NEWS. ARTS. LIFE. | APRIL 2021 | FREE | SINCE 1971 PUBLIC LIVES
GREEN ENERGY
MUNCHIES
MARY KRUGER IS ROC’S CANNABIS CRUSADER
CAN POT MAKE YOU MORE CREATIVE? UHH . . .
WEED BUTTER MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER
LEGAL POT IS COMING TO NEW YORK
INBOX WANNA SAY SOMETHING? CITY wants to hear you rant and rave. Your feedback must . . . . . . be no more than 250 words . . . respond to CITY content . . . be engaging CITY reserves the right to edit for accuracy, length, and readability.
Send your rants and raves to: feedback@rochester-citynews.com
CITY, 280 State St., Rochester, NY 14614 (ATTN: Feedback) DEEP DIVE WAS REFRESHING I really appreciated Steve Orr’s indepth article in the March edition of CITY about the vagaries of the Rochester Historical Society and its attempts to stay afloat (“History in the unmaking”). Articles like this, which go beyond the headlines, are a great journalistic resource. One thing missing from the article is that Carolyn Vacca, the president of the Rochester Historical Society and a professor at St. John Fisher College, is also the Monroe County historian. Her long service in this position gives her an abundance of insight into the workings of museums and archives in our area. Lisa Jadwin, Rochester ‘LOST YEAR’ WASN’T LOST ON THIS TEACHER I just wanted to share my appreciation for the beautifully written “Our Lost Year” article and its subsections in the March edition of CITY. CITY has always been a source of local pride and joy for me, while also at times stirring the pot of controversy. When I saw the cover page of this most recent issue, I was curious as to how the year would be presented with so much going on. The article was presented in such a matter-of-fact way with no bias! Even in history books, events are often presented in a biased manner, but this article was not. This article should be what is presented in our future history books. As a high school teacher, I am eager to share that this is among another CITY articles I will be having my students read, analyze, and reflect on. 2 CITY
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HISTORICAL SOCIETY IS A TREASURE The Rochester Historical Society has been a part of the fabric of the Rochester community for over 100 years. While we may be a bit frayed around the edges, as noted in the recent CITY article (“History in the unmaking”), with a little tender loving care, we can continue to provide a link to this area’s past for decades to come. We fear the article may have left some readers with the impression that RHS is under investigation. We need to clarify that RHS is not under investigation. This has been verified by both the state historian and the president of the Museum Association of New York. More importantly, we would like to share some of our good news! As part of our longterm strategic plan, we recently refreshed our web site, rochesterhistory.org, and hope to make more of our collection available online for viewing, education and research if and when financial and volunteer resources materialize in the future. With the waning of the pandemic, we’ll soon be able to establish regular, if minimal, hours of operation. In the meantime, RHS can be accessed by appointment. Unlike many historical societies throughout New York, including Syracuse and Buffalo, RHS receives no public funding — not from the state, the county, or the city. The funds to cover our bare bones operating expenses flow primarily from donations. As the recent article pointed out, that leaves us in a somewhat precarious financial situation — a reality shared by many not-for-profit organizations. As noted in the article, we continue to carefully evaluate our collections and weed out items which lack historical relevance to the Rochester area. This process is akin to clearing out a grandparent’s attic. But we cannot simply cull unwanted items by holding a garage sale or giving friends items they may like. Rather, using a deliberate process detailed in our collections policy and consistent with New York regulations, we identify articles that may be duplicates or are unrelated to our mission. We then contract with auctioneers to sell these items. This process is not to make money, but to ensure our collections are relevant and reflect our purpose and mission. This is a standard best practice for any museum. However, there is current debate among elite art museums regarding selling pieces to generate operating funds. While this periodic purging has mostly been on hold during the pandemic, we have a responsibility to continue assessing our collections to ensure we have room for future donations chronicling our lives in the 20th and 21st centuries. We hope that you will take this opportunity to join us in our efforts to stitch together the threads of the “Rochester tapestry” and preserving it for future generations! RHS Board of Trustees Thanks to all who worked on and put together this amazing piece. I am truly blown away! Alexa Cunningham, Webster POLICE, PROTESTERS NEED TO TALK Thank you for your report debunking the allegations that some Rochester police officers are wearing white power symbols on their uniforms (“No, those RPD officers were not wearing neo-Nazi symbols,” Feb. 26, online). The deaths of Daniel Prude and George Floyd, and other recorded interactions between police and civilians, have caused much distrust of law enforcement in our community and many communities around the country for good reason. Accusing police of something so outrageous as
wearing white power symbols in plain view detracts from legitimate complaints about policing. For their part, police could do a better job of talking to their accusers. The video that accompanied the story showed a shouting match between protesters and police over the insignia in question. Protesters complained that the symbol was a “neo-Nazi sign.” A commanding officer replied, “No it isn’t.” Then the conversation, if it could be called that, went on like that and grew more and more heated. Things might have gone smoother and tempers might not have flared had the commander just explained the history of the symbol to the protester and why the officer was wearing it. Instead, it took CITY to explain it. Jeffrey Whittaker, Rochester
NEWS. ARTS. LIFE. April 2021 Vol 49 No 8 On the cover: Photograph by Ryan Williamson 280 State Street Rochester, New York 14614 feedback@rochester-citynews.com phone (585) 244-3329 roccitynews.org PUBLISHER Rochester Area Media Partners LLC, Norm Silverstein, chairman FOUNDERS Bill and Mary Anna Towler EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT themail@rochester-citynews.com Editor: David Andreatta News editor: Jeremy Moule Staff writer: Gino Fanelli Arts editor: Daniel J. Kushner Life editor: Rebecca Rafferty Music writer: Frank De Blase Calendar editor: Kate Stathis Contributing writers: Beth Adams, J. Nevadomski, Ron Netsky, Veronica Volk CREATIVE DEPARTMENT artdept@rochester-citynews.com Creative director: Ryan Williamson Designer/Photographer: Jacob Walsh ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT ads@rochester-citynews.com Sales manager: Alison Zero Jones Advertising consultant/ Project mananger: David White OPERATIONS/CIRCULATION Operations manager: Ryan Williamson Circulation manager: Katherine Stathis kstathis@rochester-citynews.com CITY is available free of charge. Additional copies of the current issue may be purchased by calling 585-784-3503. CITY may be distributed only by authorized distributors. No person may, without prior written permission of CITY, take more than one copy of each monthly issue. CITY (ISSN 1551-3262) is published monthly 12 times per year by Rochester Area Media Partners, a subsidiary of WXXI Public Broadcasting. Periodicals postage paid at Rochester, NY (USPS 022-138). Postmaster: send address changes to CITY, 280 State Street, Rochester, NY 14614. Member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the New York Press Association. Copyright by Rochester Area Media Partners LLC, 2021 - all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying, recording or by any information storage retrieval system without permission of the copyright owner.
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IN THIS ISSUE OPENING SHOT
Riona Thomas, 3, reads "Tickle Time!" with her mother, Rei Thomas, at the Irondequoit Public Library. The library is eliminating late fees on materials geared toward children and young adults. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
NEWS
6
EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
MY 'STONER' STEPBRO BECAME A CANNABIS KING
ARTS
LIFE
16
36
SOCIAL JUSTICE FUELS THE FIGHT FOR LEGAL POT
20
State lawmakers say the goal is addressing the ills inflicted by decades of cannabis criminalization. LESSONS IN LEGALIZATION
38
What New York can — and should — learn from other states. BY JEREMY MOULE
MORE NEWS, ARTS, AND LIFE INSIDE
PERFECT VISION
Hindsight inspired rapper King 20/20 to move toward sobriety and a new sound. BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER
WHO SAYS MONEY DOESN'T GROW ON TREES?
Rochester's exotic plant market is in full bloom.
REBECCA RAFFERTY & DAVID ANDREATTA
24
MARY KRUGER: A CANNABIS CRUSADER PASSES IT ON
BY DAVID ANDREATTA
BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER,
BY GINO FANELLI
12
GREEN ENERGY
Can cannabis fuel creativity? Anecdotally? Hell yeah. Scientifically? The jury is out.
PUBLIC LIVES
She defied the stoner stereotype to become a leading voice in the Rochester legalization movement.
BY REBECCA RAFFERTY
BY DAVID ANDREATTA
ON THE COVER
FAR OUT, UP CLOSE
RIT scientific photographer Ted Kinsman gets up close and personal with pot. Like, really up close.
He was a troubled kid. And an expert in marijuana.
8
REVEL IN THE DETAILS
52
BY VERONICA VOLK
WHEN 'OM' HELPS YOU TAKE CARE OF MOM
Meditation, mindfulness are lifesavers for stressed-out caregivers. BY BETH ADAMS roccitynews.org
CITY 3
WELCOME
Welcome to the pot issue
E
diting a monthly magazine is a little bit like writing on spec. You’re constantly looking into a murky crystal ball trying to anticipate what topics will resonate with readers in four to six weeks. Anyone who has followed the years-long debate over marijuana legalization in New York, though, knew that April was either going to be the month that the state approved the recreational use of cannabis or blew the best chance it has ever had to make it happen. AT CITY, we gambled on the state getting the job done and set about reporting stories that surrounded the topic. The language of the state’s legislation had yet to be finalized when this issue went to press. But word was the bill would pass the legislature early this month and deliver on a promise by legislators to include “social equity” provisions that aim to help people from communities negatively affected by decades of marijuana criminalization enter the legal industry. In this issue, we explore what social equity ought to look like and consider the lessons to be learned from other states where pot is already legal as New York sets about writing the complex rules that will control what will be a highly-regulated market. We also dish on what’s in store for the edibles market; examine the link between cannabis and creativity; feature the work of a scientific photographer from RIT who gets up close and personal with pot, like really up close; and learn what drives Rochester’s cannabis crusader, Mary Kruger. I even introduce you to my stepbrother, a cannabis pioneer in Canada, who cautions against excluding what he calls “legacy players” — people convicted on marijuana charges, like him — from the legal market. Hint: it didn’t work so well in Canada. The first sales of legal marijuana are likely more than a year away. But the move paves the way for a potential $4 billion industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs and end years of racially disproportionate enforcement of formerly stringent marijuana laws. These are good things, regardless of whether you indulge in the jolly green grass, and New Yorkers want them. A Siena College poll from March found that nearly 60 percent of New York voters favored legalizing recreational marijuana, including 71 percent of Black voters. Can you say, “Weed the People?”
David Andreatta, Editor
Thoughts about CITY? Tell us at feedback@rochester-citynews.com
CLARIFYING OURSELVES: A report on the Rochester Historical Society that appeared in CITY’s March edition reported that the society did not have a website. The society launched its website, rochesterhistory.org, on March 1, the same day CITY’s report was published online and in print. References to the society not having a website have been removed from the digital version of the story. 4 CITY
APRIL 2021
EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
Want legal pot to thrive? Let the ‘stoners’ in BY DAVID ANDREATTA
@DAVID_ANDREATTA
DANDREATTA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
W
ord that New York legislators are serious about implementing a social equity component to their plan to legalize pot has me thinking a lot about Clint. Clint Younge is my stepbrother. Or rather, he was my stepbrother. Neither of us know how to classify our relationship anymore. My father was married to his mother for a long time. We grew up together. He is also a pioneer in Canada’s cannabis industry. In recent years, he has traveled the world as a cannabis consultant, addressed Parliament on behalf of the industry, and made a small fortune in the process. Recently, he was interviewed by Forbes magazine about the cannabis market in Europe. Clint, 39, has been on the cover of several pot-related publications. To know him like I did, though, you wouldn’t have ever thought he had it in him. We met when I was 12 and Clint was 6. He was the brother I never had and a bit of a scamp. He was mischievous and clever, but forever in trouble — at first with our parents, then his teachers, and eventually the law. I remember visiting him while he was doing a short stretch for grand larceny at the Barton Street Jail, a maximum-security provincial detention facility in our hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. He was 17 at the time, but he looked much older. “I was stealing cars just to get around,” he recalled in a recent phone conversation from his home in British Columbia. “That’s how much of a dummy I was.” Clint was no dummy, but you could have been forgiven for thinking of him that way at the time. He liked pot and was cast off by many as a “screw up” and a “stoner.” He was an admittedly pitiful thief, too. He once landed in Barton Street for 14 days for stealing a head of lettuce from a supermarket. There was a whole story about how he was just trying to help a friend get something to eat, but in the end, he got locked up for iceberg lettuce. That and his unresolved rap sheet. 6 CITY
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Clint Younge. PHOTO PROVIDED
“The guys in jail were like, ‘You’re in here for stealing lettuce?’” he said. Clint had mental and emotional problems, some of which he came by naturally and some of which were exacerbated by a tumultuous home life and the crowd with which he ran. Our parents tried straightening him out with doctors, medications, and military school. None of it worked. A couple years after I had visited him in jail, he was a high school dropout and homeless. He was estranged from our parents, whose marriage was crumbling anyway. I had begun my career in newspapers and gave him $500 and a one-way bus ticket out west. My hope was that he would go to the Alberta oil sands, where it seemed anyone could get a job, and make a life for himself. Clint ended up in the resort town of Banff. He would bum around the western provinces for several years, all the while partaking in his favorite pastime and the only thing that seemed to hold his interest — pot. He smoked it. He ate it. He bought it. He sold it. “I loved the plant,” Clint said. By his late 20s, after learning to manage his mental illness — with marijuana, of course — he got serious about cannabis. He found a series of jobs, each with more responsibility than the last, at a string of black market medical cannabis dispensaries that were popping up all over Canada at the time.
Although medical marijuana had been approved in Canada in 1999, it was only available by mail, and regulations limited the number of growers to a handful of conglomerates whose product, patients complained, was inferior to that found on the black market. Clint eventually became the chief executive officer of the largest chain of these black market operations and opened shops in Ontario. His shops, like others, were in a constant tug-of-war with authorities. In 2016, police raided one of his stores in Hamilton, seizing $75,000 worth of marijuana, and charged Clint with possession for the purpose of trafficking. The shop reopened within the week and the game of cat-and-mouse continued until the country legalized recreational pot in 2018 and, eventually, shut down the dispensaries for good and replaced them with government-run operations that, consumers complain, sell inferior pot. Clint never did a day in prison. His trial was delayed until after legalization and he ended up pleading guilty in 2019 to possession charges and was sentenced to pay a $7,000 fine. But his criminal record precluded him from immediately entering the legal market. On the outs in Canada, he was lured by a Swiss hemp company to oversee its operations there, which he did until recently.
That’s why Clint comes to mind for me when I hear New York legislators talking about making it a priority to help people who have been prosecuted for marijuana-related crimes get into the legal game. Clint is not the posterchild for the type of social equity envisioned by New York lawmakers. He’s white and he doesn’t come from a neighborhood ravaged by the war on drugs. But he is not unlike a lot of people who were cast off as “stoners” and criminals because of their commitment to a drug that is now legal. The legal cannabis market dismisses them again at its own peril. Who better than them, who know the product and who know the consumer, to make the legal market thrive? “I’ve been in cannabis for 13 years now in the gray or regulated market,” Clint said. “And I’ve been in the black market and playing around with cannabis since I was 15.” The black market, which Clint calls the “legacy market,” is thriving in Canada, and it will in New York if the state doesn’t make it easy for people with the right skills to get into the legal market. As of last year, half of all pot sales in Canada were black market, according to Statistics Canada. Clint pointed to the groundbreaking cannabis social equity program in Oakland, California, as an example of what New York, or Canada for that matter, ought to be doing. “In Oakland, they said, ‘If you were charged with a cannabis crime, you’ve got dibs on the legal market,’” Clint said. “Canada tried to eliminate all the experts and it backfired completely.” Canada is slowly acknowledging the error of its ways. The country recently began issuing micro-cultivation licenses for small-scale growing operations, where the barrier to get in on the action is much less costly for legacy growers and sellers. “You need the legacy players,” Clint said. “If you don’t get people into the system from the past, all you’ll get is crap. People would rather go see Mike in Apartment B if he’s got a good bag of weed than a legal shop with garbage.”
NEWS
GOOD DEED WEED
ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB WALSH
Social justice fuels the fight for legal pot BY GINO FANELLI
C
@GINOFANELLI
edric Cotton was 14 when he fell in with the wrong crowd. He left his mother’s house, dropped out of school, and started slinging bags of weed on the streets of Rochester. Like many dealers, he built a criminal record and served stints in jail on a variety of charges. Every time he was released and contemplated going straight, he found himself trapped in the same cycle: further from finishing school, finding a job, and ditching dealing. With each new charge was a new obstacle to building a better life for himself. 8 CITY
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GFANELLI@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
So he stuck with it. He felt he had no choice. “A drug dealer is one of the lowest people on the totem pole, besides pedophiles and stuff,” Cotton said. “A person hears you’re a drug dealer, they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want him in my house, we don’t know what he’s going to do.’ You always go back.” Cotton spent almost 20 years “hustling,” as he calls it, before leaving it behind in 2014. Today, at 43, Cotton looks back on his younger years with regret. He sees a young man who missed opportunities to attend school and develop a career.
His story is not unusual. The front on the war on drugs that focused on low-level marijuana possession has cost generations of people the chance at a better life. This is particularly true for Black people, like Cotton, for whom the rate of marijuana arrests are higher than for whites, despite similar rates of cannabis use. Legalizing the recreational use of marijuana in New York is often framed as a budgetary issue. Feasibility studies cited by the governor and legislators, who have introduced their own dueling packages of legislation, project a tax
windfall of anywhere from $300 to $430 million annually. But many legislators, including those with the most pull in Albany who are pushing back on the governor’s measure, say they are motivated to legalize marijuana less by the creation of a new tax revenue stream than to exact a form of social justice that addresses the harms inflicted by current and past marijuana laws, chiefly on low-income neighborhoods whose residents are primarily people of color. The disproportionate number of Black Americans jailed on
marijuana charges is reason enough to legalize the drug, these legislators say. The focus of legalization, they say, must be on redressing damages and providing new opportunities in communities most negatively affected by the decades-long prohibition on cannabis. On the negotiating table have been two bills, one supported by the governor called the Cannabis Regulation and Taxation Act (CRTA), and one backed by the majority of legislators called the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA), that has the support of not just the cannabis lobby, but lawyers, doctors, and civil rights activists. Legislators and the governor have since reached a final deal on legalization and that legislation will replace the CRTA and MRTA. The MRTA envisioned expunging the criminal records of people convicted of possession, and funneling tax revenue from legal marijuana sales into resource-starved communities for vital services, education, and programs that help residents train for work, start businesses, and get in on the retail end of cannabis. “There’s addressing prior harm, and then there’s making sure as we’re moving forward New York establishes a cannabis industry that is rooted in economic justice,” said Melissa Moore, state director for the New York Drug Policy Alliance, a pro-legalization organization. “That has multiple entry points, as many avenues as possible for low-income New Yorkers, for New Yorkers who have been directly impacted by the drug war, to be able to participate.”
BLACK PEOPLE 16 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE ARRESTED In 2019, the New York Civil Liberties Union released its analysis of state Division of Criminal Justice Services data on marijuana arrests between 2000 and 2018. The group found that Black people accounted for 52 percent of the arrests despite comprising just 14 percent of the population statewide. A study by the American Civil Liberties Union found similar disparities nationwide. In New York, the worst disparity of any county was found in Monroe County, according to the report.
Defender Jacquelyn Grippe said. “What starts as a routine traffic stop for something like speeding, running through a stop sign, all of a sudden turns into a full-blown search and seizure.” The state legislature’s legalization bill, the MRTA, included provisions to prohibit police searches based on the odor of marijuana. Whether that survived the negotiating table with the governor is uncertain. Mayor Lovely Warren said in an interview that over-policing and disproportionate arrest rates have created cycles that have kept people trapped in the criminal justice system. “It’s just a vicious sort of treadmill that we have people on,” Warren said. “Our hope is that reinvesting in these communities and reinvesting, most of all, in the people in the communities, that we’ll be able to change that generational cycle.”
WHAT REINVESTMENT LOOKS LIKE
Cedric Cotton. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
Black people were 16 times more likely to be arrested on marijuana charges here than white people. Legalizing cannabis has been shown to narrow the disparity. After New York decriminalized possession of small amounts of weed for personal use in 2019, there was a “really big drop off” in arrests in Monroe County, according to Public Defendor Timothy Donaher. Data provided to CITY by the Public Defender’s Office showed that it handled 28 marijuana cases in 2020, down from 191 in 2019, 467 in 2018, and 498 in 2017. Donaher acknowledged that the steep drop off in 2020 was somewhat artificially depressed by the pandemic, but said it could not be solely attributed to
the health crisis. Advocates of cannabis legalization have bristled for decades at the description of marijuana as a gateway drug. But marijuana has opened the door to more serious criminal charges being brought against consumers. The plant’s pungent odor has long served as a legal pretext for police officers to search automobiles, as long as the officer believes that the search may turn up evidence of criminal activity. Through those searches, officers sometimes find more serious contraband. “We see very often in the city, in Rochester City Court, people of color being pulled over and detained under the guise of there was an odor of marijuana,” Assistant Public
Like the CRTA and MRTA, the final deal between Cuomo and lawmakers includes provisions for social equity investments. The proposal funnel 40 percent of marijuana tax revenues into education, another 40 percent into vital services and programs for communities hit hardest by cannabis prohibition, and the remaining 20 percent would fund drug education and treatment programs. In Rochester, Warren already has plans to put $2 million to $5 million of cannabis tax revenue into a pair of initiatives. Her proposed Housing First Trust Fund would provide city residents with home ownership and housing assistance while her proposed Equity and Recovery Agenda Emergency Fund would provide $2,000 microloans for families in need. “Our focus would be on direct access, directly to the people that live in the communities that have been most impacted,” Warren said. Democratic state Senator Jeremy Cooney also said he believes the tax revenue from marijuana sales needs to be used to lift communities up, not bolster the state’s general fund. CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
roccitynews.org
CITY 9
“What I want is to make sure, in the MRTA for example, we break out areas like education, workforce training, things that will actually empower communities of color to break generational poverty,” Cooney said. Elected officials, activists, and community leaders have also offered ideas and proposals for how New York should use its revenues from legal weed taxes. For example, the MRTA bill would have directed some marijuana revenue into a “community grants reinvestment fund,” which would have provided grants to nonprofits and government programs specifically in neighborhoods disproportionately affected by the criminalization of marijuana. Legislators had also proposed a public health initiative, funded by cannabis revenue, targeted specifically toward educating young people about drug safety. And in Monroe County, Special Assistant Public Defender Danielle Ponder and Spiritus Christi Prison Outreach Director Damond Wilson, both of whom serve on the citycounty Commission on Racial and Structural Equity (RASE), recently floated a plan to fund a reparations initiative with cannabis revenue. Their proposal would create a community chest for Black county residents that provides funding for entrepreneurs, housing, and a variety of other needs. “The average Black family’s net worth is 10 times less than the average white family, with the possibility of becoming more disparate in the wake of the pandemic,” the letter reads. “This disparity will continue without the introduction of economic equity laws and policies, better known as reparations.”
BUILDING A MARKET FOR ALL What Cotton, and many other people, want of legalization legislation, are provisions that help dealers and growers who have long supplied the unregulated market break into the legal market. “I would like to see a lot of people opening up small businesses to try and make money and put it back into the community,” Cotton said. “Some people have years of experience already . . . some people been doing it 20, 30 years, and are still doing it.” 10 CITY APRIL 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB WALSH
Jeremy Cooney. FILE PHOTO
State legislative leaders have taken a similar position. Their MRTA, which was first introduced in 2013, had provisions that offer preferential licensing to people who had been wrapped up in marijuana charges, something Cuomo and legislators agreed to carry over into their negotiated final proposal. In February, Cuomo updated his proposal to contain similar provisions. Cooney, who co-sponsored the MRTA, said eligibility criteria should include race, prior convictions for marijuana charges, and residing in a community that has been disproportionately affected by the stringent marijuana laws of the past.
“It’s just so blatant to me that we need to do something specific,” Cooney said. Many of the 15 states that have legalized recreational marijuana have similar “restorative justice” plans. In many cases, however, these programs have not delivered on their promises. For example, in 2019 Los Angeles launched a social equity program aimed at giving 100 pot business licenses to people either with marijuana charges or from a community hit hard by past laws. But the program has been mired in controversy. Less than 20 of the approved licenses were reportedly given to Black business owners. Additionally, small business owners often had to wait for months to receive their license, all the while renting out vacant storefronts they were required to have just to qualify for the license. Illinois officials also promised priority access to licenses for people either harmed by marijuana criminalization or who lived in affected neighborhoods. Sales started in January 2020, but a year later the Chicago Sun-Times reported that not a single licensed marijuana business in the state listed a person of color as its majority owner. One state lawmaker there called the program “an epic failure.” Cannabis sales hit $1 billion that year
and weed giants including Cresco Labs, PharmaCann, and Green Thumb Industries have been able to swiftly enter the legal market and dominate. New York’s cannabis advocates fear a similar situation could play out here. They worry that the big medical marijuana companies such as Columbia Care will leap into the recreational business and dominate that market once it opens. To counter that, Cooney supports “capping” the participation of large companies in the legal market, in part by limiting their number of dispensaries. “That is how you allow them to participate in the market without allowing them to dominate the market,” Cooney said. Both Cooney and Warren are supportive of “incubator” programs that would assist small business owners in getting their cannabis companies off the ground without the initial, costly overhead. Cotton said that creating pathways for everyday people to participate in the legal industry is a given. “They always cut the little man out, that’s what we don’t want,” Cotton said. “We don’t want a lot of big corporations to come in here and take the money from the Black community, and take it where? That’s like defeating the purpose.”
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NEWS
DRUG MONEY
Lessons in legalizing marijuana BY JEREMY MOULE
@JFMOULE
JMOULE@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
WHAT NEW YORK CAN — AND SHOULD — LEARN FROM OTHER STATES
M
arijuana was once viewed by many as a social scourge — the illicit vice of hippies, social outcasts, and unmotivated slackers. But times have changed. The devil’s lettuce is reviled no more. Polls from both Gallup and Pew Charitable trusts show twothirds of Americans support the legalization of cannabis, up from around a quarter of Americans when President Ronald Regan escalated the nation’s war on drugs. Cannabis is now a growing medical and recreational industry 12 CITY APRIL 2021
that generates about $15 billion a year in annual sales and rising. Those sales provide tax revenue to governments while generating broader economic activity, such as job creation and an influx of new spending in communities. Legal pot could be an economic boon for New York — essentially bringing an underground agricultural and retail industry to the surface. As lawmakers have publicly made the case for legalizing marijuana for adult use, they’ve had glints of green in their eyes.
“What we do know is New York is the largest illicit cannabis market in the country and the competition for either medical operators or new social equity dispensaries and producers in the state, of which there will be many, is really ultimately capturing that marketplace and bringing it into the regulated environment, said Adam Goers, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Columbia Care, the company that operates one of Rochester’s medical cannabis dispensaries.
Adam Goers. PHOTO PROVIDED
When Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled his 2021-22 budget proposal, the bill he submitted to legalize recreational marijuana projected that legal weed could net the state over $300 million a year in tax revenue once the marketplace is fully operational. A competing legislative proposal, sponsored by Assembly member Crystal Peoples-Stokes of Buffalo and Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan, projected tax revenue could reach $430 million. For a state that faced a multibillion dollar deficit due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic fallout, the new revenue stream has proved enticing. Local governments, who have their own budget struggles, are also eager to cash in on legal pot. A deal reached by Cuomo and legislative leaders would place a 4 percent sales tax on marijuana retail purchases, the revenue from which would be returned to local governments. When Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren delivered her State of the City in January, she proposed using $2 million to $5 million in expected marijuana tax revenue to fund an emergency grants program and a Housing First Trust Fund to assist in the development of quality housing as well as provide emergency rental aid and housing court services. But how accurate are the state’s revenue projections? Legal cannabis would be a wholly new industry in New York and officials don’t have historical sales data to reference. As they worked to put numbers to their plans, they looked at sales trends in places like Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, the states that pioneered legal weed and generally strike a good balance between taxes and maintaining a competitive marketplace, as well as licensing and supply. Many researchers, industry experts, and legalization supporters have said that if anything, New York officials are lowballing their projections. But they’ve also noted that the success of a legal cannabis market and industry in New York will depend on several factors, including the state’s tax structure, the accessibility of licenses to businesses in various parts of the supply chain, and the regulations the state would put into place. Columbia Care is an indication that New York could have a robust
Morgan Fox. PHOTO PROVIDED
legal marijuana marketplace. The company, which operates in 12 states and Washington D.C., has started its own line of recreational products. Goers said he thinks Columbia Care has a role to play in helping New York get its legal cannabis marketplace up and running swiftly, and in helping New Yorkers start cannabis businesses.
THE CANNABIS PAYOUT The aim of cannabis legalization in New York is two-pronged. First and foremost, legalization is intended to undercut the established, illicit marijuana market. Of even greater importance to legislators and many cannabis advocates, though, is using the legal marketplace to address
the harms caused primarily to communities of color by decades of marijuana criminalization. “The overarching purpose is to stop punishing people for using a substance that’s objectively safer than alcohol and to make this substance much safer and regulated than it is,” said Morgan Fox, media relations director for the Colorado-based National Cannabis Industry Association. But legalization comes with fringe benefits in the form of jobs, tax revenues, and, as Fox put it, bringing an unregulated market into the open “where there can be much closer oversight and where you can contribute to legitimate business creation.” A pair of studies, one from 2019 and another released in February,
found that a legal, regulated cannabis industry in New York could create tens of thousands of jobs and surpass the economic impact of the state’s 440 licensed breweries, which the New York State Brewers Association estimates at $3.4 billion a year. Both build on a 2018 state Department of Health report that used data from Washington and Colorado, as well as drug use data from a national survey, to conclude that New York’s market for recreational marijuana could be between $1.7 billion and $3.5 billion a year. That report explained that cannabis firms would do business with other suppliers and they’d pay state taxes, while employees would also pay state taxes in addition to spending their earnings doing things that people do — buy houses, go to movies, take vacations. The SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government, which was the source of the 2019 study, figured a recreational cannabis market on the low end of $1.7 billion would directly employ 21,080 people in cultivation facilities, manufacturing, testing labs, and retail dispensaries, and would generate $4 billion in total economic output. A market on the high end of $3.5 billion could employ 43,400 people and generate $8.4 billion in economic activity, researchers found. CONTINUED ON PAGE 14 roccitynews.org CITY 13
MARIJUANA TAX REVENUE BY STATE $71,000,000
$1,665,000,000
2016-2021
2014-2021
Laura Schultz. PHOTO PROVIDED
$2,068,000,000
$222,000,000
2018-2021
2019-2021
$1,200,000
$193,000,000 2018-2021
2020
$349,000,000
$409,000,000
2018-2021
2015-2020
$1,810,000,000 2015-2020
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A report released in February, authored by James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies for New York City affairs at the New School, and Michele Mattingly, a labor market economics consultant, reached similar conclusions. The study was funded by Scott’s Miracle-Gro, a consumer lawn care and gardening products company that is unabashedly pro-cannabis legalization. Of note, that study projected that for every $100 million in taxes the state collects on marijuana sales, an additional $30 million in state and local income, property, and sales taxes are generated. The beer biz and a legal cannabis industry would differ in one very significant way. Unlike marijuana, beer is legal under federal law, so brewers can sell and procure key supplies from across state lines. “The cannabis industry cannot cross state lines,” Laura Schultz, Rockefeller Institute of Government’s executive director of research and the author of its 2019 study, explained in a recent interview. “So everything in the supply chain has to be produced in New York, which means none of that economic impact can trickle out.” The federal status of marijuana would also buffer New York’s cannabis industry from legal recreational pot markets in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? A LESSON FROM CALIFORNIA If state lawmakers try to turn legalization into a blatant money grab, which Cuomo has been accused of doing, legal observers say they’d likely undermine their efforts to establish a thriving regulated cannabis market and a long-term revenue stream. “You can’t look at it right now as the savior for the New York state budget because of COVID, it’s just not the right case” said Jason Klimek, an attorney with Boylan Code in Rochester who specializes in, among other things, cannabis law and tax law. “It’s going to take years for the market to stand up, get on its feet.” Setting taxes too high, or nickeland-diming growers, producers, and sellers, could push cannabis prices higher than consumers are willing to pay. Sticker shock could send recreational cannabis buyers right back to black-market dealers, as could a lack of predictability around what, if anything, they’ll be able to find on dispensary shelves. “The problem is, this isn’t like another good where there isn’t a really good substitute,” Klimek said. “Let’s just say the price of alcohol gets unreasonable, most people are probably not going to set up brewing operations, and there’s not a huge black market for bootlegging. But there is for cannabis.” These are all problems plaguing
“The crux of the issue boils down to, after everything is done, after taxes are calculated, after expenses are tabulated, what is the cost to the final consumer?” California’s relatively young legal cannabis market, which is considered the largest in the United States. As that state moved toward legalization, government officials projected sales of recreational cannabis would generate annual tax revenues of somewhere between the “high several hundred millions” of dollars to just over $1 billion. The first two calendar years in which sales were legal, revenue fell short of that projection, though in 2020 sales increased significantly and the state cleared $1 billion in excise, cultivation, and sales taxes. “It is believed that California’s effective tax rate of around 40 percent was too high to draw consumers away from the illicit market,” the Parrott and Mattingly study found. Additionally, three quarters of California’s cities and one-fifth of its counties prohibited cannabis dispensaries. And some looking to enter the industry haven’t been able to secure licenses due to bureaucratic delays and the compounding costs associated with them. The result: while California’s government is making money off of legal marijuana, the state’s black market has continued to thrive. The firms BDS Analytics and Arcview Market Research reportedly estimated that in 2019 that illicit cannabis sellers made $8.7 billion while legal retailers made $3.1 billion. “They basically created a structure that gave no incentive to go legal,” Schultz said.
THE EXCEPTION, NOT THE RULE A benefit to New York arriving relatively late to legalization is learning from the mistakes and success of states that got there earlier.
How marijuana will be taxed is outlined in the proposal agreed upon by Cuomo and lawmakers. Retail sales would be subject to a 9 percent tax that would go to the state and a 4 percent tax that would go to local governments. It also includes a potency tax, which is an excise tax based on the amount of THC in a product. But the state will eventually impose other regulations on the industry, in areas of product testing, consumer safety, and the issuances of retail licenses. As to the latter, legal experts and advocates say that if New York maintains its focus on addressing social equity, as legislators claim, the state would have low barriers of entry for obtaining licenses. That means the state would charge reasonable fees for licenses at all points of the supply and retail chain. What’s reasonable? By way of example, Massachusetts charges brick and mortar dispensaries $5,000 a year for a license, while California charges between $2,500 and $96,000 depending on a retailer’s sales volume. The state should also create an application process that is simple and efficient, so would-be ganjapreneurs can get their businesses running promptly, and so that they don’t have
to spend money on an attorney or consultant to help navigate a regulatory labyrinth, argued Fox and Klimek. “It’s really important to be able to learn not only from your own mistakes, but learn from the mistakes of other states and localities in order to help these programs grow and evolve as necessary,” said the National Cannabis Industry Association’s Fox. He added that regulators need to be nimble so they can easily incorporate new information and research into regulations. If New York can get the tax and regulatory aspects of legalization right early on, then a robust cannabis industry is likely to take root in the state, he said. An analysis of cannabis revenues from legal states shows that generally, in their first year or two, sales and revenues have been lackluster. But once the market gets humming, sales grow sharply and in most cases, revenue exceeds what the states projected at the time they legalized cannabis. Colorado officials initially projected that the state would bring in $70 million a year in tax revenue. In the 2014 calendar year, which is when legal pot sales started in the state, Colorado netted $67.6 million in taxes. For 2020, state officials estimated cannabis
tax revenues would reach nearly $388 million. More than $10 billion worth of cannabis products have been sold in Colorado since 2014. Washington has had a similar experience. In the 2015 fiscal year, the state generated $65 million in marijuana tax revenue, a figure that has climbed steadily with each passing year. In 2020 those taxes brought in $474 million. Officials initially projected receipts of $380 million a year. States that have legalized weed in more recent have seen closer alignment between projected and actual revenue. Over on the East Coast, Massachusetts began legal sales of marijuana in late 2018. Officials projected that the state would see $216 million in the first two years, but as of February 2021 it’s pulled in $215.6 million through marijuana taxes. The Rockefeller Institute for Government’s Schultz noted that Massachusetts may have missed out on sales revenue because of a slump during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The crux of the issue boils down to, after everything is done, after taxes are calculated, after expenses are tabulated,” Klimek said, “what is the cost to the final consumer?” roccitynews.org CITY 15
ARTS
REVEL IN THE DETAILS
IMAGE PROVIDED BY TED KINSMAN
FAR OUT, BUT UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH POT Ted Kinsman’s artful images of cannabis plants — and his many other creative projects — draw everyday people into the wild world of science. BY REBECCA RAFFERTY
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@RSRAFFERTY
any a cannabis consumer has an intimate relationship with his bud. But few have gotten as up close and personal with pot as Ted Kinsman, a scientific photographer at Rochester Institute of Technology who does not indulge in the jolly green grass. When Kinsman’s otherworldly images of microscopic parts of the cannabis plant started circulating on the internet in 2018, not everyone 16 CITY APRIL 2021
BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
believed what they were seeing. Some took to Snopes.com to verify that the suspiciously psychedelically-hued images were true representations of pot. The sleuthing site confirmed that they were genuine images of cannabis, but clarified that Kinsman had digitally colorized them to make parts of the plant pop — specifically the parts that get you high. Kinsman, a professor in the Photographic Sciences Department
at RIT, published his images along with an essay explaining how and why he made them, in a 2018 book titled “Cannabis: Marijuana Under the Microscope.” His close-up images of cannabis look like alien landscapes — vibrant forests with Dr. Seuss-like trees enveloped by a pitch-black vacuum. “I like to think it’s what a person would see if they were just a few microns tall and walking through these
forests,” Kinsman told Tech Insider shortly after his book launched. For reference, the average strand of hair is 70 microns wide. Kinsman digitally colors most of the plant with a vibrant gradient of green, while he uses candy-like pinks, purples, and blues to highlight the glandular trichomes — bubble-like sacs filled with a concentration of the chemical tetrahydrocannabinol, better known as THC.
More than just a series of engaging pictures that might charm any abstract art-loving collector, Kinsman’s book dives deep into the minutiae of the plant, exploring cell biology and the structures and functions of its parts in an easily understandable manner. He cast his approach as “plant biology lite” in a conversion with CITY. “My goal is to inspire respect for cannabis, as well as the beauty of all plants in the natural world,” Kinsman wrote in the introduction to his book. Talking with Kinsman, it’s obvious that he’s enthusiastic about natural phenomena and artful engineering, but also that he has a lot of fun with his explorations. His fascination is infectious when he discusses the structures of snowflakes, engineering a machine that prints dot matrix portraits out of coffee drips, or instructions on building a cocktail drinkbot. Kinsman says his goal is to make science as visually appealing as possible to everyday people. He’s done it. Although his images won’t be found in an art gallery, they have found their way into pop culture. His cannabis imagery and other work have been featured in science magazines, TV shows, and commercials. Time-lapse imagery he made of a rose blooming accompanies the opening credits of “The Bachelor.” Other images of his have been seen in episodes of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “American Idol,” and “The X-Files.” In 2019, the BioCommunications Association honored Kinsman with its most prestigious commendation, the Louis Schmidt Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the progress of biocommunications. While the wildest-looking of Kinsman’s cannabis images are scientifically accurate, they aren’t photographs. There is no camera
IMAGE PROVIDED BY TED KINSMAN
involved. They’re images made with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which bombards carefully selected and arranged freeze-dried plant samples with electrons. The microscope scans the surface topography of the sample, and creates a high-resolution image using that data. That takes about four minutes. Kinsman then painstakingly colorizes the image in Photoshop. That part takes hours upon hours.
For 10 years, Kinsman had his own SEM in his living room, until it broke down about two years ago and he scrapped it. His wife was happy to get the space back, he said. “What most people don’t realize is a scanning electron microscope is about the size of the VW Bug,” he said. “And it weighs around 2,000 pounds.” Kinsman said he likes to focus on making images of things that others haven’t done before, or haven’t done well.
Recently, he designed a bicycle with a giant Spirograph-like apparatus affixed to it that enables the rider to create Spirograph-like drawings by pedaling. Kinsman presents his engineered art-meets-science creations at makers’ fairs. “I’m not really an artist,” Kinsman said. “I just try to sell science the best I can.”
roccitynews.org CITY 17
ARTS
BRING ON THE BARDS
POETRY IN TIMES OF STRIFE
Three Rochester poets share how they perceived 2020 and how it inspired them BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER & REBECCA RAFFERTY
A
s Amanda Gorman reminded the world with her performance at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, good poets have the power to speak intimately and profoundly about love and loss, about phenomena and trauma. The last year had its share of all of those things. As the world reeled from the coronavirus pandemic and its human, and social, and economic toll, people across the country took to the streets calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality. In celebration of National Poetry Month, CITY checked in with three local poets who shared their thoughts on the upheaval and how it inspired them.
ANDERSON ALLEN The work of Anderson Allen — a local poet and artist-inresidence at Avenue Blackbox Theatre — is inextricably linked to his connection with his community, and his identity as a Black man choosing to love as he navigates violence, brutality, and racism. Allen initially wrote the poem “Joy, Fury in Purpose” in 2018, but its message of living Anderson Allen. PHOTO BY COCOA DAVID life defiantly, and pushing back as a person of color against social institutions that would destroy him, perhaps resonates now more than ever. He recited the poem at a Black Lives Matter protest last summer. In the work, Allen invokes goddesses from West African mythology and religious traditions to signal new birth, both literal and spiritual, and embrace the sanctity of Black life. Joy, Fury in Purpose I rep the village disenfranchised in the concrete jungle for the children looking for a Black Transformer who converts himself from safe space to Jungle Jim, (**Safe space is a constant**) From Rubix cube to dictionary, from living verb to extraordinary, they feared my greatness and so did I they feared my becoming and so did I I was blinded by the anointing within my clumsy grace and somehow, I still managed to stumble upon my greatness
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Which is proof that accidents have purpose and happen on purpose, which then proves that you have purpose So I must stand and evolve in my power until the light comes on purpose This world fears Black Bodies embodying Black Stars in Black Space on Black Time When you see Black Men give reverence to Black Women, Black Children, to all Black Beings, this worship is ritual They are our power Without them, we are just warriors with spears and bleeding hearts, fighting for a now that can be nurtured and protected I can feel the earth tremble in the breath of my lover’s labor I hold her hand as we brace ourselves for the next contraction I carry a river in my eyes waiting to release itself She squeezes in reciprocity, clenches for the final push Yemaya, Mawu, I have never seen a change so beautiful Listen to the emphatic melody of a love child’s purity, it’s the sound of a father’s lifeline double dutching with a replication of his DNA I look into her eyes and see how far we’ve come, and I look at her mother knowing the path ahead is far from over Because the preservation of my legacy will cost me my life and then some I hope the day never comes that I have to look My Sun in the eyes and tell him that he, too, must become a martyr in a war he never asked for The powers that be only want what they can buy, and rising above the will of the almighty dollar makes you a threat to national security Melanin in motion is synonymous to danger Dribble your thoughts with a perseverance that sends death fleeting in the opposite direction Run your route, Sun! If the cops come knockin’ daddy’s blocking you ’til you reach the end zone That is my duty as your father I’ll be a savage if it means you get to live in a world where a black boy knows what it means to be a child
I will not whitewash your pride just to drape you in pretentious patriotism I will not tell you to pledge allegiance to a country that paints you as a villain from your first cry I will not tell you to be coal and burn to cinder ’til you are grey and lifeless Our bodies have been the fossil fuels churning the melting pot for far too long Sons and Daughters of the days to come, the pursuit of happiness is a long road to misery Do not trouble yourself with such a fickle thing that you effortlessly transcend Chase your bliss Remember who you are, who you’ve always been: a beautiful, majestic, undying Love, a lineage of tribal spirit that traces back to a time when your heartbeat was just a random thought your parents couldn’t fathom You are the ascendant of your ancestors greatest hopes, so rise! You are the becoming of a nation, so rise! Lift the weights of oppression off your back and rise! Stand on the shoulders of the present moment and Rise! Your brothers and sisters across the diaspora need you, so Rise! I won’t stop screaming until you rise I won’t stop bleeding until you rise I won’t stop fighting until you rise I won’t stop dying until you rise This is your world Paint it as you see fit. You are my joy and my joy is not to be tampered with I Love You. Claim what is rightfully yours. You are my joy, Claim what is rightfully yours You are my life, Claim what is rightfully yours You are my pride, Claim what is rightfully yours You are my joy, my joy, my joy You are my life, my life, my joy You are my pride, my pride, my joy My life, my pride, my joy, my joy, You are my joy, Claim what is rightfully yours.
In "Sympathy for the Conspiracy Theorist," poet Albert Abonado engages in empathy. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
ALBERT ABONADO Charles Coté's poem "December" finds transcendent love in an unexpected place. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
CHARLES COTÉ Charles Coté, a poet and professional psychotherapist, is perhaps best known for his “I Play His Red Guitar,” a 2019 full-length book of poems reflecting on the death of his son Charlie from cancer in 2005. Coté is adept at articulating emotions that often go unverbalized — moments of love and interpersonal connection that are seemingly intangible. In 2020, the idealism of his romantic poems was tempered by the loss and alienation brought on by the health crisis. He said his recent work is “less so much caught up in my personal benefit from love, and more about ‘How can love help us transcend this moment?’” Throughout last year, Coté recalled, he read a different poem by 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi each day, and subsequently wrote a tanka, or 31-syllable poem of five lines, in response to each piece. Coté then combined several of the tankas into a single poem. In December, he wrote about how, during a nighttime walk with his wife, love led him to empathize with and appreciate a neighbor he had previously judged.
December When it’s time, will you turn toward that sound that is no sound without you, here writing every morning when there were no words before, when you pierce that rind, its shiny coat in winter when the sun hangs low its head on the horizon, when the first snow starts falling? The first drafts you’ll write on blank pages, this again a new beginning after so many attempts to avoid Love’s helplessness. And this love inside branching to eternity, light ghosting the tree last night at the hoarder’s house, what we’d never seen before, what before we’d scoffed: Look at all that uselessness, the shame of it all. But now we gaze and wonder how they gathered in the stars. They gathered their own longing, and what they found there, they brought it all home, and what they gathered, they loved, and what they loved, it cost them.
As the child of Filipino immigrants, poet and essayist Albert Abonado’s writing often contains themes of identity and rich descriptions of the relationship between family and food. He blends senseimpressions with stream-of-consciousness imagery, connecting the present with personal and cultural memory. Abonado says that last year he found himself thinking in a more nuanced way about mortality, about the relationships he has with conservative friends
and relatives, and about widespread conspiracy theories and how people get obsessed with them. “Sympathy for the Conspiracy Theorist,” which he penned in April of 2020, warily explores those ruminations. “It’s easy to forget how we can have wildly different ways of processing our grief and terror,” Abonado said. Abonado published a book of poems, “JAW,” in March 2020 and is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship for his creative writing.
Sympathy for the Conspiracy Theorist The world is indeed rotten and inexplicable and who doesn’t wish to see the truth behind the truth? Beyond the gauzy simulation of public prayers, the latest promises of chemistry. The problem is, as you see it, how we come to know. What we find, for example, on the windowsill are the wasps who entered through some undiscovered hole of our house, a thimble of wings I sweep into my palm. Their carefully wrought mechanisms come apart between my fingers. What held any of them together, and what did they do with their suffering? There must be a reason for this performance against our glass besides desire, the breeze on the other side of the window or the fields filled with photosynthesis and sugar. Let’s assume, then, a hypothesis about wasps that begins here as a sliver of venom before it is buried into the brain of another animal, which is preceded by the atoms that became poisonous, preceded by the engine of stars, preceded by the ripple in gravity we call prayer. No, you are right, as you suspect you have always been. Consider this my apology. There is always something more to this than this. roccitynews.org CITY 19
ARTS
GREEN ENERGY
CANNABIS AS CREATIVE FUEL Can pot make you more creative? To be blunt — don’t bet on it. BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER, REBECCA RAFFERTY & DAVID ANDREATTA
T
he connection between creatives and cannabis is long and storied — from the 19th-century hashish-smoking collective Club de Hachichins to the late comedian George Carlin to the ubiquitous hip-hop icon and unabashed marijuana ambassador Snoop Dogg. Musicians, artists, and writers have long used marijuana as creative fuel. But is there a link between cannabis and creativity? If so, what precisely is the relationship? “Everybody is trying to show that marijuana does everything,” says Dr. Alice Flaherty, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who has written extensively about creativity and drug use. “If it was doing anything for creativity, people would be publishing it up the wazoo, and they’re just not.” Clinical proof that cannabis influences creativity is scant. Whether there’s a connection hasn’t been studied enough, in part because there’s so little consensus on what constitutes creativity and how to measure it. Was Steve Jobs, an avowed recreational pot smoker, more creative than Louis Armstrong, another casual cannabis consumer? What researchers agree on is that creativity is spurred by what is known as “divergent thinking,” or the ability to think outside the box. Ten years ago, researchers at University College London set about studying the effects of smoking cannabis on creativity. They suggested that cannabis can promote the ability to connect unrelated concepts, an aspect of divergent thinking. That is not unlike what Alexa Silverman, the pianist and band leader for the Rochester pop-jazz fusion band The Recall, describes experiencing when she uses cannabis. The drug, she says, keeps her 20 CITY APRIL 2021
Okemini Kalu, who goes by the name Prince O. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
Siena Facciolo. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
from “overthinking” her music and enables her to experiment with more interesting chord progressions than she would if she were preoccupied with adhering to standard music theory rules. “I feel like getting out of your head helps you become more creative, because you’re not paying attention to the rules,” Silverman says. “It helps you get out of that mindset of, ‘I need to be in this box, I need to do something a certain way.’” What the University College London researchers concluded was that cannabis promotes the release of dopamine that can result in greater verbal fluency — in this case, the ability to rattle off as many words in a minute that began with a given letter. This was particularly noticeable in research subjects who were deemed, by their own responses to a personal survey, to have “low creativity.” Cannabis had no effect on the “high creative” subjects, however. Researchers concluded that cannabis made “low creatives” less inhibited. “This disinhibition may already be present in the high creativity group when not intoxicated and they may already be reaching maximum performance levels that do not change under the influence of cannabis,” the researchers wrote.
FINDING THE ‘FLOW’ That doesn’t mean that highly creative artists don’t swear that marijuana enhances their craft. Siena Facciolo is a private music teacher and singer-songwriter who creates brooding piano ballads under the stage name Siena. Facciolo began using cannabis edibles back in December as a way to tap into what she calls a “flow state” — “the ability to, without barriers, express whatever’s inside of you.” “The barrier might be selfcriticism,” she explains, “but the barrier could also be feeling like your emotions are too big.” Facciolo used to reach that state of mind through live performances and jamming with friends. But she says she turned to edibles when the pandemic limited her human interaction. “I do use them to basically cut through the bullshit of everyday life and just kind of actually get in touch with myself better,” Facciolo says. “’Cause I feel like we’re often berated by obsessive thinking and critical thinking, and we’re always analyzing everything.” Bassist Arjun Baxter, an Eastman School of Music graduate who works with Rochester acts such as the classically influenced folk duo CONTINUED ON PAGE 22
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creativity,” Flaherty says. “If you just make more shit then you increase the odds that something you make is going to be good by chance.”
TOO MUCH OF A ‘GOOD’ THING
Dan Sweeny. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
The Archive Ravens and pop artist Grace Serene, knows about paralysis by analysis. “When you talk about overanalysis, that’s a second that gets in the way of a nanosecond judgment you need to be making, in terms of a player on the spot,” Baxter says. “The faster you can [get in the mindset of ] ‘I’m not thinking and I’m simply doing,’ it makes it a lot easier to get your fingers ready for playing those notes, especially right at that moment when you need it.” Cannabis, he says, helps his improvisation and technical proficiency. Part of his daily routine is smoking sativa weed strains that he finds are conducive to productivity during the daytime. “It keeps me incredibly driven, and I’m not overthinking things,” he says. “I’m going pretty instinctually.” Baxter has played in the Rochester 22 CITY APRIL 2021
progressive rock band Kind of Kind, fronted by guitarist-vocalist Dan Sweeny, who credits cannabis with assisting in the writing of most of his group’s songs. Sweeny applies the artistic prescription “write drunk, edit sober” — often incorrectly attributed to Ernest Hemingway — to his use of cannabis. “When I’m high, I’m a lot less critical of the things that I write, and I’m more apt to just create for creation’s sake, and not to think so much about, ‘Oh, does this work? Does this not work?’” he says. “I’ll figure that out later.” Flaherty, the Harvard professor, who explored writer’s block and what sparks the drive to write in her 2005 book, “The Midnight Disease,” says there is a theory that marijuana can make artists feel more creative because it causes them to lower their standards. “There’s a Darwinism theory to
A couple years before he hosted “The Daily Show,” comedian Jon Stewart interviewed George Carlin in 1997 and asked pointedly, “Was there ever any fear that, by giving up the drugs, you lose a bit of the genius?” Carlin, who was an admitted drug addict earlier in his life, replied that he was using marijuana at the time perhaps once a month, but joked, “I have always, somewhere, a joint near me.” “That has been a canard for some time, that most of this creativity comes from being wacky, and I’m sure there’s a lot of truth in that,” he said in answer to Stewart’s question. “Where the drugs are concerned, and alcohol, they do seem to open a window for you. They do seem to broaden the vistas — at first.” But he warned against relying too heavily on cannabis, drawing parallels to great writers who became alcoholics. “I do find that, with judicious use, there’s some value in it,” he said. “But most of the things we use don’t let you leave them alone.” A more recent study of a cannabiscreativity link out of the Leiden University Institute of Psychology in The Netherlands drew partly the same conclusion. In 2015, a group of researchers delivered low doses of tetrahydrocannabinol — the chemical in cannabis known as THC that alters the mind — and high doses of THC to two groups of volunteers. One group was administered THC equivalent to about a half a joint, while the other got an amount similar to two joints. Researchers found that the group that received the lower dose had no boost in divergent thinking, while the high-dose group saw their divergent thinking abilities drop significantly. “The frequently reported feeling of heightened creativity [among cannabis users] could be an illusion,” the researchers wrote. “In other words, smoking a joint may not be the best choice when in need of breaking the ‘writer’s block,’ or overcoming other artistic inhibitions, and smoking several of them might
actually be counter-productive.” Zach Dietl, 37, a Rochester painter and sculptor, may be a testament to that conclusion. He saw his creativity bloom when he stopped using cannabis recently. He says he had lived a substancefree life into his 30s, but began using alcohol and pot after completing his graduate degree in fine arts to, as he put it, “question my earlier boundaries.” He says it was fun until he realized he was all play and no work. “I found it seriously hampered my ability to focus and grind out artwork,” he says, adding that before long, he was working on his art only once every few months. Occasionally, Dietl says, smoking weed helped him get over that self-critical hump confronting many artists. “But more often than not, I was just stoned and not making work,” Dietl says. “As time went on this became more and more a problem where I spent too much free time high and procrastinating.” Working sober hasn’t seemed to hamper his creativity. He’s currently working on a series of paintings of small woodland creatures arming themselves with human refuse, like squirrels holding weapons improvised out of silverware. “Kind of like nature’s revenge,” he says.
TO BE BLUNT There are, of course, legions of cannabis users who create nothing of note. It is possible that creative people come by their talents naturally despite, not because of, their drug use. It is also possible that the process of creating is so mentally and physically taxing to some artists that they turn to cannabis to relieve stress. Rochester painter and mixed media artist Jamie Lowes uses medically-prescribed marijuana to manage chronic pain stemming from a back injury he suffered as a younger man. But he acknowledges enjoying other benefits to using pot, namely, “putting you in a mindset where you’re able to be a creative force.” His work varies in style, but most paintings are moody washes of earthy colors, with line-heavy renderings of women’s faces and partial bodies emerging from the
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Rochester painter and mixed media artist Jamie Lowes uses medically-prescribed marijuana to manage chronic pain stemming from a back injury he suffered as a younger man. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
shifting hues. Others are of gnarled trees or architectural ruins, each with a fantastical vibe. “Time disappears in the best way possible,” he says of using cannabis. “Almost purely for me, almost purely, like the whole rest of the world literally would disappear. I can start painting at 10 o’clock and before I know it, it’s four o’clock in the morning.” For Rochester-based artist Okemini Kalu, who goes by the name Prince O., smoking marijuana gives his voice what he calls a “coarse, rugged” timbre that’s ideal for his dark, psychedelic-friendly club music sound. The calming effect, he says, is complementary to the euphoria he feels making music. “What I take out of smoking cannabis is those moments of just being zoned out, in the moment,
and that extreme focus that the herb gives,” Prince O says. Marijuana has been scientifically proven to relieve pain, produce a feeling of relaxation, increase appetite, slow the perception of time, induce laughter, and heighten sensory perception. What it has not been scientifically proven to do is enhance creativity. “I’ve seen a lot of marijuana use in artists who are patients and I’ve not seen any evidence of increased creativity other than in one guy who stopped using it,” Flaherty said. “That patient got very creative after he stopped using,” she said. “But I also think he got manic because the marijuana was keeping him calm.”
roccitynews.org CITY 23
ARTS
NEW BEATS
2020 marked a turning point for Jordan Moss, aka King 20/20, both musically and personally. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
HINDSIGHT INSPIRED KING 20/20’S PERFECT VISION With ‘These Streets,’ Jordan Moss moved toward sobriety and away from rap BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER
F
For the better part of three years, fans of Jordan Moss have known him as the rap artist King 20/20. The alias sprang, he says, from the idea of being a “king of vision, king of seeing things through, and being clear-headed.” But the name has also become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a cosmic callback that brings things 24 CITY APRIL 2021
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DKUSHNER@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
full-circle for the musician and poet from Rochester, by way of Canandaigua. The year 2020 marked something of a metamorphosis for Moss — both musically and personally. He moved toward a more instrumental, film score-inspired sound, and away from a dependence on alcohol.
The changes culminated in his new, electronic-infused album “These Streets,” released in February. The largely instrumental collection of 10 songs was conceived as the soundtrack to a poetry book of the same name written by Moss and his uncle, John Burgess, and published in November 2019. By that time, Moss had created
the groove-oriented tracks “Another Year” and “Above,” which would become the easy-listening hip-hop bookends of the album. As the realities of the pandemic set in, with their extended quarantines and opportunities for self-reflection, Moss found himself gravitating away CONTINUED ON PAGE 27
NEW MUSIC REVIEWS “HAOMA” BY PANDA ON ACID For all the feelings of desolation brought on by the coronavirus, 2020 really was a rich period for writing and recording new music. Plenty of albums, including those by Rochester artists, were released to little fanfare at the time. “Haoma,” the debut album from Panda on Acid, is one of the under-the-radar works. Panda on Acid is composer-producer Panauh Kalayeh, a Pittsford-Mendon High school graduate who worked for over a decade in California contributing music to TV and film, and producing on hip-hop albums such as RZA’s 2008 album “Digi Snacks.” He’s since returned to Rochester, and in October released “Haoma,” which Kalayeh refers to as his “passion project.” The album, which plays like study music for hippies, is certainly a departure. Its chill-out sensibility throughout all eight tracks is an invitation for the listener to decompress and unwind. But any temptation to label the sonic framework simply as “stoner music” would be too reductive. What makes the music stand out is its understated incorporation of a variety of nuanced styles, including reggae, post-rock, New Age and Indian classical music’s Hindustani tradition. Kalayeh’s ability to create meditative music that maintains forward momentum is on full display with the track “Family,” on which the multi-instrumentalist plays the Persian dulcimer instrument known as the santoor. And while the album’s drum programming sounds canned and inorganic compared to its other instrumentation, “Haoma” is a refreshing and transparent trip. — BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER
“SPRING GARDEN” BY HAROLD DANKO On his latest adventurous CD, “Spring Garden,” pianist and retired Eastman School of Music professor Harold Danko pays tribute to Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Danko’s extensive liner notes leave no doubt about his fascination — obsession, really — with Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet score. When “The Rite of Spring” premiered in Paris audiences and critics were not ready for Vaslav Nijinsky’s radical choreography and Stravinsky’s seemingly cacophonous music. But, over the subsequent century, the music has been widely
recognized for its avant-garde brilliance. Many jazz artists, from Alice Coltrane to The Bad Plus, have interpreted it. In the decades since Danko first heard it in the 1960s, he has pored over the orchestral score and four-hand piano score. All of Danko’s 10 original compositions on “Spring Garden,” released by SteepleChase Records, contain references to Stravinsky’s masterwork. Along the way, Danko also channels other musical influences, including tango, blues and standards. Rich Perry’s tenor sax is a major presence throughout, taking a more pronounced melodic lead in contrast to Danko’s often impressionistic and abstract keyboard work. Bassist Jay Anderson contributes fine solos and, along with drummer Jeff Hirshfield, anchors the complex rhythms. — BY RON NETSKY
sounds like the soundtrack to a motorcycle road trip. The guitars are in overdrive, blaring with such distortion that at times they resemble out-ofcontrol synths. Green’s next single, “Silent Star,” released on April 2, is decidedly less unbridled but no less cool. The jangly guitar tone that begins the song recalls vintage rock ‘n’ roll in its ’60s heyday, à la The Velvet Underground. Green’s hushed voice tiptoes between aloof and seductive, as understated keyboards and fuzzed-out guitars create a distinct lounge rock vibe. — BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER
It’s been less than seven years since woodwind player Alexa Tarantino performed with Earth, Wind & Fire at the Rochester International Jazz Festival a month after graduating from Eastman School of Music. On her forthcoming CD, “Firefly” — to be released on April 16 by Posi-Tone Records — Tarantino shows why she’s one of the fastest rising stars on the contemporary jazz scene. Since moving to New York City she’s played with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, the DIVA Jazz Orchestra, and others, and recorded three albums as a leader. “Firefly” is a showcase for her own vision, gorgeous musical tone, and
“CHANNEL 21”/ “SILENT STAR” BY FORREST GREEN Rock singer-songwriter Forrest Green first emerged on the Rochester music scene as a teenager in 2010, fronting the hardcore punk band Beastman. More than a decade later, Green has released a pair of new singles that retain his penchant for raw musical expression while moving toward a more polished, retro rock sound. Although Green recently moved to Brooklyn, he says his time in Rochester informed the new music. Think of it as a parting gift to the city that was so instrumental in his musical development. Green’s garage rock roots in the Flower City come to the fore on “Channel 21,” which was released in February and mixed by Sam Snyder. The track, which also features Green’s former Beastman bandmate Aaron Mika (currently of Anamon) on drums,
expertly shaped solos. Tarantino also excels as a composer, contributing six of the record’s 12 tunes, including the album’s most experimental and challenging track, “Rootless Ruthlessness.” But she’s also generous in sharing the compositional spotlight. Her superb band includes Behn Gillece on vibraphone, keyboardist Art Hirahara, bassist Boris Kozlov, and Rudy Royston on percussion — each of whom contributes original tunes. On the opener, Hirahara’s “Spider’s Dance,” Tarantino’s sax slithers while Gillece and Hirahara also contribute excellent solos. Equally adept on flute, Tarantino glides through Gillece’s “Mindful Moments.” The two outstanding covers are “Iris” and “Lady Day,” both by Wayne Shorter. — BY RON NETSKY
“FIREFLY” BY ALEXA TARANTINO
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from rap entirely as he completed the rest of the album. It was a stark departure from the King 20/20 catalog, but he committed to the stylistic change, finished writing the record, and produced trippy, abstract music videos, or “visualizers,” for the tracks “Don’t Stay Cheap,” “Metropolitan Scene,” and “Pulse Riff.” “I didn’t really know at that time that I was going to pivot away altogether when I started making the record,” Moss, 28, says of his shift away from rap music. “But with me, if I’m going to work on something I’m really going to throw myself into it 100 percent.” Toward the end of King 20/20’s rap phase, the music was brimming with swagger. Moss calls it “bragadoccio records.” He says he found himself running out of meaningful things to say, and playing a character that didn’t relate to his life experiences. “I feel like I just didn’t really know what my voice was anymore, and I kind of felt like I could define a personality for me as an artist better, doing electronic or singing,” he says. “I don’t think that that cape, wearing that — it just didn’t make sense anymore.” Before Moss turned the page on a musical chapter that had him feeling inauthentic, he released the rap single “Stupid Dumb,” a revealing rebuke of his past mistakes with drinking and driving: Yeah, I’m gettin’ really sick/ It’s 2 a.m. but I’m a bitch/ I had them shots so now I’m lit/ Yeah, this turned into some shit, right?... Now they have us pullin’ over/ Damn, may be too old for this.” The release of the song, on New Year’s Day 2020, was a wake-up call for Moss, who says he stopped drinking three weeks later. But the artist’s journey toward his now 14plus months of sobriety may have started much earlier, with the event he recounted in “Stupid Dumb.” In 2018, Moss recalls, he was charged with impaired driving. “The messed-up part was, it wasn’t really a turning point,” he says. “You know, it should have been.” Moss had been working as a
The poetry book "These Streets" by Moss (left) and John Burgess was the impetus for the King 20/20 album of the same name. PHOTOS BY JACOB WALSH
bar back at Swan Dive and Bitter Honey. He describes working 13hour days and being surrounded by people who enabled his heavy drinking. When he interacted with others outside of a bar, he was frequently hung over. Months after his impaired driving charge, Moss’s drinking habits were wearing on him, but he was unable to stop. “I just realized that I’m a person that just shouldn’t be near alcohol,” he says. “I can’t just do the one-drink thing. I always had the ‘more’ gene.” He now refers to alcohol as “a distraction and an impediment” that would have prevented him from completing “These Streets.” He has since changed his living arrangements, having moved into an apartment with his girlfriend and getting a dog.
“I was definitely a child,” Moss says of his mindset before sobriety. “And still, even in this last year, I’m finding out, ‘Who am I without alcohol?’” Lincoln All, a musician who mastered “These Streets,” provided what he calls a “second set of ears,” balancing the various frequencies of the tracks and imbuing the music with subtle spatial qualities that added more ambiance. All attended Nazareth College with Moss and the two gelled over their mutual love for hip-hop, sound design, and music production. He’s seen a change in Moss’s work ethic. “I don’t want to say that he was not working when he wasn’t sober, or anything like that,” All said. “But there’s a definite difference, I think, since he has been sober.” Despite Moss’s shift away from
lyric-laden rap songs toward electropop soundscapes that draw from hip-hop, R&B, dance, and ambient music, King 20/20 hasn’t changed entirely. His sound still has his signatures, such as a subterranean bass that conjures images of an allnight rave and melodic hooks that recall a wailing siren. Moss says that as he gets older he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a rapper. “I’m not sure exactly where I’ll land, ‘cause I still am kind of defining what King 20/20 will be into the future,” he says. “But I definitely will keep on with the instrumental and probably ditch the rap, but pick up singing. I quite like it.”
roccitynews.org CITY 27
MUSIC //
With evolving NYS guidelines for live music, events are highly subject to change or cancellation. It’s wise to check with individual venues to confirm performances and protocols.
ACOUSTIC/FOLK
Friday Acoustic Sessions. Iron Smoke
Distillery, 111 Parce Ave Suite 5b. Fairport. 388-7584. Fridays, 7:30 & 10:30 p.m. Apr 9: Rob Smith; Apr 16: John Akres; Apr 23: Marty Roberts; Apr 30: Tom Willette. Marye Lobb. Virtual Little Cafe, online. thelittle.org/music. Fri., April 23, 7 p.m. Virtual Sing Around. Golden Link Folk Singing Society, online. goldenlink.org. Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m.
CLASSICAL
Aeolian Pipe Organ Concerts. George
Eastman Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org. Sundays, 3 p.m. Apr 4: Steve Kelly; Apr 11: Keith Reas; Apr 18: Joe Blackburn; Apr 25: James Kealey. Brass Guild. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Thu., April 8, 7:30 p.m. Chorale/Eastman Philharmonia. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Fri., April 30, 7:30 p.m. Classical Guitar Night. Virtual Little Cafe, online. thelittle.org. First Sunday of every month, 7 p.m. Coleridge-Taylor & Mendelssohn. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, online. rpo.org. Through April 18. $25. Eastman School Symphony Orchestra. Eastman School of Music. esm.rochester. edu/live. Mon., April 26, 7:30 p.m. Eastman@Washington Square. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Thursdays, 12:15-12:45 p.m. Apr 8: Rosa Boemia: Brazilian Choro; Apr 15: Voices of the Winds; Apr 22: Claire An, violin & Irina Lupines, piano; Apr 29: Early Music for Voice & Lute. ECMS General Recital. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Fri., April 9, 7 p.m. and Sun., April 25, 3 p.m. Exile & Connection. Pegasus Early Music, online. pegasusearlymusic.org. Thu., April 29, 7:30 p.m. Incantare.
28 CITY APRIL 2021
Faculty Artist Series: Yoojin Jang, violin; Chiao-Wen Cheng, piano. Eastman School
of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Wed., April 14, 7:30 p.m. From a Hall of Mirrors. Pegasus Early Music, online. pegasusearlymusic.org. Fri., April 16, 7:30 p.m. and Sat., April 17, 4 p.m. Geoffrey Burgess, oboe; Leon Schelhase, harpsichord. From Czechia with Love. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, online. rpo.org. April 15-May 30. $25. From Saint-Georges to Schreker. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, online. rpo.org. Through May 14. $25. Live from Hochstein. WXXI, Classical 91.5FM. hochstein.org. Wed., April 7, 12:10-12:50 p.m. Apr 7: Antara Winds; Apr 14: Grace Browning; Apr 21: Music of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, & Ratcliff; Apr 28: A Trio of Trios: Music of Debussy, Mozart, & Piazzolla. Piano Department Recital. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Sat., April 17, 11:30 a.m. Souvenir de Florence. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, online. rpo.org. Through May 2. Ravel, Debussy, & Tchaikovsky. $25. String Fever. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, online. rpo.org. Through April 4. Pops with Jeff Tyzik. $25. Tallon Perkes Competition. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Fri., April 23, 4-10 p.m. and Sat., April 24, 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Trio Cerchio. Livestream, online. libraryweb.org. Fri., April 16, 10 a.m. Irondequoit Public Library. Registration required.
Truth is of No Color: Concerts for Social Justice. Rochester Philharmonic
Orchestra, online. rpo.org. Through April 29. Celebrating the legacy of Frederick Douglass.
CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL
POP/ROCK
School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Fri., April 9, 7:30 p.m. fivebyfive: Composer Chats. Livestream, online. fivebyfivemusic.com. Sat., April 24, 1:30 p.m. Anthony R. Green. Live performances, video premieres, and chats with host Evan Meccarello. Musica Nova. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Wed., April 28, 7:30 p.m. OSSIA. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Thu., April 29, 7:30 p.m.
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 1 p.m. Live on FB. Rocket Man Musical Brunch. OFC Creations Theater Center, 3450 Winton Pl. ofccreations.com. Sun., April 11, 10 & 11:45 a.m. $30 & up.
org. April 3-16. $25.
JAZZ
TRADITIONAL
Eastman Audio Research Studio. Eastman
Eastman Jazz Ensemble/Eastman Jazz Lab Band. Eastman School of Music,
online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Sun., April 4, 7:30 p.m. Eastman Jazz Lab Band. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Sat., April 3, 7:30 p.m. Laura Dubin & Antonio Guerrero. Livestream, online. Ongoing, 8:30 p.m. Live on FB. Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, online. rpo.org. Through April 6. Jeff Tyzik, conductor. $25. Rochester Brass & Electric. 75 Stutson, 75 Stutson St. 75stutsonstreet.com. Sat., April 10, 7:30 p.m. $20. Soul Chameleon. 75 Stutson, 75 Stutson St. 75stutsonstreet.com. Thu., April 8, 7:30 p.m. $20. Wine Down Wednesday. The Penthouse, 1 East Ave, 11th floor. 775-2013. Wednesdays, 6 p.m. Apr 7: Freedom Trio; Apr 14: Jerry Falzone & Liar’s Moon; Apr 21: Jimmie Highsmith Trio; Apr 28: Paradigm Shift. $20.
Amanda Ashley: Afternoon Cocktail.
POPS/STANDARDS
Latin Heat. RPO, online. rpo.org. April 29-June 13. $25.
Music at the Movies. RPO, online. rpo.
Collegium Musicum. Eastman School
of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Tue., April 27, 7:30 p.m.
VARIOUS
Earth Month Performathon. Thu., April
22. Livestream, online. Local musicians showcase benefits Climate Solutions Accelerator.
VOCALS
Eastman Chorale. Eastman School of
Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Mon., April 5, 7:30 p.m. Voice & Opera Department. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Wed., April 7, 5 p.m. Women’s Chorus. Eastman School of Music, online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Tue., April 6, 7:30 p.m.
WORLD
Barbara B Smith World Music Series: Shruti Bhave, Hindustani violin. Eastman
School of Music, online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Sun., April 25, 3 p.m. Nate & Mary’s World Music Quartet. 75 Stutson, 75 Stutson St. 75stutsonstreet. com. Sat., April 3, 7:30 p.m. $20.
INSIDE WXXI PUBLIC MEDIA | WXXI-TV PBS AM 1370 NPR CLASSICAL 91.5 FM | WRUR 88.5 FM | THE LITTLE THEATRE
See more WXXI-TV specials on the next page.
WXXI-TV • THIS MONTH American Masters: Oliver Sacks: His Own Words Friday, April 9 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV Dive into the life and work of the legendary neurologist and beloved author, who was a fearless explorer of the brain and mind. Sacks redefined our understanding of the diversity of human experience and of our shared humanity. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Hayes
When My Time Comes Monday, April 12 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV Nationally-syndicated talk show host and Peabody-award winner Diane Rehm investigates the right-to-die movement using her own story of how the death of her beloved husband of 54 years, John Rehm, led to her own interest in the option of medical aid in dying. Photo Credit: Glogau Photography
Philly D.A. Tuesdays at 9 p.m., beginning April 20 on WXXI-TV Go inside the emotional, high stakes work that Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and an ensemble of idealistic outsiders from different walks of life take on as they attempt a fundamental overhaul of an entrenched criminal justice system. Credit: Ryan Collerd with composition by Tynell Marcelline
Greta Thunberg: A Year to Save the Planet Thursday, April 22 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV Celebrate Earth Day with this new three-part documentary that follows teen environmental activist Greta Thunberg as she seeks to raise awareness of the accelerating climate change. Encore airings of all three episodes air Wednesdays, April 28 – May 12 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV. Credit: Jon Sayers copyright of BBC Studios
International Jazz Day 10th Anniversary Special Friday, April 30 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV Enjoy this look back at 10 years of historic International Jazz Day concerts featuring dozens of music icons, including unforgettable performances by Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox, Hugh Masekela and many more. Pictured: Lizz Wright Credit: Courtesy of Graham Denholm/Getty Images
30 CITY APRIL 2021
f o r e w o p e h t g n i s U
A I D E M C I L B U P to su pport a child ’s learning and g rowth!
WXXI Education has always been committed to using public media as a tool to bring critical early learning to children in our community. In continuing that commitment, our education team has partnered with the Pioneer Library System, as well as the Child Care Council and Monroe County Library System to train local child care providers, librarians, and early childhood educators on the use of Sesame Street in Communities resources.
Sesame Street in Comm unities Virtual Su mmit
It’s all part of Sesame Street in Communities Public Media Champions Project, a new initiative created by Sesame Workshop and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that works to enhance the early childhood education programs in rural communities. WXXI is one of only 20 PBS stations across the country to be selected to participate in this initiative. Since launching in 2015, Sesame Street in Communities has supported families on topics ranging from parental addiction to family homelessness—giving children the tools they need to build resilience and grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. To learn more about WXXI’s Sesame Street in Communities work, visit: wxxi.org/sesame.
April 14 at 7pm • FREE! Register at: bit.ly/WXXISesameSummit Join WXXI Education and our partners for an hour-long virtual community summit that will provide parents, caregivers, early childhood educators, and community members an opportunity to learn about the Sesame Street in Communities resources and hear from a panel of local experts on a variety of family topics (health and wellness, school safety, routines, and more!). Our panel will include local experts from Ibero American Action League, Roc the Future, and University of Rochester Medical Center and Golisano Children’s Hospital, as well as a special guest from Sesame Workshop’s Social Impact Team. roccitynews.org
CITY 3
TURN TO WXXI CLASSICAL FOR MUSIC PERFECTLY TUNED TO YOUR DAY
Live from Hochstein
Bach’s St. John Passion
Wednesdays at 12:10 p.m. on WXXI Classical 91.5 FM The spring concert series continues as a hybrid of special encore programs and live performances. The live performances begin on April 14th. But first, we bring you one more encore on April 7th featuring Antara Winds with Ramon Ricker, which originally aired in May 2017. The rest of the month enjoy these live performances from Hochstein’s Concert Hall:
Thursday, April 1 at 8 p.m. on WXXI Classical 91.5 FM J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion is part of the German Lutheran passion-oratorio tradition. The passion narrative from the Gospel of John is recounted by the Evangelist (narrator), Jesus, Peter, Pilate and various servants. In this performance, recorded at Asbury First United Methodist Church in March 2019, Rochester’s chamber choir VOICES performs with soloists and orchestra.
4/14: Grace Browning, harp 4/21: Rob Simonds, violin; Cary Ratcliff, piano 4/28: David Ying, cello; Elinor Freer, piano
5 Things of Note about Scott Regan Host of Open Tunings, airing weekdays from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. on WRUR-FM. 1. Where did you grow up? The obvious answer is I never did. But digging deeper, I was born in Boston. After moving around a few times, I landed in Camillus, outside Syracuse, when I was 9. A proud graduate of West Genesee HS. 2. As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? A pitcher for the Red Sox, of course. Well, more realistically, a shortstop. It’s always good to be realistic.
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion Friday, April 2 at 8 p.m. on WXXI Classical 91.5 FM Regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of classical sacred music, Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion sets chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew to music, which was first performed in 1727 on Good Friday at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Recorded in March 2013 at Asbury First United Methodist Church, this performance features David Tayloe, tenor; Zachary Burgess, bass; Michaela Anthony, soprano; Carolyn O’Dwyer, mezzo-soprano; Matthew Swenson, tenor; Anthony Baron, bass-baritone; Eastman Chorale; Asbury First United Methodist Church Choirs; William Weinert, conductor. 32 CITY APRIL 2021
3. Where did you go to college + what was your degree in? I spent my first year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I took advantage of their world class math and science, engineering courses to learn my first chords on guitar, play soccer and hockey. Then transferred to SUNY Oswego, where I learned more chords and played more soccer. On the side I double majored in Fine Art and English. 4. Who is your favorite musician? Bob Dylan is the most powerful singer I’ve ever seen live. It was a show with The Rolling Thunder Review in 1976 that got me. He also writes some decent songs. 5. What are three things you can’t live without? Is this a science question? Water, air and a good night’s sleep. Photo credit: Richard Ashworth
AM 1370, YOUR NPR NEWS STATION + WRUR-FM 88.5, DIFFERENT RADIO Kelly Corrigan Wonders Sundays at 9 p.m. on AM 1370 Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders, a place for people who like to laugh while they think and find it useful to look closely at ourselves and our weird ways in the hopes that knowing more and feeling more will help us do more and be better.
America, Are We Ready: The First 100 Days of the Biden Presidency Thursdays at 8 p.m. on AM 1370 through April 22 Join this national conversation during the first 100 days of the Biden administration. WNYC’s Brian Lehrer hosts this live callin show featuring broad, good faith, inclusive conversations that lift the voices of callers around the country. To join the discussion, call 844-745-TALK (8255).
Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was Sundays at 10 a.m. on WRUR-FM 88.5 through April 11 This series tells the story of radio’s role in the 20th century transformation of the African-American community. First aired in 1996, the specials have been reformatted into six hours for 2021. Original host Lou Rawls guides us, with new narration from original producer Jacquie Gales Webb. Through interviews, historical airchecks, comedy, drama, and music, the series reveals the remarkable correlation between milestones of Black radio programming and African-American culture. Among other topics the series explores the role of radio during the great migration of Blacks from the South, trailblazing Black DJs and stations, and Black radio during the Civil Rights movement.
Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio Sundays at 2 p.m. on AM 1370 From street food in Thailand to a bakery in a Syrian refugee camp to how one scientist uses state of the art pollen analysis to track the origins of honey, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio goes anywhere and everywhere to ask questions and get answers about cooking, food, culture, wine, farming, restaurants, literature, and the lives and cultures of the people who grow, produce, and create the food we eat.
FIVE FACTS ABOUT WXXI NEWS’ MEGAN MACK 1. Your role in the newsroom: I am the Executive Producer of “Connections with Evan Dawson,” and Live/Televised Engagement Programming. My responsibilities with “Connections” include brainstorming show topics, booking guests, and doing background research and pre-interviews for our discussions. The television portion of my job includes producing live forums and WXXI’s debate and election coverage. 2. College + degree: I have a B.S. in Television-Radio-Film from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. I also have a B.A. in Italian. 3. Favorite thing to do in your spare time: I perform sketch comedy with my troupe, Thank You Kiss, and I teach comedy improvisation. 4. Three things you can’t live without: My golden retriever, Ceili; long walks in nature; and my guilty pleasure, “The Golden Girls.” 5. Best part about your job: It’s two-fold: learning about so many different things every day and talking to the remarkable guests we have on the show. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.
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Movie theaters are magical spaces.
6 CITY
There’s something inherently special about experiencing art, entertainment, and creativity in those cozy dark rooms. Audiences can bond over that mid-film twist in “Parasite,” join in a chorus of guffaws when Saoirse Ronan dives out of the car in “Lady Bird,” or let the tears flow while soaking in the beauty of Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.”
At this time, only our Little 2-5 and Cafe building (blue building, with the entrance off our parking lot at 8 Winthrop Street) will be open. There will be matinees, along with evening shows on Fridays and Saturdays, and matinees only on Sundays. Due to our current situation, your Little Experience will be slightly different.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been one year (!!!) since The Little screened a movie indoors to the public, and we greatly miss this theater experience. We miss seeing our community’s passionate and smart film fans every day. Judging by the responses we’ve gotten in the past 12 months, The Little was missed by you as well. And now, we have good news: The Little is slated to reopen on a Friday through Sunday schedule, starting Friday, April 16.
Visit thelittle.org for details on your next Little venture, including mask requirements, reduced capacity and assigned seating, online ticketing, programming and more. Even with The Little reopening, The Virtual Little will continue. Visit thelittle.org/virtuallittle to rent and stream new and award-worthy independent movies.
The Little Theatre • 240 East Avenue • Rochester’s East End
SEPTEMBER APRIL 2021 2020
LIFE
Mary Kruger at her home in Rochester. Kruger is the president of Roc NORML and has been an advocate for cannabis reform and education. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
36 CITY APRIL 2021
PUBLIC LIVES BY DAVID ANDREATTA
@DAVID_ANDREATTA
DANDREATTA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
Mary Kruger: A cannabis crusader passes it on
I
t sounds impossibly cliché that Mary Kruger, the executive director of the Rochester chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, smoked a bowl before she sat for an interview with CITY in her living room one recent morning. But she did, and she said she does every day. “It’s like drinking coffee,” she explained. Her long brown hair was still damp from a shower and she sat on a dark blue sofa in a room teeming with houseplants and strings of tiny white lights. On the coffee table sat a bong, an ashtray, a bottle of cannabis-infused hand lotion, and books about social justice and Buddhism. The room smelled of sandalwood from the nag champa incense she had burning. “I can have it affect me more than coffee if I want to,” she went on. “And there is a level of, ‘Oh, I smoked too much. Now I can’t do the thing I needed to do for another half hour.’” Kruger, 30, who lives in a tidy purple house in the South Wedge, hadn’t reached that level that morning, and said she doesn’t on most days. Walking that line is how she has managed to emerge as a leading voice in Rochester for the crusade to legalize the recreational use of cannabis in New York. Over the last two years, her name has become synonymous with local efforts to push for cannabis legalization. From her perch at ROC NORML, she has organized monthly public forums, led lobby days in Albany, gotten the ear of legislators, orchestrated a partnership with the Rochester Razorsharks minor league basketball team, and cultivated sponsors and goodwill. A typical ROC NORML monthly meeting draws anywhere from 10 to 50 people. That morning she was focused and rattling off the pillars of what she said must be the driving force behind legalization: social equity. That is, a commitment to fighting social and economic inequality by leveling the playing field in communities of color that have been disproportionately negatively affected by marijuana laws. What that looks like to Kruger is the expunging of criminal records for
people convicted on marijuana charges; ensuring equal access to business loans and licensing opportunities for retail cannabis sales; the creation of incubator programs; and reinvestment in neighborhoods hardest hit by the drug war. Supporters note that Black people are almost four times more likely to have been arrested for marijuana possession than white people, even though rates of use are similar. “There are billions of dollars to be made in this new industry,” Kruger said. “How can the state responsibly use marijuana legalization as a way to build communities up? Because the state has been responsible for having used marijuana prohibition to break communities down.” The message on the T-shirt she wore reinforced her stance: “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” The quote is attributed to former President Richard Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman, who has said the Nixon administration’s war on drugs was nothing more than a political vendetta against Black people and the antiVietnam War left. State legislators who support legalization largely embraced that take and positioned themselves to address it. Their bill, the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, went much further toward meeting the social equity goals of advocates than a dueling measure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act. The two sides spent the better part of the last month debating a middle ground, and legislators got the upper hand. State Sen. Jeremy Cooney, a Democrat from Rochester who co-chairs the Senate’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus’s Marijuana Task Force, credited Kruger with introducing him to the social equity platform. He recalled Kruger reaching out to him when he was a candidate for what would be an unsuccessful run for office in 2018. They met for coffee. He attended ROC NORML meetings. She galvanized her members to support his campaign — then and on his winning run last year.
Over time, Cooney said, he came to understand the issues and saw how Rochester could benefit from the commitment Kruger was talking up. “She educated me, quite frankly,” Cooney said. “I would say that her organization is the most organized local effort for legalization in Rochester.” “She knows her stuff,” he added. “There’s no doubt about it.” Kruger founded ROC NORML in 2018 upon returning from teaching abroad in southeast Asia and a year in Oregon, where recreational use of marijuana was legal. The group is an offshoot of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws that was founded in 1970 and has played a central role in the decriminalization of cannabis. The organization has more than 50 chapters in the United States, including four in New York. She said no state where marijuana is legal has managed to meet the social equity demands of advocates, and that she saw launching a local chapter of NORML as a way to help shape cannabis policy as New York flirted with legalization. “I needed the conversations that weren’t happening in Oregon — around justice, equity, and reinvestment — to be on the forefront of the conversations here in Rochester,” Kruger said. To that end, Mayor Lovely Warren has proposed investing tax revenues from legal marijuana in a housing trust fund that would, among other things, assist low-income people with start-up funding to buy a home.
Zach Sarkis, the founder of NY HempLab, a Rochester-based hemp industry incubator, said few marijuana legalization advocacy groups have done more than ROC NORML to get people in power on board with the agenda. “Literally, ROC NORML has gone into offices where people are anti-cannabis and showed up with books of data and facts and changed a lot of perspectives,” Sarkis said. “If it wasn’t for people like Mary, this shit wouldn’t be happening,” he went on. “People think this stuff just happens. It happens because people like Mary Kruger show up.” Kruger recalled trying pot for the first time when she was 15. She said it was in the garage of her family home in Irondequoit with a friend after an Earth Science final exam. “We made something out of a plastic water bottle,” Kruger said. “It was a few months after that that I started consuming every day.” She said she wished she had gotten a formal education on cannabis in school, like what health classes offer in the way of alcohol consumption, where teachers talk about things like standard drink sizes, how alcohol affects the brain and body, and media influences. Instead, she said, any reference to pot in a classroom setting was shrouded in gloom and doom. “‘Reefer Madness’ has lasting effects into today,” Kruger said. She said she learned about marijuana the hard way — through experimentation and wading through the vast morass of literature on the subject and pocketing truths when she found them. In the meantime, Kruger attended SUNY Brockport, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a minor in race studies. Today, she puts her degree to work at a software company that specializes in helping crisis lines and nonprofits match clients with services. “If I’m going to consume cannabis every day, I gotta get my shit done,” Kruger said. “I can’t be the stereotype.”
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LIFE
Sydney Luke is suprised by some of the information written on the side of a plant at Stem, a plant shop on Alexander Street that specializes in rare and exotic plants. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
38 CITY APRIL 2021
BLOOM & BOOM BY VERONICA VOLK
@VOLKVERONICA
VVOLK@WXXI.ORG
WHO SAYS MONEY DOESN’T GROW ON TREES? Rochester’s rare plant market is booming
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magine a hard-to-find, intensely Instagrammable houseplant, and something like the monstera deliciosa albo variegata, with its iconic broad-split leaves streaked with white, might come to mind. Samantha Mills has one in a gold pot on the counter of her shop. “Her name is Betty,” Mills said, a tribute to “The Golden Girls star Betty White. Mills is a co-owner of Stem, a new shop at the corner of Alexander Street and Park Avenue specializing in plants like Betty: hard to find and all the rage. The market for horticulture, particularly high-end houseplants, that had been blossoming for years came into full bloom during the pandemic, as people hunkered down at home long to reconnect with the natural world and social posts about the houseplant hobby fuel their yearning. Growers and retailers are struggling to meet demand, and it’s not uncommon for greenthumbs to fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars on coveted, rare plants. On a recent afternoon at Stem, the foot traffic was constant and customers laid down anywhere from $2 to $475 on plants. Mills values “Betty” in the thousands of dollars due to the plant’s unstable mutation and slow propagation. Kerynn Laraby, the other coowner of Stem, said business has been booming since the doors opened in February. “It was a madhouse,” Laraby said. “We sold out real quick.” The notion of Stem was conceived a year ago. Mills is a horticulturalist whose love of plants was cultivated as a little girl gardening on her family farm. Laraby discovered a passion for plants when she and Mills began collecting rare houseplants for fun. Their hobby quickly translated to making online sales, and they noticed a deficit in the plant economy in Rochester.
Kerynn Laraby is a co-owner of Stem Rochester. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
Since opening, Laraby said, Stem has received customers from Buffalo, Syracuse, Watkins Glen, and as far away as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Local nurseries have seen similar spikes in interest in houseplants. “It’s been nuts here,” Marissa McTiernan, a longtime employee at the Garden Factory in Gates, said of houseplant sales. “We can’t even keep them in stock.” McTiernan said she first noticed a serious uptick in houseplant sales around three years ago. But in the last year, she said, the nursery has shifted from placing orders for new plants monthly to weekly to keep up with demand.
Complicating efforts to meet pent up demand, retailers and suppliers said, are pandemic-induced restrictions on international shipments between the United States and South Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, where many rare plants originate. Even the ubiquitous pothos, a lush vining plant known for its low maintenance and ability to grow and propagate, has become harder to find and keep in supply. The rare houseplant boom has drawn comparisons to the tulip mania that gripped the Netherlands in the 17th century, when tulip bulb prices skyrocketed to extraordinary heights before crashing in dramatic
fashion. The term “tulip mania” is now synonymous with economic bubbles in which prices of assets deviate wildly from their face value. But McTiernan doubted that the houseplant boom is a bubble poised to burst. “I don’t think it’s going to go back to normal, ever,” she said. Linda Adams agreed. She is the chief operations officer of the Florida Nursery, Growers & Landscape Association, a nonprofit that supports commercial nurseries that sell houseplants to retailers across the country. CONTINUED ON PAGE 40
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Brandon Kelloway shops at Stem.
PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
“Times are good,” she said. Adams has been with FNGLA since 1984, and seen the ups and downs of the industry. Though the prices of individual plants fluctuate based on trends, she said, there are always new varieties to be coveted. She differentiates between the popularity of particular plants over time — like the tulip or orchids, of which rare varieties have been known to fetch upward of $100,000 — and the current explosion in popularity of houseplants. “The people in the industry that are studying these things think that this is going to continue,” Adams said. One reason plant fans are adamant about the staying power of this trend is the proven psychological and scientific benefits of keeping and growing plants. “Plants provide meaning, purpose, connection, and even 40 CITY APRIL 2021
physical and mental stimulation,” said Matthew DelSesto, a researcher of therapeutic horticulture at Boston College. People and plants have been intrinsically linked since the dawn of human existence and share an evolutionary history. Plants provided nutrition, medicine, and energy for people and livestock to migrate around the globe and human settlements to flourish. For people who live in urban settings and spend so much more time nowadays interacting with screens, houseplants are demonstrably beneficial. They require tactile attention, like potting and pruning and watering, the acts of which are shown to reduce stress. They give their owners validation of a job well done by sprouting new leaves and blooming flowers. They give people an outlet, and a sense of control.
“The sense of connection and also the sense of contribution in a world that maybe often seems distant and out of control is really key right now,” DelSesto said. There are benefits to even looking at plants, with studies marking the accelerated convalescence of hospital patients with landscape views out their windows. Plants can be living art; the lush greenery of thriving plants set against a minimalist backdrop has become the aesthetic of many online influencers during the houseplant boom. They can also be a symbol of status. Like any hobby, there are levels of exclusivity. The fiddle leaf fig, whose popularity swelled after its use in interior design in the 2010s, is both
notoriously hard to care for and expensive, with a mature plant going for hundreds of dollars. But smaller, easyto-care-for plants like sansevieria, with its stiff, upright foliage and variety of subspecies, offer even novice plant collectors a way into the club. A group of prospective plant buyers in Stem chit-chatted about pest control products and watering schedules with the same enthusiasm of Star Wars fans discussing Easter eggs in “The Mandelorian” series. Mills recited the slogan of the popular Japanese franchise “Pokemon” when referring to her own collection: “Gotta Catch ’Em All.”
Christina Suralta carries a White Vein Fittonia as she shops for other plants at Stem.
“I friggin’ love plants,” said Sydney Luke, a Stem customer who described having an entire room in her home dedicated to her plants and left the store with two more in a paper bag to add to her collection. Luke said it was the pandemic that boosted her casual interest into a full-blown obsession. “You couldn’t do anything, and I just feel like having plants around my house and propagating more plants to have everywhere made me happier,” she said. “It’s where I had to stay for months, so it was nice to just kind of liven it up.” The thriving online community of plant-sharing groups and plant influencers has also served as a proxy for a social life for plant lovers during the pandemic. That was how Lee Ennis connected with plant enthusiasts in the area and eventually found out about Stem. “You kinda get to meet people,”
PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
Ennis said. “You learn more about people. And then it’s really nice to be able to feel comfortable and confident supporting a local business when you’re like, oh, I know actually who runs that.” It was Rochester’s passionate online plant community that helped drive Mills and Laraby to open Stem. Mills acknowledged the risk in building a business around items experiencing sudden, explosive growth. “They could wax and wane like any other trend,” she said of houseplants. “Like bell bottoms.” But she added that she’s banking on people having found a renewed connection with plants and the boom being a gift that “keeps on growing.” “Plants bring people joy and we just absolutely need that right now,” she said.
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LIFE
FILM
A scene from "Without a Whisper," a documentary film by Katsitsionni Fox, which will be screened as part of the inaugural Haudenosaunee Filmmakers Festival. PHOTO COURTESY WOMEN MAK MOVIES
INDIGENOUS VOICES IN THE SPOTLIGHT The inaugural Haudenosaunee Filmmakers Festival features the work of filmmakers from the Six Nations Confederacy. BY REBECCA RAFFERTY
F
@RSRAFFERTY
or the majority of film history, stories about Indigenous people have been presented by non-Indigenous writers, directors, and too often, actors as well. This fact has done a lot of damage in terms of how Indigenous people are seen, and the often subtle apologist tones with which American history is portrayed. That’s begun to slowly change. And this month, Rochester’s newest film festival will serve not only as a showcase of regional Indigenous films, but an initiative to promote filmmaking specifically among Haudenosaunee women. “There is a powerful difference 42 CITY APRIL 2021
BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
between telling our own stories or having someone tell them for us, says Michelle Schenandoah (Oneida), founder and editor-in-chief of Rematriation Magazine, a publication devoted to creating space for and uplifting Indigenous women’s voices. She’s also one of the founders of the Haundenosaunee Filmmakers Festival, which premieres virtually throughout the week of April 19-25. The festival, which is co-hosted by Friends of Ganondagan and Rematriation Magazine, is also intended to coalesce as a network of Haudenosaunee film writers, directors, producers, and actors. It seeks to
connect Haudenosaunee filmmakers with resources and opportunities to screen their films, to connect Indigenous filmmakers and industry leaders, and foster collaborations across the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Toward that end, the event includes screenings and educational panel discussions, but also a filmmaking workshop exclusively for Haudenosaunee women. A call for films in early February yielded dozens of submissions, out of which 25 were accepted into the festival. A handful of feature-length films will be presented, as well as a number of short films. The films will
be first available to stream on different days of the week corresponding to different categories of films that will be presented, and after they’ve debuted, they’ll continue to be available for streaming through May 1. Classics (more than two years old) will debut on Monday, April 19. The category includes the touching 2016 short documentary, “Soup For My Brother,” by Seneca director Terry J. Jones. Filmed entirely on Seneca Nation territory, the story’s protagonist, Jimmy, lovingly prepares a soup for his deceased brother, guided by memory and the words of his grandfather.
Michelle Schenandoah. PHOTO PROVIDED
Contemporary films (less than two years old), will debut Wednesday, April 21. This group includes “VeRONAka,” a short comedic drama by director-writer Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore (Mohawk), in which the title character is a personified COVID-19 who terrorizes the community before her run-in with a group of powerful Mohawk aunties. This set also includes one of the feature films, “Haudenosaunee Canoe Story,” by director Rosann Whitebean (Mohawk). The documentary film follows a father, Hickory, and his 5-year-old daughter Ellie as they undertake a voyage through waterways and the history of their people. On Friday, April 23, films by Haudenosaunee women will be featured, including “Without A Whisper” by Katsitsionni Fox (Mohawk). The award-winning short documentary tells the story of how Indigenous women influenced the early suffragists, and features Mohawk Clan Mother Louise Herne and suffrage movement historian Sally Roesch Wagner joining forces to tell the hidden history. The film was meant to premiere at Ganondagan in 2020, but the pandemic prevented that. The final category, presented on Sunday, April 25, is Traditional Language, featuring films that prominently feature the Haudenosaunee family of languages, with accessibility considerations for non-speakers. This category replaced the planned Youth category, Schenandoah says, because the festival organizers didn’t receive as many entries
A scene from "Haudenosaunee Canoe Story," by Rosann Whitebean.
from young filmmakers as they’d hoped. They did, however, get a lot of Indigenous-language submissions. Within this category is a short documentary film about Marion Delaronde (Mohawk), who is preserving and helping to perpetuate the Mohawk language through the use of puppetry on her Montrealbased children’s show, “Tóta tánon Ohkwá:ri” (“Grandma and Ohkwá:ri”). That film is also part of a presentation of five short films from the Rematriation Magazine Indigenous Women Series that will be streamable throughout the week. The series shares the stories of Haudenosaunee women artists and leaders and the films have a common thread of dismantling social injustice, but through a spirituallygrounded lens, Shenandoah says. She adds that the series centers the voices of Indigenous women who hold traditional knowledge about living in balance with the earth, democracy, and justice.
PHOTO PROVIDED
The other subjects of this set of films are Grammy Award-winning musician Joanne Shenandoah (Oneida); Santee Smith (Mohawk), who is an artist, dancer, and choreographer, and who was the first Indigenous woman appointed Chancellor of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada; Carla Hemlock (Mohawk), an activist and textile artist who uses her designs to promote caring for the earth; and Angela Ferguson (Onondaga), who is focused on food sovereignty — a drive “for our nations to be able to feed ourselves with our own food,” Schenandoah says. Films aside, four panel discussions will also be live-streamed, including Thursday’s, “Which Side of the Camera?” The program will feature Haudenosaunee filmmakers discussing their experiences making films about Haudenosaunee people. The festival will also feature a week-long workshop, “Rematriating
the Narrative,” that is open exclusively to Haudenosaunee women. It will focus on un-learning the Westernlens approaches of storytelling and filmmaking, and replacing those with methods of telling stories from an Indigenous point of view, Schenandoah says. As part of the workshop, participants will create one-minute film stories from their perspectives. On Saturday, April 24, a panel also called “Rematriating the Narrative” will discuss and showcase the work of the women who participated in the workshop. There’s limited space for the workshop, and interested Haudenosaunee women can register at rematriation.com. Head to ganondagan.org for more information on the festival.
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LIFE
TASTY THC increased blood pressure, and severe nausea or vomiting.” Yikes! Here are some tips for eating edibles and avoiding that bad trip.
THOSE EDIBLES HIT HARD
PHOTO COURTESY DAN CURTIS, CURTISVISUALWORKS.COM
AN EDIBLE ENIGMA Expectations for edibles vary - here’s what to watch out for BY REBECCA RAFFERTY
@RSRAFFERTY
BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
L
ast summer, Rochester morning radio show host Brother Wease was hungry during a commercial break. In the refrigerator he found a packaged sleeve of cookies, and without much thought, he devoured five of them and went back on the air. Wease recalled that about an hour later, in the middle of the show, he started feeling “dizzy and a bit nutty.” He had unwittingly eaten cannabis cookies and ingested 50 milligrams of THC — between five and 10 times the recommended dose. Wease was no stranger to edibles. But he’d gone too far. He described his state as “comatose, a bad trip, and a buzz that lasted 24 hours.” It was so bad, he recalled, that his wife had to put him to bed. 44 CITY APRIL 2021
“I was out of my mind,” he said. The longtime voice of Rochester radio was caught unaware, but even people intending to consume cannabis edibles can make mistakes. Stories of overindulgence — often by people who are eager for a high or don’t know what they’re supposed to feel — abound. That single-serving square of cannabis chocolate becomes four. The few
gummies become a handful. New York is on the cusp of legalizing recreational cannabis, including THC-infused edibles, and the likelihood is that adults who’ve never sampled will dabble. A 2016 nationwide study found that nearly 30 percent of respondents who had used cannabis reported consuming it in edible or beverage form. But beware, newbies. Edibles are deceptive and a lack of knowledge about them can lead to a bad, if not terrifying, experience. A fatal overdose of THC is unlikely, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that a consuming too much THC can lead to “extreme confusion, anxiety, paranoia, panic, fast heart rate, delusions or hallucinations,
It is so easy to ingest too much THC from edibles that the topic has become the subject of numerous medical research papers in recent years. Each goes off on its own tangent of the topic, but they all start from the same premise: The biggest difference between ingesting and inhaling cannabis is that eating the drug delays its onset. In other words, you don’t feel as high as quickly. “Consumers often do not understand this aspect of edible use and may consume a greater than intended amount of drug before the drug has taken effect, often resulting in profoundly adverse effects,” wrote the authors of a 2016 paper titled “Tasty THC: Promises and Challenges of Cannabis Edibles.” The consequences can be serious. Researchers from the University of Colorado School of Medicine found that marijuana-related emergency room visits increased threefold over a four-year period that included Colorado legalizing pot. Of the almost 10,000 cases they reviewed, 11 percent involved edibles. The report looked at ER admissions from 2012, when the state had only a medical cannabis program, through the end of 2016, two years after the state began legal sales of marijuana for adult use. It noted that out-of-state tourists accounted for a disproportionate number of edibles cases. “It’s not because people are seriously injured, it’s because they’re new and they took way too much, and they don’t know what’s happening,” said Johnathan McFarlane of Hybrid Marketing Co., a Denver-based cannabis marketing firm. “They don’t know what to do. So the doctors are basically just like, ‘You’re just gonna have to hang out.’” CONTINUED ON PAGE 46
WAIT FOR IT. WAIT FOR IT. JUST WAIT. Many people consume cannabis edibles without understanding how they behave in the body. It takes longer for the THC in edibles to kick in (typically between 30 and 90 minutes), and the resulting “high” is longer-lasting, with a peak at two to four hours after ingestion. By contrast, when weed is smoked or vaped the high hits quickly and peaks within 30 minutes to an hour. “Give yourself at least two hours before you consider taking any more, because sometimes it will take that long for the effects to be felt at all,” MacFarlane said. Many individual factors, including weight, metabolism, and eating habits contribute to how soon and for how long a person will feel high. If you’ve had a big meal recently, for example, it may take longer for your body to metabolize the THC. After Colorado saw a spike in hospital admissions from THC, the state mandated that edibles’ labels contain a prominent diamondshaped “THC” symbol to let buyers know that’s not their grandfather’s Snickers bar they’re picking up. The labels must also outline the dosage of THC and its intoxicating effects. New York appears to have taken a lesson from Colorado’s experience. The legislation working its way through Albany to legalize recreational pot tightly regulates testing of all cannabis products sold in New York and their packaging, labeling, and advertising. When the sale of cannabis was cleared for recreational use in Colorado in 2014, the state limited the amount of THC in edible products to 10 mg per serving — roughly equivalent to smoking a joint — and a maximum of 10 servings per package. Because edibles come in cookie and candy forms that are attractive to children, they have to be sold in opaque, childproof containers that explicitly warn that the product contains marijuana (as well as how much THC is in each serving). Colorado also banned retailers from adding weed infusions to a premade food item, such as a name-brand candy bar. 46 CITY APRIL 2021
Rochester radio show host Brother Wease had a bad trip when he ate too many cannabis cookies. PHOTO COURTESY IHEART MEDIA
‘START LOW, GO SLOW’ Because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, its sale and use is regulated on a state-bystate basis, and those rules vary dramatically. As a result, the edibles sold at medical and recreational dispensaries don’t face the same stringent federal controls on quality and consistency as pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and tobacco. There’s no uniform method of producing THC infusions, either. As many of the compounds are eliminated in the process to make oils and butters, edibles may contain high amounts of THC and only a fraction of the plant’s other constituents, according to “Tasty THC.” Zachary York, inventory manager at Colorado dispensary
Lightshade, said the highs cannabis users associate with certain strains of cannabis often don’t translate to edibles. The components of the plant that create the expected effect, he said, are sometimes stripped from the THC distillate used in edibles. In other words, if a package indicates an edible was made with, say, an indica strain of weed, there’s no guarantee that the consumer will experience the same high she might expect from smoking that strain. “There is still a lot of progress to be made in terms of our understanding,” York said, adding that legalization opponents may latch onto that, but it shouldn’t scare people off. “We just need many scientifically-repeatable experiments and studies to really nail down the best edible formulation.” Many people do have a nice time on edibles, and if you’re aiming for a controlled experience, patience is key. People who work in the pot industry all repeat the catch phrase, “start low and go slow,” as the best advice to give a person concerning edibles. So what should you do if you get too baked?
“Get comfortable, drink water, and know that you are safe,” York said. “Shower, experience things. If you’re uncomfortably high, put on music, or put on a TV show, do some activity to distract you. Your high mind will start gravitating to those positives and absorbing them.” Additional reporting by CITY freelance writer Vince Press.
VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS [ Opening ]
Film
Art Group: Spring Art Show & Sale. Fri., April 30, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. 7467843. Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave. 276-8900. The 613 by Archie Rand. April 25-July 18. Reservations required.
Wednesdays-Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Advanced tickets required. $5-$10. eastman.org/dryden-theatre. Ganondagon, online . Haudenosaunee Filmmakers Festival. April 19-25. ganondagan.org. Hartnett Gallery, online. Sarah Friedland: Assembled Choreographies. Through April 26. Apr 12, 8pm: Artist talk. blogs.rochester.edu/hartnett. Little Theatre, 240 East Ave. FridaysSundays. Starting Apr 16. thelittle.org. Virtual Little Theatre, thelittle.org. 2021 Polish Film Festival. April 7-14. Daily screenings & discussions with filmmakers. $12. thelittle.org/series/ polish-film-festival.
Chili Town Hall, 3333 Chili Ave. Chili
[ Continuing ] Art Exhibits Bridge Art Gallery, URMC, 300 Crittenden Blvd. Youth for Racial
Justice: Not A Moment, But a Movement. Through April 30. 2753571. Flower City Arts Center, 713 Monroe Ave . Photogravure. Through May 1. Reservations required. flowercityarts. org.
Geisel Gallery, 2nd Floor Rotunda, Legacy Tower, One Bausch & Lomb Place. Object Lessons: Recent
Works by Lee Hoag. Through Apr 30. thegeiselgallery.com.
Dryden Theatre, 900 East Ave.
Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince St. vsw.org. A History of Police
Brutality & Accountability Initiatives in Rochester from the Portable Channel Archive. Ongoing.; Recordings at Risk: Early Portable Channel Video..
George Eastman Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org. Stacey
Art Events
Image City Photography Gallery, 722 University Ave. Through the Student
Fri., April 23, 7 p.m. MAGIC Spell Studios, RIT Center for Engaged Storycraft. Limited capacity; registration required 606-9824. Sam Cannon: Capturing Fiction. Thu., April 22, 6 p.m. Virtual George Eastman Museum, online. Registration required $10 suggested. eastman.org.
Steers: Night Reels (to Jun 6) | Carl Chiarenza: Journey into the Unknown (to Jun 20) | One Hundred Years Ago: George Eastman in 1921 (to Jan 2022).
Lens 2021. Through Apr 18. 2712540.
International Art Acquisitions, 3300 Monroe Ave. Marcella Gillenwater:
Limitless. 264-1440.
Main Street Arts, 20 W Main St. Clifton Springs. Diner’s Club Show.
Through April 16. Appointment required. mainstreetartscs.org.
Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave. 276-8900. “To Help People See”: The Art of G Peter Jemison Ongoing.
NTID Dyer Arts Center, 52 Lomb Memorial Dr. Black is Black: Blackity
AF. Ongoing. Part II: Generational Oppression. rit.edu/ntid/dyerartscenter.; This is Not Normal: Deaf Modernist Sensibilities. Ongoing. rit. edu/ntid/dyerarts-center.; Palettes of Nature. Ongoing. A collaborative exhibit with deafgreenthumbs. rit.edu/ ntid/dyerarts-center.
RIT City Art Space, 280 East Main St. MFA Thesis: Photography &
Related Media (Apr 1-11) | BFA Senior Capstone: Industrial Design (Apr 1518) | BFA Senior Capstone: Studio Arts I (Apr 22-25) & Studio Arts II (Apr 29May 2). cityartspace.rit.edu.
Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Ave. Last Year On Earth
| The Warp & Weft | Through The Cracks | UnJustness. Through May 8. $2. rochestercontemporary.org.
Rochester Museum & Science Center, 657 East Ave. (rmsc.org). The
Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World. Through May 16. W/ museum admission: $14/$16. rmsc.org/changemakers.
Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince St. vsw.org. A Publishing ‘Lean-To’ by
Encountering Black Holes: Art & Science at the Edge of Astrophysics.
Dance Events
MFA Thesis Dance Concert. Through
April 17, 7:30 p.m. SUNY Brockport Fine Arts Series. Registration required fineartstix.brockport.edu. Rochester City Ballet: New Works. Sat., April 24, 7 p.m. and Sun., April 25, 2 p.m. Skalny Lecture & Artist Series facebook.com/skalny.center. Virtual DANCE/Strasser. April 24-May 22, 7:30 p.m. 395-2787.
Theater
2021 Playwrights Playreadings.
Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Through May 27 genevatheatreguild.org. The Fantasticks. Fri., April 23, 7:30 p.m., Sat., April 24, 7:30 p.m. and Sun., April 25, 2 p.m. OFC Creations Theater Center, 3450 Winton Pl $25 & up ofccreations.com. Festival of Ten: Revisited. Fridays, noon. Livestream, online. Fine Arts Series at SUNY Brockport of 10-minute plays Mar 12: “In a Perfect World” Mar 19: “Squirrels in a Knothole” Mar 26: “Martha’s Choice” 395-2787. Love Letters. Fri., April 9, 7:30 p.m. OFC Creations Theater Center, 3450 Winton Pl $10 & up ofccreations.com. She Kills Monsters: Virtual Realms. Fri., April 16, 7:30 p.m., Sat., April 17, 2 & 7:30 p.m. and Sun., April 18, 2 p.m. RIT & NTID Performing Arts $5/$10. RITTickets.com.
Matt Johnston. Through April 30.
roccitynews.org CITY 47
LIFE
GONE TO POT
A Moroccan salad with mint, tossed with cannabutter and honey. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH WEED BUTTER With cannabutter, your culinary possibilities are endless. Live the high life with this fancy-pants three-course meal. BY J. NEVADOMSKI
R
ochester is a foodie town, and with legal recreational cannabis coming to New York, the availability of commerciallyproduced cannabis edibles is poised to explode. But those who love to cook may want to experiment with cannabis as an ingredient in their own kitchen. One of the easiest and most efficient ways to consume cannabis is through 48 CITY APRIL 2021
homemade cannabutter. As the name implies, cannabutter is a combination of cannabis and butter and it provides an opportunity for us to explore a more refined use of the flower. What’s great about cannabutter is its versatility. It can be used in any recipe that calls for butter, like baked goods such as cookies and brownies, but it can also be spread on a morning muffin or a dinner roll,
or melted over a side of vegetables, like asparagus, broccoli, and mashed potatoes. But wait, there’s more! The same principles used to make cannabutter can be applied to make THC-infused olive oil, coconut oil, or any other fatty cooking mediums. What follows is a three-step process for making cannabutter (THC-infused, clarified butter), as
well as three recipes to try with your creation. Not in the mood for an elevated evening? Each of the recipes can be enjoyed without the THC.
Note: It is crucial to remember that homemade edibles are notoriously difficult to accurately dose. There’s just no good way to gauge the potency or amount of THC in any DIY infusions. Use responsibly.
CLARIFIED CANNABUTTER: This formula has a one-to-one ratio of butter to ground, dried cannabis and can be expanded or reduced in size while keeping the 1:1 ratio. For this example, we are using 1 cup of clarified butter to 1 cup of ground, dried cannabis, which works out to between 7 and 10 grams. Step 1: Prepare the cannabis Before you can make cannabutter, your cannabis needs to decarboxylate, or “decarb.” This heating process converts the plant’s non-intoxicating acidic cannabinoid called THCA into THC, the molecule that delivers the euphoric effect you want. The same process takes place when the plant is smoked or vaporized. Skipping this process will result in weaker or downright ineffective THC levels. There are a variety of ways to apply heat to cannabis for decarbing, but the best way is in the oven. Preheat your oven to 235 degrees Fahrenheit. Evenly spread out the cannabis on an oven-safe tray lined with parchment paper. Place the tray on a center rack and bake for 25-35 minutes. Cooking times will vary based on the oven and moisture content of the cannabis. Ideally you want the final product to have reached a sustained temperature of 230-240 degrees, and for the cannabis to appear lightly toasted. Step 2: Clarify the butter Clarifying the butter — meaning extracting water and solid milk proteins — before infusing it with cannabis will give your cannabutter a more stable, versatile, and higherquality end result. THC-infused clarified butter can last for months in the refrigerator. The yield of store-bought butter to clarified butter is about half of the original amount, so to produce 1 cup of clarified butter you need to start with 2 cups (4 sticks) of unsalted butter. Note: This process can be streamlined by buying ghee and skipping directly to step 3.
Start by cutting the butter into cubes, and placing them in a small saucepan. Melt the butter on the stovetop over medium heat. Continue gently cooking over medium to medium-high heat until a layer of white milk protein begins to separate to the surface. Increase heat to high and bring to a low boil until the proteins begin to froth. Lower the heat back to medium and continue to gently simmer until the milk proteins continue to separate and sink to the bottom of the pan. Adjust the heat as needed and continue to gently simmer and boil off any remaining water content, without scorching the milk proteins at the bottom of the pan. Once the water content has boiled off and the fat and proteins have separated, gently strain the butter through a cheesecloth into a heatresistant jar using a funnel and allow to cool before refrigerating. Clarified butter can last refrigerated for up to 6 months. Step 3: Infusion Once you’ve clarified roughly 1 cup of butter, it is time to infuse it with the prepared cannabis. Basically, you are treating this step of the process the same way you would brew tea, only for a much longer amount of time. On the stovetop using low heat, bring the clarified butter to a very low simmer, ideally between 160180 degrees (never higher than 200 degrees). Add in the previously prepared cannabis, mix well, and let gently simmer for two-and-a-half hours, stirring every half hour. Remove from heat and let sit for an additional 10-15 minutes before straining. Strain the butter through a cheese cloth into a heat-resistant jar using a funnel and allow time for the butter to drip through without squeezing the cheese cloth. Be patient. Ringing or squeezing the cheese cloth will dramatically alter the flavor of the final infused butter. Chill the butter overnight. This same infusion process can be applied to olive oil, coconut oil, or any number of other fatty cooking mediums. CONTINUED ON PAGE 50
roccitynews.org CITY 49
Roasted garlic (and weed) butter bruschetta canapés. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
ELEVATED APPLICATIONS Now that you have a supply of THCinfused cannabutter, it’s time to use it in some culinary endeavors. The three examples presented here include an appetizer, a main dish, and an exotic dessert. But the real possibilities are endless. Just keep in mind that the potency of your cannabutter will vary, so it’s best to use it sparingly. Appetizer: Roasted garlic butter bruschetta canapés Serves 2-4 You will need: 1 baguette (thinly sliced on the bias) 2-3 Roma tomatoes (medium diced) 1/2 small red onion (finely diced) 3-5 tablespoons fresh basil (roughly chopped) 3-4 tablespoons olive oil 5-6 large garlic cloves (roasted and mashed) 2-3 tablespoons cannabutter (room temperature) Salt and pepper to taste Instructions: 1. Mix the diced tomato, onion, basil, and olive oil in a non-reactive bowl, adding salt and pepper to taste. Let the mixture stand at room temperature for 30-40 minutes to marry the flavors. 2. In a separate bowl, mix the roasted garlic and the cannabutter into a thick paste. 3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 50 CITY APRIL 2021
Arrange the sliced baguette on a nonstick oven-safe tray. Using the back of a spoon, smear a small amount of the garlic butter mixture on the top of each baguette slice. Place the tray on the center rack of the oven and bake until evenly toasted (about 10 minutes). 4. Remove from the oven and allow the baguettes to cool enough to be comfortably handled and top each slice with two tablespoons of the tomato basil mixture. Serve warm. Main Dish: Creamy butter & mushroom risotto with white wine Serves 2-4 You will need: 8-10 cups chicken or vegetable stock 3 cups arborio rice 1 cup white wine 1 lb. assorted mushrooms (thinly sliced) 1 small yellow onion (finely diced) 4-6 cloves fresh garlic (roughly chopped) 1/4 cup olive oil 1/4 cup fresh parsley (roughly chopped) 1 tablespoon fresh thyme (removed from stems) 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary (finely chopped) 2-3 tablespoons unsalted butter 2-3 tablespoons cannabutter Salt and pepper to taste Instructions: 1. In a large saucepan, bring the stock to a simmer over medium-high heat,
Creamy cannabutter & mushroom risotto with white wine. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH
completely, and serve warm.
then reduce to low heat to keep the stock perpetually warm throughout the cooking process. 2. In a separate large sauce or flatbottomed sauté pan, heat the olive oil over medium to medium-high heat until it begins to lightly smoke. Add in the garlic and onion, cook until softened (about five minutes). Add in the dry rice, mix well, then cover the mixture with the white wine and bring to a simmer. Allow the wine to reduce until the mixture has thickened. Add in the thyme, rosemary, parsley, mushrooms, and salt and pepper to taste, mix well. 3. Begin ladling the stock over the rice, just enough to cover the rice mixture with each interval as the rice absorbs the stock, stirring frequently. Repeat this process until the rice is fully cooked al dente (soft outside, slightly firm inside) and the mixture still retains a soupy (not firm) consistency (roughly one hour). Add in the butter and allow to melt, stir
Dessert: Moroccan fruit salad with mint Serves 4-6 You will need: 1/2 cup strawberries (stems removed, cut into quarters) 1/2 cup fresh or dried figs (stems removed, cut into quarters) 1/4 cup fresh blueberries 1/4 cup fresh blackberries 1/4 cup fresh raspberries 1/4 cup toasted pine nuts 4-5 tablespoons fresh mint leaves (finely chopped) 6-8 tablespoons buckwheat honey 2-3 tablespoons cannabutter (room temperature) Instructions: 1. Starting at room temperature, thoroughly wash and dry the figs and berries. In a non-reactive bowl gently toss the figs, berries, pine nuts, and cannabutter with half of the fresh mint leaves. 2. Separate into individual portions and place the mixture into serving bowls. Generously drizzle honey over each serving and garnish with the remaining mint leaves. Serve at room temperature. J. Nevadomski is the author of the long-running “Highlife for Lowlifes” series (2013-present) and is a food and culture contributor to CITY.
roccitynews.org CITY 51
LIFE
PEACE OF MIND
Kathleen Gansemer uses mindfulness to help balance the demands of caring for her aging parents. Gansemer uses breathing exercises to incorporate mindfulness into her nature walks. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
WHEN ‘OM’ CAN HELP YOU TAKE CARE OF MOM Meditation, mindfulness are useful tools for caregivers BY BETH ADAMS
K
@BETHADAMS20
athie Gansemer concentrates on her breath first. Slow, steady breaths. Then, perhaps, she recites an inspirational quote or a poem to set the mood. One of her favorites is from the 13th-century Persian poet, Rumi. It encourages the reader to welcome even the most disturbing thoughts and emotions as a potential means to clear the way for an unexpected delight. Then, focus. Meditation has become an integral part of Gansemer’s life since she became the primary caregiver to her 52 CITY APRIL 2021
BADAMS@WXXI.ORG
parents four years ago, when she moved them from Pennsylvania to an independent senior community a few miles from her Penfield home. Her 93-year-old father has suffered two strokes and brain cancer. Her 89-year-old mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She is in contact with them every day, managing their health care and taking them to medical appointments, doing their grocery shopping, and running errands for them. “There are different draws on me at times that can be pretty
intense in terms of caregiving,” Gansemer, 62, said. Sometimes, she said, their health crises coincide with the needs of another family member with mental illness who also relies on Gansemer for help. “That, literally, is almost next to impossible to handle,” she said. Caregiving can be a moving experience. But it can also take an emotional and physical toll on even the most resilient caregivers, whose needs are often overlooked by a healthcare system focused on patients. A 2018 study from the Alzheimer’s
Association found that as many as 40 percent of caregivers reported symptoms of depression, and other research shows that the immune system can be weakened by the stress of caregiving, leaving caregivers vulnerable to illness. But Gansemer, a Xerox retiree whose physical pursuits include playing paddle tennis and taking long bike rides, has found meditation helps her cope. She is not alone. Research has shown that simple CONTINUED ON PAGE 54
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PathStone has partnered with Rochester Regional Health to offer onsite supportive services to 78 units within Skyview Park Apartments. These units will be reserved for the Frail Elderly. To be considered Frail Elderly you must be a senior who is enrolled in Medicaid and need assistance with personal care/or community living, such as shopping, laundry, medication management, nutrition, etc. Additional requirements apply. Contact us for more information. The housing lottery will be held on June 8, 2021 at 2pm via Zoom.
https://zoom.us/j/94456826094 The application deadline to be included in the lottery is May 18, 2021
Income and Occupancy Limits are Subject to Change
roccitynews.org CITY 53
daily meditation reduces the stress level of people who care for those stricken by Alzheimer’s. Gansemer discovered meditation when she started practicing yoga. Soon, she was meditating every day. “It calms you down, evens you out, centers you, so you’re not as reactive,” Gansemer explained.
‘WHO ARE THE MOST STRESSED PEOPLE ON THE PLANET?’
Numerous studies have shown the multiple benefits of meditation. But in 2012, Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, examined whether meditation could help caregivers in particular, specifically those tending to loved ones with Alzheimer’s or dementia. She thought they would be the perfect population to study. “I said,” Lavretsky explained, “‘Who are the most stressed people on the planet?’” In the randomized study, one group of caretakers for people with dementia was told to do a guided chanting meditation for 11 minutes each day for eight weeks. Compared to a control group of caretakers, who simply listened to relaxing music while lying or sitting down, the meditation group showed improved mood, resilience, and cognitive performance, along with changes in neurological biomarkers of aging. “We found that 64 genes changed their expression,” Lavretsky said. “Forty-five of them were responsible for inflammation. Nineteen genes were responsible for antiviral activity.” Inflammation of the immune system can contribute to a multitude of chronic health problems. The takeaway for caregivers: It doesn’t take much time or effort to reduce the effects of stress. Even slowing down breathing to four to six breaths a minute is known to calm the central nervous system, Lavretsky said. “Blood pressure drops, heart rate drops, and a sense of calm comes in,” she added. “I ask patients to do that for three to five minutes and maybe have quiet music along with it.” That kind of slow and steady breathing is how Gansemer focuses during her meditation sessions. When it comes to self-care, Gansemer ranks the ritual right behind her daily exercise 54 CITY APRIL 2021
Kathie Gansemer, center, and her parents, Richard and Ruth Roush. PHOTO PROVIDED
program and carving out personal time for herself. “I wouldn’t be the same person if I wasn’t meditating. I’d probably be a lot more amped up, hyped up at times,” she said with a laugh. “I’m a pretty energetic person, and sometimes I need to bring that down a few notches.”
MEDITATION VS. MINDFULNESS
Gansemer sometimes takes meditative walks. Another name for this is “mindfulness,” or “mindful movement,” which has been shown to have some of the same benefits as meditation. A 2018 Penn State study, for example, found that while students reported less stress when walking, they experienced even less anxiety and fewer negative thoughts when they combined walking with a focus on their breathing and surroundings. The terms “meditation” and “mindfulness” are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are distinctions between the two. Meditation generally refers to a formal practice. Mindfulness can be described as a way of living. A person can be mindful — that is, immersed in the
current moment — while doing just about anything, like washing dishes or walking. “I think the word ‘mindfulness’ can sometimes put out a welcome mat that is accessible and enticing, perhaps not inherently or by projection, associated with religious practice that a person might not be connected with,” said Harrison Blum, director of religious and spiritual life at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He has put a lot of thought into making Buddhist meditation and secular mindfulness training accessible to people regardless of their religious, racial, or socioeconomic status. In 2014, Blum launched his Mindfulness Allies project at a community center serving low-income residents, mostly people of color, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “In the first night, when I asked people why they chose to come to that class,” he recalled, “two out of the eight people broke down crying, talking about how challenging their lives were.” Blum said one woman told him she had wanted to learn meditation for years, but she could never get to a class at the Buddhist center just a half-mile away because she couldn’t afford to pay someone to babysit her children.
Moving a meditation class to where people are, rather than asking them to come to a Buddhist center, might also help people overcome other potential roadblocks, Blum said. “A secular or Christian person going into a Buddhist center may be a bridge too far,” he added. “But a Buddhist teacher partnering with and having the sensitivities needed to work with and teach from a community center with a different population can be, perhaps, a way to make accessible teaching across some of those cultural barriers.” Access to training has not been a problem for Lisa Thompson of Rochester, who cares for her parents. “I’ve tried a little bit of meditation,” she said, “I think that mindfulness is more of my thing.” Thompson’s parents moved into her home three years ago when her father, who is in his mid-80s, began losing his sight. “I’m originally from Jamaica, and in our culture, you take care of old family members,” she said. She shares caregiving duties with her three sisters, so she doesn’t feel overwhelmed. But Thompson handles day-to-day tasks for her parents such as shopping, filling prescriptions, and helping them with anything else they need. Thompson learned about mindfulness at a retreat at Keuka College, where she works. “It really has changed my life,” said Thompson, who believes she is more patient and understanding and has a better sense of self. Her definition of mindfulness is being present in everything she does, from her daily exercise routine to conversations with her parents. “So often, my mind will stray,” she said. “It will drift off, and I will catch myself and bring myself back. And so on a constant basis, I’m working to stay present.”
TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP
If time and access are barriers to learning and practicing meditation, apps are an option for those who have a computer or a smartphone. A number of apps can be downloaded for free, including Care for Caregivers, an app offered by the Garrison Institute. It features brief videos of guided meditations, some of which are led by world-renowned meditation
teacher and best-selling author Sharon Salzberg. In one of the videos, she describes how practicing mindfulness by focusing on body movements is probably the easiest way to overcome excessive worry and rumination. “If we are just walking down the corridor, rather than being lost in a fantasy about what is coming next, feel your feet touching the ground,” she says. “Feel your body moving through space, something like that, and you’ll find that it’s a very different day.” Apps like these are among the tools that Katie Badeau recommends to the stressed and burned-out people she works with as a caregiver coordinator at the Western New York chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. Caregiver support group meetings have moved online during the coronavirus pandemic, and she said not all caregivers are tech-savvy or even interested in a virtual meeting. So Badeau tries to educate them on, say, what a simple deep breathing exercise can do to relax and center them. “You know, if you’re stressed enough, sometimes you’re willing to try anything,” she said. “Our options are limited here, we’re stuck at home, give it a shot.” There is a stigma for caregivers around seeking support and admitting they sometimes need help, too, Badeau said. Indeed, Thompson said she used to feel guilty about taking time off. But she learned that if she reserves every Saturday just for herself, it makes her a better caretaker for her parents. Her advice to other caregivers: “Take the time that you need, because if you’re not well, then those around you won’t be able to get the support they need from you.” Includes reporting by WBFO reporter Nick Lippa. This story was produced through the New York & Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations and universities dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about successful responses to social problems. The group is supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. The collaborative’s first series, Invisible Army: Caregivers on the Front Lines, focuses on potential solutions to challenges facing caregivers of older adults.
roccitynews.org CITY 55
LIFE
WHAT ALE'S ME
ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB WALSH
IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE CANNABIS CRAFT BEVERAGES HIT NEW YORK BY GINO FANELLI
I
@GINOFANELLI
n 1779, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter that rain falling on vineyards that will one day bear grapes to make wine was proof that God loves us. Like many Founding Fathers, Franklin enjoyed a drink. He was also a prominent hemp farmer, whose pioneering newspapers were printed on hemp paper. He probably wrote that letter about rain and wine and God on hemp parchment. Where am I going with this? Alcohol and cannabis are about as American of a pairing as apple pie and ice cream, peanut butter and jam, and Cheech 56 CITY APRIL 2021
GFANELLI@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
and Chong. New York is on the cusp of legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, which raises the prospect of a marriage between the local cannabis and craft beverage markets. The Food and Drug Administration still prohibits cannabis-laced alcoholic drinks, but that hasn’t stopped booze makers from . . . experimenting. In other states where pot is legal, craft breweries are pumping out new drinks that ditch the alcohol but add the cannabis. Closer to home, Constellation Brands has invested more than $4 billion in Canopy Growth, a Canadian cannabis company. Two years ago, the
company put out its first beverage, a flavored sparkling water infused with CBD, called “Quatreau.” Paul Leone, executive director of the New York State Brewers Association, said a new cannabis market, including cannabis beverages, could benefit the state’s craft scene. He would like to see the industry mirror the 2013 Farm Brewery law, which helped usher in a craft beer boom. “It’s long overdue for this to be legal in New York state, and it is an agricultural product,” Leone said. In 2018, California’s Lagunitas Brewing Company launched Hi-Fi
Hops, an IPA-inspired, non-alcoholic beer that comes laced with either 10 milligrams of THC, or 5 milligrams THC and 5 milligrams CBD. Likewise, in March, Shipyard Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, launched Pumpkinhead THC Elixir, a non-alcoholic pumpkin ale with 5 milligrams of THC, in collaboration with Novel Beverage of Scarborough, Maine. “It’s an alternative product for adults, and that can be an alternative to drinking alcohol, but it also can be an alternative for smoking cannabis,” said Matt Hawes, founder and CEO of Novel Beverage. “It’s a new delivery method that is very socially acceptable, it’s very comfortable to us, it doesn’t have these known health disadvantages like smoking may have, and they’re dosed to be approachable, so a wide-range of consumers can enjoy them.” While Pumpkinhead will only be available in Maine due to federal restrictions on transporting THC products over state lines, Hawes is hoping to be able to form contracts in other states where cannabis is legal to produce it and similar offerings on a broader scale. “We do have a plan to make an expansion into New York when that becomes an opportunity to us,” Hawes said. Katharina Jackson, a bartender at Lux Lounge and Swan Dive, has long used cannabis to treat chronic pain. The practice has led her to experiment with CBD- and THC-infused cocktails. Her favorite was an Old Fashioned, made with Wild Turkey 101 and a dose of CBD-infused coconut oil. Her approach is not as much making a drink that guarantees a cross-faded experience, but to complement cocktails with the unique flavor notes of cannabis. “I try to think about not so much a drink that gets you high, but one that incorporates the flavors appropriately,” Jackson said. It is a premise she believes could serve as a whole new market. Different mocktails could be used to complement the flavors of different cannabis strains, all set in a new variety of taprooms focused on buds instead of suds. “You can taste a flight of different ones, and have it be more interesting than a ginger CBD, THC tonic,” Jackson said. “It has different flavors, different herbs, different textures. These beverages can be just as interesting as craft cocktails.”
ABOUT TOWN DRINK (AND SMOKE*) THIS NOW: *We aren’t suggesting you do anything still technically illegal. No, no, no. We wouldn’t do THAT! All we’re saying is if you’re gonna smoke your favorite strain of weed with a beer, you ought to know how to do it right. NOTE: Be responsible; alcohol and THC react differently for everyone. Skunk Black IPA from Three Heads Brewing/Sour Diesel:
A legacy strain of weed common on New York streets for decades, Sour Diesel imparts skunky, slightly earthy tones reminiscent of its petroleum namesake. Skunk Black IPA packs a punch of similarly aromatic floral hops and a subdued kiss of roasted malt tucked away on the back-end. Stay Out of Malibu! from Aurora Brewing Company/Strawberry Cough:
Strawberry Cough is a relatively intense strain, known for both its pronounced perfume of fresh berries and profoundly uplifting effect. It’s a perfect marriage with Stay Out of Malibu!, a decadent Berliner Weiss laced with layers of Earl Grey tea, cardamom, and pomegranate. Ideal for relaxing in the nice, quiet little beach community in your head. Grodziskie from Young Lion Brewing/ Gorilla Glue:
Grodziskie, also known as Grätzer, is a barely extant style of beer lovingly referred to as “Polish champagne.” Smoked malt adds a note of campfire to the finish of this low-alcohol wheat ale, akin to the more common German Rauchbier. This odd, easy-going beer pairs well with Gorilla Glue, a high-octane hybrid strain known for its heavy relaxation qualities. Griddle Cakes from Rohrbach Brewing/ OG Kush
A surreal time in pre-pandemic 2020 had me drinking two different blueberry pancake beers in the same week. Griddle Cakes has since become a staple beer of mine. A lovely ménage of berries and maple pairs well with OG Kush, a strain perfectly suited for a lazy Sunday brunch.
Activism
Literary Events & Discussions
9-10. 540WMain, 540westmain.org “Resisting Gentrification: Then & Now” Registration required; scholarships available.
p.m. South Wedge. Apr 9: Surface Salon, 661 South Ave; Apr 10: John’s Tex-Mex, 426 South Ave 851-2932. Blackfriars Book Club. Thursdays, 7 p.m Through Apr 29. Titles revealed previous Fridays blackfriars.org/#bt-book-club. Books Sandwiched In. Tuesdays Virtual Central Library, online. Reviews posted weekly calendar.libraryweb.org. The Changemakers Book Club. Fri., April 23, 6 p.m. Apr 23: KaeLyn Rich’s “Girls Resist!: A Guide to Activism, Leadership, and Starting a Revolution.” Part of the RMSC exhibit, The Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World $15. rmsc.org. Pages with Purpose. Thu., April 8, 7 p.m. senecaparkzoo.org Patricia Chapple Wright’s “For the Love of Lemurs: My Life in the Wilds of Madagascar” Registration required. Rochester Jewish Book Festival. Sun., April 11, 2 p.m., Thu., April 15, 8 p.m. and Sun., April 25, 8 p.m. Livestream, online. $6-$11. rjbf.org.
2021 Gentrification Conference. April
Asian Matters: Standing with Rochester’s Asian American Communities. Sun., April 11, 5:30-6:30
p.m. Registration required. endhateroc. org/asian-matters. RYCL Youth Climate Summit 2021. Wed., April 14, 9 a.m.-noon. Livestream, online. Rochester Youth Climate Leaders. Registration required rycl.org. Trail Keepers: El Camino. Thu., April 15, 3-5 p.m. Conkey Corner Park, 92 Conkey Ave 256-2130. geneseelandtrust.org.
Lectures
16th Annual Reshaping Rochester Lecture Series. Wed., April 28, noon.
Mitchell Silver, NYC Parks Commissioner on the public realm. cdcrochester.org. History of Rochester Parks. Thu., April 22, 6 p.m. Virtual Central Library. Registration is required libraryweb.org. In Focus Talk. Fri., April 9, 1 p.m. Clara Auclair: Treasures of the Francis Doublier Collection Virtual George Eastman Museum. Registration required. $10 suggested. eastman.org.
Joseph Fischel: Gay Rights for Cows, or the Extinction of Sodomy Law. Tue.,
April 6, 4:45 p.m. Livestream, online. UR Rainbow Lecture sbai@rochester.edu.
Julie Hanlon Rubio: The Search for Common Ground, Community & Belonging in a Polarized World. Thu.,
April 15, 7 p.m. Nazareth College 3892731. Nina Allender: Suffrage Cartoonist. Wed., April 14, 7 p.m. Registration required genevahistoricalsociety.com.
Noal Cohen: My Perspective on Jazz in Rochester from 1955-1961. Thu., April
8, 7 p.m. Livestream, online. Pittsford Community Library. Registration required libraryweb.org.
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. Thu., April 8, 10 a.m.-12:15
p.m. Carol Anderson, keynote of RIT’s Moving Forward: Suffrage, Past, Present & Future, followed by panel discussion, “Legacies of the 19th Amendment: The Struggle Still Continues” Registration required: susan.gawlowicz@rit.edu. Quajay Donnell: Public Art Matters. Wed., April 14, 7 p.m. Pittsford Community Library. Registration required. libraryweb.org.
Racist Policy & Resistance in Rochester. Tue., April 13, 7 p.m. Penfield
Public Library. Registration required libraryweb.org.
Rochester’s Rich History: Rochester’s District Steam Heating System. Sat.,
April 17, 1-2:30 p.m. Virtual Central Library. Registration required calendar. libraryweb.org. Save the Frogs Day. Sun., April 25, 1-2 p.m. Michael Horton. afroghouse.org.
The Story Behind the Most Famous Songs of the Erie Canal. Tue., April 20,
7 p.m. Livestream, online. Fairport Public Library 223-9091.
Akimbo Books Pop-Up. April 9-10, 12-4
Kids Events
Fairies, Trolls, & Gnomes. Sat., April 17, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and Sun., April 18, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Strong National Museum of Play, 1 Manhattan Sq. (museumofplay. org) $18/$23. National Sense of Smell Day. Fri., April 23, 12-4 p.m. Lyell Branch, Rochester Public Library, 956 Lyell Ave. 428-8218. Sensory Friendly Sunday. Sun., April 25, 4:30-7:30 p.m. Strong National Museum of Play, 1 Manhattan Sq. (museumofplay. org) $18.
axomhome.com 661 south ave
Recreation
Getting Back On Your Bike: An Introduction to Cycling in Rochester.
Sat., April 24, 1-2 p.m. Virtual Central Library, online. Registration required libraryweb.org.
Life in a Forest Puddle: A Look into Vernal Pools. April 9-10, 1-2:15 p.m.
Sterling Nature Center, 15380 Jenzvold Rd Sterling Apr 10, 3-3:30pm: FB Live @ sterlingnaturecenter (315) 947-6143. Mushroom & Moss Walk. Sun., April 18, 10 a.m. Letchworth State Park, 1 Letchworth State Park . Castile Registration required 493-3682. Spring’s First Butterflies Walk. Sat., April 10, 1 p.m. Letchworth State Park, 1 Letchworth State Park . Castile Registration required 493-3682.
Special Events
Annual Yom HaShoah Commemoration.
Wed., April 7, 7 p.m. & Thu., April 8, 12-3 & 7 p.m. Local Holocaust survivors & keynote Rachael Cerrotti tell their stories jewishrochester.org. Be a Kid Again: Adult Hours. Fri., April 9, 5:30-8 p.m. Strong National Museum of Play, 1 Manhattan Sq. (museumofplay. org) $15/$20. Community Garage Sales. Sun., April 18, 7 a.m.-1 p.m. and Sun., April 25, 7 a.m.1 p.m. Rochester Public Market, 280 N. Union St. 428-6907. cityofrochester.gov/ garagesales. roccitynews.org CITY 57
LIFE
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ACROSS
1. Nerf darts or water balloons, e.g. 5. Morbid word in a nursery rhyme 10. Metal collected and sold for recycling 15. Tilt 19. Silly quarrel 20. Roman goddess of flowering plants 21. “Don’t be _____!” 22. TV character credited to Ronnie Howard 23. Diner side 25. “Ground up” political movement 27. Facilitates 28. Not so much as 30. Discards casually 31. Ewes’ mates 34. German “you” 35. Christmas in Florence 38. Drains 41. Author whose 19th century books inspired many 20th and 21st century film adaptations 43. Counting everything 44. Dampen 47. Expert 48. Measurement for a farmer or a realtor 49. “Love Actually” or “What Men Want”, e.g. 51. Places to buy ready-toassemble furniture 53. Words sung before “be” or “go” 55. HS diploma alternative 57. Surprise action by a group of criminals, or police 58. Convention center? 59. Statistic used to calculate batting average 60. Moody rock genre 61. Garfield’s romantic interest 63. River of Hesse 64. Motifs 66. Body part often confused with the uvula 68. Extend, as a subscription or vows 70. Pizzeria owner in “Do the Right Thing” 71. Light at a rave, maybe 73. Surreptitious 75. Laugh syllable 58 CITY APRIL 2021
PUZZLE BY S.J. AUSTIN & J. REYNOLDS 1
2
3
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5
6
20
19 23 27
38
39
32
40 48
53
55
54
60
59 64
65
70
71 78
84
33
41
47
72
79 86
85
91
92 97
96 103
102
104
108 112
113
114
122
123
128
129
132
133
78. Like samba, rumba, and mambo 80. New moniker given to Jacob in Genesis 82. Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend 84. Breezy sign-off online 86. Missing, as at the start of a party 88. Dallas sch. 90. Penguins’ predators 91. Deadhead, stereotypically 93. _____ Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd 94. Imbibe gradually 95. Former U.N. Ambassador Haley 96. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, e.g.
8
9
10
11
12 Across 13 14
15
1 16
217
3 18 4
1. Word that follows 14 the start of each22 starred answer 17 25 26 5. On the ocean 20 10. "...hear ___ 28 29 30 drop" 23 24 14. Pound of poetry 34 35 36 37 28 15. Tips 16. Russo of 42 43 44 45 3646 37 34 35 "Outbreak" 17. Chop ___ 51 52 41 49 50 18. *** Edward 44 Teach, 56 57 58 familiarly 47 48 61 20.62 Asia's ___ Sea 63 51 21. Dark time for 66 67 68 69 poets 58 59 60 22. Lets up 73 74 76 77 64 23. Many four-doors 75 25. Billionaire Bill 68 80 81 82 83 28. The Braves, on scoreboards 71 87 88 89 90 30. Middle of many German names 93 94 95 63. Rough breathing 31. "Go on ..." 64. *** Place for 98 99 34. March 10017 101 miscellaneous honoree, for stuff 105 106 107 short 67. Baja's opposite 38. Close to closed 68. "If all ___ fails 109 110 111 40. Mine, in ..." Marseiille 115 116 11741. *** Cold 118 119Vow 120 taker 121 69. 70. Farm sounds comfort 125 124 44.126 Ones127 born before 71. Beliefs 72. Common thing? Virgos 130 131 73. "Green Gables" 45. Jessica of "Dark girl Angel" 134 135 46. "___ Johnny!" Down 47. Hosp. areas 1. Tablelands 48. ___125. Jeanne 97. Elasticized corset R&Bd'Arc star with 80 million 2. Blue shade album cartoon sales 49. Stimpy's 99. Parts of a set 3. "___ loud and pal128. Like an engine whenyou waiting 101. One in Berlin clear" at an intersection 51. Some college Eric Clapton love 102. Word before and after eat students 129. Make a harsh4.noise song 53. Greets 103. Material for uniforms 130. Voice of Fredricksen in “Up” 5. Optimally nonverbally 105. The I of ICP 131. Writes in a wrong crossword 6. Mah-jongg piece 58. Popular typeface answer, say 107. Containers for 5-Across 61. Gallery display 132. Require 108. Anheuser-Busch subsidiary 133. “Hop on Pop” writer 109. Puppy’s bite 134. “_____ in arms” (oft110. Condemn repeated phrase of 2021) 112. Westernmost county of 135. Arabian and Mediterranean, Texas e.g. 115. What you might try to do when buying a car 118. Clooney role 122. Trademarked pest control device 21
24
31
7
5
15
18
21
42
45
65
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72
7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3
3 3 3 3 4
Answers to this puzzle can be found on page 25
DOWN
1. The only Black man to win singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open 2. Movie rating grp. 3. Physics measure often confused with weight 4. The “al” of “et al” 5. Continent for DRC 6. _____ Mo 7. Moan like a dog 8. Given name of “Mr. Cub” 9. More prone to backtalk 10. Droops 11. Arthritis or asthma 12. Stephen of “Interview with the Vampire” 13. “_____ gratia artis”, MGM motto 14. Part of USPS 15. Like lips that sink ships, idiomatically 16. Big moments for the NYSE 17. Place for a monument 18. Thomas Hardy heroine 24. Org. that began welcoming girls in 2019 26. Fingers with a mustache? 29. Mujeres con esposos 32. Bub 33. Jolt of power 36. Positive battery terminal 37. Hat for a Scot 38. Sounds from a food fight 39. Queen of Soul, familiarly 40. Portly swine sometimes raised as a pet 42. Appear that way 44. Tool known as a whipper snipper in Australia 45. Roof overhang 46. Russian emperor 48. Declare 50. Oscar winner Tomei 52. One of six for a bee? 54. Cartesian conclusion 56. California band joined by Michael McDonald in 1977 58. Computer enthusiasts 62. Grp. that filed for bankruptcy after being charged with fraud in January 65. Subway entrance 67. Prepared to lay
69. Hose 72. Molecular “messenger” in several COVID vaccines 74. Twain’s burial town 76. Skywalker who turned to the dark side 77. Pine secretions 79. T-Bonz brand 81. Laughing (in the aisles) 83. Brother of Dori and Nori in “The Hobbit” 84. Underwhelming sound 85. One-time Yankee Martinez 87. Pollute 89. Turn on its head 92. Common way to be paid for a Craigslist deal 97. Supermodel played by Angelina 98. Conundrums 100. Mattress irritant? 104. Thermonuclear weapons, for short 106. Play in a puddle 107. Sam, Tom, and Ben 108. Spiked 111. Gang with pitchforks, maybe 112. Environmental activist Brockovich 113. Prospector’s strike 114. “_____ Tourist” (Jim Gaffigan special) 116. Sierra Nevada products 117. Cube creator Rubik 119. Yeats’s land 120. Taj Mahal city 121. Leader of The Untouchables 123. Cry at a futbol match 124. Letter following sigma 126. And still 127. Some SAT takers
roccitynews.org CITY 59
