CLIF GARBODEN

Friends remember Alan Lupo

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:19:05 GMT

The Boston Phoenix is collecting memories from all those whose lives were touched by our friend and colleague, Alan Lupo.

Words as music: Alan Lupo was many things — among them, the best metro columnist Boston may ever see. By Margaret Doris.

The people's gravelly voice: Alan Lupo, 1938 - 2008. By Clif Garboden.

“Because I grew up in a family and in a neighborhood that had no voice, I have tried in some small way to be a voice for those whose feelings are too rarely heard, or even expressed. I hope this was not presumptuous, and I hope that I can continue to do that, for in today's neighborhoods there are also large numbers who do not "fit."
“I am still — foolishly, perhaps — enough of an idealist to believe that the media are too often the only ones in town to help redress the grievances of those who have nobody to lobby for them in the corridors of public and private power.
“I still believe that it is our job to raise hell responsibly and comfort the afflicted, to focus public attention on issues and events that people in power would just as soon see disappear from public discourse.”

— Alan Lupo
December 31, 1993

The Boston Phoenix is collecting memories from all those whose lives were touched by our friend and colleague, Alan Lupo. If you have thoughts you'd like to share, please e-mail them to Clif Garboden, Senior Managing Editor, the Boston Phoenix, cgarboden@phx.com or Margaret Doris, contributor, the Boston Phoenix, MEDoris@bu.edu.

The first time I saw Alan Lupo was during one of my earliest Phoenix freelance assignments, circa 1980. I was doing some work in the newsroom and just a few desks away was this larger-than-life character who had achieved a journalistic stature worth aspiring too. Although Alan was the last person one could be intimidated by, I don't believe I worked up the gumption to introduce myself. But I did get to know him well during my 1995 to 2005 stint at the Globe, and in my view, he played a unique role in that institution.

Put simply, a visit to Alan's office was a welcome oasis from the pressures of unstinting deadlines, unappreciative editors, uncooperative sources, and any other problems that were impinging on your day. It was a place to spin yarns, to joke (he had a completely infectious laugh), and to soak up some homespun wisdom that managed to put things in perspective. For several years, I was the Globe ombudsman — a sometimes thankless task — and it's fair to say that Alan displayed far more than the typical level of empathy and support. The thing I most remember about him is that I always ended up feeling better after I left his office. And that's no mean feat.

— Mark Jurkowitz, former Phoenix news editor and media columnist

He's the salt of the earth. The best of the breed. The last of the street and beat reporters. He knew every bar, every precinct, every pole in Boston. He'd give you the shirt off his back. Fill you with bagels, coffee, and ribs. He was there when you were up and when you were down, never patronizing, always considerate and kind.

His jokes and tales of Jewish life in Winthrop were legendary (with a hint of the borscht belt). He was love personified — love of journalism, his native Winthrop, his rambling house by the bay (where the doorknobs rarely stayed put), his friends, and, most of all, Caryl and the kids But when you were alone with Alan Lupo, you felt all that love was just for you, alone All my love to you!

— Amy Zuckerman, journalist

I attended Columbia journalism school with Al and his future wife, Caryl Rivers, and for a few months in the summer and fall of 1960, I was his roommate. We sublet a grungy basement apartment on W. 113th Street from a classmate. Both of us were working temporary jobs at the AP while waiting to go into the military, I as a draftee, Al as a reserve second lieutenant at Fort Knox. (He must have been the most unlikely ROTC student at UMass.)

The apartment had so many cockroaches we thought about putting numbers on them and betting on which one would disappear first when we turned the lights on. We kept in close touch for years, twice sharing vacation quarters on Cape Cod. When I quit journalism in the early ’90s to join the US Foreign Service, we saw less of each other but exchanged occasional emails — the last one early this year, informing me of his cancer but expressing optimism, laced with wisecracks, that he could beat it. Like everyone else, I remember Al as the consummate mensch, someone who made you proud to be a fellow member of the human race.

As you know, he wrote a fine book, Liberty's Chosen Home, on the Boston busing controversy. Al's book never drew a fraction of the attention given to Tony Lukas' later work, Common Ground (in which Lukas acknowledged help from both Al and Caryl). I asked Al once whether he didn't resent being overshadowed. "Nah," he said, "Lukas blew me out of the water. He deserved what he got."

That was characteristically gracious and free of ego. Al had every right to his measure of hubris, but he never exercised it. My sympathies go not only to Caryl, Steven, and Aylissa but also to Boston and to the shrinking world of serious print journalism.

— George Newman, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland

Alan was an aficionado of feuds, as long as they were Boston feuds. Nothing angered him except injustices (he laughed at fraud and pretension), but a special part of Alan's more-than-encyclopedic knowledge of Boston was his appreciation for one of its most important products — spite.

Alan could tell you who hated who in this town, why they did, and what began it all. Didn't matter if the feud began in 1894 and ended when both parties passed on in FDR's first term. Feuds made for good stories, and Alan never, ever, ignored or forgot one of those.

Nothing was jollier than listening to Alan describe the slights of yesteryear. Nothing was more valuable to someone learning how to function as a newspaper person in Boston. Simply put, before working with Alan Lupo, I didn't know nuttin' but nuttin' about this town.

How does one pay tribute to the finest native guide a traveler could possibly have? I'd lived in Boston for several years before crossing paths with Alan at the Phoenix, and had no idea it was different from anyplace else someone might live. And, if one was a recovering hippie living in Inman Square whose last port of call was Oakland, California, it wasn't. It only took me five years to travel south of Huntington Avenue.

Alan changed that. Simply by listening to him (the Phoenix was, and I hope is, a shrine for schmoozing), I got my first clues as to the real nature of the contrary, splendid, maddening city Alan loved and understood as no one else. There was the day I mentioned in a meeting that I was seeing a lot of a certain construction company's cement mixers around Cambridge and Somerville. Ten minutes later, I had the family tree of all partners in my head, knowledge painlessly imparted amid bursts of laughter.

The best reporters and the best writers are always the best storytellers. Without that ability to hold an audience, what good are facts and a prose style? If a reporter can't sit in the office, or a coffee shop or bar, and TELL the story they want to write, he or she won't do the story justice.

I never heard Alan tell a story he didn't do justice. I only wish I could remember them all.

— Michael Gee, former Phoenix writer and Herald sports writer

I was lucky enough to share face-to-face adjoining desks with Loops for five years in the old Phoenix newsroom. I still believe it was a perverse experiment by [editor] Bob Sales to attempt to create nuclear fission through a collision of fashion styles. (In 1991, I took a job writing for GQ. Three months later, I told Alan. I think he finally stopped laughing shortly before the passing of the millennium.) Also, at the time, I was living on the top floor of a three-decker up near Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain.

My local was down on Washington Street. It was Doyle's Café. It was dark and cavernous and it featured an odd array of folksingers on weekends. It was not yet Six Flags Over Curley, the Irish-American political theme park that it is today. Anyway, one day a few years down the line, Loops came into the newsroom bubbling with enthusiasm about this great new spot he'd found in JP called Doyle's. Not long after that, I went there with him. Now I'd been hanging around that place for three years at that point and I think I knew one bartender and one waitress. Alan knew everybody. He knew the cooks, for God's sake. (I didn't even know they had cooks.) And everybody knew him. I was momentarily resentful — This was my place, after all. Who's this thooleramawn from Winthrop anyway? — and then permanently awed by the depth of the empathy, compassion, and simple humanity that were so fundamental to the person Alan was. It was what people responded to in him.

It was how he came to know everybody in the joint. That these qualities also made him one of the greatest journalists this town will ever see is simply a bonus, a grace note for us all. Godspeed, my friend. Flights of angels and all that. And, as they say in the Old Country — my Old Country, not your Old Country — we knew the two days.

— Charles P. Pierce, Boston Phoenix writer, 1978-1983, 10/10/08

There's too many injustices in our world. So, I believe a journalist should write by the standard of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable." Alan Lupo did this for many decades and Boston and Massachusetts are really a better place because he practiced this.

From the fight to save neighborhoods from the 10-lane Inner Belt Highway in the 1960s, to the busing/desegregation years of strife in the 1970s, to so many stories that mattered year in and year out into this year, he was there to record, empathize, and tell what wouldn't be otherwise told. He shined a light on injustices and brought to life the characters in our midst with humor and honesty.

I first met Alan in the early 1970s when he came to our community group's Dorchester office to listen and write stories about city issues when he was a member of the Boston Globe's hard working Urban Team. He had a big life as a journalist with the Globe, Herald, Phoenix, and Channel 2.

He wrote numerous stories about and a book called Rites of Way about the fight of Boston neighborhood leaders against the 10-lane Inner Belt Highway that was to be built from Route 128 in Dedham through Boston's neighborhoods, cross the Charles River, and the through Cambridge to connect to I-93 in Somerville. He is recognized in a memorial history of this campaign that stands outside of the Roxbury Crossing Station on the Orange Line where this 10-lane highway would have run.

Alan Lupo wrote many news stories and a thoughtful book about the years of busing and desegregation that pulled apart our neighborhoods during the 1970s. It's called Liberty's Chosen Home. He was a champion of the East Boston community leaders who successfully fought the expansion of Logan Airport into their neighborhood for decades.

He was always someone that a community leader, community organizer, or just an average Joe or Mary could call and get his ear to talk about the grievance that you had that you thought should be covered by a newspaper.

I remember he was doing an article about the organization I worked for in the 1980s called Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance and some campaign we were doing about mortgage red-lining by banks. But always the observant and humorous guy, he happened to spot a hand written sign posted on the door to the downstairs from our office that warned people of rats on the stairwell. Lupo then remarked in the story how the big bankers in their big office buildings that we were taking on did not have to venture through such hazards. It was very funny though our landlord gave us hell about it.

Alan's message machine when he was a Globe reporter used to say something like, “he was sorry he was not there but he was out avoiding editors and hoped he wouldn't slip out of his mortal coil.”

In his columns in recent years, he continued to bring up what Congressman Barney Frank called the "no say'ims" about what was true but often avoided. Lupo said if we wanted good city and state services, we needed to pay taxes to support them and sometimes even a little higher taxes.

He was a what we call a real Boston original. He will be much missed.

— Lew Finfer, Executive Director, Massachusetts Community Action Network

I first got to know Alan Lupo through a class on community journalism that he taught during the spring of 1974 while I was a student at UMass/Boston's College of Public and Community Service. I had recently moved down from Vermont, so I was not yet familiar with his work as a journalist. When I brought home an announcement of his course, my then partner strongly praised Alan from The Reporters on television. It didn't take much to convince me, and I signed up immediately.

I was not to be disappointed — he was a fascinating teacher! At the time I was a member of a small group of people putting out Boston's pioneering weekly Gay Community News, a seat-of-the-pants operation just then getting underway. He was warm and supportive, and I found his comments very helpful for my writing on GCN and elsewhere. Long after that class had concluded, I would run into him or talk with him on the phone, and he would always stop to give me some good advice. I also looked forward to reading his regular columns in the Globe and Phoenix. He made the art of journalism a little more comprehensible to a layperson and gave me the confidence to contribute to the public discourse when I felt I had something worth writing about.

— John Kyper, Roxbury

I learned of Lupo's passing in the backwards way I learn of many events these days. I was skimming the arts section of the Oregonian here in Portland and saw a review of Dennis Lehane's latest which I happened to be reading, and the reviewer, Jeff Baker, added a list of books related to Boston that he felt were also worth reading. I was happy to see Liberty's Chosen Home listed between The Last Hurrah and Johnny Tremain. Happy, that is until the second sentence which mentioned Alan's recent death.

Upon our first meeting, Alan shared his take on my father (they had crossed paths in Boston political circles years earlier) and how that had given me a hint of how my father was seen by people outside of family and friends. Since my father had died a few years earlier, at age 57, and I was still in my early 20s I had not gotten to really know him adult to adult. Alan's recollections helped me gain a more complete picture of him.

I wanted to write something which might help Alan's children gain some new insight into their dad but the fact that I found him a generous and sensitive soul surely is something that they already know. I can only add my name to the long list of people whose lives he touched in a very positive way.

— Michael Romanos, former Phoenix photographer, Portland, Oregon

When Al worked at the Phoenix office at 100 Mass Ave, he’d start each day with coffee, to which he’d religiously add a dram of ouzo from a bottle he kept in the file drawer of his desk. It was vile stuff, which he gladly offered to share — though he had few takers . . . and certainly no repeaters.

The very first time I met Al, he scared me. We were both covering, I think, a Joe Timilty flesh-presser at some benighted VFW in Dorchester. Anyway, it was some place overpopulated with elderly Irish women who loved Joe’s hair. The shawlies were swooning, I was taking pictures, and Al, who surely must have been there for the Herald or the Globe or some place, was just leaning in the doorway, unshaven and possibly smoking.

He said something to me — I forget what — about whatever campaign was going on, and the voice alone (never mind his size) reminded me of the kids who used to beat me up at the bus stop. I was also intimidated by the idea that Al was 10 years older than I was and probably knew all the nasty/funny things about Boston politics that I’d missed. (He did.)

Some years later, when we met again on more equal footing, I had trouble justifying his presence with that memory. The guy knew how to project an image, and his “Insider” columns for the Phoenix — powerful, poignant, or hilarious — are a j-school education unto themselves.

— Clif Garboden, Senior Managing Editor, Phoenix Newspaper Group

The first time I laid eyes on Alan Lupo he was delivering a guest lecture to a class I took at Boston University called Magazine Writing. This was either in 1969 or 1970 and our teacher was, as we called her, "Mrs. Lupo" — a/k/a Caryl Rivers, wife of Al Lupo (subsequently I learned that she called him "Loops"), and a well-regarded journalist in her own right. She was also one of the two or three best teachers I've ever had.

At the time I was 21 years old; Al was 31, and well on his way in a career as a first-rate cityside reporter. For which local paper he worked at the time I cannot say, but I'm pretty sure it was the Globe. He was a burly, plain-spoken guy with a gravelly voice and a Boston accent, but in no way was it Kennedy-esque or George Plimptonian.

Al had curly black hair and corny sideburns. I regarded him as another "old" guy who'd missed the sturm und drang and hurly-burly of the hippie ’60s (mostly because he was out earning a living) and was trying to look semi-hip. Nevertheless, I immediately thought to myself, as he figuratively opened to we students the reporter's notebook that was his life, "This is a man I would like to be."

At almost the exact same moment I thought, "This is a man I will never, ever be."

Because upon initial inspection, my hipster-wannabe self knew unquestionably that Al Lupo was the goods, a guy who loved the spade work, walking the streets, talking at some length to the subjects of his stories, and telling those stories as clearly and concisely as possible. His definition and mine of the verb "to dig" were worlds apart. Al knew the value of hard work; I, on the other hand, was — and, unfortunately, am to this day — an aesthete, a snob and a dilettante.

I lived in my head. Al lived in, reveled in, and reported expertly on, the Real World. Straight, no chaser.

Years later, Al and I were colleagues, after a fashion, at the Boston Phoenix. I doubt that he remembered my face from the small crowd that day in his beloved wife's class, but at the Phoenix he was only great to me. Friendly, funny, and a guy who seemed to have more than a passing interest in early rock 'n' roll (e.g. Big Joe Turner) and some jazz, although I imagine he'd have told me that he couldn't carry a tune in a wheelbarrow.

I hadn't seen Alan Lupo for some years before I learned on the evening of Monday Sept. 29, 2008 that he'd gone from this life into that. He was smart and compassionate, one who actually believed in the perfectibility of humankind, a notion in which I, too, would like to believe but, alas, cannot . . . at least not yet. Al never took himself too seriously — his family's dog and cat were, after all, named "Jane" and "Kitty Widdums," respectively — but he took his work very seriously.

What better way to live a full and valuable life?

— James Isaacs 10/2/'08,
former Phoenix music columnist

The people's gravelly voice

CLIF GARBODEN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:23:36 GMT

Alan Lupo, 1938–2008
There’s a lot to be said about Alan Lupo. All of it good. Much of it colorful as hell.

Get over it

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:17:42 GMT

What every freshman should know about going to college in Boston
Okay, you survived the college-application process; you filled out the miserable FAFSA forms; you sweated out the wait for acceptance letters; and cut your best financial-aid deal.

Okay, you survived the college-application process; you filled out the miserable FAFSA forms; you sweated out the wait for acceptance letters; and cut your best financial-aid deal. You blocked traffic in front of the dorm while you unloaded your shit, met the pimply-faced assholes who will be your roommates, waved goodbye to your trepidatious parents, and now you’re on your own. You the man!

Actually, no, you’re not. Back in high school, to hear you tell it anyway, you were a goddamn god; now you’re just somebody else’s pimply-faced roommate. Get over it. And while you’re binding and gagging that unearned ego, get prepared for an entire semester’s worth of smaller adjustments. Long before your time, a comedy troupe called the Firesign Theatre preached: “Everything you know is wrong.”

They were right. Boston isn’t wherever you’re from, and there are lots of notions and expectations new students in our city need to put behind them. Like, immediately.

Among the more immediate are ZEBRA CROSSINGS — those inviting pathways of diagonal white lines painted on the street at intersections. You may think there’s a law that cars have to stop and let you cross if you so much as cast your shadow onto one of these. After all, pedestrians have rights! Inside a zebra crosswalk, you’re as safe as if you were flanked by the offensive line of the ’78 Steelers. There is such a law, but if you believe the rest, you’re going to die. In Boston, no car even slows down for a mere mortal. You can explain about your rights to the EMTs as the ambulance mows down other pedestrians rushing you to Mass General. The only safe way to cross a Boston street is in the middle of the block. That way you can spot anything that might run over you in time. We are not kidding about this.

Do you believe in BIKE LANES? Yeah, hey, everybody wants to be green. Don’t pollute; ride your bike to class. The city encourages this by painting more lines on the streets— lines defining narrow makeshift corridors between the cars parked at the curb and the cars weaving in and out of traffic at 40 miles per hour. Like zebra crossings, bike lanes are not safe havens. They are death traps. If, asserting your rights as a cyclist, you pedal along them, you will 1) have to stop short for a double-parked UPS truck; 2) be hit by the opening door of a parked car; 3) be sideswiped by somebody driving like a drunk Asian nun on a cell phone. You’re better off taking your chances in the real traffic lanes. Trust us.

Terror 'toonist

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:29:00 GMT

Dept. of gallows humor
Earlier this month, syndicated cartoonist Matt Bors found a new fan in none other than Salim Hamdan, the man tried and convicted for once having been Osama Bin Laden’s driver.

Victim, not vixen

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:59:43 GMT

Sex, death, and the filthy rich
Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

INNOCENT: Evelyn Nesbit at age 17, posed as half child and half woman by Photo-Secessionist portraitist Gertrude Käsebier.

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century | by Paula Uruburu | Riverhead Books | 372 pages | $27.95

Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So said many at the turn of the century, and looking back at the visual record of her youth, you’re hard-pressed to argue. She also had terrible taste in men and consequently became the central figure in a 1906 homicide scandal that claimed, and has maintained, the title “crime of the century.”

Nesbit’s father died young, and her waifish beauty, contravening the buxom-and-pudgy Victorian ideal, made her, at age 14, America’s most popular artists’ model. Evelyn took her charms to the Broadway chorus line, from which she was snatched by society architect Stanford White, who in turn befriended, supported, and, when she was 16, raped her, after which she became his underage mistress. Mentally ill Pittsburgh millionaire heir Harry Thaw vied for her attention; he took Evelyn to Europe, where he sadistically beat her as punishment for enduring White’s “seduction.”

Evelyn nevertheless married Thaw in 1905. They lived in Pittsburgh with his pious nouveau riche Presbyterian family, who held her in the kind of contempt today reserved for porn stars. Then while on a trip to New York, Thaw assassinated White during a musical staged on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The subsequent trials exposed Evelyn’s sordid past and set legal precedent for the insanity defense.

It’s a famous story, dramatized by Hollywood in the 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (which starred 22-year-old Joan Collins as Nesbit), and drastically reimagined as fiction by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Nesbit herself published two, sometimes inconsistent, accounts: The Story of My Life (1907) and Prodigal Days (1934).

Never has this awful tale been better researched or described than in Hofstra University English professor Paula Uruburu’s American Eve, which sets a lot of records straight. To say that Uruburu takes Nesbit’s side oversimplifies the deep and subtle arguments she makes in the defamed showgirl’s defense. Uruburu defuses the obvious question — “What was she thinking?!” — by building a psychological profile in which sexual naïveté plus parental abandonment aggravated by an unearned notoriety based on looks alone adds up to certain doom. Is this telling the story from the “woman’s point of view?” Yes, but American Eve is by no means an exaggerated or strident feminist tract. And it is, after all, a woman’s story.

Repression illustrated

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:46:20 GMT

People’s history in graphic format
Graphic novels are an acquired taste.

JUST THE FACTS: Geary’s Hoover is a masterpiece of understatement.

J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography | By Rick Geary | Hill & Wang | 110 pages | $16.95

Graphic novels are an acquired taste. Because they’re often driven as much by the art as by a theme, their stories tend to be, uh . . . non-linear. Which is a nice way of saying they don’t make a whole lot of sense. Not so with National Lampoon/Heavy Metal illustrator Rick Geary’s graphic bio of the notorious FBI strongman, J. Edgar Hoover, or American Splendor author Harvey Pekar’s anthology of new-left living-history reminiscences, Students for a Democratic Society.

Geary’s Hoover is about as linear and minimalist a narrative as you could ask for, reeking of non-judgmental detachment that creates a masterpiece of understatement. Railing against the pompous, unyielding, dictatorial, hypocritical, closeted-gay, right-wing-extremist FBI chief would be your basic barrel-fish target exercise. Fun, but not convincing. Geary’s flat delivery, by contrast, makes Hoover’s bodacious sins, which will be as unfamiliar as they are astonishing to younger generations, all the more believable for presenting them in the passively accepting context in which they were committed.

The panel addressing FDR’s empowerment of the Bureau reads simply: “Roosevelt authorized telephone wiretaps, although such abridgment of civil rights was of questionable legality.” On Hoover’s dossier on Eleanor Roosevelt: “The first lady did not share her husband’s camaraderie with the director. . . . To Hoover, Mrs. Roosevelt was the worst sort of ‘sentimental moo-cow’ — a bleeding heart for the enemies of American society.” On competition from the newly formed CIA: “He immediately ordered a policy of non-cooperation between the FBI and this upstart group.”

Neither does Geary’s art add much excitement to the words. If anything, the images are even calmer and more matter-of-fact than the narrative, the action depicted lacking all passion — which makes the darkest points powerfully ironic. The tone is a deft parody of the goody-goody text style used in, say, the Hillary Clinton coloring book that used to be available at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock. It adds up to very sophisticated way of letting readers understand that Hoover was scum.

Phoenix.com wins at AAN conference

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:37:25 GMT

A line drive triple in Philly
ThePhoenix.com Web site won first place at the annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference.

It is the heat

CLIF GARBODEN — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:18:23 GMT

. . . though humidity plays its part. Either way, global warming means sweating it out this summer.
“Going green” may be an annoying trendy catch phrase, but there’s something to be said for turning down the global thermostat before we all drown in a pool of our own sweat.

“Going green” may be an annoying trendy catch phrase, but there’s something to be said for turning down the global thermostat before we all drown in a pool of our own sweat.

Picture yourself on a hot, sticky summer day. Your shirt has cemented your shoulders to the back of your chair; your underarms itch; your pants are way too tight in the crotch; there’s a puddle of condensation ruining the finish on your kitchen table all around your Captain and Coke. You say something unoriginal like, “Christ, I hate this heat,” and some nearby asshole admonishes you with something even less original: “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

Okay, he’s kind of right, but he’s still pathetic for saying it.

The air-water complex
Here’s how it works. “Humidity” refers to the amount of water that’s vaporized in the air. That water comes from pretty much the same places all our water comes from — the estimated reserve of 326 million cubic miles of the stuff distributed across the planet among oceans, rivers, streams, underground springs, and the polar ice caps. Water combines with the air through the familiar process of evaporation. The warmer the air gets, the more water vapor that air can hold. So hot and humid go together naturally, like cold and dry or jocks and PBR.

When Harvey Leonard or J.C. Monahan or anyone of a broadcast-meteorological bent tells you the humidity is, say, 25 percent, they’re talking about relative humidity, which is to say the amount of water in the air relative to the maximum amount of water air could hold at a given temperature (be it current or predicted).

Got that? There’s a whole lot more to explain and a lot more other factors involved, but that’s the basic concept. (If you’re curious about how confusing it can get, check out the Wikipedia entry on “humidity,” which was apparently written by a full-time nerd and edited by a part-time chimp.)

Hold the thought.

Yeah, but it’s a dry heat
Now imagine yourself in Arizona. The thermometer reads 95 degrees Fahrenheit. (All temperature references in this article will be expressed in Fahrenheit, because, as any real American knows, Celsius is for sissies.) You say something obvious like, “Christ, I hate this heat,” and some nearby asshole waxes sage and retorts: “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.”

Screw him. As if that’s some kind of compensation for having your lungs recoil with every breath. What’s his point? To shift blame away from the too-oft-maligned concept of temperature? Bottom line, it’s too damn hot.

Keeping the faith

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:02:36 GMT

Mobe turns 30
Boston has a good rep in progressive circles for being on the right side — most of the time — on every social/political issue since slavery.

Ding Ho home

CLIF GARBODEN — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:31:27 GMT

Comedy benefit adds second show
Opening a comedy club in a Cambridge Chinese restaurant was a laughable idea unto itself.

Not fade away

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:51:32 GMT

Ain't no party like a Wormtown party
Wormtown. It's a state of being, an alternative reality, a club-music subculture centered in Worcester, Massachusetts.

BOSOM BUDDIES: The notorious Captain PJ with then Worcester mayor and current Massachusetts lieutenant governor Tim Murray at Wormtown's 25th-anniversary party at Ralphs, in 2003.

Wormtown. It's a state of being, an alternative reality, a club-music subculture centered in Worcester, Massachusetts. It's 30 years old and it may or may not be on it's last legs. Those familiar with the undergroundish institution neither need nor ask for further explanation. Newcomers to the scene may or may not have arrived too late ever to really get it.

But basically, back in 1978, a grassroots pro-punk/hippies-suck initiative coalesced around a Worcester fanzine called Wormtown Punk Punk Press. The name Wormtown, if not the original mission, stuck, and as recently as 2007, the Lucky Dog Music Hall kept the idea alive by hosting weekly local band showcases called Wormtown Wednesdays. Via a string of teen garage bands, Wormtown has re-invented itself numerous times — serially embracing punk, hardcore, alt-rock, ska, speed-metal, and whatever else dared assume its name.

In short, it's a fungible scene — complete with its own pantheon of band-legends and it's own "You Know You're in Worcester" gaggle of regulars. This weekend, Wormtown will celebrate itself with two nights of reunion shows at Ralph’s Chadwick Square Diner. The Friday, May 2, program features the Commandos (late-’70s punk), the Pathetics (1996 neo-punk), Black Rose Garden (early-’90s angst fronted by the lion-voiced Rose Elliott), and the Numbskulls (2001 neo-neo-punk). Saturday's lineup includes the Performers (1980, "Worcester's answer to the Clash"), the Odds (1981 retro-garage), the Prefab Messiahs with Bobb Trimble (art-punk et al), and Boston's the Classic Ruins (garage/rock).

When the Phoenix newspapers launched a Worcester edition in 1992, I was tapped to be editor of the satellite start-up. The Wormtown scene was well in place when we got there, and while I longed to embrace it in the pages of the Worcester Phoenix (such bands were considered "disreputable" by the Worcester establishment and got scant press coverage), I hesitated to presume or intrude on what was clearly something with a life of its own — media support or no media support. No matter. After a year of weekly local-music coverage penned by the ever-faithful (Reverend) Joe Longone and a couple of Phoenix-sponsored local-band showcases, Wormtown embraced us. Thus began an alliance — centered on the annual Phoenix Best Music Poll — through which I met the bands and the fans and, thereby, found a home away from home.

Our championship season

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:30:36 GMT

Brilliant us
This year’s New England Press Association annual awards dinner forsook the Park Plaza’s rubber chicken for the upper-scale poultry fare at the Marriott Copley Place. And the food’s not the only reason we’re glad we went.

This year’s New England Press Association (NEPA) annual awards dinner forsook the Park Plaza’s rubber chicken for the upper-scale poultry fare at the Marriott Copley Place. And the food’s not the only reason we’re glad we went.

In all, the Phoenix Newspaper Group harvested 23 prizes for works published between August 2006 and August 2007, including 16 first-place wins. To top it all off, the Boston Phoenix won the coveted George A. Speers Newspaper of the Year Award, considered the prize of prizes in the NEPA contest.

Allow us one brief excessive brag. The judges’ comments regarding our Speers win said: “After 40 years, the Boston Phoenix remains a model for alts, bristling with attitude and loaded with coverage . . .”

The comments accompanying our General Excellence grab were even more flattering and flowery: “The paper zigs and zags with nary a yawning take on situations.”

Thanks, we needed that.

Congrats to our combined staffs for their individual and collective contributions to this outstanding year. And we did it all without Tom Brady.

FIRST PLACE —The Boston Phoenix
General Excellence in the Alternative Newspaper class for the issues of November 10, 2006, and May 11, 2007.

Arts & Entertainment Section Alternative class for the issue of September 29, 2006.

Investigative Reporting David S. Bernstein for “$50 Million Mistakes,” an exposé of the high cost of settling civil complaints against the city of Boston (September 29, 2006).

Business Reporting Mike Miliard for “Choosing Our Religion,” his report on New England’s love affair with Dunkin’ Donuts (March 2, 2007).

Editorial Writing for Phoenix editorials on the machinations of former state attorney general Tom Reilly (September 8, 2006), hand-gun control (April 27, 2007), and same-sex marriage (January 5, 2007).

General News Story David S. Bernstein for “She Who Controls the Purse,” which ran down rumors involving State Senator Therese Murray and the Mass Tourism Board (February 9, 2007).

History Reporting James Parker for “You Say You Want a Revolution,” an account of the author’s weekend with a group of rockin’ Revolutionary War re-enactors (July 20, 2007).

Serious Columnist Harvey Silverglate for his “Freedom Watch” columns “Blues & Blood,” on local DOJ corruption prosecutions (September 8, 2006), and “Shut My Mouth,” decrying student self-censorship at Tufts and Brandeis (May 18, 2007).

Sports Story Mike Miliard for “Home of the Braves,” a nostalgic look at that other Boston baseball team (May 11, 2007).

Feature Photo Freelancer Eric Levin for his “Best” supplement photo of Brookline News, (April 20, 2007).

Thought for food

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:43:58 GMT

A million words for rice
If you’re going to waste your time (or your company’s time) online, stop thinking about porn or poker and do something constructive.

Tritown flashback

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:42:19 GMT

The return of Hollis the Mountain Man
Except for its art museum, Fitchburg is generally off the Phoenix radar.

The only game in town

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:01:36 GMT

Sox fever grips the Hub
Memo received and understood, chiefs.

Worth remembering

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:19:12 GMT

Abortion on trial
In 1975, Dr. Kenneth Edelin was a household name in Boston.

The dirtiest cop

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:25:08 GMT

How Times Square corrupted the 20th century
This is what history writing should be.

TRUE CRIME: The web of details and
motivations in Dash’s book outshadows any
noir master’s contrivance.

“Trial of the century” may be going a bit far. The almost contemporaneous judgment supporting millionaire Harry Thaw’s insanity-plea defense after his public assassination of architect Stanford White had far longer-lived impact on the 1900s. Yet the 1912 murder conviction of New York City police lieutenant Charles Becker deserves its innings. For one thing, he didn’t do it. Becker, a super-dirty cop who had indeed done many bad things, was framed by craven gang interests and railroaded to Sing Sing by an ambitious DA. More important, he ultimately was sentenced to death, and he became the only policeman ever executed in America.

Fascinating as the story is, this tale of mob hits and judicial miscarriage is merely the tantalizing underpinning for historian Mike Dash’s richly researched portrait of turn-of-the-century New York’s demi-monde. Satan’s Circus draws on published histories, personal diaries, court records, interview transcripts, and letters so exhaustively that even snippets of private conversations are 100 percent authenticated. The incredibly complex web of details and motivations that emerges outshadows any noir master’s contrivance.

The book’s central figure is neither Becker nor any of the saga’s cavalcade of gangsters and gamblers with colorful names like Dago Frank Cirofici, Kid Twist, Lefty Louie, Gyp the Blood, Bald Jack Rose, Dollar John, and Dopey Benny. Rather, the focus is the title real estate — Satan’s Circus, nickname for the lucrative vice-saturated blocks around Times Square, a neighborhood where the underworld really could, and did, “meet the elite.”

Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, And New York’s Trial Of The Century | By Mike Dash | Crown | 354 Pages | $24.95

The Lower West Side blocks between 23rd and 57th Streets didn’t have a monopoly on grafting, gambling, and prostitution. An intricate network of criminal activities and payoffs — administered by city-hall bosses, the political machines’ influential district captains, gang lords, and cops — funneled tainted cash to (mostly) the Democratic Party and divided much of Manhattan into turfs. The teeming fiefdoms were ruled by ethnocentric organized crime groups — chiefly Jews, Italians, Irish, and the less cohesive but cleaner-imaged Germans (who had the upper hand by dint of early arrival). In immigrant-flooded post–Gilded Age urban America, everyone and every institution — political, social, business, or criminal — was characterized first and most by ethnicity.

The uneasy peace among struggling factions institutionalized civic vitiation and defined a power structure, hierarchy, economy, and social order as influential as anything above ground. Corruption’s near-total infiltration of the elected establishment created an extortion-funded alliance that worked to everyone’s short-term benefit.

Home grown terror

CLIF GARBODEN — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:37:05 GMT

Cathy Wilkerson's memoir of the Weather Underground recalls a time when revolution seemed possible
Cathy Wilkerson, 62-year-old math teacher and mother of one, was famous long ago, as a member of the radical political collective Weatherman.

A POLITICAL ODYSSEY: Cathy Wilkerson, as an active member of national SDS, rallying students to the organization and the movement.

Underground cinema
Two documentary films cover the activities of the Weather Underground in first-person interviews with some of the group’s high-profile members. Director Emile de Antonio’s 1976 Underground, made while many of the principals were still in hiding, includes segments featuring Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, and Bernadine Dohrn. Copies of the film are difficult to find. A flashier and more disturbing 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, adds Todd Gitlin and Mark Rudd to that list, but Wilkerson does not appear.

Crisis housing
The "townhouse explosion" destroyed an historic building at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village. The house was once owned by Charles Merrill, of Merrill-Lynch fame, and later by lyricist Howard Dietz ("That's Entertainment"). At the time of the blast, Dustin Hoffman lived next door. The current structure at that address, designed by architect Hugh Hardy, stands out — literally — from the block's row of flat 1840s Federalist facades. Hardy's plan pays a sort of tribute to the 1970 explosion by having the new building's front rooms set at an angle, causing them to protrude toward the sidewalk as if the structure had been turned on its foundation by some mighty upheaval.

By actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people’s minds and wins converts. One such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets. Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt . . .
— Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, The Spirit of Revolt, 1880

Cathy Wilkerson, 62-year-old math teacher and mother of one, was, to quote “Desolation Row,” famous long ago, as a member of the radical political collective Weatherman, whose name references another Dylan song. To understate it in the extreme, Weatherman and Wilkerson were controversial players in the late-1960s–early-’70s anti-war movement. Thirty-seven years after a bombing-plot-gone-wrong put her name in the headlines and her face on FBI most-wanted posters, Wilkerson has chronicled the trajectory of her personal involvement in radical politics in an autobiography, Flying Close to the Sun (Seven Stories Press; 393 pages; $26.95).

Unlike the majority of ’60s anti-war activists, Weatherman advocated armed conflict with the war-makers and all who sailed with them, particularly cops, banks, military contractors, and imperialist corporations. While millions across America were demonstrating against the war inside confrontational limits set by the nonviolent tactical legacy of the civil-rights movement, Weatherman, in the spirit of 19th-century Communist anarchists, was provoking the police into street tussles and planting home-made bombs in politically ugly nexus.

The War is swell

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:00:45 GMT

Ken Burns captures reflections in ‘Hell’s own cesspool’
Sometime in the late ’80s, I was sharing some Iron City with my father at the bar of a Pittsburgh American Legion post.

VIDEO: A preview of The War

The War: An Intimate History | WGBH: September 23-26, 30 + October 1-2 At 8 PM

THE LINE-UP
1_“A Necessary War”: September 23: 8-10:30 pm
2_“When Things Get Tough”: September 24: 8-10 pm
3_“A Deadly Calling”: September 25: 8-10 pm
4_“Pride of Our Nation”: September 26: 8-10:30 pm
5_“FUBAR”: September 30: 8-10:30 pm
6_“The Ghost Front”: October 1: 8-10 pm
7_“A World Without War”: October 2: 8-10:30 pm

Sometime in the late ’80s, I was sharing some Iron City with my father at the bar of a Pittsburgh American Legion post. My dad served in World War II, on the destroyer escort Roche, in the North Atlantic and South Pacific. Prompted by the predominance of self-absorbed, career-drinking sixtysomethings around us, I asked, “When they let you out of the Navy, did anybody tell you what to say — warn you what you weren’t supposed to talk about?”

“No, they just gave us our discharge papers and told us to go home.”

“So what was it really like aboard ship? Were you afraid all the time?”

“Mostly, it was boring. There was nothing you could do about anything, so you just lived day to day and did your job. Something could happen any time. You never talked about it. We acted like it was normal.”

WW2 made the United States a superpower, but at what price?

You’d expect Ken Burns’s 16-hour PBS mega-documentary, The War (shown in seven installments beginning this Sunday, September 23, at 8 pm on Channel 2), which fixates on the personal wartime experiences of US combat troops who waged the Allied campaigns against Germany and Japan, to make up for vets’ remarkable lack of insightful reminisces about World War II.

It does and it doesn’t.

Through extensive (and extensively edited) interviews with articulate and carefully selected veterans, who happened to take part in most of the war’s major events, and their families, The War does offer fresh, and very human, insights into how awful the experience really was. But also it’s clear that for individual servicemen, WW2’s on-the-ground context was narrow and mystifying. Incredible events took place — victories, defeats, hardships, and blunders — that are now understood in big-picture perspective but that were experienced, and are often recalled, as isolated triumphs and terrors.

By the end of the series, the interview subjects’ increasingly grim personal pictures of the fabled crusade for democracy no longer match the sometimes glib bravado of the film’s narration. It’s as if there had been two wars — one for public consumption (positive and patriotic) and one that was an experience of the soul (puzzling and private).

Everybody say, ‘Arragh’

CLIF GARBODEN — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:57:11 GMT

Two excellent books about pirates
Each of these books bears a tongue-in-cheekily arcane subtitle.

AYE, MATIE!: Talty’s history of Captain Morgan is both informative political history and grand adventure tale.

Empire Of Blue Water | by Stephan Talty | Crown | 305 Pages | $24.95

The Republic Of Pirates | by Colin Woodard | Harcourt | 328 Pages | $27

Each of these books bears a tongue-in-cheekily arcane subtitle. Stephan Talty’s Empire of Blue Water’s continues: “Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign.” Colin Woodard’s Republic of Pirates prattles pompously on about “Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.” Read in order (Empire first) these histories cover American piracy from its privateering origins following the first British conquest in the Caribbean (Jamaica, 1655) through the violent death of Edward Thatch (a/k/a Blackbeard, 1718) and piracy’s subsequent rapid dénouement.

Both authors are journalists, and both volumes are seriously researched (far-flung period documents abound), but Woodard’s Republic is the more traditionally scholarly, in that its chronicle is faultlessly thorough — often telling you far more than you can, or need to, remember. (The litany of captured, renamed, scuttled, and refitted pirate ships is beyond meaning and interest, except perhaps to cranky old men who re-enact naval encounters with toy boats in their bathtubs.) Empire of Blue Water, by contrast, is a sparkling and engrossing adventure narrative presented in the deeper context of international political history. Either is well worth your time. Together they’ll make you a pillaging expert.

Empire focuses on the (usually) sanctioned piracy of Sir Henry Morgan and the buccaneer empire at Jamaica’s Port Royal. That lawless outpost was obliterated by an earthquake in 1692, and the pirates were left to go freelance. Eventually they set up shop at New Providence in the Bahamas, which is where Republic picks up the story.

The books seldom contradict each other. Beyond the particulars and (in Woodard’s case) minutiae of their narratives, they offer a host of revelations about Carribean pirates — way beyond anything Hollywood has ever explored. Among the things you’ll learn:

• Piracy was no bit player in the New World drama. It was an essential factor in keeping Spain from dominating the Americas, and it diminished that country’s status back in Europe. The conquistadors got here first and established a pipeline of Latin American riches to fund the expansion of the Spanish Empire. Piracy interrupted the eastward flow of gold and silver, bankrupting the genetically imperiled Spanish monarchy.