, a couple of different of leaking infrastructure. organizers who just basically helped support residents Somerville is the least green city in the state. There is who want to lift up the pavement in their yard and put in a direct correlation with lack of green space and the “heat green spaces. There’s a couple done every year—we’re at island” effect, and we need to be adding more green a point right now where there’s some conversations with spaces, not removing them. In Union Square … there is the city and some residents and environmental groups to an opportunity to increase the green space significantly really build out that program. over what the developer is proposing, but it is getting little traction. We are so intent on development that we are ignoring that we have displaced untold native flora and fauna that are vital parts of a healthy ecosystem and the key to a healthy future. There is an epidemic of the slaughter of trees happening right now.

Leigh Meunier (Climate Coalition of Somerville)

Just some affiliations, different groups I’m connected to in the city—Climate Coalition of Somerville, Somerville Climate Action, and Somerville Interfaith, but speaking to the issue of displacement in the city … who is being displaced, who’s already gone? What did the city look like in 2010-2012, the different communities that were here, individuals, groups? I don’t really have a good sense of all that information and so I wonder what role the local media can play in really helping to, for lack

Ulysses Lateiner (Somerville resident)

Chris and Renée mentioned the whole tree crisis that we have in Somerville, but this isn’t just a Somerville crisis, this is a regional thing. In Cambridge right now in the last couple weeks there was this huge ongoing outrage out on near Alewife … where this developer’s going to cut down hundreds of mature old-growth trees to expand like an underground parking garage …

If the media can help the people of Cambridge, Somerville, [and] Medford too for all I know, connect the dots on what’s going on here, it’s like a big story … This isn’t just us getting our trees chopped down, it’s going on everywhere … It’s just the developers that benefit from this. Most people like trees, and if the media helps sort of connect the dots, I think people realize they have a lot more power to speak up and maybe fight back.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

7

OPINION

SAY GOODBYE TO SPRING AND CELEBRATE THE START OF SUMMER

BLOCK PARTY RUGGLES PLAZA June 18 • 4pm-7pm

The bittersweet anniversary that comes every May

BY REV. IRENE MONROE

(rain date: June 19)

F E ATURI NG Legendary DJ Bruno

Old school & new school house music and disco classix

House of Nahdra and The Royal Tribe

AfroFuture fashion performance

Everyday Boston

Story-sharing activities

Suya Joint food truck Pan-African cuisine

+ free giveaways & lawn games + FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Info: northeastern.edu/crossing

Presented By A department of City and Community Affairs at Northeastern University

DigBoston Gateway Block Party ad.indd 1

5/17/19

When you reside at the intersections of multiple identities, anniversaries of your civil rights struggles can be both bitter and sweet. And last week was a reminder.

At 12:01 am on May 17, 2004, the City of Cambridge was the first to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. At 9:15 am, the first couple was married. Then-Cambridge City Clerk Margaret Drury said to Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish, “I now pronounce you married under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

That day was also the 50th anniversary of the historic US Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling that upended this country’s “separate but equal” doctrine, adopted in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896.

While joy washed over me that day knowing my now-spouse and I could follow McCluskey’s and Kadish’s footsteps and be legally married, we could not rejoice over the limited success, huge failures, and ongoing resistance of “Brown” that allowed a few of us entry into some of the top universities of this country, as it continues to be challenged as a form of reverse discrimination.

On this year’s 65th anniversary of Brown, African Americans and Latinx Americans continue to attend not only segregated schools—whether here in Boston or across the nation—they also attend high-poverty urban ones with metal detectors. All as the school-to-prison pipeline continues to compromise young lives.

Where it was once thought that access to quality education would dismantle, for future generations, the pox of bigotry and ignorance that certain parents inherited, race and class, unfortunately, continue to be discriminating indices upholding not only “separate” school systems but also “unequal” treatment of students.

This May marked the 15th anniversary of marriage equality in the Commonwealth.

Looking back at advances such as hate crime laws, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and DOMA, the legalization of marriage equality, and anti-homophobic bullying becoming a national concern, to name a few, the LGBTQ community has come a long way since the first Pride marches. I give thanks for these advances and for having had the opportunity to write Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, who wrote the landmark decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the following note in 2016: When I left for NECN (New England Cable News) on Friday I never imagined in my wildest dreams I would meet you there. And, of all things take a group photo with you and my buddies Sue O’Connell and Scott Kearnan. WOW! And, thank you!

The closest I came to meeting you was once many tables removed from the stage you spoke from as GLAD’s 2013 Spirit of Justice Awardee. A tsunami of thanks I send your way for authoring the Goodridge case, allowing me and so many of my LGBTQ brothers and 1:54 PM sisters across this beautiful Commonwealth of Massachusetts to marry the person we love.

As an African American lesbian, there aren’t too many places in this country I feel protected by state laws. The Goodridge decision bestowed upon me full citizen-state rights that when same-sex marriage was legally recognized on May 17, 2004, I then began to proudly lift my voice and say, “I, too, am Massachusetts!”

This June will be the fourth anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the historic US Supreme Court ruling that legalized samesex marriage in all 50 states.

The ruling was a great day—similar, I surmise, to that day in June 1967 when the Supreme Court case of Loving v. the State of Virginia declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

However, with victory comes backlash. Opposition to the SCOTUS decision went public with born-again Christian Kim Davis—the now infamous Kentucky County clerk who not only refused to issue marriage licenses to a same-sex couple but forbade her co-workers to do so as well.

Now, there is the talk among Christian evangelicals of walking back Obergefell v.

Hodges “without disrupting other precedents on marriage.” As Rebecca BuckwalterPoza wrote in an article titled “The End of Gay Rights” in the June 2017 issue of Pacific Standard Magazine: “The Supreme Court can significantly undermine LGBT rights even without reversing a single case. The Court can strip the rights to intimacy and marriage of their meaning, carving away gradually and masking the magnitude of changes by phrasing them in arcane legal terms.”

And last year, the Supreme Court ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in favor of Jack Phillips, the baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple on the grounds of religious freedom.

Again, over the years, I’ve learned that joy can share its space with sadness.

May 17 is always one of those days.

8

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

PHOTO OF LINDA BROWN SMITH, ETHEL LOUISE BELTON BROWN, HARRY BRIGGS, JR., AND SPOTTSWOOD BOLLING, JR. DURING PRESS CONFERENCE AT HOTEL AMERICANA. IMAGE BY AL RAVENNA IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WORLD TELEGRAM & SUN.

1155 Tremont Street, Roxbury

JOY AND PAIN

THIS IS FOSTER CARE GUEST COLUMN

These children “deserve every opportunity that their non-foster peers receive”

BY HOPEWELL

CELEBRATE AND HONOR ASIAN AMERICAN HERITAGE CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY WITH RAYNA LO May 16 & June 20, 2019 | 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM Free Chinese calligraphy sessions! Practice writing the characters for your favorite Chinese dim sum dishes using traditional Chinese tools.

FILM SCREENING: “THERMAE ROMAE” June 5, 2019 | 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM

In partnership with the Japan Society of Boston and the Consulate General of Japan in Boston

Join us for a screening of Thermae Romae (subtitled in English), an adaptation of Mari Yamazaki’s popular manga of the same name. The story follows the adventure of Lucius, a Roman architect, who is criticized for his “outdated” thermae designs until he discovers a tunnel that leads him to a modern Japanese bath house.

On any given day in the United States, there are more than 450,000 children in foster care. Through no fault of their own, these kids have been removed from their parents as a result of abuse and/or neglect. Once a child has been removed, a team of caring Free and open to the public! adults secures a safe and loving place for the child to live until or unless they can return RSVP at northeastern.edu/crossing home. This is foster care. As the largest nonprofit provider of intensive foster care in For more info, please contact: 617-373-2555 Massachusetts, HopeWell’s mission is to enrich the lives and expand the opportunities of individuals and families in need of love, support, and a safe place to grow and thrive.

THE SERIES IS PRESENTED BY: Founded in 1964, HopeWell supports approximately 1,100 foster children a year throughout Massachusetts as well as in the Hartford, Connecticut, area. HopeWell began by creating the first community-based residential program for boys and launched its Intensive Foster Care Program (IFC) in 1975, which serves the most difficult to place children in a family-based setting. In the early 1980s, family support and stabilization services were added to enable HopeWell to partner with intact families involved with the Department of Children and Families (DCF) to avoid out-of-home placements. HopeWell also provides residential and shared living services for 50 adults with developmental disabilities. Through its My First Place program, the organization supports youth who Dig Boston - May 2019.indd 1 have aged out of foster care by providing them with stable housing as well as education and employment services.

During the month of May, HopeWell celebrates National Foster Care Month, a time to acknowledge foster parents, family members, volunteers, mentors, policymakers, child welfare professionals, and other members of the community who help children and youth in foster care find permanent homes and connections. Speaking about the network of foster families who work in partnership with the organization, Shaheer Mustafa, HopeWell president and chief executive officer, states, “Children who come in to foster care deserve every opportunity that their non-foster peers receive. Whether it’s reading a bedtime story, helping them with their homework, or simply celebrating their success, our foster parents offer children a consistent, safe, and predictable environment that helps them heal, grow, and thrive. They’re some of the most remarkable people you could ever meet, giving unselfishly of themselves to provide a home to a child who has experienced tremendous loss. During the month of May, we work to celebrate and recognize our kids in care and their foster families for the amazing work that they do all year long.”

There are children in every community who need foster care. In Massachusetts alone, there are more than 10,000 children in foster care. Children of all ages are living with foster parents who have unselfishly opened their hearts and homes to support them, often when they’re most vulnerable. With more children in need of care than available homes, HopeWell is looking to expand its network of foster parents. HopeWell knows that fostering a child is a chance to impact and change the life of a child. Children who come into foster care have experienced loss and trauma that can impact their physical health and cognitive functioning, as well as social and emotional wellbeing.

However, the impact of this trauma can be positively influenced by the type of foster placement, the stability of the placement, and the access the foster child has to services and supports. HopeWell’s network of foster parents will tell you that they are not alone in caring for their children. Our extensive team of social workers and family resource specialists work in partnership with foster parents, offering training, wellness programs and ongoing support and assistance 24 hours a day. At HopeWell, we recognize it takes a village to support kids in foster care, and we take pride in the level of support we offer our incredible foster parents.

BINJ SUPPORTERS PUT THE

4/26/19 1:34 PM

invest in

investigation

Interested in becoming a foster parent? Learn more by visiting hopewellinc.org or call 1-800-592-0400.

When You Support Independent Nonprofit Media, You Support All Your Favorite Causes At The Same Time

GIVETOBINJ.org NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

9

THE FIGHT FOR LIFE FEATURE

The Bay State has a fraught history of sentencing people to serve life without parole.

Now lawmakers have a chance to end the bad deal Beacon Hill made to trade the death penalty for natural life sentences.

BY JEAN TROUNSTINE In 1997, after a string of gruesome killings including the brutal kidnapping and murder of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, Massachusetts was on the brink of reinstating the death penalty.

But legislators made a deal.

In a last-minute dramatic turnaround, Rep. John P. Slattery of Peabody cast the deciding vote in the House, defeating the death penalty bill. Many in the Commonwealth were up in arms, but Slattery was sure the measure would end up putting juveniles to death and said he followed his conscience.

Other lawmakers took to the papers to defend their votes. Jay R. Kauffman of Lexington justified his in a Boston Globe editorial, “We need to do a better job of educating our friends and neighbors that first-degree murderers do not walk away.” He added, one imagines, to show that death penalty opponents were no shrinking violets, “Commit a murder and you’re locked away for life. Period.”

Massachusetts capital punishment opponents were proud of their 1997 decision, as research showed that there was no deterrence with the death penalty. Its costs were astronomical as well; per the Guardian, since 1978, 13 California death penalty cases that ended in executions cost about $300 million each. Additionally, there had been a number of cases that made national headlines in which prisoners were executed in spite of strong evidence of innocence, prompting outcries of injustice.

Left without arguments based on deterrence, cost, or justice, all that remained for those seeking an eye for an eye was revenge. And so Massachusetts struck a deal: The state gave up the death penalty, but put in place life without parole (LWOP).

All these years later, several studies show that LWOP provides no assurance of more public safety. Nor does it reduce crime rates or give victims the tools to truly heal.

The sentence of life without parole is its own brand of death; however, a new bill in Mass aims to end the bad deal and provide all prisoners with a chance at parole.

A battle is already brewing, as victims of crime and their families have begun to protest sorely needed legislation— proposed both in the House by Rep. Jay Livingstone of Boston (H.3358) and in the Senate by Sen. Joseph A. Boncore (S.826)—that would allow the opportunity of parole for all. It’s a familiar fight; every time that any state seeks to end life without parole, crime victims seek solutions in petitions, phone calls, and meetings, with a goal of keeping perpetrators of violent crime behind bars forever.

However, as more and more people recognize that harsh sentencing has added to mass incarceration, states are beginning to rethink keeping people imprisoned for life.

Massachusetts could be leading the way.

The History of LWOP

The idea of eliminating the death penalty was historically more “palatable to a fearful public” if people had a “guarantee” that the prisoner would never be released, Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst at the Washington, DC, nonprofit the Sentencing Project, wrote in 2013.

Today in Massachusetts, LWOP is an automatic sentence for anyone 18 years old or over who is convicted of firstdegree murder defined by law: “Murder committed with deliberately premeditated malice aforethought, or with extreme atrocity or cruelty, or in the commission or attempted commission of a crime punishable with death or imprisonment for life.” Research by the nonprofit Criminal Justice Policy Coalition shows that since 2012, the Commonwealth’s “Three Strikes” law can lead to LWOP as well: “It has also been mandated for anyone convicted of one of 18 non-homicide crimes carrying a potential life sentence when that conviction is the third for a felony offense.”

10

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

But the sentence known as “life means life” was not always the law of the land. In 1913, a person sentenced in the federal system was generally incarcerated for only 15 years, wrote noted political scientist and author Marie Gottschalk in 2012 for Prison Legal News. Although the federal system held the right to keep those behind bars they deemed dangerous, parole reviews took place and many prisoners were set free. States had similar rules.

Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project who recently co-authored The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, noted in a talk at Harvard Law School earlier this year that before 1970, only seven states had a LWOP provision. One of those states was Massachusetts.

In 1972, after the case Furman v. Georgia declared the death penalty unconstitutional, the country clamored for the harshest sentence available. Almost immediately, a multitude of jurisdictions began to adopt LWOP as a “fallback,” Mauer said. Four years later, the US Supreme Court resumed executions, but LWOP sentences were still in place. Today, life without parole is often the required alternative if a prosecutor doesn’t succeed with his death sentence bid. According to Gottschalk, death penalty

researcher Ashley Nellis noted in 2016 that there were 53,290 people serving life without parole sentences, i.e., one in every 28 prisoners.

As of May, 2017, according to the Sentencing Project, Massachusetts had the fifth-highest rate of people serving first-degree, second-degree, or virtual life sentences (more than 50 years). That’s 2,038 prisoners, or roughly 1 in 4 (23.2 percent). Per the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC), in terms of LWOP, as of 2018, there were 1,059 men and women sentenced to die in our prisons.

abolition work helped to “normalize [this] sanction.”

By 1990, according to a 2013 report by the Sentencing Project, all states except Alaska had adopted a LWOP sentence (the District of Columbia and the federal system haven’t adopted one either). Alaska, meanwhile, has a 99year sentence that is the functional equivalent of LWOP. As a result of harsh sentencing, the number of people in prison began to soar. Lock ’em up and throw away the key became the tenor of the day as the so-called war on drugs proliferated. Crime did not rise, in spite of fears that it would, as more and more people were sent to prison in the US—for life. Looking at the big picture, Joseph Dole, who is the author of numerous articles on the topic and is currently serving life without parole at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, wrote in a letter for this article: “There has finally been an acknowledgment that long sentences are the main driver of mass incarceration.”

Despite historic crime lows, the number of people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole has continued to rise, quadrupling since 1992. In Still Life: America’s Increasing Use of Life and Long-Term Sentences,

2017, Hartman penned an editorial titled “Death by Another Name” for the Marshall Project, writing that the sentence of life without parole only changes “the method of execution.”

LWOP is “the sense of being dead while you’re still alive,” Harman wrote, “the feeling of being dumped into a deep well struggling to tread water until, some 40 or 50 years later, you drown.”

Hartman stressed that “hidden death sentences” mean many incarcerated men and women must live the rest of their lives in “prisons with extraordinarily high suicide rates, with substandard medical, dental, and mental health care, and with scant rehabilitative programs. Prisons rife with gang violence, racism, and despair.”

Most of those serving LWOP make up an overwhelmingly elderly population, and certainly prisons are not set up to be nursing homes. According to Prisoners’ Legal Services, it’s up to three times more expensive to house an elderly prisoner in the general population; much

The “Other Death Penalty”

Marie Gottschalk of Prison Legal News has called LWOP “death in slow motion.” Gottschalk has pointed out that in spite of “mounting evidence that lengthy sentences have minimal impact on reducing the crime rate and enhancing public safety,” the US has held tight to what many have called the “other death penalty.”

Kenneth Hartman was the first to so label it, having served more than 37 years before California Gov. Jerry Brown commuted his sentence (commutation leaves the conviction intact but reduces the punishment). Before his sentence was commuted and he was released on parole in

THE FIGHT FOR LIFE continued on pg. 12

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

11

THE FIGHT FOR LIFE continued from pg. 10 more than the going rate in Massachusetts of $65,477 per person (from the DOC). Plus, research has proven that people age out of crime and those aged 50 and older are unlikely to recommit crimes. According to a 2015 report by the Center for Justice at Columbia University, “Nationally, arrest rates are just over 2% for people aged 50+ and are almost 0% for people aged 65.”

There is also extreme racial disparity in life without parole sentencing, just as there is in every other part of the punishment system: Black people make up two-thirds or more of the LWOP population in nine states: Alabama, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, and South Carolina.

Additionally, just four states—Florida, Pennsylvania, California, Louisiana—and the federal system are responsible for half the prisoners sentenced to LWOP. According to attorney Patricia Garin, who supervises Northeastern University School of Law students representing lifers at Massachusetts Parole Board hearings, the reasons why we have more prisoners serving life without parole sentences are important.

“We have gotten more and more punitive as a society,” Garin said in an interview for this article. “In the past, prosecutors were more often willing to believe that persons should be given parole eligible life sentences so that they could earn a second chance. Presently, prosecutors’ charging decisions are often driven by politics and a misguided belief that they should always be seeking the longest sentence possible.”

The felony murder doctrine has also added to the number of people sentenced to life. Felony murder is generally defined as “an unintended killing during a felony and/or an accomplice’s role in a murder.” A 2009 report by the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts found that 20% of those sentenced to life without parole committed a felony such as armed robbery, but most were not the ones who actually killed the victim or had intent to do so.

Devastating Losses

James Rutherford, imprisoned at MCI-Norfolk, compared serving a sentence of LWOP to “a death in the family.” Rutherford was 27 when he was convicted in 2013 of first-degree murder in Massachusetts for his part in the stabbing and beating death of Francis P. Spokis during a robbery in Spokis’ home, as reported in the Worcester Telegram.

Rutherford told his wife, Brooke Hadley, “At first everyone shows up to the wake showing their support and then afterwards the funeral comes; people attend the funeral and little by little they forget you as time passes and they move on. I felt like I existed but I wasn’t really living.”

Hadley said in an email that she understands how devastating it is for a victim to lose someone they love, “but the person who committed the crime also lost everybody around them … including themselves.”

At the Harvard forum about life without parole, one woman described her pain: “When you’re living with someone who is serving LWOP, it becomes part of your life. … Knowing that my husband could die in prison and not have the opportunity to come home is almost unbearable.”

Clementina Cherry knows all about loss for both those who commit violence and those who experience it. Testifying before the Massachusetts Joint Commission on the Judiciary in 2014, she spoke about how she had worked with the family of the young man who served 15 years for killing her son, Louis, who was gunned down in a crossfire between rivals. Cherry founded the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Dorchester “to develop a structure for the 12

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

way families can heal,” and said that in 1994, there was “no blueprint for families” who had lost their loved ones to violence.

“And so it goes each time a child commits a crime against another; at least two families lose; two families mourn; two families must try to heal, and two families are left to wonder what could have been done to prevent this ongoing cycle of kill or be killed,” Cherry said.

Monalisa Smith, founder of the Boston-based Mothers for Justice and Equality, said that a part of supporting victims’ families is recognizing that the families of perpetrators are also suffering. Her organization saw early on that many of them had family members who were on both sides of such scenarios—they had been a victim of crime and had committed a violent act. She has since created numerous programs for healing and reducing community violence.

Danielle Sered, founder of Common Justice and the author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, has had major success in helping mostly teen survivors and perpetrators by developing and advancing solutions to violence. She examined numerous studies, and in her book, says that she found, “There is no evidence whatsoever … that connects the length of a defendant’s sentence to the well-being of a victim of crime.

None.”

In the first-ever survey on victims’ views on safety and justice, completed in 2016, most victims say that they prefer rehabilitation to punishment, while 3 to 1 believe in holding people accountable through options beyond prison, and 6 to 10 advocate for shorter prison sentences rather than LWOP and want more money spent on prevention and rehabilitation.

Lessons

Gottschalk said that the debate over juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences can teach us a lot about the fight against ending LWOP. Just as legislators in Massachusetts believed LWOP would be the last stop, those who wanted juvenile murderers sent to prison for the rest of their lives have had difficulty with the many Supreme Court rulings that have given relief to juveniles. According to a 2013 report by the Sentencing Project, this includes more than 10,000 life-sentenced prisoners. These men and women have been “convicted of crimes that occurred before they turned 18 and nearly 1 in 4 of them were sentenced to LWOP.” A series of US Supreme Court cases have yielded landmark rulings: It became unconstitutional in 2010 to sentence juveniles to life without parole for nonhomicidal crimes (Graham v. Florida); since 2012, no juvenile can receive a life without parole sentence for any homicide without consideration of their age (Miller v. Alabama); in 2016, the Miller decision became retroactive (Montgomery v. Louisiana).

As Gottschalk has written, brain research proved to be an extremely promising avenue to end or at least limit

the use of JLWOP. These “legal and political strategies” were rooted in arguments that the underdevelopment of teenage brains led to diminished culpability for their crimes. Which is not to say that adults are not capable of transformation after sentencing.

Garin, the Northeastern law professor, said that several studies have shown that people serving life sentences are the best bets for parole (I also wrote about this truism in my 2016 book, Boy with a Knife: The Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner’s Fight for Justice). Said Garin, “By and large, these are people who have transformed themselves in prison. We ignore the fact that second-degree lifers have the lowest recidivism rate of all prisoners.”

Rutherford, the prisoner at MCI-Norfolk, is an example of an adult who has transformed his life. He has completed a slew of programs in prison and is currently on the waiting list for enrollment into Boston University’s college program behind bars.

“Sobriety is possible as long as you mentally leave ‘maximum security,’” Rutherford said. “The depression and shame I carry is permanent but I know using drugs is not the answer. … I have come a long way, not only because I wanted to change for myself, but I wanted my family to have the James that they always loved and knew. I am so thankful I have a positive support system and a positive outlook.”

Hope on the Horizon

An Act to Reduce Mass Incarceration (H.3358) has been filed by Rep. Livingstone. The same bill has been filed in the Senate by Sen. Boncore (S.826). The bill promises parole eligibility for all after 25 years and is retroactive for those already serving a LWOP sentence. So far 28 legislators have signed on to the House bill, and 14 in the Senate. There will be a hearing this fall in the Judiciary Committee, potentially followed by a vote in the Massachusetts Legislature.

Vermont is also considering such legislation that would end LWOP for all.

Livingstone emphasized that there is no guarantee of parole release with the bill. Twenty-nine percent of juvenile lifers and 24% of adult lifers have received positive votes for parole since former Chair Paul M. Treseler took over the Parole Board in September 2015. These are records I have kept from when he took over until January 2019, when he became an associate justice of the Boston Municipal Court. It often takes two, three, four, or even more hearings for a petitioner to earn parole. If successful, serving the remainder of one’s life in society means lifetime parole supervision for anyone with a life sentence.

Asked about his bill, Livingstone said at the Harvard talk with Marc Mauer, “No one decades later is the same person they were decades earlier, and the idea that the State would just be writing off those people where they would be locking them up so they would never get out just struck me as wrong.”

The representative also pointed out the Commonwealth’s shameful record of zero commutations by any governor in more than 20 years. In January, Gloriann Moroney, who was recently nominated by Gov. Baker to be a member of the Parole Board, told the Governor’s Council (who approved her nomination) that 240 commutations had been filed by those hoping to have their sentences commuted. None of these had been acted on.

“The way I try to think is, How can we get the best results for society?” Livingstone said.

For those like Brooke Hadley, who speaks for her husband and many of the 1058 other prisoners serving life without parole, the hope that this bill will be passed “is keeping us going.”

IMAGE BY INCARCERATED ARTIST JACOB BARRETT USED VIA THE REAL COST OF PRISONS PROJECT NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

13

K IS FOR NASTY MUSIC

What’s up with the Quincy rap scene anyway?

BY INTERVIEW BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 In my first year at Bay State College in Boston I made a project called School of Knock. When I was making this project my dad, who was in jail for two years, was released, and on the first day out he overdosed and died. It almost shut everything down. I was three songs from completion, and I told my homey there was no more reason to keep doing this shit, but he talked me out of it and convinced me to keep doing this shit.

Then I got my first apartment and made an album about that shit—getting shitty weed, not being able to sell it, my landlord banging on the door all the time. It was very real, a storytelling project.

I’ve been writing about hip-hop in the Greater Boston region for approximately 15 years. In that time, I have probably covered less shows in Quincy than I have in New Hampshire, which shouldn’t be the case. Nothing against acts from the Granite State—especially the namesake duo Granite State that I have long admired—but Quincy’s right beside the hub of New England hip-hop, and should at least have some fraction of the shows that come through Cambridge and Somerville.

Some have made attempts to bring rap music to the City of Presidents, while others have made quite a name for themselves—from battle rap champ Moroney, to Louis Bell, the Grammy-winning producer formerly known as Lu Balz who has since moved to LA to produce tracks for Post Malone and others. With what seems like more action on the Quincy front than ever before, I rode to the tail end of Red Line to meet up with one of the city’s chief up-andcomers, Knasty, and to learn more about his hustle and plans to help develop the scene south of Boston.

I learn from what I see around me. I grew up with some questionable folks and I knew that wasn’t for me. I’m no angel though–I’ve experimented a lot with psychedelics.

When people ask you where you’re from, what do you say?

I tell them it’s complicated. I grew up in Southie but I’ve lived in a whole lot of places.

I moved to Quincy when I was like 10 years old, then I moved to South Carolina for a couple of years. With three months left in my senior year of high school, my mom moved down to Plymouth, so I was crashing on couches in Quincy for a while. I went to college eventually and moved to Boston for a little bit, then got my own place in Quincy, but I’m still bouncing around. I was just out in LA for a little bit, and that was just too much, so I’m back home for the time being.

14

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

Have your music making and consumption habits changed as you have moved around? What were you doing in LA? Yeah, it’s all about the environment. I went out to LA and planned on being there for a long time, but really I was just getting my feet planted and working on this project. Right when I finished my project, some shit happened back here and I had to get home right away.

I mastered all the songs out there—there was no AC in the studio, it was like 120 degrees—then I went back to my coffee shop job, then the next day woke up and went surfing, then everything fell apart and I had to come home.

From listening to your music, it seems like you’ve had a couple of setbacks over the years.

Yeah, when I came home my mom had gotten sick, so I had no choice. At first I was scrambling, but in the time since, I’ve done some of my most notable shit. I just kind of go where it takes me.

You’re 24 and you’ve been rapping for 10 years. I did the math and am assuming that some of the first shit you put out is cringe-worthy. Is that a pretty accurate statement?

Yeah, the lyrics were terrible. My beats were terrible, I was still going on SoundClick.

What other names have you rapped under?

I was Knockout for a long time, but I changed it to Knasty because I was Knasty Knockout. It’s kind of a tribute to [Nasty] Nas, but I always spelled it with a “K.” I dropped an album called Knasty, and after that [the change] happened in a second. I’ve done a lot of research and there’s only one Knasty with a “K.” A lot of people think it’s K-nasty, but it isn’t. It’s [silent], like [in the word] knife.

How far back do you go on the scene around here?

Back when I was 16 at Quincy High School I booked my first Middle East show. I sold a bunch of tickets but it cost me a whole bunch of money at the end of the day. It was set in stone, though, my name on the flyer, and that’s kind of when I said, I’m in. From there I really spent a lot of time experimenting to find where I fit in before I really gave it another push.

Any problems with your own personal drug use?

I never really had a problem with it. I learn from what I see around me. I grew up with some questionable folks and I knew that wasn’t for me. I’m no angel though—I’ve experimented a lot with psychedelics.

How about living on the South Shore and everything that’s happening around you? Has that influenced your work at all?

It’s very situational. There’s what you see every day.

My favorite Nas line is, “Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the streets / Suede Timbs on my feet makes my cipher complete.” You can apply that to anything—Monday morning going to work, Friday night hitting the club. I just try to put exactly what’s going on around me into my music.

Aren’t you a little bit young to be quoting Nas? Do you have contemporary influences too?

A little bit. I try to broaden my range a lot. When I was coming up I was against the tight pants and against the swag movement and all that, but I’ve definitely opened my ears a little bit. Now I try to incorporate more of those elements while still having integrity.

What’s the Quincy scene like now?

It’s tough. Like Boston, they suppress hip-hop. Even back at Quincy High School I was never allowed to do the talent show because I rapped. The last show we did with all Quincy artists on the bill, though, we sold out. Two tickets were sold the day of the show—everything else was sold beforehand. But I want to centralize the energy.

Not just for my own benefit, but for everyone.

What’s happening now and next with you?

I spent all last year working on this. I went on two tours, one more successful than the other, and I went to [the hip-hop festival] A3C in Atlanta. I’ve been there three times. And I went to South by Southwest. I saw a lot, and it comforts me to know that I don’t fit into a lot of the categories that a lot of these other rappers fit in.

Everybody has their Migos costume—it looks like they’re dressed for Halloween.

I’m trying to start my own independent label, and part of it is that I want the main studio to be out here in Quincy. There’s going to be music and videos between now and then—I have 20 new songs loaded up right now.

My team is just getting everything together right now.

It’s about bringing the people I work with together so we all make money. We’ll all be tied to [the label] but none of us will be tethered to it.

pace

rt Pop Up S

A

A mer Media m u S w e N t Vibran

GUST 31 MAY 9 - AU bly Row m e s s A , y a W xpop 431 Artisan edia.org/vo m le il rv e m so ar:

ents Calend Hours & Ev

ry Public Libra , Somerville s w o h S y d lks, Come ts, Author Ta h Join us for ig N ie v o torytime, M Binge!, Children’s S ing, SCATV ll te ry to S , sts, Music & more!

Live Podca Workshops ia d e M , e e Radio Liv Boston Fre

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

15

TOTAL RECALL MUSIC

Our biggest music festival turns 10 (kind of)

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON First of all, it hasn’t been a decade. You’re not losing your mind, nor is time slipping away even faster than usual. Rather, in just six short years, the Boston Calling crew has managed to throw 10 of the biggest events in Hub music history. (In 2015, for example, we experienced it in May and again in September, with the festival providing memorable bookends for that summer.)

Say what you will about the ticket prices and celebrity Instagram vibe; the fact is that a lot of people and promoters have wanted to bring a megafest to town forever, and Boston Calling has come through big time for New England. In the process, they’ve spurred a lot of memorable moments, a small number of which we’ve compiled below in anticipation of this coming weekend …

It’s not exactly a highlight, but let’s start off with that time our investigative reporters learned that everyone who went to the first incarnation of the festival unknowingly encountered biometric surveillance: Nobody at either day of last year’s debut Boston Calling partied with much expectation of privacy. With an army of media photographers, selfie takers, and videographers recording every angle of the massive concert on Government Center, it was inherently clear that music fans were in the middle of a massive photo opp. What attendees (and promoters, for that matter) didn’t know, however, was that they were all unwitting test subjects for a sophisticated new event monitoring platform. Namely, the city’s software and equipment gave authorities a live and detailed birdseye view of concertgoers, pedestrians, and vehicles in the vicinity of City Hall on May 25 and 26 of 2013 (as well as during the two days of a subsequent Boston Calling in September). We’re not talking about old school blackand-white surveillance cameras. More like technology that analyzes every passerby for height, clothing, and skin color. -Chris Faraone, Kenneth Lipp, Jonathan Riley (2014) On the positive side of things, it’s been quite a thrill to learn who will be coming to perform…

It’s mid-January [and] the official Boston Calling announcement just came from on high, and here’s how it shakes out: Beck, the Pixies, and My Morning Jacket grab the headlining slots for the big event this May 22-24. The former is coming off his critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated album Morning Phase, but the discography, as if you needed reminding, goes deep.

My Morning Jacket, meanwhile, are a festival rock band’s festival rock band. And the Pixies, well, if you need to ask… The rest of the lineup shakes out with a little bit of everything: Jack Black (via Tenacious D); a couple of Aussies (neo-crooner Chet Faker and psychrock crew Tame Impala); electro folk-pop (Grizfolk), which is a thing; and just in case anyone was feeling a little too safe, the exquisitely articulated brutality of El-P and Killer Mike, aka Run the Jewels. -Martin Caballero (2015) Props to former Dig Music Editor Nina Corcoran, who always sorted through the goods and found the standout gems…

Friday’s lineup may have only been three acts, but it packed more punch than the four hours would suggest. The eternally sweet Sharon Van Etten took to the stage with her band for a slow set of heartfelt and heartbroken songwriting. Despite a few hecklers, Etten kept calm onstage and sang her way through older cuts (“Don’t Do It”) and new material (“Taking Chances,” “Your Love Is Killing Me”). … Upbeat, steady, and relatively poppy considering her other work, it 16

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

brought more smiles out of her band and the audience than the rest, providing the founding cement for the acts to follow. This festival, unlike others, is about taking in music as it happens, not proving you already know it all. -Nina Corcoran (2015) And then came the relocation, or, as Corcoran put it, the time Boston Calling waved “hello to diversity [and] goodbye to City Hall Plaza”…

With giant Ivy League fields comes a whole lotta space. Moving over to Allston allows Boston Calling to feel less cramped and, in the process, book acts that will draw even bigger crowds without upsetting our beloved BPD. Plus people who don’t buy festival tickets may get a better sound bite to chew on, but they won’t be able to see the stage screens anymore. Hosting a music festival with dozens of elongated buildings around it looks cool.

It doesn’t sound cool. All the delayed reverb and eerie echoes of City Hall will now be a thing of the past. Openair festivals lend to a naturally swollen, warm, grandiose sound. Ditching a metallic wall is for the better.

For a radio pop-leaning crowd, Boston Calling brought in rappers who bridged the gap between lyric obsessives and rap dabblers. Local legend Michael Christmas practically lowered the stage he stood on, delivering his lines like he shouldn’t be idolized. Just like his pop culture references to Michael Cera and Hot Pockets provided equal ground, so did Vince Staples’ allusions. The Cali rapper plowed through hits, but he used nearly every break for positivity, as if lashing back at those who assume rap is dangerous (Heyyyyy, NYPD). After telling the younger fans at the front to stay in school, Staples rattled off local universities, including outsiders like Emerson College and numerous community colleges alike.

Then came the grooves, the powerhouses who used dance to energize themselves, the fans, and the spirits of nearly every living thing in sight. Christine and the Queens took the stage by storm as the second act of the day. The French singer-songwriter kept up to speed with her backup dancers, all of whom broke into backflips and splits without wasting a second or smile. As she preached empathy, love, and acceptance, the crowd applauded right back, creating the type of positivity rarely seen throughout the whole day at a festival,

and yet that vibe kept going. Even Unknown Mortal Orchestra utilized their psych-rock wobbling so that they, Portland-via-New Zealand quasi-rockers, could get people dancing. -Nina Corcoran (2016) And let’s not forget the laughs…

Originally, Boston Calling’s new location came with other new additions, like a film festival curated by Natalie Portman. While that addition fell through, they stepped up their game in its place, growing what was a tiny comedy stage from the past year into a proper comedy experience. The 13-act “comedy festival” is hosted by Hannibal Buress, who, presumably, picked the lineup. Saturday saw him share the stage with Phoebe Robinson, Jordan Rock, Bethany Van Delft, and Boston’s own Lamont Price. As the headliner, Hannibal Buress was everything fans could have wanted. He worked his way through new material, much of which saw him leaning into media and audio assistance, which, instead of becoming the brute of his material, acted as well-timed flourishes, driving his jokes home with an extra touch of absurdist humor. It’s tempting to spoil his jokes here, but we don’t want to ruin what’s likely an upcoming special (viewers were reminded before he took that stage not to film the material on any device), so just know Reddit, coffeemakers, and ballet all come into play at some point. -Nina Corcoran (2017) And finally, a note to bring us into this year’s spectacular…

Overall, Boston Calling felt very chill. It didn’t try to overextend itself. The ability to float from one set to the other without getting stuck in a human gridlock felt freeing. Even the excited but within reason sets were welcome as they matched most attendees’ moods. In an age of festival saturation, there’s something nice about having a stacked lineup that doesn’t feel overwhelming in execution—meaning, there’s no temptation to dart across the festival in a frenzy, trying to see 15 minutes of every performance—because of when and how events were scheduled. Instead, it gives you time to breath. There’s a reason to explore. At no point did you feel a deep sense of FOMO for missing anything, yet could leave each night feeling like you saw something worthwhile. -Nina Corcoran (2018)

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

17

OUTSIDE THE LITTLE BOXES BOOKS

Meet the author who braved the ’burbs to explore the roots of some of America’s most progressive communities beyond city limits

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

PICTURED: ONE OF THE ORIGINAL TAC HOMES ON SIX MOON HILL. ORIGINALLY BUILT FOR THE EQUIVALENT OF LESS THAN $200,000 TODAY, THEY NOW SELL IN THE MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR RANGE. Amanda Kolson Hurley is about to blow your mind.

The suburbs, she argues, don’t completely suck. Look closely, the Atlantic writer suggests in her new book, Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City, and you’ll even find some of the most progressive models of community in the entire country.

“Misinformed cliches,” Kolson Hurley writes, “still define suburbia in the popular imagination, and it drives me crazy. I lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. I’m a suburbanite, but my life doesn’t revolve around manicured lawns, status anxiety, or a craving for homogeneity.”

The author continues, “More than half of all Americans live in the suburbs, and according to demographer William Frey, within the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, more than half of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians do. Minorities now account for 35 percent of suburban residents, in line with their share of the total U.S. population.”

As for the experimental living mentioned in the title of her book, Kolson Hurley revisits the history of fringe locales like the Stelton Colony, an anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey, as well as Six Moon Hill in Lexington, Massachusetts, where Bauhaus architects first moved their families back in the ’40s.

Ahead of an event that DigBoston is hosting with the author and CityLab in Central Square next week, we asked Kolson Hurley about her radical new project.

How much of this book, and this interest of yours, really comes from you growing up and living in the ’burbs?

I grew up in suburbia, so that’s my natural habitat.

I’ve also lived in the city for a number of years. I guess I’ve never considered myself a dyed-in-the-wool suburbanite.

But it was in the Maryland suburb that I live in now where I started to see how people continue to talk about suburbia as if it is this landscape filled with 1950s people.

It got me interested in the history of the suburbs, and in reading about that, I started to realize how the suburbs have changed a lot, especially in the last 15 to 20 years.

But was never this monolithic place that we sometimes assume.

When you look at a lot of the suburbs you discuss and visit in your work, does it sometimes feel like you’re looking at an oasis? How much do these places stick out from the typical suburb?

Because they were founded with a real degree of intentionality, they have not really bled out. The people who settled them really wanted them to be defined communities that embody certain principles or values. A lot of them are self-contained. In a lot of cases, there’s a really stark difference when you are driving or walking and you cross this invisible line. One former anarchist colony in New Jersey that I wrote about has sort of been swallowed up by the surrounding community, but you can still see a lot of the [original] cottages, even if they have been built on or modified in the time since. They were anarchists, so they didn’t have a lot of rules or boundaries to the community. Things were a lot more fluid there.

A lot of people in places like Boston get pushed to the suburbs, as opposed to wanting to move there, which leads me to wonder if there is a difference between communities and groups of people who go to the ’burbs intentionally, and those who just wind up or are pushed there. Is that a distinction you’ve seen in your research?

We tend to think of the suburbs in terms of aspiration and people aspiring toward suburban life. That’s definitely part of American culture. But there’s also an element of the suburbs being a place of compromise— maybe you want to be living in the city, or you were living in the city and for various reasons, perhaps the city became too expensive, you had to move. In the case of the anarchists, the suburbs were a place where they could go and have a little more privacy [since they were being spied on by the government]. Another group that compromised took part in this New Deal program in Greenbelt, Maryland. Most of them were crammed into little apartments in Washington, DC, and for them, being out in what was the countryside back then was a real mixed bag. There are poems about being that far away and isolated from things. The narrative has always been pure aspiration—that everyone wants a suburban life. But I think it’s always been the compromise place.

How accessible are these places to newcomers and outsiders? Is there a general mindset among them?

More so than the average suburban community, these places have traditions of being open and nonconformist.

However, there are values you could say they share with the surrounding majority upper-middle class communities that can make them resistant to things like new affordable housing. It’s very hard to generalize that sort of thing, but if you did you could say these places are generally liberal.

Is there any research that shows people live in a more cooperative manner in the suburbs vs in a city or vice versa?

I think the assumption people make is that because suburbanites are more scattered, lots tend to be bigger, and people tend to live in single-family homes on their own lots, that you’re going to be sharing less and doing less in your community. There has been research that tries to quantify these things, and it’s kind of inconclusive. One study I [read] was about cul-de-sacs, and how they don’t connect, but there’s also research that says that people who live on cul-de-sacs become really close with their neighbors. You can probably argue it both ways. … In the first generation of a lot of the communities I’m writing about though, they really were relying on a lot of cooperative living and volunteerism.

Everything from the Boy Scouts, to services for the elderly, they took it upon themselves to do these things.

Once that foundation was built, were there a lot of efforts of people to share their ideals with the people around them? Or have these mostly been walled gardens?

I write about Reston, Virginia, which was founded as kind of an anti-suburb. It would be very urban, it had a mix of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and income levels. There was culture. It was this experiment that really struggled at first, but that ended up working a lot better than I think people imagined it would. There are certainly struggles there, because development has really taken off and people disagree about what that should look like, but there really seems to be a lot of local pride in the progressive values and work done by the prior generations.

You also write about Lexington, and specifically members of the Architects’ Collective (TAC), who founded Six Moon Hill in that suburb. How does this prominent Greater Boston model of a radical suburb fit into the context of all of the places overall that you’re writing about?

I only write about two of these communities in Lexington, but there were several, I think due to the proximity of schools like Harvard and MIT. I wanted to write about [Six Moon Hill] because it really was the best example of how, at this one period in time—right around after the second World War—where people didn’t take for granted that large-scale suburban development was going to be cookie cutter and bland. The war had just finished, there was a huge demand for housing, and there was an urgent need for it. Some of these younger, more visionary architects saw this as a sort of window to bring more modernist, progressive design to the American public in a major way. They saw it as a great opportunity to do something quite bracing. They were mostly young architects—men and women, some married and having children—and they wanted to build communities for themselves, sure, but also for other people like them. It was a pretty Utopian vision.

>> RADICAL SUBURBS BOSTON RELEASE AND INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA KOLSON HURLEY. PRESENTED BY CITYLAB AND DIGBOSTON. WED 5.29. 6PM. 730 TAVERN, 730 MASS. AVE., CENTRAL SQUARE, CAMBRIDGE. REGISTER FOR FREE AT CITYLAB.COM. 18

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

ARTISTS NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

THE SOUND OF 70MM FILM

On a particular technology shown off by the Somerville Theatre’s 70mm & Widescreen film festival

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Most discussion on the subject of 70mm film exhibition places an emphasis on the texture of the images, for reasons both understandable and entirely justifiable. But what this inadvertently obscures is that advances in audio technology have been tied into the development of 70mm (and other modes of large-format film exhibition) just as tightly as the accompanying developments made on the visual side. For instance, one need only look at the first real sustained run of 70mm film exhibition in the United States, during the mid-1950s, which began when the producer and entrepreneur Mike Todd took the lessons he learned from a prior venture, Cinerama, and came out the other side with his latest project, Todd-AO. The Todd-AO process, as it came to be known, called for movies to be shot on 65mm stock and then projected via 70mm prints—with space made on the latter for six entirely separate sound tracks.

This was because the process also called for five speakers behind the screen itself: left, left-center, center, rightcenter, and right (the sixth track was often reserved for effects, to be output from speakers away from the screen).

What this allows for, in the films that make full use of the technology’s possibilities, is an unusually immersive soundon-film experience, one where, to name just one example, you might hear the dialogue moving across the frame in conjunction with a character, at those moments where they happen to be moving from left to right or right to left while speaking it.

With the precedent set and (perhaps more importantly) the speakers already installed at the movie houses, many of the other 70mm ventures and technologies inaugurated during this period of time (there were more than a few) went on to utilize that same audio layout. And indeed, six-track sound would eventually become a standard of theatrical exhibition—though one unendingly tinkered with—for the remainder of the 20th century. But the elegant and effective Todd-AO layout, with its five discrete channels all grouped together behind the screen, did not last beyond the first run of 70mm roadshow films, eventually ditched in favor of “surround” methods that placed at least two or three audio tracks away from the frame itself. At this point, it seems rather safe to say that relatively few movie theaters in the United States remain capable of exhibiting a film down to the letter of these Todd-AO standards. But one among them is the Somerville Theatre.

“We went through the trouble and the expense of setting up the old Todd-AO configuration,” wrote David Kornfeld, the Somerville’s head projectionist, in an email sent last week. “Five front channels, one surround. Every 70mm production before (around) 1976 utilized that standard, to a greater or lesser degree.” Kornfeld confirmed to me in that same email that five channels of discrete sound behind the screen is a rarity within the likes of

IMAGE FROM IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD 20

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

commercial film exhibition (“two of the channels are not in use during non-70mm exhibition”)—meaning the Somerville Theatre isn’t afforded many opportunities to show off that particular installation. But one such opportunity is, luckily, a recurring one: Its annual 70mm & Widescreen Film Festival, dedicated to those namesake formats that the Davis Square movie house is rather uniquely equipped to showcase (this year’s iteration concluded days ago). An extraordinarily ambitious project within the context of repertory film programming, the Somerville’s 70mm Fest began only after the theater completed long-term efforts to get its projection booth as prepared as possible for the many nuances and vagaries of large-format exhibition.

“Many technicians warned us it would be futile,” Kornfeld continued, “[and] finding all the sound processing equipment needed to reproduce the various 70mm formats (there are ten, we can run eight, the remaining two are obsolete)—said equipment not having been made for decades—took many years. Once it was all located and purchased, it had to be installed, configured, and made to work with our current system. All new speakers and the wiring for them were installed. Magnetic heads had to be found, installed, and aligned, along with the entire sound system. A DTS process and readers also had to be located and installed. On top of that, an entirely new booth had to be constructed, and the 70mm projectors located, bought, refurbished, installed, and aligned. The entire project, from its conception to hitting the screen with 2001 (1968) in February 2015, took about seven years.”

This year’s festival showed off a handful of the 70mm sound formats that Kornfeld cites above. Per his email, three of the eight movies that played this year were projected from prints outfitted with Dolby six-track magnetic sound: The Dark Crystal (1982), Poltergeist (1982), and The Remains of the Day (1993). The most recent film in this year’s festival, Dunkirk (2017) played with 5.1 sound from a DTS track. And finally, three of this year’s films played with sound mixed in the Todd-AO standard: Those are West Side Story (1961), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (though it should be noted that for those last three films, what you’ll be hearing is not exactly the “original” sound, but rather DTS tracks that reconstruct the six-track magnetic sound featured on the original 70mm releases). When I attended the Somerville’s first 70mm & Widescreen festival in fall of 2016, it was not the cinematography of any specific film that left the sharpest memory, but instead the six-track Todd-AO sound, most notably during West Side Story and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World—on the specific level of sound presentation, both were unmatched.

These are, of course, radically different films in nearly every other manner: West Side Story is the adaptation of

the Broadway musical directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad is the 190-somethingminute comic epic directed by Stanley Kramer and featuring a speaking cast of well over 40 performers. But they do share a highly specific quality made possible only by the specifics of the Todd-AO process—both frame a majority of the action in extremely wide medium shots that bring at least two or three characters into the same composition, and then utilize the sound in purposeful conjunction with those compositions. In West Side Story, the multichannel front sound is used to define and even expand the space within the frame, not only by situating characters in specific places but also by using pitch and volume to illustrate who’s close to the screen and who’s far away. It becomes a natural extension of the blocking, essentially, sound as a reflection of mise en scène to an extent very rarely seen. And in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the five-channel sound is most notable when used to expand the film’s absurd sense of busyness, its impressively untoward enormity. Kramer often collects four, five, six, or more actors together in the same wide frame, packed together from one end of the screen to the other, and having all their dialogue emerging from seperated, crossed-up sources only emphasizes the packed-train-atrush-hour atmosphere of the whole piece (there’s not a lot of overlapping dialogue, but one might reasonably say it’s something of a precursor to Altman’s films of the ’70s anyway). The five-track front sound emerges not as some roadshow gimmick, nor as unnecessary tech fetishism, but as an integral part of a larger form.

For those who missed the festival this year, take heart knowing that many of the films that played are moderately likely to return at some future iteration. “Print availability and the number of films made in the format always limits what we can show,” said Ian Judge, general manager of the Somerville Theatre, also by email. “The festival repeats itself by design, as well as by necessity—we are trying to give new and younger audiences a chance to see these films as they were meant to be seen, as well as let older audiences experience them again in their native format.” Some of the prints may be “restrikes,” and the Todd-AO sound mixes are indeed reconstructions, but the speakers behind the screen at the Somerville still bring us one step closer to how these films were originally intended to be exhibited. And so on the sizeable list of exemplary film experiences to be had in the Boston area, screenings of 70mm prints that utilize the Somerville’s five-channel front sound rank near the very top.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE SOMERVILLE THEATRE AND ITS PROGRAMMING, SEE SOMERVILLETHEATRE.COM.

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

21

DISCLOSED SAVAGE LOVE

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NETE3 I keep running into the same issue with my best friend of five years. (She’s also my maid of honor at my upcoming wedding.) We’re both empaths—most of my friends are—and we’re both in therapy working on how to cope with that. I have severe anxiety that impacts my physical health, so one of the empath-related issues I’m working on is not following through with plans when I need to take time alone. My friend claims she understands this but my actions severely impact her mood. Example: We’ll make tentative plans to get together, I’ll feel too sick to follow through, and then she’s in a negative emotional spiral for days. The final straw came when she called me late this past Friday night—just once, with no subsequent voice mail, text message, or followup call. On Monday morning, I sent her a text message asking how her weekend was and got an icy reply. Evidently, something happened to her on Friday, she called me for support, and my failure to return her call left her feeling very upset. I apologized for the accidental trigger and tried to lay down some protocols for reaching out in an emergency situation (leave me a voice mail and send a follow-up text) so I know it’s urgent. She hasn’t replied. I’m really frustrated. She has a lot of baggage around being shamed for being emotional, so I try to be careful not to invalidate her feelings, but I don’t know if that’s even making a difference. We’ve had several conflicts over the last year, always triggered by something I did or said, almost always accidentally, that caused her to “take a step back.” She insists she understands I’m doing my best to be a good friend while also working through my own emotional shit. But that’s not the sense I’m getting. I’m feeling increasingly like it’s impossible to be a human being AND her friend. Until recently, I had zero emotional boundaries and made myself available to her at a moment’s notice to help shoulder her emotional burden. But now that I’m trying to be more conservative with my abundance and take better care of myself, it seems like all I do is hurt her. What the fuck do I do? I’ve tried to be open-minded and patient with her dramatic mood swings, but she seems unable to give me the benefit of the doubt, which I always try to give her. This rocky ground between us is adding more stress to the whole wedding situation. (You’re supposed to be able to rely on your maid of honor, right?) This thing we have is not sustainable as it is, although I love her deeply.

Help me figure this out?

Emotions Making Personal Affection Too Hard Being so attuned to other people’s emotional states that you feel their pain—being an empath—sounds exhausting. But Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist in private practice, isn’t convinced your empath superpowers are the problem here.

“EMPATH’s moods seem overly dependent on what the other person does,” said Gottlieb. “That’s not being ‘an empath.’ Most people are empathetic, which isn’t the same as what these two are doing. They’re drowning in each other’s feelings. This is what pop culture might call codependency, and what in therapy we’d call an attachment issue.”

From your letter, EMPATH, it sounds like you might be ready to detach from your friend—you mentioned a final straw and described the relationship as not sustainable— and detaching would resolve this attachment issue.

“This feels less like a friendship and more like a psychodrama where they’re each playing out their respective issues,” said Gottlieb. “A friendship isn’t about solving another person’s emotional issues or being the container for them. It isn’t about being devastated by another person’s feelings or boundaries. It should be a mutually fulfilling relationship, not being co-therapists to each other. In a strong friendship, each person can handle her own emotions rather than relying on the friend to regulate them for her.”

Gottlieb started writing an advice column because, unlike psychotherapists, advice columnists are supposed to tell people what to do. I’m guessing your therapist mostly asks questions and gently nudges, EMPATH, but since Gottlieb has her advice-columnist hat on today and not her psychotherapist hat, I asked her to tell you what to do.

“She should act more like a friend than a therapist/caretaker,” said Gottlieb.

“She shouldn’t treat her friend or herself as if they’re too fragile to handle basic communication or boundaries. And they should both be working out their issues with their respective therapists, not with each other.”

And if you decide to keep this woman in your life (and your wedding party), EMPATH, you’ll both have to work on—sigh—your communication skills.

“Right now, they don’t seem to know how to communicate directly with each other,” said Gottlieb. “It’s either an icy text or complaining to outside parties about each other.

But when it comes to how they interact with each other, they’re so careful, as if one or both might break if they simply said, ‘Hey, I really care about you and I know sometimes you want to talk about stuff, but sometimes it feels like too much and maybe something you can talk to your therapist about.’”

Lori Gottlieb’s new book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, is a New York Times best seller. Follow her on Twitter @LoriGottlieb1

On the Lovecast, Dan chats with actor Maddie Corman: Listen at savagelovecast.com.

22

05.16.19 - 05.23.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

RUTHERFORD

BY DON KUSS DONKUSS@DIGBOSTON.COM

FRIDAY, JULY 12, 6 PM - 11 PM CELEBRATE LA FÊTE NATIONALE WITH DELICIOUS FOOD AND DRINK, AND DANCING IN THE STREET! LIVE MUSIC BY

Bon Bon Vivant & Shamarr Allen & the Underdawgs FRENCHCULTURALCENTER.ORG

$34 IN ADVANCE | $40 AT THE DOOR | CHILDREN UNDER 10 FREE EVENT SELLS OUT - BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW - RAIN OR SHINE NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

23