LEO Weekly Nov 23, 2022

CH-CH-CHANGES: LEO’S GOT ‘EM.

By Erica Rucker | erucker@leoweekly.com

AS BOWIE says in his song “Changes,” it’s time to “turn and face the strange.”

Like most media outlets, LEO is going through some changes, and one of those is losing our fearless leader Scott Recker as he branches out into other things. This means that someone else has to step up into his place, and LEO’s owner Euclid Media Group asked me to do it.

Did I hesitate? Yes, because sometimes I just enjoy being in my lane and flying under the radar and maybe, this was too big a task considering all that this “little newspaper that could” has been through. We struggle, y’all.

We’re not above free coffee, food and the occasional lucrative partnerships… especially that last part.

But LEO, like Louisville, is kind of special to me.

It’s been there through many seasons of my adult life and always a place I would go to read or find something that I couldn’t find elsewhere. It was the paper of the weirdos, the underserved, the folks who didn’t have a voice elsewhere. From drag shows, to art, to poetry, to cosplay, to concerts, we found community in its pages. We also found our way to the local porn shops, but this is a no-judgement zone.

LEO covers things that other outlets do, but most of the time, we do it in a way that is very much our own. Love it or hate it, the sometimes sardonic and

biting tone of LEO lets us have discussions other outlets can’t. We don’t have the pretense or the need for filters in the way that other outlets do. It’s something we’re fiercely protective of.

With that in mind — a job that lets me speak the truth, be in community and share space with my favorite people in the world, Louisvillians — I said yes to the job (cue panic attack).

We’re more than smart asses, though (insert diabolical grin). We’re also creators, taxpayers, homeowners, voters, parents, etc. We’re Louisvillians. The issues and people of our city matter a whole lot to us. We’re not outsiders talking without experience, here.

I’m aware that while we’ve been good at speaking truth to power for a long time, and that we are focused — most of the time — on punching up instead of down, the challenges we’ve faced as an outlet — ownership changes, staff changes and reduced budgets — have left us a bit battered and in a bit of an identity crisis.

What is LEO and who is LEO for?

Simple answer is that it’s in our name: Louisville Eccentric Observer. We’re here for Louisville.

Louisville’s landscape has changed since our founding in 1990. It’s more diverse (from the people to the food and experiences — the recent Asian Night Market comes to mind), still DIY, still leaning left (yes!), and nurtures a great art, theater, performance scene and finally decent nightlife.

LEO’s borders used to be really focused in the Highlands, Crescent Hill and Germantown — our original stomping grounds — but it’s just not possible

for us to exist in the vacuum of those areas anymore and neglect all of the other fascinating parts of the city and the people who live there.

We know that we’ll never be all things to all Louisvillians, but we can be more adept at reaching the stories in areas that we haven’t before. We can be better at inviting more people to our “table” and having difficult conversations in a way that is productive and helps our city grow more equitable. We can also be more fun, more creative, more risk-taking.

Our print version is on a biweekly schedule (every other week), and we keep a daily digital schedule. We can do things that we couldn’t before and bring you LEO in a new way. I don’t think we’ve given ourselves enough room to breathe and enough time to remember that we’re part of Louisville, its past, and hopefully, its future.

It isn’t lost on me that my very existence in LEO is proof that Louisville has changed. LEO hasn’t had a lot of Black folks on staff. A few of us here and there, and never in the editor’s chair. It’s major that I have this opportunity, and it means that part of my responsibility is that I remember the past and make what is possible for the future better and fairer, if I can.

When I assume the role of editor-inchief in January, I hope that LEO can step out of the shadow of what we’ve been and into the LEO that still has some breath to breathe, some stories to tell, and most of all, a community that cares about it, even if we make you angry. We really are here for you.

P.S. Look for the Letters to the Editor to return because I miss hearing your voices and knowing what’s on the mind of the city. Get your “caps” fingers ready. •

THE UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOMES OF JUDICIAL RACES

By Dan Canon | leo@leoweekly.com

IF there’s one takeaway from the 2022 judicial races in Jefferson County, it’s that women will always win judicial races against men. It’s well established that a candidate’s perceived gender is an important factor in nonpartisan races, and Louisville voters have decided that women make better judges. Simple as that.

Ah, wait. The low-dollar district court matchup between public defender Anthony Jones and elder law attorney Emily Korfhage Monarch disproves that rule. Jones won by almost 4,000 votes. Okay then, this indicates that people want defense lawyers and other candidates who are dedicated to reforming our criminal legal system. Louisville’s voting population was energized by the Breonna Taylor protests, and they are more engaged than ever in these judicial races, so they’ve done their homework this time.

Hold on, that’s not it either. Lisa Langford, a former prosecutor, trounced former public defender Justin Brown. Ted Shouse, a high-profile criminal defense lawyer who has been on the front lines of nearly every social justice legal battle in Louisville for more than a decade, suffered a 20,000vote defeat to a mostly unknown insurance defense lawyer who had the backing of the GOP and the FOP. And the “people’s lawyers” running for Court of Appeals — State Representative McKenzie Cantrell and Tricia Lister — both lost to sitting judges who have gotten plenty of bad press.

We can at least say that incumbent judges have a major advantage. Oh, except that Tracy Davis beat out Judge Mary Shaw, who was the only incumbent challenged at the Circuit Court level. That must be because Shaw signed the bogus search warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s death. So voters want judges who are more in touch with social justice — no, no, sorry. We already debunked that one. Fuck! This is hard.

My law professor brain wants a framework for understanding voters, a formula for winning elections, or at least some stable measure of predictability that could be used in future elections, but no such thing exists. Propose a marker, any marker, to predict voter behavior in this last election, and it can be discarded by the judicial results in Jefferson County. Experience? No. Ethnicity? No.

Endorsements? No. Fundraising? Close, but not quite. No single factor, or even combination of factors, yields a satisfactory answer.

In looking at these results, it might be tempting to conclude that judicial campaigns just don’t matter that much. A candidate could put their name on a ballot, never knock on a single door or put up a single yard sign, kick back, and wait for the results. In fact, it seems like that’s exactly what a few of them did this cycle. Meanwhile, highly recognizable candidates like Shouse and Cantrell campaigned hard and still lost.

The truth is that party identification is the single most important factor in predicting voter behavior, and when you take that away, we know diddly/squat about what motivates voters. Research on voting behavior is focused almost entirely on high-level elections, and most of that on presidential races. There hasn’t been much in the way of empirical research on nonpartisan races for the last 20 years.

The best we can do are little glimpses into ways that voters might behave with stylus in hand. In one of the more recent studies on the matter, political scientists Chris Bonneau and Damon Cann theorize that people will sniff out (and sometimes invent) party affiliations where none are listed. That’s fine for highly-informed voters, but most of the people who show up to vote for the top of the ticket won’t know anything about judicial candidates before Election Day. We also know that uninformed voters tend not to vote at all on the down-ballot races. That seems to have been the case in Louisville; 277,343 votes were counted in the mayoral race, and most of the judicial races had less than 200,000. When you start to look at uninformed voters who do vote, that’s where things get fuzzy. Some folks will vote along perceived gender or ethnicity lines, or on general name recognition, but many will simply vote for the name that’s at the top of the ticket. In any event, no published studies offer any helpful explanation for the baffling array of results in Jefferson County this year.

The lack of meaningful data is troubling. Somewhere around half of all U.S. elections are nonpartisan. In many states, the state Supreme Court and Court Of Appeals judges will control important aspects of reproductive rights, public education, voter maps and

more. District and circuit court judges determine property rights, child custody issues, how full the jails are and honest-to-god-lifeand-death matters. And yet we know almost nothing concrete about how candidates in these races might successfully sway voters.

Given this dearth of knowledge, a candidate in a nonpartisan race has to do… well, whatever it takes. An electoral win becomes an exceedingly complicated calculus that takes a bajillion factors into account. Circuit Judge-elect Julie Kaelin told me: “Endorsements, name recognition, gender, getting out and meeting voters in the community, engaging on social media platforms, etc. are all important factors in the final calculation. A good candidate is cognizant of this, chooses their race wisely, and then works hard to leave nothing to chance.”

Beth Thorpe, a digital strategist who has worked on several judicial campaigns, explains that strategies are more complicated in nonpartisan races because “partisan identification and stance on issues are the main ways the voting public understands who they should vote for. Judicial candidates also sign pledges here to not negatively campaign against their opponent. In partisan races there is often a negative contrast that you push on your opponent. So you are left with a few things, and the absolute biggest is name identification.” That’s where vigorous campaigning comes in. “People seeing the judicial candidate

names over and over again matters. Meeting the candidate personally matters. Developing a really good narrative for why the candidate is the right one with videos, graphics and speeches that tell that candidate’s story is absolutely essential for connecting with the voter.”

Essentially, you’re scrambling to reach as many low-information voters as you can, so you can keep them from casting an arbitrary vote, or not voting at all.

So while the 2022 election results might look like chaos to the casual observer, the answer is not to write off judicial campaigns as ineffective. To the contrary, Thorpe says: “People who volunteer, donate and publicly back candidates as well as organizations who run voter outreach programs in judicial races make a massive difference in outcomes. Running countywide takes a village, and I encourage people to reach out to candidates and see how they can be a part of their campaign.” •

Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and law professor. His book “Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class” is available wherever you get your books.

FEDERAL FUNDING FOR NATURAL DISASTERS FAILS KENTUCKY COUNTIES THAT NEED IT MOST

By Jared Bennett | Kentucky Center For Investigative Reporting

This story is from Kentucky Center For Investigative Reporting. It was produced as part of a collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, Columbia Journalism Investigations and Type Investigations.

CLAY COUNTY Emergency Management Director David Watson sees signs of recovery all over Oneida, Kentucky, where flood waters tumbled down the mountains and ripped through town in late July.

By mid-September, when a reporter joined Watson for a ride-along, debris had been cleared from driveways, new mailboxes stood in front yards and construction crews were fixing crucial roads that the floods previously made impassable.

Watson’s job is to coordinate rebuilding efforts for the Eastern Kentucky county. But he said floods are becoming more common and more dangerous here, and Watson worries recovery won’t be enough.

“Every time we have these flash flood warnings, we’re sitting and holding our breath, just praying that it dissipates before it hits little Oneida,” he said.

Watson isn’t just responsible for recovery alone. He’s also the person tasked with making Clay County safer and more resilient in the face of future floods through a process known as hazard mitigation planning.

Watson knows this preparation is important. But repairing what’s been damaged, helping people who lost everything get back on their feet and getting Clay County back to something resembling normal is demanding in itself.

Watson said the job has been like drinking through a firehose.

“At the end of the day, counties focus on getting their roads and bridges built back to pre-disaster conditions,” Watson said. “Then when you look at hazard mitigation, sometimes you think that’s the least thing from my mind right now. As a county, it probably should be one of our top five

priorities.”

The idea is to reduce the harm that future extreme weather events cause people and property with long-term solutions like fortifying bridges to withstand repeated flooding, building storm life-saving shelters and helping people relocate from flood-prone properties stuck in a cycle of disasters.

But preparing for the next calamity while still recovering from historically devastating weather is a daunting task for county emergency planners across Kentucky. Especially planners like Watson who could use a lot more support coordinating complicated projects and securing federal funding to pay for mitigation.

Few counties can afford to implement robust mitigation plans without federal support, and they face barriers that make it hard for some of the state’s most disasterprone communities to get the help they need.

Most of the hazard mitigation money set aside by the Federal Emergency Management Association doesn’t reach counties until well after a disaster. Some counties can’t afford to put up their portion of the funds (FEMA grants will cover as much as 90% of the costs, states and local governments provide the rest).

Any county in the state can apply for hazard mitigation funds that become available after a disaster, even if they weren’t directly impacted. As a result, some communities already reeling from recent disasters struggle to complete a complicated and time-consuming application process that can pit them against wealthier communities also vying for the grants.

A Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of federal hazard mitigation spending shows just how unevenly the money has been distributed as a result, reflecting a process based more on competition than on need. Communities directly impacted by Kentucky’s recent disasters received comparatively fewer federal hazard mitigation dollars – averaging $24 per capita in hazard mitigation assistance funding since 1988 compared to an average of $36 per capita for Kentucky counties spared from the storms.

KyCIR conducted the analysis using data from a recent project from Columbia Journalism Investigations, Type Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity that examined the complicated bureaucracies preventing many communities directly impacted by climate change from winning federal mitigation grants. The project also highlighted how the system is struggling to

THORNS & ROSES

ROSE & ABSURD: MEDICAL MARIJUANA IN KENTUCKY… SORT OF

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear used an executive order to e ectively legalize medical marijuana for Kentuckians diagnosed with 21 “severe” medical conditions, ending the Commonwealth’s longstanding total prohibition of the drug. The catch is that the marijuana must be legally purchased out of state. Beginning on Jan. 1, Kentuckians with terminal illness, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, severe and chronic pain and 17 other medical conditions will be allowed to possess up to eight ounces of medical marijuana that they lawfully bought in another state. Even though it’s a strange and tiny step, a rose goes to Beshear for trying to do something to jumpstart legalizing marijuana via a state government that’s dominated by Republican dinosaurs. An absurd goes to how convoluted and behind-the-times the order is.

ROSE: THE LAST BULL

The last of the 10 cattle that got loose in the Highlands has been caught. Last month, the highly-publicized, non-injury vehicle crash that ended with cattle grazing in Cherokee Park and running down Bardstown road captured the hearts and minds of Louisville. While most of the cattle were caught shortly after the crash, one bull evaded capture until this past weekend. According to a video posted local live-streamer Tara Bassett, that bull was taken to an animal sanctuary. If we’re still looking for a piece of public art to replace the removed statue of that Confederate o cer, we have a nomination.

ROSE: SPEAKING OF THAT…

Speaking of that removed Confederate statue, someone recently posted a picture on Reddit of an in atable horse that was attached to where the old Castleman statue once sat. There was also a piece of paper posted on the front of the base that read “Clyde of The Triangle” and “aka Horsey McHorse Face.” We’re big fans.

ROSE: SUPREMELY SHOOTING DOWN MISINFORMATION

After voters shot down Amendment 2 — which would have added language to the Kentucky Constitution declaring that nothing in the document guaranteed or protected abortion rights — the future of abortion rights in the Commonwealth has entered the state’s Supreme Court, which will decide on a legal challenge to the state’s abortion ban. It’s likely going to be a messy battle, but during opening arguments in front the Supreme Court on Nov. 17, Kentucky Solicitor General Matt Kuhn tried to frame the Amendment being shot down as a result of “misinformation” from activists confusing voters. Justice Lisbeth Hughes responded by calling ballot questions “the purest form of democracy.” A rose goes to Hughes for slicing right through bullshit Republican doublespeak.

THE WORST, BEST & MOST ABSURD

Letcher County Emergency Management Director Paul Miles stands in front of rst responder vehicles that were damaged in the July oods. | PHOTO BY JARED BENNETT..

NEWS &

ANALYSIS

keep up with climate change’s rising stakes.

Kentucky – which saw more flood related disaster declarations than any state from 2000 to 2022 – is a prime example of this disconnect.

Of the 29 counties eligible for FEMA aid after the tornadoes and floods, four counties have never received any hazard mitigation funds. Of those four counties, which have some of the highest poverty rates in the state, only Clay County employs a full time planner working on emergency management.

University of Iowa professor Eric Tate studies the connection between poverty and weather disasters. He said the competitive grant process FEMA uses to distribute hazard mitigation funds exacerbates the nation’s already unequal response to climate change.

Wealthier, whiter and less rural communities are often better equipped to handle the administrative burden it takes to secure FEMA hazard mitigation grants, Tate said. At the same time, officials in communities with predominantly rural or minority populations whose constituents are more likely to live in disaster-prone areas often fail to even apply.

In that way, few disasters can truly be called “natural,” Tate said. “They are disasters, but because of the way we organize society, the fact that we have such inequality and discrimination… that is what’s leading to all of these problems.”

ONEIDA

Joyce Johnson said she has lived in a small valley near Oneida since she was seven.

Seven weeks after the July 28 flood, the only items inside Johnson’s home were a few broken appliances and a muddy Bible resting on a dented clothes dryer. The walls had been stripped down to the studs, leaving a four-foot gap to the floor.

Johnson pointed to a hole in her bedroom where the flood slammed debris through the side of the house. She said she was thinking about leaving.

“We’ve worked our hearts out,” Johnson said. “But if it happens again, I’m leaving. I can’t handle this. This is awful to see your home destroyed and no way to put it back.”

Johnson said she was raised in a house higher up the valley, where her parents still live. In her 50 years living in the area, she remembers the creek rising plenty of times, but said flooding has become a more serious problem in recent years.

In March 2021, a flood damaged the floors and insulation in the mobile home down by the creek where Johnson’s niece lived. Her niece had only recently moved back into the trailer when the creek flooded again this July. That flood carried the trailer about 30 feet and slammed it against a utility pole as the family watched from a porch nearby.

Johnson’s niece is now renting a home in town while Watson, the county emergency director, raises the money to repair the mobile home and move it up the valley and out of the flood zone.

Counties can use hazard mitigation funds to relocate people out of flood paths, but the process is often too slow and cumbersome to be an effective option. Instead, Watson plans to use donations from community groups to move the trailer before winter arrives. He visited Johnson in September to scout the new site.

“Hazard mitigation money could fund this,” Watson said. “But she’s got to get her family back in the house. She can’t wait a year and a half ‘til hazard mitigation finally kicks in, and they say, ‘Hey, here’s some money for you guys.’”

Watson said he’s been learning more about the hazard mitigation process since the July floods.

Federal and state emergency management officials announced a new round of hazard mitigation funding tied to the disaster on Sept. 7. Watson said four families in Clay County have expressed interest in using hazard mitigation funds to purchase properties in flood zones so they can relocate, and Watson is gathering the materials needed to package their application.

Watson works for Clay County, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the state, in addition to a full time job as the engineering director at the local hospital. He’s been in the position for 13 years but said he hadn’t applied for a hazard mitigation grant before because the county had other priorities for their limited resources, and he doesn’t have the staff.

“It really would take one staff member to do nothing but hazard mitigation planning, applications, follow through, and the whole nine yards,” said Watson.

Kentucky Emergency Management spokesperson Angie Van Berkel said in an email that the agency works with Kentucky Area Development Districts, regional focused planning and development agencies, to provide technical resources for communities that want to apply for grants. A representative from the Cumberland Area Development District, which represents Clay County, did not respond to requests for comment.

‘A BIT OF A MYSTERY’

FEMA gained the authority to provide funding for disaster preparation in 1988. Kentucky is one of 15 states with an enhanced hazard mitigation program, allowing for more federal money for hazard mitigation after every disaster.

Counties that want funding must submit grant applications to the Kentucky Mitigation Council, which is part of the state’s emergency management division. The council is composed of representatives from local government and state

officials including Kentucky Hazard Mitigation Officer Geni Jo Brawner, floodplain coordinator Alex VanPelt and Division of Water Director Carey Johnson, with support from the University of Kentucky’s Hazard Mitigation Grants Program Office. Counties submit their proposals, and the council decides what to pass along to FEMA for approval.

Drew Chandler, emergency management director for Woodford County, said most local emergency management officials aren’t totally aware of the criteria the council uses to review requests.

“It’s a bit of a mystery,” said Chandler, also the outgoing president of the Kentucky Emergency Management Association, a nonprofit organization for emergency management professionals in the state. His county has received $2.3 million in hazard mitigation funds since 1988 to take on projects such as distributing emergency radios to people living in the floodplain and elevating a historic log cabin near Woodford Reserve distillery.

“I would like to think that the priority does, in fact, go to the counties that were impacted by the disaster,” Chandler said. “But I wouldn’t want to do that job because of the complexities and having to make decisions about which project is more worthy than another.”

Jessica Elbouab, a spokesperson for Kentucky Emergency Management, the state agency in charge of coordinating disaster response, said in an email that the council prioritizes communities that were directly impacted by the floods.

The agency provided KyCIR a list of projects approved by the council after the December tornadoes. The list showed 78% of the $134 million in federal hazard mitigation funding went towards projects in counties eligible for individual or public assistance relief. Another 21% went towards counties that were not directly impacted by the storm, with the rest going towards statewide projects. Kentucky received another $3.5 million in federal funds to support regional or statewide planning projects.

The counties that suffer the most disasters aren’t necessarily the ones that get the most FEMA funding for disaster preparation.

In eastern Kentucky, Letcher and Owsley Counties saw five and seven natural disaster declarations, respectively, between 1988 and 2020. FEMA data shows neither received hazard mitigation money during that period. Fayette County, the state’s second most populous county, was named in one declaration but got $16 million over that same span.

Kentucky Emergency Management spokesperson Van Berkel said in an email that Letcher and Owsley County have never applied for hazard mitigation funding and that Fayette County was the site of a $12 million hazard mitigation project awarded after flash floods killed

two people in 2006. Van Berkel also said that the threshold for a disaster declaration is higher in more densely populated counties.

“This doesn’t negate the need for mitigation,” Van Berkel said. “If impacted counties are not applying, rather than forgoing the FEMA funding, it is important to submit as many project proposals as possible to ensure all floods are utilized.”

Elbouab said the council typically looks for projects that will prevent future disaster damage, have passed a cost-benefit analysis and avoid harming the environment.

The council also makes funding decisions based on the state’s hazard mitigation plan, which explains the disasters that threaten Kentucky. The 2018 document established broad goals, such as educating people about mitigation strategies and doing a better job coordinating and prioritizing mitigation.

These plans will become more important as climate change brings stronger storms and heavier rainfall to Kentucky and other parts of the U.S.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell called climate change the country’s biggest crisis in an August 2021 press release announcing a $3.5 billion commitment to hazard mitigation efforts across the country. FEMA allocated Kentucky nearly $22.8 million of the money to fund projects that lessen risks posed by natural disasters. But state and federal officials have not yet answered questions about how the money will be spent.

EMERGENCY PLANNERS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

There are 45 counties in Kentucky with parttime emergency management directors, according to a list provided by Kentucky Emergency Management. Counties with full-time emergency planners tend to have more success securing federal hazard mitigation dollars.

The five counties that have received the most grant assistance all have someone working fulltime in that role.

For the last 26 years, Ronnie Pearson has served as the full-time emergency management coordinator in Warren County, which has received $2.8 million in hazard mitigation grants since 1988. Pearson has used mitigation grants to build six storm shelters around the county, among other projects, with help from a deputy director and a full-time grant writer he shares with the rest of the county government.

Pearson said the structures provided shelter for 200 to 300 people when tornadoes hit the county last December. Eighty people died in that outbreak, 17 of them in Warren County.

Emergency planners in at least 12 counties have used hazard mitigation funds to build at least 67 storm shelters in Kentucky, most of them

near the state’s largest cities and in counties with full-time emergency management directors.

Graves County has received $187,000 in hazard mitigation funds since 1988. But there were no storm shelters in Graves County last December when the tornadoes killed 24 people there. Emergency Management Director Tracey Warner has since secured hazard mitigation money from FEMA to build six shelters.

Warner has served as Graves County’s first full-time director for the past three years. The Kentucky Emergency Management Association named Warner their “manager of the year” for her service to the county in the aftermath of the tornadoes.

She is now preparing applications for funding tied to the flooding in eastern Kentucky to take on other necessary improvements, such as building a more resilient emergency operations center.

“Whether I get it or not, it’s fine,” she said. “You just keep asking.”

Not every county has a full-time emergency manager like Warner or Pearson.

Nine of the 29 counties most impacted by recent disasters had part-time emergency management directors, according to data from the state and KyCIR’s reporting. At least four of the counties whose emergency management directors are listed as full-time share other responsibilities such as coordinated 911 services or acting as the county’s floodplain coordinator.

Letcher County emergency management director Paul Miles works part-time. He retired in 2017 after a 30-year career in law enforcement and accepted the part-time emergency management role less than a year later.

When the flood hit in late July, Miles remembers coordinating first responders helping the rescue effort in his county using an emergency radio as he fled the flood waters in his truck. His office and two backup emergency operation centers had flooded. All the county’s emergency response vehicles were swept into the North Fork Kentucky River.

For Miles, figuring out long-term solutions will have to wait.

In mid-September, the county’s search and rescue truck was still tangled in a sycamore tree.

“We still have roads that aren’t open. We have people that have their driveways washed out that are impassable,” Miles said. “We have not cleared this hurdle yet.”

Letcher County has never received any hazard mitigation money, and Miles has never applied for a grant. Miles said the county had had problems with flooding before, but not to this extreme. So, leaders focused on other priorities, like coordinating a volunteer search and rescue team.

FEMA will reimburse the county for flood repairs after a separate complicated approval process, and any hazard mitigation projects will require the county to pay for a portion of the costs. Many counties in Kentucky struggle to keep up with their mitigation plans already. Miles said that even with COVID-19 relief funds, Letcher County’s limited resources are tied up with simple repair and maintenance.

“With our roads right now, there’s so much damage I don’t know where the money is going to come from,” Miles said.

Clay County Emergency Management Director David Watson stands with Joyce Johnson in front of a trailer on Johnson’s property that was damaged by the July oods. | PHOTO BY JARED BENNETT..

FEMA knows accessing hazard mitigation funds is a challenge for many communities.

The agency agreed to find ways to simplify the application process after a 2021 Government Accountability Office report found many local governments struggled with the complexity of the grant application process. Others had access to technical expertise or could hire expensive consultants to navigate the paperwork.

FEMA recently solicited public comments to inform potential changes to the agency’s hazard mitigation Program and Policy Guide, which was last updated in 2015.

In one public comment, the Association of State Floodplain Coordinators, a nonprofit organization for people working to reduce flood loss, said FEMA’s hazard mitigation program keeps getting more complex. “More complex programs are almost impossible for low-capacity jurisdictions to administer, FEMA should simplify as much as possible,” the association wrote.

The association said FEMA should let states run their own hazard mitigation grant programs so they can respond to disasters without seeking federal approval for projects.

Tate, of the University of Iowa, said FEMA should invest more in so-called technical assistance grants that help under-resourced communities manage the complicated grant process.

“Larger and wealthier communities are the ones that have those capabilities already,” Tate said. “So, it’s easier for them to compete for these projects than the smaller, rural, poor communities.”

FEMA provides some money to help underresourced communities with the process. but Tate said that investment has so far been too small to close the gap. Kentucky has received $191,000 in technical assistance since 1988. Emergency management officials have used that money to support salaries and training, according to FEMA data.

Stephen Eisenman, founder and strategy director at the Anthropocene Alliance, a nonprofit that helps communities across the country prepare for climate change, said that Congress could rewrite the grant program and distribute the funding more equitably — especially if voters support candidates who acknowledge the threats posed by climate change and want to invest in mitigation.

“Kentucky’s being screwed over by the storms, and so has almost every other state and city in the South, and yet, that’s where the least political support for action on climate change is,” Eisenman said.

KyCIR reached out to the office of U.S. Congressman Hal Rogers, a Republican representing most of eastern Kentucky who has helped secure more than $800 million in flood control studies

and projects in his district, to ask about FEMA’s hazard mitigation program. His spokesperson didn’t follow up with KyCIR’s interview requests by publication time.

KyCIR also sent interview requests to the chairs and vice chairs of both the Kentucky Senate and House energy and environment committees to discuss the state’s disaster mitigation programs. They did not respond to inquiries.

WHEN RECOVERY ISN’T ENOUGH

FEMA pays for some smaller-scale mitigation projects, such as reinforcing damaged roads, as part of its Public Assistance program for reimbursing counties’ cleanup and recovery costs. Unlike hazard mitigation grants, that money is designated for counties hit by a disaster.

Watson said most of that spending in Clay County will go toward getting things back to the way they were before the flood, to what FEMA calls “pre-disaster conditions.”

The problem, Watson said, is that repairing the damage doesn’t solve the problems like unstable infrastructure that made the last flood so destructive.

As he drove through Oneida one day in September, Watson pointed out a large pipe that became clogged with debris, causing the water to spill over the road and flood nearby homes.

Watson said FEMA might reimburse the county’s spending on repairing the pipe, but it will still probably overflow again during a heavy rain.

“Here’s the reality: you can spend a half a million dollars going up the holler, repairing roads and bridges, doing bank stabilization, ditching, asphalt repair, all the above,” Watson said, but if the county doesn’t find long-term solutions to infrastructure problems, “it’s all gonna be wiped out again.”

Many policies the county is navigating were written by Congress decades ago. Watson worries what’s on the books now can’t keep up with the disasters Clay County is facing. He said he hopes federal officials learn from what’s happened here and consider updating disaster policies to make it easier for people to access much-needed aid as disasters become more frequent.

If officials really want to improve the hazard mitigation assistance process, Watson said they should do a better job spreading the word about how it works so that more counties like his can take advantage of federal grants.

“I think the biggest part of the improvement is education right now,” Watson said. •

Contact reporter Jared Bennett at jbennett@ kycir.org.

By Carolyn Brown | cbrown@leoweekly.com

BELIEVE it or not, you might notice the wizard’s friends before you see the wizard himself.

They gather at Old Louisville Brewery one Wednesday every month to talk about magic. Sometimes there are tarot readings or they play board games or watch movies. Many of them are magic enthusiasts, too, some with wizardly outfits and accessories of their own — a slouching black hat here, a carved wooden staff there.

It won’t be long before you find the wizard, though. He’ll be decked out in one of his robes — maybe the purple one with gold fringe, or the green one spangled with stars. He sports a long, dark beard streaked with white, plus a gold nose ring. He definitely stands out, but don’t be intimidated — he’s here to have fun. As he’ll tell you: “I take silly things seriously and serious things sillyously.”

If you don’t see him, he hasn’t vanished into the ether. He might be doing a tarot reading for a guest behind the front window, tucked between a line of books and his crystal ball, accompanied by any of his stuffed gnomes (he’s got dozens; he loves gnomes.) He might be packing up his woven blanket decorated with crystals and dolphins, upon which he puts a stack of business cards, which read: “No one meets a wizard by accident.”

More likely than not, though, he’s wandering between the backyard — where passionfruit vines blanket the fences — or the front room, socializing with friends and strangers, “moving about the cabin,” as he puts it.

But you will see the wizard, because he wants to meet you, and he’s glad you’re here. He wants you to hear his credo, a statement he makes at the end of every episode of his podcast, a statement he has tattooed on his left arm around a drawing of a wizard: “I believe in you. Your magic is real.”

For nearly a decade, Devin Person, 36, has been a professional wizard. A former Brooklynite and longtime occult enthusiast

who was featured in The New York Times for “granting wishes” and giving strangers quests on the New York City subway, Person has since made his home in Louisville, where he hosts Wizard Wednesday, a magic-themed monthly gathering at the Old Louisville Brewery. He also has written two books, and has another one on the way. On his podcast, “This Podcast is a Ritual,” he speaks with guests, talks about his path to becoming a wizard, and occasionally answers questions that come in through the “Wizard Hotline,” offering advice and thoughts on the supernatural in a gentle voice.

He began his journey to become a wizard in 2014 via a solo ritual of his own devising, surrounded by handmade sigils and assisted by nitrous oxide, to connect to his future self — “the best wizard [he] could possibly be.” In 2016, Person began hosting events, offering wizardly guidance, and appearing in public in long sorcerer’s robes.

Person moved to Old Louisville with his fiancée in 2020, in pursuit of a place that would be more neighborly than New York City. He’s found it since, he says, and has established himself in the community, using wizard events for fun, to meet others who, like him, love “counterculture and weirdo stuff.” As his podcast webpage says, “The real magic isn’t content… but connection.”

“I’m not trying to force my will on other people or cast fireballs or marinate in delusion,” he said. “Instead, I’m able to get people interested, where they’re saying, ‘A wizard — what do you mean?’ And I’m like, ‘fun, connection, human, community.’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”

The Meaning Of The Magic

If the title “professional wizard” brings to mind an ultra-serious cult leader, a performing magician, or someone under the influence of delusions, fear not — Person is none of those. What characterizes his wizardry is the sense of fun and joie de vivre that comes

with embracing and using one’s own power to make a better, more magical life.

“It’s not that I disavow the supernatural,” he told LEO. “I think our culture sells us a version of that as a way to distance ourselves from the essential fact that everything is supernatural. There is no ‘natural world.’ Everything is supernatural.”

“The magic is literally all around us at all times,” he continued, “and the idea that magic is shooting a fireball from nowhere is just saying that you set the standard at impossible, so everything then fails. When I’m like, ‘I can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet in an instant,’ you’re like, ‘Well, that’s not magic. That’s just a phone call.’ No, that’s still magic.”

Instead, he he puts a finer point on his approach to wizardry:

“I could [say], ‘I am the reincarnation of Merlin, and I believe all of this, and I will now cast a fireball!’” he said, putting on a cartoonishly dramatic voice. “‘Oh, it’s not working, but that’s because the moon’s in the wrong position, and I’m very serious!’ And that doesn’t sound great to me.”

Instead, he says, his M.O. in his role is “taking one step back and saying, ‘What is the character of the wizard? What is the idea of magic? How can I step into that intentionally?’”

Still, the word “professional” is in his title for a reason. Though it’s not his main business — his 9-5 is a hypnotherapy practice in Bashford Manor — you can hire him to create and perform a ritual, officiate a wedding, or emcee an event, among other things, for rates that usually range from $150-$500.

He’s also got a Patreon with six sponsorship tiers, which are priced, respectively, at $4.20 (“Gentle Hobbit”), $6.66 (“Sorcerer’s Apprentice”), $11.11 (“Chaos Mage”), $23 (“Wise Owl”), $69 (“Machine Elf”) and $420 (“Elder God”) per month.

The latter category is “obviously a joke,” the description says, though Devin says that if anyone takes him up on it, he’ll make them

a plaque, fly to their city and do a full magic ritual with them.

No takers so far, though.

The Pa

The oldest of five brothers, Person spent some of his early life in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but he grew up mostly in West Lafayette, Indiana, where his father taught nuclear physics at Purdue University. His mom was a computer programmer and stay-at-home mom who became a social worker later in life. The family eventually moved to Westford, Massachusetts, where Person graduated

high school in 2004.

Person says that his parents were supportive of his eccentricities, although not into counterculture in the same way that he was: “They weren’t hippies, but they were liberal pseudo-academics.” The family ate tofu, avoided red meat and limited TV time — not, Person said, “strict from a religious moral perspective, but more like trying to help us stave off the worst effects of mass American culture.”

As a teenager, Person and his family marched in a parade celebrating the town of Westford’s 275th birthday. His parents and brothers wore colonial outfits — costumes

with tricorne hats borrowed from the local historical society. He, however, sported a spiked black collar, a mohawk and a black hoodie decorated with a few patches. In a family photo taken after the parade, he frowns, the spitting image of teenage angst.

“In 8th grade,” Person wrote in a 2019 Instagram post with the aforementioned photo from after the paarde, “I discovered pot, LSD, and punk rock. That trio proved to be a potent combination, kicking off my adolescent awakening that school was stupid, adults had agendas, and I was going to have to walk my own path.” The photo, he said, is “a fun image of youthful rebellion, but it begs the

Fiancees Lisa Ann Markuson and Devin Person play around in the backyard of Old Louisville Brewery. | PHOTO BY CAROLYN BROWN.

question: Who’s the real rebel? I’m dressed like a punk, conforming to the archetypal image of non-conformity. My family are role playing colonial settlers, with the metaawareness that this juxtaposition with their surly teen will be hilarious. The photo was, in fact, my mom’s idea who insisted I dress as punk as possible.”

“In regards to wizardry, I don’t have any sweeping conclusions beyond my own awareness of how I’ve always been draw [sic] to costumes and love getting lost in whatever character is creating me. Especially when it puts me a little out of step with the world.”

When he was 18, he read an interview with comic book writer Grant Morrison in Arthur Magazine, a counterculture publication, in which Morrison discusses their own love of the occult and their understanding of consciousness and reality. Magic, they said, is “a kind of participation with everything around you” and “the dawning understanding of how things all fit together.” For Person, the piece was mindblowing — and formative.

The same year, he moved to Olympia, Washington, where he lived for three years. He then spent a year in Portland, Oregon before moving to Austin, Texas, for college in 2008. He worked a long string of short-term jobs, which included: late-night talk show host, touring band roadie, weed dealer, stand-up comedian, medical research subject, sex blogger, freelance journalist, model and porn store employee (graveyard shift.)

Still, he grew tired of the lack of stability and structure that that lifestyle offered. In 2013, his final year in an undergrad jour-

nalism program at the University of Texas at Austin, he realized that the kind of intensive longform reporting he’d hoped to do — “send me out to live with some cult for a month, and then I’ll write a feature about it,” for example — was no longer a realistic option. Inspired by an info session at his school and his love of comedy, he decided to pivot: he moved to New York City to join a graduate program for TV writing. He was drawn by the opportunity to collaborate with other writers rather than write alone, but it didn’t last — the program, he said, was “bullshit,” with an uncompetitive environment and substandard instruction. He foresaw his future if he completed that degree: he’d become an intern, or, at best, a writing assistant, saddled with debt and earning a meager living. He dropped out after one semester.

The same year, he found a job at Squarespace helping customers troubleshoot problems with their websites. He laughs that the meanest customers were those advertising things like yoga studios and meditation retreats, not to mention “life coaches, life coaches, life coaches — so many frickin’ life coaches!” Person — incidentally an avowed longtime fan of “The Wizard of Oz” — was in the role of Dorothy Gale peering behind the curtain: “A lot of the life coach websites [had] these huge overblown claims of, like, ‘I’m going to help you manifest your dreams and 10x your sales,’ and I’m like, ‘I can look at your backend of your website. You don’t have any sales. You barely have any traffic!’”

The experience gave him an idea for a character: an occult life coach, someone who, rather than inspire a client with the Law of

Attraction, might tell them, “Kill a rooster at midnight and divine by its entrails, and that’s how you’ll manifest your dreams.”

But he got bored of the joke pretty quickly and realized he couldn’t commit to it longterm. What stuck, though, was another idea:

He could become a wizard.

“I realized that I cared deeply about magic. I’ve been doing magic for over a decade,” he said. “My version of magic is not what you find in the occult book section. There’s definitely overlaps. I like a lot of those traditions. I’m inspired by a lot of those traditions. But it was different. And it was personal.”

The Ritual

From then on, Person committed himself to becoming a wizard. He set a date — Sunday, November 30, 2014 — and planned a ritual to make his new identity real. He was inspired by a hypnosis audio track that talked about the power of manifestation: not, for example, the ability to control the weather with one’s mind, but the ability to make one’s own life more in alignment with a goal.

Inside a Manhattan rehearsal space rented for an hour, surrounded by candles, nitrous oxide, strobe lights, and other “assorted ritual supplies,” Person called out to his future self, a self who might have already become “the best wizard I could possibly be,” and asked for his help, by way of sending magic back into the past.

If the ritual worked, he said, he’d be creating his own future wizard-self’s existence, even if not immediately. If it didn’t work, he’d understand that it was “an important detour,” and he’d “go the other way.”

“At the end of the ritual, there was no bolt of lightning, there was no smoke, there was no portal where future me called out in a booming voice,” he told LEO. “But I did it.”

A week later, on a trip to Philadelphia, a huge problem struck: his knee “swelled up to the size of a basketball.” Person has a condi-

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tion called PVNS (pigmented villonodular synovitis), which causes occasional flare-ups of swelling. He found a doctor who gave him good news: he could try an experimental drug to counter the condition’s effects. There was one caveat, though: the doctor said all of his hair would likely turn completely white, which it did.

Person was absolutely thrilled. As he told his audience: “That was unbelievable proof for me that my spell had worked, the magic was flowing, and I was really gonna transform myself into a wizard.”

He still commemorates the ritual’s anniversary every year. In 2018, he did so by recording “Opening Ceremony - How to Create a Slightly Better Reality,” the first episode of his podcast, “This Podcast is a Ritual.” In it, he recounts the story of his ritual to a live audience at Magick City, a venue in Brooklyn. At one point, he invites them all to join him in saying the word “magic.” Their unified chorus explodes the

audio waveforms.

“And did you feel that?” he asks the crowd and the listeners. “Did you feel that echoing throughout time from wherever you are — echoing forward, echoing back, this one connection of all kinds of people, people that we don’t even know, saying, ‘MAGIC!’”

“It’s pretty cool,” he said. “That’s magic.”

In The Beginning

Person continued to wizard-asa-verb after his hair turned white.

In December 2017, he started a stunt that got him featured in The New York Times, The New York Post and elsewhere: He would ride the New York City subway in full wizard attire, talking to riders and “granting wishes,” sometimes sitting below a sign a friend made that said, “Talk To The Wizard / Because no one meets a wizard by accident.”

The first wish he granted was actually on a shared Lyft

Using a card deck inspired by the anime “Cardcaptor Sakura,” Devin Person does a tarot reading at Old Louisville Brewery. | PHOTO BY CAROLYN BROWN.

ride. A passenger asked for help finding a job in nursing, a field she’d gotten into because it had been her grandma’s profession. Person assigned her the task of calling her grandma, because “all my wishes, you have to do a task — you don’t just get it for free. You have to show the universe you’re serious.”

The woman messaged Person a week later: per his instructions, she had called her grandma a day after their Lyft ride. The day after that, she got the job.

The more that Person was public with his wizardry, the more he met people who were open to it, which surprised him. He wrote a self-help book, “Mysteries of the Deep,” for which he started a crowdfunding campaign — or “spell,” as his campaign video calls it — to raise $420. It ended up bringing in $1,985. He started to see clients oneon-one. He created two precursors to Louisville’s Wizard Wednesdays: an event series at the now-closed Brooklyn venue Tarot Society called “New Age & Chill,” then a series at Magick City called “The Wizarding Hour.” Both events celebrated mystic practices and gave local occult fans a place to gather and socialize; an event listing for one New Age

& Chill advertised “soothing soundbaths,” “hypnotic vision quests,” “rolling paper high-ku,” “collaborative quantum healing” and “mindexpanding visual art.”

The Poet And The Wizard

The poet and the wizard met at Squarespace’s 2017 corporate Christmas party in New York City.

Squarespace had hired Lisa Ann Markuson’s company, Ars Poetica, to work the event. The company, as Markuson told the New York Times in 2018, is a group of “poetry DJs” who use typewriters instead of turntables, making haikus for partygoers upon request.

Person, still “fully practicing his wizardry,” had a full beard then, and all of his hair was still white, thanks to his knee medication — as Markuson put it, he looked like a “sexy Santa.” She, then 30, thought he was older than his 31 years.

Person came over to Markuson and asked her to write a poem — about herself.

And he asked her to put her phone number on the back.

In separate interviews, both of them described the interaction as “love at first sight.” Person called it “very magical.” He was attracted to her entrepreneurial acumen and the way that she wrote poetry on the fly — she, too, was a “magic wordsmith.” The moment sealed their fate, and they’ve been “practically

inseparable,” Person says, ever since.

As Person continued to socialize inside Old Louisville Brewery one Wizard Wednesday night, I spoke to Markuson in the backyard. She asked about my plans for my story, and I explained that it would largely be a profile of Person and the nuances of his wizardry, part of which included a clarification for readers that he was neither a faith healer con man, nor crazy. She nodded knowingly.

“I think a major, major part of what [Person’s] purpose in life is, is to be a living example of our ability to choose what we want our life to be like,” she said. “You do not have to resign yourself to a specific life path that’s already been ordained by Boomers or by capitalism or by Christianity or by heteronormativity — by anything.”

She continued: “If you want to get a little creative and try something out, and you’re not afraid of just being a little silly and a little bit vulnerable about it, you can make the world that you want to live in happen right now. You don’t have to wait until the revolution comes for you. You can start now and you can make your own world better and then share that with as many people as possible.”

It wasn’t until 2019 that the idea of moving to Louisville occurred to Person or Markuson — though technically, they say, it was because of coincidences and external signs.

In summer 2019, Person, who had recently quit his job at Squarespace, took a solo trip — a “quest,” he calls it — to a weekend retreat in North Carolina hosted by a group called The Religion, a fake religion whose core tenets include “goofwork” and “ceremony.”

While he was there, people kept talking about Louisville, speaking highly of it as a cool place with friendly vibes. It struck a chord with Person: maybe this was the new home he’d been looking for, a calmer, quieter place than Brooklyn.

Markuson had done a poetry gig in Lexington around Derby time in 2019, and she found the city enchanting, the state friendly and warm. The two of them visited Kentucky together in November of that year, stopping in Lake Cumberland, Berea, Lexington and Louisville. On Nov. 30, the fifth anniversary of Person’s original ritual, the two did another ritual together in a bathtub at a bed and breakfast in Springfield, Kentucky. Kentucky, they decided, was where they were meant to go — at some point.

But it was the urgency of the pandemic that pushed them to move. They arrived in Louis-

ville shortly after Memorial Day weekend in 2020. They tried out neighborhoods for a few months, eventually relocating to Old Louisville in September.

Since then, Markuson said, they’ve been “happier than we’ve ever been.”

Moving to Kentucky has given them more opportunities for activism, for gardening, for “spending more time having friendships and just spending quality time with people.”

Person laid low in Louisville at first, getting established and continuing to work on his podcast. It took a full year before he did any wizard rituals in public. It was because, in part, he didn’t want to be a distraction during the racial justice marches that happened in downtown Louisville throughout 2020, which also overlapped with the pandemic shutdown.

Though Person is an avid leftist who has marched for racial justice and abortion rights, he refrains from wizarding at protests where his presence would undercut the legitimacy and seriousness of the cause. (He made an exception, though, on Jan. 19, 2017, the night before Trump’s inauguration, when he stood outside of Trump Tower in full robes and held a sign that said “Wizards Against Trump,” for which he appeared in a story on a New York City TV news station.)

Just as much, Person said, he refrained

from wizarding here because he wanted to get a feel for the city first. “The last thing I wanted to do was try and force my New York wizardry into a Louisville-sized hole,” he said. “I wanted to engage with Louisville on its terms. I didn’t want to try and come and force some outside idea onto it. I wanted to see what it meant to be a wizard in Louisville.”

But on June 26, 2021, it was time for the wizard to join Louisville officially.

At the Garden of Goodness, a public garden in Old Louisville, Person hosted his first show in Kentucky: a performance with Isolation Tank Ensemble, a local “trash-prog” band, and Cookie Tongue, a Brooklyn-based “theatrical freak folk musical menagerie with puppetry, animation, butoh-inspired dance, and ritual magic, featuring original songs and whimsical interludes inspired by Cookie Tongue’s surreal mythology, fairytales, childhood, ghost stories, and a sprinkle of the occult,” who performs with ”guitar, singing saw, glockenspiel, organ, bells, drums, experimental percussion, and orphaned toys.”

About 120 people showed up, and they participated in a sonic experiment: open their phones, go to a website Person created, play one of three tones (69 Hz, 420 Hz, or 666 Hz), and find everyone else who was playing the same tone, creating a “cacophony of cricket sounds.” Then came another experiment: press a vocal/musical audio track at the same time as everyone else.

“But I knew that we would fail,” Person said. “It was very intentional.” Throughout the garden, he heard the echoes of harps, and of recorded voices counting to ten and talking about fairies.

The audio eventually faded out. Cookie Tongue began their set. Fireflies shone in the dusk. It was a night fit for a wizard.

Or, as Person would soon create, a whole community of them.

The Friends Of The Wizard

On July 14, 2021, Old Louisville Brewery hosted its first ever Wizard Wednesday.

To Old Louisville Brewery manager Jenn Fraley, part of the magic of Wizard Wednesdays is the environment they create. The guests at Person’s events are always nice, she said, and they tip the bartenders well. The parties create more foot traffic, and that creates repeat visitors. Those, in turn, make the bar live up to its mission even more.

“We’re an open, inclusive space,” she told LEO. “Our slogan is, ‘Good beer makes good neighbors.’ We want to be that nice neighborhood place where you can come and hang out and sit by yourself if you want to, or you can come and there’s always somebody to chat with.”

Person, already a regular at the bar by the time Wizard Wednesdays started, approached Fraley with an idea: could the bar host a monthly event themed around wizards and magic?

Fraley’s helped Person put together the parties since then, though her role is mostly now hands-off. Occasionally, she has turned down his ideas: hosting a band was a no-go for space reasons. Past parties have featured dream interpretation and a performing magician. Person often does tarot for partygoers upon request.

As the parties have grown, they’ve attracted more guests, including some aspiring (or recently inaugurated) wizards.

Greg Esbrandt and his spouse Hyacinth Revey-Atkins, both Louisville transplants like Person and Markuson, have been coming to Wizard Wednesday since July’s oneyear anniversary event. They are formally inducted wizards, inaugurated at this very

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bar. Esbrandt usually wears a plain black wizard hat to the parties; Revey-Atkins wears a red jumpsuit decorated with homemade patches.

Initially drawn to Wizard Wednesday by a flier, which had little info beyond the title, Esbrandt and Revey-Atkins almost couldn’t go to any of them — Esbrandt’s Dungeons & Dungeons group met on Wednesday nights. He lucked out, though, when that group changed their meetings to Tuesdays.

At September’s party, they were fully embedded in the scene, part of a group in the backyard that was discussing the pros and cons of changing one’s own name. Later that night, Revey-Atkins got a tarot reading from Person, which he said was uncannily accurate.

Revey-Atkins defined wizardry this way:

“I think it’s fundamentally about an openness to the universe,” Revey-Atkins said. “It’s about being able to let the universe manifest things in your presence and you looking at that and saying, ‘That’s something that I’m supposed to pay attention to.’”

Esbrandt leaned in and whispered to me: “We’re figuring it

out just as fast as you are.”

The guest of honor at the couple’s first Wizard Wednesday, the one who made them wizards in the first place, was one more famous than Person: Gilly (short for Gilderoy) Shine, aka Gilly the Sunshine Wizard, who had traveled to the event from Cullman, Alabama, a small town halfway between Huntsville and Birmingham. (Shine asked LEO not to use his real name.)

One of Shine’s wizard outfits includes rainbow tie-dye overalls, pastel-striped sunglasses, a colorful felt wizard hat, and ginger sideburns. On TikTok, where he has more than 440,000 followers, he posts near-daily videos in which he casts spells to encourage his viewers. They all end with his signature signoff: “Wisha-wisha. I love you!”

An openly gay autistic man, Gilly Shine has faced his share of haters, but the core message of his wizardry is much like Person’s: embrace your own uniqueness and power.

“One of the things that I tell people when I make them into wizards is that you get cosmic power and all this cool stuff, but you do you have to serve people for the rest of time,” he said. “We’re given these magical powers from the universe for good — for helping people! —

so we have to. But we can still enjoy the fact that we have cool magical powers.”

The Purpose Of The Wizard

An archetypal wizard — seen in pop culture figures like Gandalf, Dumbledore and the Wizard of Oz, for instance — is a guide, someone who helps the main charac-

ter find their way to a goal. A wizard is “not the hero,” nor “the center of the story,” as Person explained in a 2016 public lecture, but, instead, someone who can see things the main character cannot.

Even on Wizard Wednesdays, when Person is ostensibly the evening’s main character, he’s really one of many. But if his purpose is to help people accomplish a goal, sometimes that goal is just creating connections.

“The magic is the friends you make along

the way. It sounds cheesy, but it’s really true,” he told LEO at September’s Wizard Wednesday. “My favorite thing is to step back and just prod little groups here and there and make introductions.”

He pointed out a nearby group, a trio of guests who were immersed in a game involving playing cards and a composition notebook.

“These people all met through Wizard Wednesday, they’re playing cards right now,

Guests at Wizard Wednesday play a tabletop game at Old Louisville Brewery. | PHOTO BY CAROLYN BROWN.

37th Annual Bardstown Road Aglow

Participating

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WENDY’S TREE LIGHTING

Wendy’s Tree Lighting Festivities Start at 5:30 p.m. in Wendy’s parking lot 1108 Bardstown Road at Grinstead Dr. with Tree Lighting at 6:00 p.m.

Join Santa Claus, Local Celebrities Connie Leonard and WAVE 3’s Kent Taylor along with live holiday music by Voice of Kentuckiana.

BAXTER AVENUE

Agave & Rye - Epic Food. Epic drinks. Epic environment. Check website for holiday specials.

Prohibition Craft Spirits - Prohibition Craft Spirits hand-crafts small-batch spirits including: tequila, gin, vodka, and rum. Come have a drink at our bar or take a distillery tour.

Matt Anthony’s Record Shop - Featuring the best of all genres & generations on LP’s, CD’s, & 45’s

Renaissance by Design - Visit us for our 36th Aglow. Shop full of unique gifts from collectibles, home décor, fleur de lis items, jewelry & candles. Roast marshmallows in garden.

Prophecy Ink Tattoo Studio & Fine Art Gallery - Normal business hours. Check website for holiday specials.

PG&J’s Dog Bar - Buy $50 in merchandise or gift card and receive $10 gift card. Buy $100 in merchandise or gift card and receive $20 gift card & free gift

Eyedia Design It Again - We offer only the best quality consignment furniture & home décor at unbeatable prices.

DiOrio’s Pizza & Pub - Enjoy our homemade lasgna & pizza by the slice with our large bourbon selection!

Outlook Inn - Come enjoy Linda’s Hot Buttered Lemonade, on Aglow only! $8.50 or $9.50

Focus Salon - Normal business hours.

O’Shea’s Irish Pub - Happy Holidays from O’Shea’s! Enjoy Elijah Craig Cocktail Specials. Cheers!

Molly Malone’s Irish Pub & Restaurant - Here you will find great ‘Craic,’ traditional Irish fare, Guiness on tap, & creative cocktails in a relaxed & welcoming environment. Open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week.

Wick’s Pizza - Normal business hours. Check website for holiday specials.

BARRET AVENUE

Highland Community Ministries - Silver Sponsor for the tree lighting. Happy Holidays!

ShopBar - Come shop and drink at ShopBar! Elijah Craig Bourbon and more.

Nitty Gritty - Holiday door prizes. Give-away.

Barret Bar & Grill - Normal business hours.

Better Days Records - 921 Barret Ave. New and Vintage CD’s, vinyl’s and movies. Deep inventory.

V-Grits - Our cozy atmosphere awaits you!

Unorthodox - Spend just $10 at Unorthodox on December 3 and you’ll be entered to win a $100 store gift card.

Chimera Brewing Co. - Normal business hours.

Nonstop Smokers Paradise - 10% off sales items.

Barret Liquors - Specializing in Bourbon plus Elijah Craig. Wines from all over the world.

The Fishhouse - Happy holidays! Warm up with a crispy Fish sandwich.

BARDSTOWN ROAD

(Highland Ave. to Eastern Pkwy.)

VCA Fairleigh Animal Hospital - Normal business hours.

Holy Grale - GLOU GLOU the night away at Holy Grale’s Christmas garden! Stop in to enjoy our world-class beers, hot holiday beverages and caroling around our Christmas tree.

Nowhere Bar - Come on in and warm up with some drinks and dancing, starting at 10pm!

Neat Bourbon Bar + Bottle Shop - Come and sip history by the pour. We have more bottles than Santa! Enjoy our Elijah Craig’s drink in their holiday complimentary glassware.

INgrid Design, LLC - We do branding, marketing and advertising campaigns for businesses who are targting other businesses or consumers. www.ingriddesign.com

Highland Taproom - Best Bourbon Selection and prices on Bardstown Road. Elijah Craig Hot Drink Specials.

The Joy Luck - Fun, lively indoor and outdoor seating! Come enjoy good food and Elijah craft cocktails.

Chill Bar - Stop by and try our frozen Peppermint White Russian.

Paris Banh Mi - Teas the season to have a ball! We hope to see your family and friends at Paris Bah Mi to spread holiday Cheers!

Ramsi’s Café on the World - Happy Holidays! Check website for specials.

Kashmir Indian Restaurant - Normal business hours.

The Caravan Comedy Club - Happy Holidays! Check website for specials.

Skyline Chili - Come in and warm up with a 3 way and cheese coney.

Nearly New Shop - Happy Holidays! Check website for specials.

Heine Brothers’ Coffee - Normal business hours.

Carmichael’s Bookstore - Celebrating 44 years on Bardstown Road!

Carmichael’s Kids - Raising readers since 2014!

Discoveries - Discoveries finds unique clothing, accessories, tribal artifacts & gifts from around the world. Eclectic boutique located next to the Bristol Cafe. Come discover that perfect gift or accent for your home.

Bristol Bar & Grille - Come and join Santa’s helpers at the Bristol Bar and Grille. We will have free homemade cookies, and hot chocolate. An area where children and parents can make a Christmas ornament and hang it on the Bristol’s tree or take it home. A mailbox to put Santa’s letters in along with paper, pencils and envelopes if needed. Plus selfies with one of Santa’s elves.

La Chasse - Enjoy our amazing house made Bourbon egg nog to kick off the Holiday Season! Enjoy our Elijah Craig’s drink in their holiday complimentary glassware.

The Original Impellizzeri’s PizzaPurchas $50 in Gift Cards and get a FREE $10 card!

Kizito Cookies - The legendary Cookie Lady bakes ‘em fresh tonight!

BAZ and BEA - BAZ and BEA turns 10! Come celebrate with us during our Bardstown Road Aglow Big Winter Sale with storewide discounts of 20% to 50% off. Shoppers will have a chance to enter our raffle for eigth an exclusive Kent Stetson designer handbag or choose a $100 BAZ and BEA gift card. Women’s apparel, boutique labels, hats, purses, jewelry, accessories, designer exclusives located at 1433 Bardstown Road.

Highland Morning - Normal business hours.

Givhan and Mitchell Realtors - Real Estate Aglow!

Silver Sponsor!! Real estate questions? Ask Aaron! Contact: (502) 417-7610 or askaaron@twc.com

Day’s Espresso & Coffee - Come and warm up with us & celebrate the upcoming holidays! Normal business hours.

Edenside Gallery - In our 32nd year, Edenside welcomes you for shopping like no other place you’ve experienced.

St. James Catholic Church - Five hours of live Holiday Music inside the church. From 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Murphy’s Camera - Happy Holidays! Normal business hours.

Blossom Neuro Speech & Wellness - Learn how holistic speech therapy can help you or a loved one after a stroke, concussion, Covid and more. Website: blossomneuro. com

Green District - Green District is excited to be part of the Highlands Community & celebrate the holidays during Bardstown Road Aglow!

BARDSTOWN ROAD (Eastern Pkwy to Douglass)

Boombozz Craft Pizza - Free holiday cocktail. Just mention Bardstown Road Aglow. Enjoy our Elijah Craig’s drink in their holiday complimentary glassware.

Scorpio Interiors - Louisville’s leading resource for contemporary Architectural Interiors- Furnishings - LightingWall Treatments.

Falls City Eye Care - Celebrate Aglow and our 6th Anniversary! Silver Sponsor for Wendy’s Holiday Tree Lighting.

The Leatherhead - Holiday cheer & special deals await. Just say Aglow!

The Sweet Spot Candy Shoppe - The Sweet Spot Candy Shoppe will be offering free hot chocolate & samples during the posted hours of Bardstown Road Aglow.

Hey Tiger - It’s our 13th Birthday! Tell us Happy Birthday at checkout for 13% off. Website: Shopheytiger.com

Vintage Style and Designs - Stop in for lots of in-store specials!

Acorn Apparel - Normal business hours. Check website for holiday specials.

Fun Tea - Normal business hours. Check website for holiday specials.

Uptown Café - Uptown Café is an original Highlands classic restaurant and is hosting the Elijah Craig Old Fashioned Showdown on Wed 11/30!

Dragon King’s Daughter - We’ve moved to 1543 Bardstown Road. Come enjoy Aglow with us. Check website for specials.

Against the Grain Public House - Come out dinner and drinks at Against The Grain’s Public House! We’ve crafted some special Christmas cocktails and of course, our housemade, award winning beer!

Safai Coffee - Join us for holiday drinks and a local artists’ market.

Darling’s - Open 4PM-2AM Everyday for Cocktails, Aperitifs, and Wallpaper Join us for a drink or have your whole holiday get-together with us at Darling’s

Purrfect Day Café - Cuddle with kittens & sip on beverages and snacks. Beer, wine, and hot chocolate with lots of snuggles.

Old Town Wine & Spirits - Come see us for Aglow! Check website for holiday specials.

The Flute Studio live at Bardstown Road

Presbyterian Church - The Flute Studio performs live holiday music at 1722 Bardstown Road on December 3, 2022. Website: tonywatson.org

El Mundo - Come join El Mundo for some biscochitos and an Elijah Craig Aztec Old Fashioned on Dec 3rd! We will also have hot chocolate for the kids!

Park Community Credit Union - Come see Park Community Credit Union for all your banking needs at the corner of Bardstown Road and Douglass Blvd. Happy Holidays!

Dreams with Wings - Come see our wonderful decorations!

One Love Hemp Dispensary - Normal business hours.

Fun House Records - Normal business hours.

True Grit Tattoo Company - Tattoo & Piercing Shop located at 1908 Bardstown Road. Stop in and check out the shop! Gift cards available! Dirty Hand Studios Pop Up!

St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church - Normal business hours.

Great Flood Brewing Co. - Come ring in the season at your local bar! Bring a friend and enjoy a specialty cocktail!

Havana Rumba & Tapas Bar - Happy Holidays! Check website for specials.

Louisville Classical Academy - Louisville Classical Academy is a secular Jr. K - 8th grade school in the Highlands. Come tour!

Ten20 Craft Brewery - Ask for our special for Aglow. Happy Holidays!

Mark & June Abrams - Silver sponsor for Aglow.

StateFarm - For Auto, Home or Renters Quote call or message Agent Sam Wheeler at 502-459-9700 or sam@ planwithsam.com

and they’ve been hanging out in the park on their own,” he said. “I love when I see [posts] on Instagram of people, like, ‘Oh! They totally met at Wizard Wednesday and now they’re at a soccer game together.’ That’s the magic. I try actually not to be the star and be flashy or up in everybody’s business.”

Of course, the limelight finds him anyway. Person is a dude who dresses as a wizard in public in 2022. Obviously, he knows that that’s funny and attention-grabbing — and he embraces it. Seeing a wizard is unexpected, so it makes people laugh, and magic itself, he

says, should be fun anyway. As he wrote in his first book, “Mysteries of the Deep”:

Magic is a metaphor a silly game to play

That adds a bit of purpose to brighten up each day.

This story will hit print a week before Nov. 30, the eight-year anniversary of Person’s original ritual. It’ll also be the last Wednesday of the month, when most Wizard Wednesdays typically take place.

You will, of course, see Person there. You’ll know where to find him. You’ll definitely see his friends, too — and you might become one.

In Louisville in 2022, a wizard is no longer a relic from a mythic ancient world, a figure who glowers into a crystal ball, exiled from the world in a dark tower.

Instead, a wizard walks into a bar — and creates a community.

•

Devin Person, left, does a tarot reading for Hyacinth Revey-Atkins, right. | PHOTO BY CAROLYN BROWN.

Members see it all for free!

Advance ticket purchase strongly encouraged.

Visit speedmuseum.org

Image: Detail of JOB (Cigarette papers), 1896 Color lithograph 26¼ × 18¼ in.

© Mucha Trust 2022

Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary is organized by the Mucha Foundation, Prague. The exhibition is curated by Tomoko Sato.

Media sponsorship from:

october 21, 2022 – january 22, 2023

Czech-born Alphonse Mucha (1860 – 1939) was one of the most celebrated artists in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. As an influential force behind the Art Nouveau movement, he created sumptuous posters and advertising—promoting such everyday products as cigarette papers and tea biscuits—that transformed the streets of Paris into open-air art exhibitions.

Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary celebrates the Mucha Trust Collection’s first major U.S. tour in 20 years, featuring a vast array of posters, illustrations, ornamental objects, and rarely seen sculpture, photographs, and self-portraits.

Exhibition season sponsored by: Debra and Ronald Murphy

Arthur J. and Mary Celeste Lerman

Charitable Foundation

The Sociable Weaver Foundation

STAFF PICKS

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 23

4th Annual T. Hanks Giving

theMerryWeather | 1101 Lydia St. | Search Facebook | No cover | 6 p.m. – 11:45 p.m.

SATURDAY, NOV. 26

Blues Meets Jazz

Best Western Premier Airport/Expo Center Hotel | 4110 Dixie Highway | Search Eventbrite | $45-$70 | 5 p.m.

LIVE

Yep, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a Thanksgiving

AMERICA’S DAD

celebration in honor of Tom Hanks. They’ll have a collection of Tom Hanks movies playing all evening, food themed after Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks trivia hosted by ShellShock. Even if the rest of your Thanksgiving holiday sucks, at least you can say you got the opportunity to be T.Hankful. —Carolyn Brown

SUNDAY, NOV. 27

The Illusionists: Magic of the Holidays

Brown Theatre | 315 W. Broadway | kentuckyperformingarts.org | $52.65 - $87.75 | 6:30 p.m.

Twinkling lights, cold air, the smell of a good re and magicians? The holidays are magic, and The Illusionists want to captivate you with the spirit of the season when they swing through Louisville on their tour. Can’t promise a re, but expect the unexpected, and obviously magic as well. It’s the perfect event for a special night out with the kids. Be careful though — if you don’t pay close attention, the whole event might... disappear. Ok, ok, terrible pun, but check out the show. —Erica

SATURDAY, NOV. 26

HOLIDAY MAGIC

Rucker

West Louisville Small Business Saturday

Norton Healthcare Sports & Learning Center | 3029 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd. | Search Facebook | No cover | 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Spend your Small Business Saturday shopping with numerous local businesses at this market, which will also feature food, drinks, entertainment and children’s activities. After the commercialized chaos of the upcoming week, Small Business Saturday is always a good opportunity to spend some money where it counts — with our community establishments. —Scott Recker

SUPPORT SMALL BUSINESS

Julian Vaughn, Stacy Mitchhart and Reggie Boone headline a night of jazz and blues with “a side order of soul.” Presented by Wallace L. Garner III Productions, this concert will highlight music fusion, mixing together some of the deepest and revered genres in the history of music. —Scott Recker

STAFF PICKS

THROUGH NOV. 27

‘It’s A Family A�fair’

PYRO Gallery | 1006 E. Washington St. | pyrogallery.com | Free

To say Suzanne Sidebottom works in clay is like stating Cindy Crawford and I are similar. It’s somewhat of a true statement but doesn’t give all the facts. Sidebottom creates extraordinary ceramic trompe l’oeil sculptures. Prepare to be fooled! Even the artist gets zapped occasionally, reaching “across the studio workbench for a pencil or pad of paper, only to nd out the object is not real.” Two family members are in this exhibition with her. Her sister Beth Sharpe is showing digital art prints while son-in-law Clark Filio is featuring gure oil paintings. —Jo Anne Triplett

THROUGH NOV. 27

‘I Just Continue To Paint’

By Joyce Garner

garner narrative contemporary ne art | 642 E. Market St. | garnernarrative.com | Free

GALLERY ART

Painter Joyce Garner is a trooper for her art. She said she “wore [herself] out painting” her latest gargantuan work. When you see it, you will know why. “2022” is a mural re ecting on life that’s 7 feet by 16 feet. “There is too much going on,” Garner said. “The ood waters are rising, maybe we’re going to be hit by a train again. It’s the human condition.” Her work is philosophical in its details and lord, are there details. Glad she got some rest and came back to do more paintings. —Jo Anne Triplett

‘My Art Box” by Suzanne Sidebottom. Porcelain clay, underglaze, glaze, decals.

‘2022’ by Joyce Garner. Oil on canvas.

What brings us joy? It might seem like a simple question for many, with answers popping up unbidden. But Ross Gay, the poet and essayist behind megabestseller “The Book of Delights,” has much to consider regarding joy’s emergence from sorrow, including how joy can be shared as a veritable toolkit against divisiveness. New collection “Inciting Joy” is often easygoing in language, not ashamed of letting some sentences lope along — but there are ne sagacious skills in Gay’s way of drawing from sensory detail. The many “incitement” chapters are unafraid to see and say how changes — seasonal or generational or in all human hearts — can inform “practices, habits, rituals, understandings…[that] make joy more available for us.” Gay’s reading/signing is moving to the roomier Baptist church hall down the street from Carmichael’s. Registration is requested at bookstore website. —T.E. Lyons

FRIDAY, DEC. 2-4

“Decision to Leave”

Speed Cinema | 2035 S. Third St. | www.speedmuseum.org/cinema | $12/$8 for members | Times

vary

What happens when suspicion turns into obsession?

A businessman falls to his death from a mountain in South Korea. The detective assigned to the case begins to suspect the wife of the dead man. As he investigates, he falls deeper into the depths of his desires and deception. If you’re a fan of lms “Oldboy” or “The Handmaiden” then you’re aware of the work of Korean director Park Chan-Wook and won’t want to miss his latest lm or the chance to experience it in the comfort of the Speed Cinema, Louisville’s only true art-house theater. —Erica Rucker

A still from “Decision To Leave.”

STAFF PICKS

SATURDAY, DEC. 3

Cookies With Captain Santa

The Mary M. Miller Riverboat | 401 W. River Road | belleo ouisville.org/cruises/ special-events | $17.99-$39.99, free for kids 4 and under | 12:30-3 p.m. Santa’s preferred mode of transportation is normally, of course, his sleigh, but he’ll be changing things up for a trip on the Ohio River on the Mary M. Miller, the Belle of Louisville’s smaller counterpart. He and Mrs. Claus will do meet-and-greets, and there’ll be cookies, hot chocolate, goodie bags and fun activities for kids. —Carolyn Brown

SANTA IS COMING TO TOWN THROUGH DEC. 3

‘To Carve A Constellation’

By Vinhay Keo

Moremen Gallery | 710 W. Main St. | moremengallery.com | Free

Moremen Gallery has long been a supporter of former Louisvillian artist Vinhay Keo. Now living in Los Angeles, Keo’s third solo show at the gallery features the Cambodian artist’s research to bring back to life an almost lost artform. Using Sbek Thom (Khmer shadow puppets), his work focuses on the horrors of the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime that resulted in the death of 25% of the people in Cambodia and nearly all artists. “New Friend, Old Foe” by Lori Larusso is also showing at the gallery through Dec. 5. —Jo Anne Triplett

GALLERY

‘Sweet Dreams (Red)’ by Vinhay Keo. Fabric on cork.

LISTEN LOCAL: NEW LOCAL MUSIC

By Je�f Polk | leo@leoweekly.com

YOUNG ROMANTICS

“FAST DANCING IN A FREEZING ROOM” [SINGLE]

Let’s get the Red Hot Chili Peppers comparison out of the way right off the bat. Yes, Young Romantics vocalist (and Louisville native) Griffin Fletcher looks just like a young Anthony Kiedis. God knows how many times he’s heard that, but the resemblance is uncanny. He also seems to channel the RHCP vocalist’s spirit and energy into his own vocal performance and apparently into their live shows, judging from the music video for this track. But it can also be said that Bowling Green’s Young Romantics’ latest track “Fast Dancing in a Freezing Room” — the first single from their upcoming full-length (as yet, unnamed) album to be released in December — sounds like a song that could have been a big hit for Californication-era RHCP. On the surface this is an alt-rock tune, but there is a whole lot more at work here. The R&B, funk and soul influence is unmistakable in this extremely catchy groove-driven, hook-laden song. Perhaps a comparison to Lexington’s MojoThunder is even a bit more accurate here, in vibe at least anyway. Whatever the case, whether you’re dancing, toe-tapping or head-nodding along, this isn’t a song that is going to leave many people standing still.

LISTEN: youngromanticss.com

LUX

DIRTY MIRRORS [EP]

I hate to admit that I’ve gotten cynical with age and am guilty of trying to judge a book by its cover, but I took one look at the band photo cover of LUX’s debut 3-song EP Dirty Mirrors, saw four guys who look to be in their late teens/early 20s and thought, “What are these kids really going to have to offer?” Eleven minutes later I was busy trying to pick my jaw up off the floor. I am honestly stunned! By combining shoegaze, grunge, indie rock and post-hardcore, LUX has succeeded in creating a hauntingly beautiful, dream-like soundscape that somehow seamlessly blends melancholic vocals and melodies with frantic, high-energy guitar and drums simultaneously. Elements of The Bends-era Radiohead, My Morning Jacket, Slint, early Jane’s Addiction, Cocteau Twins and We Were Promised Jetpacks are here. There is a wealth of talent in both musicianship and songwriting skills that is far beyond the band’s years. LUX is at an incredible level right out of the gate, and the sky is the limit. One of the best records I’ve heard all year, local or otherwise!

LISTEN: linktr.ee/luxband

RADIANATION

PROJECT 2022 [LP]

When New Albany native Andrew N. Aebersold says his one-man band Radianation is a lifelong music project, he means it. Now in his third decade of making music under the moniker, Aebersold has released his most ambitious album to date, Project 2022 After taking an extended break from music — 2005’s Karmony being his last release — he began writing and recording again in late 2021. Although still maintaining some influences of his previous releases, Project 2022 sees Aebersold moving away from the electronica and house music of his past and into an original alternative rock sound that falls somewhere between Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, with a tinge of modern pop punk. Using a mixture of guitars (both electric and acoustic), drums, synthesizers, pianos and traditional orchestral instruments, Aebersold showcases his knack for creating largerthan-life, cinematic, epic songs. Each of the 12 tracks that makes up this album takes on a life of its own, yet they all flow together perfectly to take the listener on a journey through dark, melancholic lows and beautiful, bright highs, making Project 2022 well worth the 17-year wait.

LISTEN: radianation.com

DRIFT CITY

DEEP REVERSE [LP]

Dwelling somewhere between dream-pop, shoegaze, alt-rock, alt-country, psychedelic pop and smooth jazz, Louisville’s Drift City has certainly carved a niche. Led by core member Jason Rivers (vocals, guitar, synth), and backed by a veritable who’s-who of Louisville musicians — Dave Givan, Billy Lease, Nick Layman, Brian Shreck and an impressive list of guest musicians — Deep Reverse is a 10-song journey into the sublime, refining the already near-perfect sound of the band’s 2020’s debut Mercurial Mirrors. One can certainly hear elements of Roxy Music, Radiohead, The Cure, Sparklehorse and even Sade. With the distinctive warble of Rivers’ rich vocals leading the way, the songwriting and musicianship here are absolutely superb. And the production is flawless, with every instrument given just the right amount of pop and blended together seamlessly without anything overbearing. This is one of those records you can put on and just sink into the music for the 41-minute runtime. They’ve also recently released a music video produced and directed by Scott Carney (of Wax Fang fame) for the album’s closing track “Terrible Sun.” Drift City is, without a doubt, a band you need to put on your radar immediately.

LISTEN: driftcityband.com

MUSIC REVISTING THE SONORA PINE A Q&A WITH TARA JANE O’NEIL

by Syd Bishop | leo@leoweekly.com

HE ’90S were a fertile time for the Louisville indie scene, spawning amazing work including Rodan, which formally introduced the world to the incomparable talent of multi-instrumentalist Tara Jane O’Neil. After Rodan ended, O’Neil went on to a prolific career as an artist and musician that included collaborations with dance troupes, performing with and in bands like Retsin and Naysayer, and a host of solo albums. And quietly in that mix was the band The Sonora Pine, which started during her time in NYC and initially featured ex-Lungfish guitarist Sean Meadows.

Perhaps O’Neil’s most criminallyunderrated project, the second, self-titled Sonora Pine record was recently re-released by the Quarterstick and HuskyPants labels respectively. Recorded by drummer Kevin Coultas, The Sonora Pine II — orginally released in 1997 — is all subtlety and exploration, delicate guitar melodies and gentle violin passages that recalls bands like Low or Red House Painters as filtered through the dreamy haze of Mazzy Star or shoegaze. You can pick up the remaster of The Sonora Pine II on vinyl via Bandcamp — or stream it where things stream. We caught up with O’Neil to ask about her musical legacy, the Louisville sound and the trouble with genre labels.

Tara Jane O’Neil: I feel like I did that sort of exercise with the Retsin band that I had with Cynthia (Nelson) which was kind of like singer-songwritery. Like, for a while we called ourselves the Retsin Goodtimes Band, which felt more like a reactivity really to where I’d been at before. The Sonora Pine felt more — and this is just broadly speaking — there are some Retsin songs that I still think were coming from a genuine place and were successful in that and sound pretty good.

For The Sonora Pine, especially the second album (except for that last piece), I wrote everything and I’m playing both guitars and bass on there, so it’s a more heavily arranged thing and was a more deliberate endeavor.

HOW DID SONORA PINE WRITE?

There is very little, and I’ve talked to Samara about this, there is very little I remember about how we made the second record. When we were putting together the

LEO: WERE YOU SHOOTING FOR SOMETHING TO SET YOURSELF APART FROM RODAN OR WAS THAT EVEN PART OF THE CONVERSATION?

Tara Jane O’Neil and Kevin Coultas Miami Beach 1997 | PHOTO BY NOEL HAWLEY

MUSIC

reissue, there is a man from Louisville, Patrick Klem, who had a bunch of live recordings. I was listening through some of that and the year before I’d been on tour for all of ‘96 with Come and Sonora Pine — I was a bit of a road dog then, but I was writing on the road I guess, because there are songs from the second album that we were already playing and playing well. So I don’t know how that happened.

For the second album, kind of like my early-solo albums, I had a little handheld cassette player, and I had the parts that I’d written, and I’d just write parts over that. Kevin [Coultas] is such a lyrical drummer. He’s got chops, but his playing on it is such a huge part of the arrangement. I don’t remember practicing with him, but we were on tour a lot like I said. You can hear it in “Linda Jo” — he (Coultas) did all the writing and playing on that song. He’s an arranger with a drum kit.

a few people will be like, oh cool. But that hasn’t really served the record or the world very well when anything is compared to anything else really, at least as far as I’m concerned.

the local economy by providing healthy,

food through just and equitable practices, employment, and ownership.

Totally, that’s the interesting thing about the band as I heard on those tapes, it was different than Rodan. All we did was hang out and play these parts over and over. I can’t even imagine doing that now; literally, it was every day for hours, whereas for The Sonora Pine, Kevin was writing that song and I was writing my own in the writer’s isolation that one needs. I don’t know how the second album came together.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT?

That’s like the easiest possible thing for that person to write. It’s like, you were in a band with three songwriters and they were going to make one continuum where like there’s classical and then there’s angularity and they’re just gonna fit right in the middle. It’s not totally untrue, but I think this is another reason why this record was lost on a lot of people because there is no wonder about it or exploration there.

So like, when you hear there’s something in between this guy from the old band and this guy from the old band, and, you know,

everyone should have access to fresh and

food, in a space that is welcoming to all. service grocery stores have abandoned most of Louisville’s west and central neighborhoods and we hope to address this through community ownership, job creation, and commitment to community health

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I think I had a bad attitude about that stuff when it was a lot closer, like 1998 maybe. But, no, now it’s nice. I mean, especially this Sonora Pine thing because I do feel like this record never got its due and I do recall feeling disappointed by that at the time. So to have a musician like Riley Walker, who’s a badass on his own, just write me out of the blue, while I was on Frankfort Avenue passing the North End Cafe [where the album was recorded], reach out to say this Sonora Pine album was like his ‘Dark Side of the Moon and I’d like to re-release it,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so weird.’

There is certainly flattery in all the work he put into it. That’s nice to know because my 24-year-old self, I feel like I still have access to, and it’s nice to shine a light on that person a little bit and just be like, ‘This is cool, and your efforts are not in vain.’ The fact that a few individuals are moved by this record, that’s the best. We’re not doing a reunion tour or all of that stuff. It’s super flattering. In this case, it feels almost like a vindication and I’m really grateful. •

HE’S GOOD TOO BECAUSE THAT SONG IS INCREDIBLY COHESIVE WITH EVERYTHING ELSE.

ON ALL MUSIC, I READ, “MOST CRITICS PLACED THE SONORA PINE’S MUSIC IN BETWEEN THE ORCHESTRATED SENSIBILITY OF RACHEL’S AND THE ANGULAR MATH ROCK OF RODAN AND JUNE OF 44.”

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO YOU THAT A FEW OF YOUR PROJECTS HAVE BEEN REVISITED LATELY? IS IT WEIRD THAT PEOPLE ARE FOCUSED ON THE PAST, OR IS IT FLATTERING?

Todd Cook | PHOTO BY NOEL HAWLEY

RECOMMENDED HAUCK’S CORNER RETURNS, DAINTY AND ALL

By Robin Garr | LouisvilleHotBytes.com

THIS SUMMER, 110 years after Hauck’s Handy Store opened as a neighborhood grocery on a Schnitzelburg street corner –and two years after it closed following the death of owner and patriarch George Hauck at 100 — this local landmark returned as a restaurant and bar.

In 1912, you could buy a baloney sandwich on white bread at Hauck’s and get change from a dime. Today, one century and $1 million in renovations later, you can still get something like that, but they spell it “bologna” now, and it will cost you $14.95 for a thick-cut, smoked slice perched on a brioche bun with stone-ground mustard, pimento cheese, pickles and an over-easy egg.

Hauck’s Handy Store may be best known to the wider community for its annual Dainty contest in July, a game rooted in Schnitzelburg in which people 45 and older compete at batting a small stick with a larger stick. Hauck’s Corner had its soft opening in July in order to host the dainty fun.

There was nothing particularly dainty about our food, though, and I say that in

a good way. The fare at Hauck’s Corner mirrors the tradition of a Schnitzelburg corner grocery, but gently melds it with the more gentrified vibe that lights up the 21st century neighborhood.

What’s more, the restaurant’s kitchen is actually a food truck backed into the patio with a single chef working within (at least at lunchtime), so expect hearty and casual fare but not elevated cuisine.

The bones of the old two-story house and store remain very much in view, including that landmark red sign that towers over the street corner. New structure surrounds the George Hauck Way side of the building, making space for additional dining rooms within.

There’s a large patio at the back, now partially enclosed and heated for winter. The old building has been made wheelchairaccessible thanks to attractively sloped sidewalks connecting several entrances. (Take care, though, when you step from the dining area into the patio to pick up your meal at the food-truck window: There’s a long step down, and no sign on the door to

The soyrizo taco channels the idea of an Ensanada sh taco but with vegan chorizo and french fries rolled in crunchy fried tortillas.| PHOTOS BY ROBIN GARR.

Hauck’s chili is great on a cold day: Complex, full of ground beef and lots of beans, and spicy enough to set your mouth on re..

The menu starts with a dozen shareable appetizers, ranging in price from $2.50 (for a deviled egg) to $14.95 (for Hauck’s nachos). Seven sandwiches are priced from $10.95 (for a bratwurst with grilled onions and sauerkraut) to $14.95 (for most of the items, including that not-so-traditional bologna). A couple of salads, a host of wings and chicken tender dishes, and a four-item taco bar round out the bill of fare, which also includes three dishes for the youngsters, a selection of 17 extra sauces ($1 each) and a single dessert option, Oreo churros ($8).

The full bar offers a range of libations, as one would expect of a Schnitzelburg watering hole. In homage to the community’s Germanic roots, there’s a good range of craft beer selections, from Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen ($7) and Reissdorf Kölsch ($3) to Hauck’s American Pislner ($6), made by neighboring Monnik Beer Co.

We ate our fill and then some.

Hauck’s chili ($6.95) was a thick beanand-ground-beef mix that was fiery in both temperature and spicy heat. It seemed complex and smoky in flavor, but its fivealarm heat made it difficult to be certain. It contained at least three kinds of beans along with chunks of burger meat, canned tomatoes and chopped onions. Shredded yellow cheese and pickled jalapeńos came alongside.

Deviled eggs ($2.50 each) are basic but tasty, and may be improved to your liking with pickled red onion, mustard seed, chili crunch or bacon jam as garnish. My choice,

Chinese spicy chili crisp, elevated the simple eggs to a new level.

Who ever heard of a taco built with vegan soy-rizo and potatoes ($11.95)? Not me! I had to try this strange fusion, though, and I wasn’t sorry. The chewy crinkle-cut fries were a bit odd, but the fiery crumbled meatless chorizo was excellent, and garnishes of avocado cream, chipotle aioli and pickled red onions kicked it up another notch. Two tacos were wrapped in doubled corn tortillas that had been fried to a crisp, chewy texture.

A smash burger ($13.95) turned out to be something like breakfast and lunch in one. Two Angus beef burgers, each thin, very crisply fried and irregular in shape – you get that when you smash a burger – were cooked well-done, placed on a large grilled brioche bun and stacked with two large, thin strips of hickory-scented bacon, a square of yellow American cheese, a dab of Hauck’s sauce and a medium-hard fried egg.

Crinkle fries on the side were sadly lackluster, apparently straight from the vendor’s bag and served, chewy, at room temperature. Optional sides of sweet potato fries or coleslaw might have been a better choice.

Lunch for two, with appetizers and entrees, came to $40.12 plus a $10 tip. •

Two attened burgers, a fried egg and plenty of bacon make Hauck’s smash burger a breakfast on a bun. warn you.)

PAYNE HOLLOW AND THE LEGACY OF HARLAN HUBBARD

By Elizabeth Kramer | leo@leoweekly.com

THE BUCOLIC drive on a warm autumn Sunday took a handful of University of Louisville students on an excursion to the river’s edge of Trimble County for a long hike down rugged terrain. Their class is studying the Ohio River’s environmental and cultural influence.

But the river wasn’t the primary focus. Rather, it was the land once cared for by and home of naturalist, writer and artist Harlan Hubbard and his wife Anna after its construction in 1952. She died in 1986, followed by him two years later. While they lived here, they raised much of their own food on the nearly 60 acres and played music together. In a towering studio behind the house, Harlan wrote and created paintings and woodcut drawings.

“Oh, look,” said senior Chloe Collins, once inside the stone and timber house Harlan Hubbard built in 1951. “This has been sitting out here for ages. This little beekeeper’s hat. How cute is that?”

Another student examined a pair of binoculars while one marveled at an old metal kazoo found on a shelf.

“He had a collection of annotated writings by Thoreau,” said their instructor, David Wicks, amid them in the Hubbards’ storied homestead, gesturing towards an adjoining room. Harlan was outspoken in his reverence for the work of Henry David Thoreau, and after a 1958 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, some people began referring to Payne Hollow as “Walden on the Ohio.”

Wicks passed out snippets of Harlan Hubbard’s writings for people to read and comment upon before nearly a dozen students and other adults went to explore the property and its vegetation.

While Wicks teaches this class, he also chairs the board of directors for Payne Hollow on the Ohio, a newly formed notfor-profit that purchased this property in September for $225,000, with money it raised independently and with matching funds from the Owsley Brown II Family Foundation. Its mission is to sustainably restore, preserve and protect Kentucky’s historic Payne Hollow.

The organization purchased it from Paul Hassfurder, a dear friend of the Hubbards and fellow artist, to whom they bequeathed the property. Hassfurder had lived there and welcomed visitors. But for several years, serious health issues kept him from living or even visiting Payne Hollow, said

Britton Patrick Morgan, Hassfurder’s friend assigned power of attorney.

“I know Paul is very grateful that the right group of people came together and put in so much hard work to make sure the Hollow actually has a future,” Morgan said.

The group secured the property in June with $5000 while the board members and advisors raised the money to purchase it and organize the work ahead of them. They divided that work, Wicks said, into three phases. The first was purchasing the land. The second includes cleaning, repairing, and restoring the buildings as well as collecting and cataloging artifacts.

DISCOVERIES AT PAYNE HOLLOW

That second phase started in July with the first of four clean-up and collection expeditions to Payne Hollow, where groups of up to a dozen or so, including board members, took pontoon boats from Hanover, Indiana, to the Kentucky shore to work.

Among them was Jessica Whitehead, a board member who chairs the artifacts and history committee. She has written “The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard: From the Collection of Bill and Flo Caddell” and a biography, “Driftwood: Harlan Hubbard in the American Grain,” scheduled for release next year.

Whitehead described the phase as “an incredible illumination of nuts and bolts of their life at Payne Hollow.”

The group went through cupboards, drawers and boxes, enabling Whitehead to scour a collection of Harlan’s journals that Anna had transcribed, the Hubbards’ sheet music with notations as they often played music together in the evenings and various art supplies Harlan left in his studio. The latter, she said, was “the motherload.” Among them was an unobtrusive-looking wooden box with a brass nameplate.

“I was floored, because this was a portable paintbox that still had pigment in the wells and paper with marks where he had tested colors,” she said.

She, Wicks and others remarked on the clever design of the house and studio. The house, illuminated by giant windows overlooking the slope leading to the shore, had a storage place on the wall for a bed to be taken down at night, and cabinets using all possible space. He had built vents and detachable rafters that could encourage air

circulation when removed during the heat of the summer. They discovered a combination of woodstoves in tactical places to keep the space warm in the winter, including one in the cellar that could radiate heat from below and boil steam.

Board member Joe Wolek appreciated that system and even the small latches that were still in good working order. “And this is after 50 to 60 years,” he said.

Another big find was Anna’s cello, which she often played with Harlan accom-

panying on his violin.

Whitehead is now digitizing and cataloging all the finds and will index and transcribe texts, such as letters, to make them accessible to researchers and others who want to know about this couple’s life.

PLANNING FOR PAYNE HOLLOW’S FUTURE

As winter approaches, the cleaning and repairing of the house and studio roofs and small holes where rodents could enter are

View of the workshop, woodshed, and painting studio. | PHOTO PROVIDED BY PAYNE HOLLOW ON THE OHIO. PHOTO BY JOHN NATION.

Harlan And Anna reading correspondence. | PHOTO PROVIDED BY PAYNE HOLLOW ON THE OHIO. PHOTO BY ELIZABETH KRAMER.

done, and the group is now turning to bigger tasks that include a more comprehensive restoration plan. There is a goal to list Payne Hollow on the National Register of Historic Places and define future uses. They are considering how Payne Hollow could serve as a cultural and scientific field station and provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research, similar to Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, and host residencies for artists and writers, like the Fort Thomas Forest Conservancy across the river from Cincinnati that includes Hubbard’s studio before he married.

Reinforcing all these ideas and activities would be furthering the Hubbards’ legacy. It’s something longtime Hubbard friends regard as meaningful in today’s world.

Among them is Wendell Berry, who donated to Payne Hollow on the Ohio and whose own legacy and values of equitable and ecological farming are championed by

The Berry Center, founded by his daughter, Mary, just 30 miles south in New Castle. The Center’s operations director, Ben Aguilar, said they are “excited at the prospect of more people coming to this part of Kentucky and seeing both the beauty of the Ohio River Valley and the degradation that it is facing.”

Then there’s Bob Canida.

Canida, who met the couple at a local hardware store in Madison, Indiana, in the early 1970s when he was 23, said there is so much to learn from them. He and his wife even eschewed owning a television while raising their children due to their influence.

“We can live simpler lives than what our society is promoting,” Candia said. “We can be a bit quieter and more reflective. We can use less of the resources around us. We can be kind and gentle people. And we can have a rich lifestyle without the glitz and glamor.” •

Payne Hollow on the Ohio chair and U of L instructor David Wicks hands out quotes by Harlan Hubbard to students visiting the site. | PHOTO BY ELIZABETH KRAMER.

Jessica Whitehead with portable paint box used by Harlan Hubbard. | PHOTO PROVIDED BY PAYNE HOLLOW ON THE OHIO. PHOTO BY JOE WOLEK.

WHAT TO SEE: DECEMBER GALLERY ROUNDUP

By Jo Anne Triplett | leo@leoweekly.com

A GALLERY roundup of art shows to see in Louisville this month. Note: This list is a selection of current exhibitions.

“STILL, LIFE! MOURNING, MEANING, MENDING”

Through December

The show focuses on dealing with loss during the pandemic.

21C LOUISVILLE

700 W. Main St.

Hours: Mondays-Sundays, 9 a.m.-9 p.m. 21cmuseumhotels.com

“PASTEL, GRAPHITE AND MUD”

Dec. 2-Jan. 31

Drawings by N. Deborah Hazlett and ceramics by David Rodger. The opening reception is Friday, Dec. 2 from 6-9 p.m.

APERTURE CREATIVE SPACE

Mellwood Art Center

1860 Mellwood Ave., #128 Hours: Fridays-Saturdays, 12-6 p.m. mellwoodartcenter.com

HOLIDAY SHOW

Through Jan. 13

Featuring original artworks from local and regional artists.

BOURNE-SCHWEITZER GALLERY

137 E. Main St., New Albany, Indiana

Hours: Thursdays-Fridays, noon-5 p.m.; Saturdays, 1-3 p.m. bourne-schweitzergallery.com

“OVER THE MOON: THE ECLECTIC ART OF ANN FARNSLEY”

Through Jan. 7

Art by the Vevay, Indiana, resident who died in 2021.

CARNEGIE CENTER FOR ART & HISTORY

201 E. Spring St., New Albany, Indiana

Hours: Mondays-Wednesdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. carnegiecenter.org

“IN THE WEEDS: CAMOUFLAGE AND ITS DISCONTENTS”

Through Jan. 8

Group exhibition examining camou�lage uses in the military and fashion and the meanings behind it.

HOUSEGUEST GALLERY

2721 Taylor Blvd.

Hours: Saturdays, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. search Instragram and Facebook

“MODERN RUINS”

Through Dec. 3

Solo show by Louisville artist Luke Keown of ruins caused by people and time.

“JUMP HEAVEN SPEED HELL”

Through Dec. 3 Matthew Walsh’s solo exhibition is inspired by video games.

“LIVE FLY, STAY FLY”

Through Jan. 8

Louisvillian Brandon Hill’s art focuses on people’s deepest desires.

FIFTEENTWELVE CREATIVE COMPOUND

1512 Portland Ave.

Hours: Mondays-Fridays, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. �ıfteen-twelve.com

ANNUAL HOLIDAY EXHIBIT

Through January

Work by Dennis Mader, Cheryl Chapman and Kevin Lippy.

GALERIE HERTZ

1253 S. Preston St.

Hours: Thursdays-Saturdays, 12-5 p.m.; most Sundays, 12-4 p.m. galeriehertz.com

“JUST PUSHING PAINT”

Through Dec. 31

CJ Fletcher solo exhibition.

KENTUCKY

CENTER FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN HERITAGE

1701 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd.

Hours: Mondays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. kcaah.org

“NATUREISH/NURTUREISH”

Through Jan. 22

Monica Stewart uses paper, wood and �ıbers to explore the facts and �ıctions of connections between nature and humans.

“ERASURE’S EDGE”

Through Jan. 22

Solo show by Noel W. Anderson re�lecting on the many interpretations of erasure.

KMAC MUSEUM

715 W. Main St.

Hours: Wednesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. kmacmuseum.org

“COLLECTION CURVEBALLS”

Through Dec. 31

A roundup of curiosities from the museum’s archives featuring art, music and pop culture.

LOUISVILLE SLUGGER MUSEUM & FACTORY

800 W. Main St.

Hours: Mondays-Thursdays, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. sluggermuseum.org

“INSPIRED”

Through Feb. 15

Shawn Marshall solo exhibition featuring landscape paintings and abstract mixed media pieces.

LOWBER PILATES AND GALLERY

1734 Bonnycastle Ave.

Hours: Mondays-Thursdays, 8 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. lowberpilates.com

“TO CARVE A CONSTELLATION”

Through Dec. 3

New interdisciplinary visual art by former Louisvillian Vinhay Keo.

“NEW FRIEND, OLD FOE”

Through Dec. 5 New installation by Lori Larusso.

MOREMEN GALLERY

710 W. Main St., Suite 201

Hours: Thursdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. moremengallery.com

“WHAT LIFTS YOU”

Through Dec. 31

Work by Kelsey Montague inspired by Muhammad Ali.

MUHAMMAD ALI CENTER

144 N. 6th St.

Hours: Wednesdays-Sundays, noon-5 p.m. alicenter.org

“THE EARLY POSTER DESIGNS OF JULIUS FRIEDMAN, 1865-1980”

Through Dec. 16

Posters by the late graphic designer and photographer Julius Friedman.

PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES

Archives & Special Collections, Ekstrom Library, UofL

Hours: Mondays-Fridays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. louisville.edu

FOUGHT FOR OUR FREEDOM: KENTUCKY’S AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS”

Through Dec. 31

An exhibition of African American Civil War photography in collaboration with Reckoning, Inc.

ROOTS 101 AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM

124 N. 1st St.

Hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. roots-101.org

“ALPHONSE MUCHA: ART NOUVEAU VISIONARY”

Through Jan. 22

Exhibition on a master of the Art Nouveau poster.

“SAM GILLIAM (1933-2022)”

Through Feb. 26

In honor of Gilliam’s recent death, the museum is showing works by the former Louisvillian.

David Rodger.

“KENTUCKY WOMEN: HELEN LAFRANCE”

Through April 30

Retrospective of the late Kentucky artist’s work.

SPEED

ART MUSEUM

2035 S. Third St.

Hours: Fridays, 1-8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. speedmuseum.org

“LIFE IS WEIRD”

Through Dec. 24

Debut solo exhibition by Black artist Robyn Gibson focused on self-portraiture and the exploration of her own trauma.

WHEELHOUSE ART

2650 Frankfort Ave.

Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. wheelhouse.art

“WE

ORDERING SECONDS

BY DAVID W. TUFFS | EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ No. 0424

ACROSS

Sexy one

Treat that’s dangerous to fillings

It has cameras set up around the House

Home of the Hittite Empire

Novelist Zola

Word with box or gloves

Unwavering

Bit of cinema décor

Latin verb that’s a letter off from 9-Down

Sagelike

Get ready for dinner

Man-eaters

Demeanor

Puts the pedal to the metal

Outbursts of megalomania

Boglike 40 Educator Khan who founded Khan Academy 43 -esque 44 ‘‘Ugh, we have so much to sort out’’

You might come to one suddenly 50 Winston Churchill gesture 52 They’re out on their own 54 ‘‘Word on the street is . . . ’’ 55 Antiquated source of light 58 Toy brand with colorful rods and gears 59 Partner of dark 60 Starts a course, with ‘‘off’’ 61 Where you might see scrolling credits? 64 Heidi of TV’s ‘‘Making the Cut’’ 66 The Arthur Ashe Courage Award and others 67 Spectators taking potshots, collectively 70 Will Smith’s actor/rapper son 73 Quickly join hands?

G or K 75 ‘‘Roll Tide!’’ school 79 Relishes 80 Eats 82 Feature of a healthy dog 84 Fjord, e.g. 85 Like Hathor, goddess of motherhood 89 Film character who shouts, ‘‘You are a toy!’’ 90 Fish with a prehensile tail 92 Primitive time 95 German article 96 Instagram hashtag accompanying a nostalgic photo 97 Two-fifths of a quarter 99 Birthplace of three major world religions 101 What an agoraphobe avoids

Uber offering 106 Group email greeting

Class

‘‘That so?’’

It’s not light reading

Advances in a baby’s cognitive development

Demonology and such

Show vanity, in a way

Cocktail often made with Tennessee whiskey, ironically

Animals in hibernación

Twitches

‘‘Please, I’ll go with you’’

Home of many schools in the Big Ten Conference

Uses chrism on

Chuckles online

Language that’s a letter off from 26-Across

Rapper with the platinum albums ‘‘Street’s Disciple’’ and ‘‘God’s Son’’

BY RACHEL ROBINSON

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage | mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage

THE WATCHER

Dear Readers: I’m away this week, so we’re re-running a popular Q&A from a few years back. This column originally appeared in late June of 2018. I’ll be back next week with a brand-new column. — Dan

Q: I’m a married gay man in Southern California. I also have a boy who has his own partner. Both my boy and his partner used to live nearby. But in August they moved to Seattle. The “why” of their move continues to bother me. They didn’t move for a job, or to be closer to family, or any of the other reasons people normally relocate. My boy said it was a combination of the weather and people. The problem, as I see it, is that both my boy and his partner have introverted tendencies—they don’t go out much—so I don’t see how the weather or people really make a difference. The bigger issue is that my boy has tried to “pimp” his partner on me throughout our relationship. I usually rebuffed his suggestions, but one night I gave in. His partner and I started to kiss and feel each other up, and it was fine. The weird thing—the thing that troubles me to this day—was how my boy reacted. He watched us with this bizarre look in his eyes, like he was really getting off on watching the two of us go at it, like some creepy voyeur. His expression freaked me out so much that I ended things and gave some dumb excuse. I recently had an encounter with another person who had a similar experience with my boy. He described how he would cam with my boy and how my boy would always bring his partner in.

My boy had expressed to me on multiple occasions how his partner cannot find sexual partners on his own. I think the real reason my boy moved was to find a new dating pool in the hopes of eventually finding a match for his partner. If my thoughts are correct, then my boy did a horrible thing to our relationship. I don’t know much about cuckolds and I’m looking for advice. How do you have a relationship with a boy when that boy’s sole focus is the sexual satisfaction of their partner?

Confused About Lad’s Departure And Deceit

A: Moving to Seattle for the “weather” seems a little counterintuitive. But I can see why a pair of introverts might prefer gray Seattle, where I live, to sunny Southern California. When it’s nice outside, you feel obligated to go outside. But it’s never nice outside in Seattle. We have a rainy season that stretches from November through July (too wet to go outside) and now, thanks to catastrophic climate change, we have a wildfire season that stretches from August through October (too smokey to go outside). So, looking out a window in Seattle you never think, “I should go for a walk and risk a chance encounter with another human being,” but rather, “I should go back in the basement and keep playing video games.”

As for the people here in Seattle… even the most extroverted newcomers complain about the “Seattle Freeze.” But if your boy and his partner are just looking for fuckbuddies, well, they’re in luck. The dick up here is damp nine months a year and tastes like smoke the other three, but there’s plenty to go around.

As for the host of other issues you raise… Look, I’m not your boy, CALDAD, so I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on in his head. But I do feel confident saying he’s not your boy anymore. Not only did he move away (with his partner) and leave you all alone in Southern California (with your husband), CALDAD, but you seem to hold him in contempt—contempt for his motives, his kinks, and his partner—and contempt is a hard place to come back from. So, since you aren’t in a relationship with him anymore, you don’t have to worry about making this relationship work. (I’m sorry if that seems harsh, CALDAD, but better to hear that from me than from the commenters.)

So, is your ex-boy a cuckold? He could be. Based on your description of his behavior the night you hooked up with his partner, it certainly sounds like he gets off on watching his partner get fucked by other guys. It’s also possible that he shares the dick he’s getting elsewhere with his primary partner. There’s nothing wrong with being a cuckold, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with “pimping” a partner out… so long as 1. your partner wants to be pimped out and 2. you’re not pressuring other guys to do things with your partner that they don’t wanna do.

But if your ex-boy was only interested in you for his partner, CALDAD, he was certainly playing the long game. Establishing an ongoing D/s relationship with a married man when all you really want is someone to fuck your partner in front of you… that seems like an awful lot of effort when Grindr is full of men who would be up for fucking your ex-boy’s boyfriend while he watched without him having to go through the trouble of entering into a long-term relationship first. Setting you up with his partner may have been an interest, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it was your ex-boy’s sole interest. And honestly, CALDAD, I find myself wondering what you expected from your ex-boy when you started to fuck his partner in front of him. Did you think he was going sit there impassively, with a look of total indifference on his face, not feeling anything in particular? If so, CALDAD, that wasn’t a very realistic expectation on your part. And I suspect if he had sat there looking bored or indifferent, you would’ve found that just as weird and off-putting. If I was fucking some guy’s boyfriend in front of him, CALDAD, I would hope that guy got off on it. Hell, I would call it off if the guy whose boyfriend I was fucking didn’t react like some creepy voyeur. Frankly, CALDAD, I don’t think your ex-boy did a terrible thing. He was honestly into you, that’s why he

was your boy, and he wanted to share his partner with you. If you didn’t want to fuck his partner, you should’ve continued to say no. Once you started to fuck his partner, you should’ve wanted (and expected) your ex-boy to enjoy the show.

P.S. On the off chance that CALDAD’s ex-boy is reading this: Welcome to Seattle! Cuckold or pimp, both or neither, you need to be clearer with your sex partners (in person, online, wherever) about what you’re doing, what you want them to do, and why you want them to do it. There are plenty of guys out there into threesomes, cuckolding, and guys who are pimping out their partners, so there’s no need to be a manipulative-by-default creep, which is how you risk coming across when you aren’t clear about what you’re doing (sharing your partner) and why (you’re a cuck or your partner has no game or both). “That’s a really good question,” Sam said. “I have to say, he is very good at it. He really gets into it, he moans, he talks about how good it feels, and he lasts a long time. That’s part of what makes sucking his cock so much fun.”

Q: I read your column a lot and there’s a pattern I’ve been noticing. A straight guy writes in and says he’s straight and likes pussy, but he’s recently discovered that he’s also attracted to trans women. And then they ask something like, “How should I describe my sexual orientation now?” To which you reply with something like, “You are straight. Trans women are women, they just happen to have dicks.” Great answer! I don’t disagree, but if I were responding I’d write, “You’re not gay, because trans women aren’t men. Trans women are women with dicks. Since you are attracted to women, you can keep on identifying as straight if that’s what feels right. Or you can identify as queer.” Queerness, as I understand it, is an expansive term that refers to anyone whose sexuality or gender expression falls outside of conventional expectations. To me it seems appropriate for these straight men to embrace the term “queer.”

Mulling Over Labels

A: While you might think it’s appropriate for straight men who sleep with trans women to identify as queer,

MOL, lots of trans women disagree.

“It’s deeply problematic when people hear that a famous man is with a trans woman and they automatically think that he’s gay, because that is disavowing the womanhood of trans women,” Laverne Cox said during a conversation with Angelica Ross about the struggles of dating as a trans woman. “You can be into a trans woman and be completely straight.” (Cox and Ross spoke on an episode of Cox’s talk show If We’re Being Honest.)

So, any straight man who thought of himself as queer because he was into and/or fucking and/or with a trans woman would be guilty of disavowing the womanhood of his own partner. And any gay sex-advice columnist who urged straight men who were into/fucking/with trans women to think of themselves as queer would be pretty quickly terfed out of the advice racket. But it does seem to me that a straight man who openly dates trans women, while no less straight than any other straight man, is definitely something more than most straight men—more confident, more secure in his own sexuality, more likely to be a good partner to any woman he winds up with, cis or trans.

Now, some cis men who date trans women aren’t straight; some cis men are bisexual or pansexual or omnisexual, as Cox pointed out on her show. And there are trans women out there who are queer and straight. Which is where it really gets complicated. A straight cis guy dating a trans woman is definitely in a relationship with a queer person; he’s arguably in a queer relationship himself. But being in a queer relationship—being the cis straight boyfriend of a trans woman or the cis straight wife of a bi guy or the allosexual partner of an asexual— doesn’t make a cis straight person queer themselves. But you know what? The fucking world is on fire and if a cis straight guy who’s with a trans woman wants to identify as queer—if he wants to round himself up to queer— and the woman he’s with is okay with him embracing the term “queer” for himself, he can call himself queer. P.S. Not all trans women have dicks.

CLASSIFIED LISTINGS

LEGAL

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