Jack Adams

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Charlie Baker visits Fields Corner, Dorchester

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*accompanies Performing for peace story

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Performing for Peace

Appeared in the Somerville Times

Somerville –– Mass. Every year for the past eight years, the Somerville Center for Teen Empowerment holds a Youth Peace Conference. The 2014 conference was hosted last Saturday evening at the East Somerville Community School, reopened this year after it burned down 10 years ago.

This year’s conference was called “Rising from the Ashes,” a nod to the rebuilding of the East Somerville Community School having risen from its former ashes. Stephanie Berkowitz, the director of external relations at the Center for Teen Empowerment, said it was also a reference to how all of Somerville has bounced back after setbacks over the years.

At this year’s event, there was an ice cream social in the school’s cafeteria before the stage show began. Many of the Teen Empowerment Center’s partnering organizations, including Groundwork Somerville, Somerville Community Access TV and Bridge over Troubled Waters, had tables and spoke with students.

The peace conference is the culmination of an entire year’s worth of work for the students hired by the Center.

“We hire students all year long,” Berkowitz said. “There’s a group of about 10 or 12 youth that are working in a whole variety of initiatives throughout the year to address different community issues that affect the youth.”

Mayor Joe Curtatone spoke at the beginning of the stage show, and was followed by students performing various scenes, as well as giving personal anecdotes. Two kids acted out a scenario where the girl is trying to do her homework, while the boy wants her to smoke a joint with him. She refuses and says she is worried that he won’t pass his test. By the end, her concern breaks through to him, and he promises to pay more attention to his schoolwork.

Another skit featured a girl who had been impregnated by her boyfriend and kicked out of the house by her father. She told her boyfriend she expected him to bear some of the burden of raising the child, which she intended to keep. The boyfriend acted responsibly and promised to be there for his girlfriend, as well as their expected child. Most of the stories ended on similarly positive notes.

A highlight was the performance by Kourtney-Shea Yurko and Saladin Islam, both high school graduates. Islam played guitar while Yurko sang her heart out. Islam was the youth coordinator at Groundwork Somerville last summer, Berkowitz said.

Berkowitz said she does not know what is in store for next year’s conference, other than that it will be happening.

“The youth that we hire over the summer and the fall will have input into what [next year’s] event looks like,” she said. “Also, the Somerville Youth Workers Network plays a part in working together to figure out exactly what the format will be each year. So far all of the youth conferences have included an original stage show like the one that we just had, and sometimes it’s during the day time, sometimes it’s been at night, sometimes it’s included workshops and all different kinds of things. It all just depends on what the planners next year decide.”

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Turkey Plays Chicken in Harvard Square

Appeared in Spare Change

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Although no one knows for sure how long it’s been there, whether a couple months or more, it appears that the Harvard Square turkey is there to stay.

Miraculously still alive in an area notorious for bad driving, the turkey spends its days either walking causally the wrong way down Mass Ave. or posing for confused pedestrians snapping photos with their phones. The turkey travels between Harvard Square and Central, always alone.

Mark McCabe, director of the Cambridge Animal Commission, said there is little his department can do besides keep an eye on the turkey.

“We don’t do anything. We do evaluate it every once in a while and make sure that it appears healthy and is not injured or anything like that. We don’t try to catch it; it is against the law to catch wildlife and move it anywhere other than where it’s at,” said McCabe.

He added that if they were to catch it, they would either have to release it exactly where they caught it, or have it humanely killed. “We’re not going to have it humanely killed just because it’s there,” he said. “Some people want us to chase it and move it, try to get it to go somewhere where it’s not in the middle of Mass Ave. … a lot of the time we don’t like to chase it because then it gets to a point where the animal gets nervous, and will be moving faster than it normally would, and doing things it wouldn’t normally do. It’s a situation where it could get hit by a car when we chase it.”

The turkey has become very popular on Universal Hub, where people regularly submit photos of the bird strutting through Harvard Square. When people unfamiliar with the turkey notice it on the street, they often stop and photograph it. “[The turkey] is probably one of the most photographed things in Harvard Square or Central Square. On a visit to the area there will be the whole Harvard University behind them and they’re taking a picture of the turkey that’s in the grassy area, or right across from the Hong Kong Restaurant or the Dunkin Donuts or whatever,” said McCabe.

Despite regularly stepping in front of cars, seemingly without any regard for its own wellbeing, the turkey has never been hit. Cars will typically stop to let the turkey pass at its own plodding pace. “He’s moving at a slow enough pace that somebody will have enough time to see him and slow down, and a lot of the time have to come to a complete stop. The person behind them doesn’t know why they’re stopped, they start beeping the horn, getting all upset. It causes quite a ruckus,” said McCabe. He also said that because turkeys are so large they are hard for drivers to miss, and considering how slowly traffic typically moves through Harvard Square, drivers have plenty of time to see the turkey and stop.

Typically, turkeys travel in groups of either all females or males, and they do not tend to stay in the same place, as they are not territorial birds. The Harvard Square turkey defies both of these behaviors.

“It may just be an outlier, that is to say it’s an individual that at some point found its way there and for whatever reason is not breeding, and is just, you know, living out its life in Harvard Square. It just likes Harvard Square. Within any given population of animals and organisms, there are always going to be some that are not in the mainstream, if you know what I mean, that are sort of doing their own thing. I think it’s reasonable to think the one in Harvard Square would fall in that category,” said Wayne Peterson of the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Like most organisms in Harvard Square, the turkey doesn’t want to be mainstream. Just wait until the turkey starts frequenting Urban Outfitters.

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McCain Visits Harvard

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Heartbreak hill on Marathon day

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Tatyana McFadden, winner of the 118th Boston Marathon Women's wheelchair race, visits Spaulding Rehab Center.

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Heartbreak hill on marathon day

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*Accompanies Fresh Media Story

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‘Fresh Media’ encourages interaction

Appeared in The Somerville Times on 4/9/2014

By Jack Adams

Fresh Media held its opening reception at the Nave Gallery in Somerville this past Friday. Fresh Media is an exhibition of interactive works put on by the Dynamic Media Institute, which is comprised of graduate students at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The exhibit will stay open through April 11.

Fresh Media’s website describes itself as “a unique prototyping event presented in a gallery environment. We use this opportunity to conduct user-testing and to think beyond the classroom.”

Most of the pieces on display were interactive. Artist Sofie Elena Hodara’s piece, called “IHear,” requires the viewer to put on headphones and move their hand above a small black box.

“[IHear] is a little box that plays music. The idea is that as you put on the headphones, you can interact with the sounds, and you manipulate them,” Hodara said.

The IHear has four light sensors, each one connected to a different recording of a cellphone ringtone. As you move your hand closer, the ringtones get faster.

“The idea is that by manipulating these ringtones, the piece is sort of asking its user to reconsider the relationship they have with their devices,” Hodara said. “It’s really fun to play with, that’s the main point. You play and then, through sort of this playful process, you hear these things as ringtones.”

To make the piece, Hodara used computing hardware called Arduino and free software called Pure Data. She mapped the light sensors to the ringtones, as well as four LED lights, to show which ringtones were activated.

“It’s taken me a while; it’s a little bit of math,” she said. “I think what was hard for me was learning how to program, how to use the programming tool in the way that I needed to.”

Artist Phil Gedarovich took a slightly different approach with his piece, called “Brain Drain.”

“The idea behind the Brain Drain is that it’s sort of an educational piece, where you interact with parts of the brain and then learn about the functions of that area,” Gedarovich said.

In addition to being a student and an artist, Gedarovich also helped curate the exhibit. He said the Fresh Media show is a prototype exhibition and a way for the students involved to get feedback on their pieces.

The Brain Drain is supposed to teach viewers about their own brains and how the different parts function. It consists of a malleable plastic brain on a table with a screen in front of it. When the viewer pushes on a particular part of the brain, information about that part comes up on the screen.

“The idea with this is that it involves touch and tactile qualities to help encourage remembering of things. You touch a part of the brain, and then it presents information about that particular structure of the brain,” Gedarovich said.

Although in the Nave Gallery the brain was on a table with all of the other art, Gedarovich said he would prefer if the piece were by itself in a dark room, where the viewer would have to sit and also wear the brain on their head. He said he wants the whole experience to feel as if you were about to be brainwashed.

“I’m trying to design unexpected experiences,” he said. “I’m sort of calling it subversive, with a question mark, design. It’s sort of a creepy or strange thing that you wouldn’t want to touch, but then it ends up being beneficial.”

A piece called “Germ’d” requires the viewers to draw their own germs, which then appear floating around on a large screen.

“The idea is it’s a PSA, but the “P” stands for “participatory,” to raise people’s awareness about germs by drawing their own versions and having them hang out,” artist Fish McGill said. “By engaging with it, it gets you to think about germs in a deeper way.”

McGill said that although the Javascript he needed to code the piece was difficult to learn, having a concept of what he wanted to make helped him.

“[Javascript is] difficult, but once you have an idea of what you want to do, you find the people that know certain things,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘Today we’re going to make baking soda; today we’re going to make flour instead of having an actual recipe. I’m going to make a pie; what are we going to need for that?’ Rather than ingredients-based learning, this is recipe-based learning.”

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Chris Loper, GM of forum, the restaurant damaged in the marathon bombings, discusses the his restaurant's plans for the anniversary of the bombings. 

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Dic Donohue, wounded transit officer, discussing his plans for the marathon anniversary. 

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Photos accompany Maple syrup story

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Boiling it Down

Appeared in Somerville Times

By Jack Adams

Somerville residents and people from as far as Connecticut gathered to witness Groundwork Somerville’s Maple Syrup Project Boil-Down at The Growing Center in Somerville this past Saturday. Groundwork Somerville’s “Green Team” demonstrated the syrup-making process, from tapping the sugar maple for sap to boiling the raw sap into syrup.

In the several weeks leading up to the event, Groundwork Somerville staff members, along with volunteers, tapped sugar maples on the Tufts University campus. Most of the sap they gathered was boiled beforehand at the Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville, a partner of Groundwork Somerville. At the boil-down itself, the remaining sap was poured into a large metal boiler, where about 85 percent of the water in the sap evaporated. The boiling-down process is finished later on a stovetop, where the sap is boiled down into pure syrup.

Green Team Coordinator Kristin Delviscio said it takes 43 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. While they typically gather about 260 gallons of sap, they only collected about half of that this year. The sap yield was so much lower this year because it has been too cold.

“When it’s freezing at night and not freezing during the day is when the sap is flowing up from the roots and into the leaves to feed the foliage that’s on its way. It’s really like pulling out the tree’s blood,” Lead Gardens Educator Sadie Richards said.

To take the sap from sugar maples, the Green Team uses a hand drill to make a small hole, into which they put a spigot that allows the sap to flow out. They tap between eight and 10 trees to get enough sap.

Groundwork Somerville Executive Director Chris Mancini has been participating in the annual boil down event long before he started working for Groundwork.

“I have an even longer history with it than Groundwork because I went to graduate school at Tufts, and there were some undergrads there who were doing this project,” he said. “They had taken it over from a community member who had been doing it at a very casual level, where he would tap one or two trees. I had met them and joined up because I wanted to be a part of them. It sounded like a very interesting project. They all graduated, but I lived here, so I ran the project as a lone volunteer, although not alone; I had a lot of other volunteers. We did a lot of organizing through Tufts, and then I had gotten a full-time job somewhere else and I knew Groundwork, so I kind of turned it over to them and they took it on. Then four years later I applied for the job as the executive director, so I have a great fondness for this project.”

The purpose of the event is to educate, and Mancini said they target the event towards families with kids. Groundwork used to take the boiling demonstration to second-grade classrooms but was unable to this year due to lack of funding.

Mancini said he hoped for a good turnout this year, saying that the previous year about 750 people came to the boil-down over the course of a day.

At the boil-down, high school kids employed by the Green Jobs Program, a program for low-income youth, sold pancakes with cups of syrup (from the supermarket). Three of the volunteers had cooked 200 pancakes that morning over the course of three hours at a kitchen donated by Cuisine en Locale.

Groundwork Somerville will sell the syrup made during the boil-down, which Mancini claims is the “most delicious syrup.”

The boil-down is the only event of its kind in Greater Boston, Mancini said, before correcting himself.

“Someone told me there might be another one in Larz Anderson Park,” he said, “but we’re the main one. We’re the best one.”

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Somerville Theatre celebrates centennial

Appeared in Somerville Times

By Jack Adams

From this past January and through May 11, the Somerville Theatre is celebrating its 100-year anniversary with 100 days of movies, events and even a little vaudeville.

After it first opened May 11, 1914, the Somerville Theatre played mostly vaudeville and plays, as they appealed to those who came to Somerville, which at the time was a shopping destination. What it plays has evolved to reflect Somerville, which Director Ian Judge said has helped it stay alive.

“All of the changes we make reflect the community around us, and I think that’s how we’ve remained relevant, remained part of the fabric of Somerville,” Judge said. “The city got funkier in the last quarter century, and our programming has had to get funky, too, and it has to appeal to lives around here. We’ve always kind of been able to roll with the punches.”

In the past 10 years, Judge said the theater has been doing markedly better. It began serving beer and wine in 2007, which has helped pay for millions of dollars worth of renovations, especially to the antique original theater.

Despite adding digital projectors to each theater, it has kept its old projectors and three projectionists to operate them, allowing the theatre to play reel film.

“Most of the stuff we’re playing for our centennial is archival film. It has to be run reel to reel the old-fashioned way,” Judge said. “We can get film from archives — the Library of Congress — that normally wouldn’t lend out a film to a regular movie theater because they’d probably destroy it. They trust us; we have a good projectionist.”

The Somerville Theatre is screening The Wizard of Oz May 11.

“I picked The Wizard of Oz for the actual centennial because I thought it was the most appropriate thing to celebrate. It crosses generations and it’s timeless, which is kind of what we’re going for here,” Judge said.

Accompanying The Wizard of Oz screening will be vaudeville and novelty shows, as well as a pit orchestra.

Judge said he thinks contemporary movie theaters lack the magic they used to have.

“[The centennial] is going to celebrate the experience as magical, which is what we want people to have here. I think that’s what’s missing about going to the movies a lot of the time these days: To younger kids, it’s not as magical as it was to me or to my parents or people who are older because the large chains have taken the magic out of the movies to a certain degree. I think when you take a little kid into a theatre like this — it’s majestic and big and the curtains pull down — it does influence them; they’re going to remember it. It’s something that will make them think, “Wow! Movies are cool. Movies are magic,” Judge said.

He made the final decisions on what would play during the centennial with the assistance of his head projectionist, David Cornfeld. There were a couple of films Judge said he wished he could have shown, specifically Gone with the Wind and Ghostbusters, but he couldn’t get copies of for various reasons.

Of all the movies playing during the centennial (Judge said he likes them all), he is especially fond ofSunset Boulevard, 1000 Clowns, and The Wizard of Oz. He said the only time he has seen 1000 Clowns before the upcoming screening was on a bootleg Japanese DVD.

Judge said the centennial has been very successful so far, actually out-grossing the other films currently playing at the theatre such as 300: Rise of an Empire.

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