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by Amanda
Drane | Jun 30, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News
My boyfriend, who is not white, returned home from a shift bartending down the street from our Northampton apartment. Still shaking, he explained he’d just been interrogated by two police officers during his walk home. They questioned where he had been and what he was...
by Hunter Styles | Jul 8, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Leisure, News, Wellness
I ran for my life. It wasn’t fast enough. A paintball came whipping through the clearing as I crossed in a running crouch, shot by the enemy team from 20 yards away. I felt it explode against my thigh. It stung for a few seconds, like someone had whacked me hard with...
by Hunter Styles | Jun 30, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News
A t the end of Bible study on Wednesday night, Steve Powell tells a joke. “This guy is talking to God,” he says. “God says that in his eyes, a million years is like a minute, and a million dollars is like a penny. So the man says: well then, God, give me a penny!”...
by Kristin Palpini | Jun 30, 2015 | Articles, Blogs, Featured, News, The Uncanny Valley
You’ve probably seen the signs — “Fast $$ for Houses,” “We Buy Ugly Homes” — tacked onto telephone poles or scrawled onto yard signs by the side of a main road. The advertising doesn’t inspire confidence. The hand-scrawled, occasionally misspelled signs scream scam....
by James Heflin
Photos by Jerrey Roberts | Jul 8, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Leisure, News, Wellness
On a recent Thursday at the Ludlow Fish and Game Club, things were abuzz. The skies were repeatedly ripped through with the blare of engines as aircraft traveled the skies around Westover Air Force Base; gunfire crackled from the firing range nearby. Amid that din,...
by
Amanda
Drane | Jun 30, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Leisure, Living By The Stars, News, Wellness
In the work-driven culture we live in, self-care is sometimes lost in the abyss of work, chores, sleep. To make matters more complicated, we all have ways of taking care of ourselves that are strikingly different from one another. Yoga, while good for all, can be...
by Kristin Palpini | Jul 8, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Scene Here
A thin man in a red basketball jersey and nylon shorts strides down Dwight Street in Holyoke, arms swinging, a smile on his face. His thick black hair is slicked back, and his ankles look like saplings sprouting from his foam slippers. He reaches the intersection with...
by Hunter Styles | Jun 23, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Stage
Bernice Kwade lives in two worlds at the same time. “When I’m at home, it’s a totally different environment than when I go out,” she said. “My parents are trying to instill traditional African values in me, but we live in America now. I want to have a more liberal...
by Hunter Styles | Jun 23, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Scene Here
Stage lights shine down on a legion of beards. They sprout from Ashfield men young and old, tall and short. Some beards are just wiry tufts, some fluffy and soft like cumulus clouds, some as thick and full as a field of wheat primed for harvest. The beards are black,...
by James Heflin | Jun 23, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Leisure, News, Wellness
So this, it turns out, was the Father’s Day I had Cheetos up my nose. Not in a funny way, but more a sort of philosophical reverie way, like that glazed look you get after you’ve had seven ice cream sandwiches and a heat stroke. This was the latest result of my...
by Amanda Drane | Jun 23, 2015 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Food + Booze, Madame Barfly, News
The Ale House on Worthington Street in Springfield is surrounded by boarded-up buildings that loom ominously up over the small, cozy one that the bar occupies. But inside, the vibe is warm and welcoming. “It’s somewhere you can go in Springfield where you don’t have...
by Story and Photos by
Hunter Styles | Jun 16, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News, Wellness
“I always knew that I wanted to be a dad,” Joey Mella tells me. “Then I got married and we had three children very quickly. Now I’m kind of maxed out.” The middle child, two-year-old Ati Mella-Reiss, pushes a miniature shopping cart across the wood floor of the...
by Amanda Drane | Jun 16, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News, Wellness
Soon-to-be parents Amy Mathers and Paul Kearney, of Limerick, Ireland, were in Florence recently visiting Mathers’ family. Mathers and Kearney are expecting their first child in September. The two said they talk about moving to the U.S. to raise a family, but Ireland...
by Advocate Staff | Jun 16, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Leisure
Dad jokes. The phrase probably just made you groan and roll your eyes a little. The dad joke is an overly familiar pun, cliche, gag, or prank that would sort of amuse a three-year-old. But somewhere along the journey to adulthood, when kids develop a sense of irony,...
by Hunter Styles | Jun 16, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Food + Booze, Leisure, News, Taste-Off!
Now that summer is almost here, we’re reaching for one of our favorite ice cream combos to get us through the work week: thick ribbons of fudge and belts of peanut butter cups in sweet vanilla ice cream. We’d call it Moose Tracks, except that name has been owned by...
by Amanda Drane | Jun 9, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News
At the Waterfront Tavern in Holyoke, a rap battle between Hoodie Cruger, who is black, and Petey Mitch, who is white, turns racist. “I got rap sheets to rival my rap sheets,” spits Petey. “For your life, somewhere someway, had to pay two cents a day. That’s not what I...
by Gary Carra | Jun 10, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Music, Nightcrawler
Noho’s And The Kids are more than allright. In fact, they’ve been called everything from “fearless and entertaining” to one of “Western Massachusetts’ indie scene’s brightest creative lights,” depending on whom you ask. The observations cited just happened to come...
by James Heflin | Jun 9, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Blogs, Columns, Featured, Leisure, Music, News, Nightcrawler
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by Hunter Styles | Jun 10, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News
Millions of augmented humans now walk among us. Their implants, tweaks, and enhancements aren’t always visible. But medical technology — which gave Americans cardiac pacemakers in the ’50s, and now artificial hearts — keeps pressing forward, and the human species...
by Kristin Palpini | Jun 10, 2015 | Articles, Blogs, Featured, News, The Uncanny Valley
For more than a decade, the island at the corner of Hampton Street and Route 5 in Holyoke has borne the word “Quota” — spelled out in flowers in the warm weather and black plastic edging in the cold. On my ride home from work down Route 5 south, I often wondered...
by Nancy Bryant | Jun 9, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Leisure, News, Wellness
My favorite walk is around my backyard. Although this may seem rather common, my yard is still new to me and very much an evolving space. Four years ago my backyard was a dense forest filled with pines, oaks, and poison ivy. The thick trees were covered with poison...
by Amanda Drane | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Food + Booze, Leisure, News
As if the stationary restaurant business weren’t tumultuous enough with its high overhead costs, perishable products, and unpredictable customers, food truck owners kick it up a degree by taking it to the streets and exposing themselves — and their kitchens — to the...
by James Heflin | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Film, Leisure, Music, Stage
Summertime, and the livin’ is greatly enhanced by a calendar ripe with performances. In a Valley that comes alive with music, theater, and every other incarnation of the arts, it can be tough to know where to turn. We’ve compiled a short list of highlights from the...
by Amanda Drane | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News, Wellness
Those coastal dwellers don’t even know what they’re missing. Sure, they can boast miles of swimmable water, waves, seagulls — the whole summer package. But do they have rope swings? Waterfalls surrounded by sylvan beauty? How about mountain water clean enough to...
by Kristin Palpini | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News
Earlier this year, when Georgia’s Ebony Monique Dickens posted that “all black people should rise up and shoot at every white cop in the nation starting right now,” she got arrested. When Jeremiah Perez of Colorado wrote in the comment of a YouTube video in December...
by Kristin Palpini | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Leisure, Music
Like anyone who loves going to music festivals, I cannot tell you how many I’ve attended: 50, 75, 10 — After a while they all run together into a single hot, soggy time dancing under open skies marked by torrential downpours, mind-blowing sets, and epic antics. Make...
by From Our Readers | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Letters from our Readers, News
Right On or Way Wrong? Two takes on ‘Stay Off the Damn Grass’ Thank you, Kristin Palpini, for your article (“Stay Off the Damn Grass,” May 21-27, 2015) on the new, oppressive South Hadley law imposing rigid standards of lawn and garden care. This town has a knack for...
by Jack Brown | Jun 2, 2015 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
We Americans have always seemed, to me, to be a nostalgic people. Maybe my thinking has something to do with the long line of Irish storytellers in my family — even today, the smallest of family events rarely passes without reference to the outlandish history of some...
by James Heflin | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music
Early 20th-century Modernist literature, at its worst, is uninviting and impenetrable. Take the work of Ezra Pound — at one extreme is his beautiful and accessible imagist poem “In A Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet,...
by Gary Carra | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Music, Nightcrawler
We knew that the powers that be were reverting back to the old name. Then we found out that they were getting a new logo. In fact, until recently, the only thing we didn’t know about Springfield’s Cityblock-turned-Bike Nite-back-to-Cityblock was who would be gracing...
by James Heflin | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Blogs, Featured, News, The Uncanny Valley
Spring-Heeled Jack, in addition to being the best-named apparition since the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, was a frequent haunter of Victorian London and, eventually, other parts of Great Britain. He was known and feared for his habits of sudden attack via tearing with metal...
by Kristin Palpini | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Blogs, Featured, News, Wellness
On occasion, to keep up my health, I take a walk. Nearby my home in West Springfield is a mile-long stretch of sidewalk with no hills, few cars, and even fewer people outside. The homes are densely packed, and I wonder about the people who live inside. Over time, I’ve...
by Amanda Drane | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Food + Booze, Madame Barfly
The fact that Coco and the Cellar Bar’s best-selling cocktail is their ginger margarita is a testament to why people pack this place: simple delights. This tasty cocktail is exactly what you’d expect it to be. Spicy fresh ginger is added to the classic margarita trio...
by Hunter Styles | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Food + Booze, News, Scene Here
Melissa Haller rattles a wheeled rack across the concrete floor. It holds 15 pans with 24 raw bagels in each. The unbaked dough shines in the fluorescent light. The air in the kitchen is thick with a warm, herby smell, cut with the savory tang of onion and garlic....
by Amanda Drane | May 20, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News
In a public housing complex specifically designed for the elderly and disabled, something as basic as a wheelchair ramp to the common community space should be part of the facility on day one. But it took the Agawam Housing Authority nearly seven years to install one...
by James Heflin | May 12, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Between the Lines, Blogs, Columns, Featured, Leisure, Music, News, Nightcrawler
Back in the final year of the 1900s, I stood, guitar in hand, on the steps of Northampton’s old courthouse at the main intersection. The occasion was the (then new) Valley Advocate Grand Band Slam. My bandmates and I had won top honors in the...
by Hunter Styles | May 20, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News
T he American Dream is a fitful one these days, marked by rising income inequality and a decade of middling economic growth. But a national study published this month by the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard University suggests that children from poor...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | May 20, 2015 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot, Wellness
Hi Yana, My girlfriend and I are in college and we’ve done some like really, really basic BDSM: blindfolding, a little handcuffs, and some bondage stuff, but nothing serious. Now we want to do some tying down. What would you suggest? — Tie-Guy Dear Tie-Guy, Like a bad...
by Jack Brown | May 12, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
Nobody in their right mind would suggest that making a movie is easy. There are so many levels to moviemaking — the writing, the casting, the shooting and editing and sound and music and so on — that it’s a wonder any of them ever come off decently, never mind...
by Words and pictures
by Hunter Styles | May 6, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Leisure, News
Liz Stewart leans forward to point out a series of bracelets made from metal nuts, washers, and wires. “It’s mostly new and repurposed hardware,” she says. “The idea is to take ordinary items and put them into situations you wouldn’t expect to see them. People look at...
by Story and photos by Hunter Styles | May 20, 2015 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Leisure, Wellness
A small stretch of land between Route 9 and I-91 might not sound like prime walking territory. But out here, you can disconnect. This is farmland — a quick and easy escape to Kansas from downtown Northampton’s Oz. At Sheldon Field, Old Ferry Road branches off from...
by Amanda Drane | May 12, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News
For Alex Morse, 26 — Holyoke’s first openly gay mayor — Saturday, April 18 started out like many other Saturdays before it. He and his boyfriend, Edwin Cruz-Vargas, 25, went for a morning hike up Mount Tom. Once they reached the top, they paused for several minutes to...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | May 6, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Leisure, The V-Spot, Wellness
Dear Yana, My eldest daughter is now 16. I’ve had to cover the sex talk basics as her mother (we’re divorced) is FAR more conservative (and shall we say repressed) than I. How do I, as a father, steer my daughter towards a more sex-positive outlook when it’s clear she...
by Amanda Drane | May 20, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Food + Booze, Taste-Off!
It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta bloat their bellies with massive amounts of pizza to find the best slice in the Valley. This week we bring you Part 2 of our Slice Showdown and we tasted Springfield pies. Limiting our pizza to slices only, we hit the streets. And...
by Kristin Palpini | May 6, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Leisure, Music, News, Scene Here, Stage
It’s the final performance of the 2015 Springfield Symphony Orchestra season and the 71-year-old group has put together a timely show, The Rite of Spring with Spencer Myer on piano. Buses for retired living communities line the street outside. Inside Symphony Hall,...
by James Heflin | May 6, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Leisure, Wellness
On a recent Saturday, I stared out an airport window at an Airbus 330, emblazoned with green and the Aer Lingus shamrock. For the first time in a long time, I was staring at a plane I was about to get on. I did a lot of work to get there. Still, it was a moment of...
by Amanda Drane | May 20, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Scene Here
Hampshire College’s commencement ceremony is a social justice rally. About 350 people pack the graduation tent on the campus commons. As president Jonathan Lash begins his speech, more guests arrive. They spill out into the lawn outside the tent. Few of the students...
by Gary Carra | May 6, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Music, Nightcrawler
Just when you thought it was safe to put your wallet away, out trots another apple product. But with more than two dozen bands cranking out more than 32 hours of music Aug. 21-23, Gary Phelps’ Apple Jam Roots Music Festival is a relative bargain, with three-day...
by Amanda Drane | May 12, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News
Max Shea had been a part of UMass Amherst radio station WMUA 91.1 starting in 1993 — when he was an undergraduate student at UMass — until April 21, when he was escorted from campus by UMass police, banned from returning, and his beloved show, Martian Gardens, was...
by Kristin Palpini | May 7, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Food + Booze, Leisure, News
On Cinco de Mayo the Advocate threw a party at the Log Cabin in Holyoke for the first place winners of the 2015 Best Of the Valley Readers Poll competition. There was a photo booth there … things got silly, here’s the proof.
by Hunter Styles | May 18, 2015 | Articles, Featured, News, Wellness
There’s something strange happening on college campuses here and across the nation. Reports of rape and sexual assault are skyrocketing. In 2013 the University of Massachusetts Amherst — a campus of 28,635 students this year — reported 22 forcible sex offenses,...
by Hunter Styles | May 12, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, News, Scene Here
A cool breeze floods the mountainside, rustling the leaves and pine needles in the branches high above me. But as I walk up the path, I barely hear it. My brain is making too much noise of its own. My eyes are down, watching my sneakers crunching along the dirt trail,...
by Amanda Drane | May 12, 2015 | Articles, Blogs, Featured, News, The Uncanny Valley
On the evening of March 17, a driver in South Hadley reported seeing a strange triangular craft in the sky with lights on each of its three visible points. After following the craft for a couple of miles, the driver pulled into the Village Commons parking lot and...
by Amanda
Drane | Apr 28, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Free Sport, News
Summer is just around the bend and the Connecticut River — the region’s longest body of running water — remains largely unswimmable due to high levels of fecal bacteria in the water. The river has come a long way since its days nicknamed “America’s most beautiful...
by Kristin Palpini | Apr 28, 2015 | Articles, Featured, Food + Booze, Taste-Off!
Dueling Donut Podcast Homer Simpson said it best when he drooled out, “mmmm … donuts.” That pretty much says it all: fried, crispy, sugary-sweet, warm, melty cake. Or for short “mmmmmm.” For this Taste-Off! the Advocate staff searched around the Valley for the...
by Amanda Drane | Apr 28, 2015 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Food + Booze, Madame Barfly
After getting laid off, 32-year printing press veteran Scott Santaniello decided to move into an industry that always seems to stand the test of time: booze, baby. Two years ago, Santaniello, a 51-year-old life-long resident of Springfield, got a distiller’s license,...
by Hunter Styles | Apr 28, 2015 | Articles, Columns, Featured, News, The Uncanny Valley
“Curiouser and curiouser!” exclaimed Alice as she took her first steps into Wonderland. If she were making a trek through the Valley instead, we think she would say the same thing. Our little corner of the globe is chock full of odd people, secret places, and...
by Kristin Palpini | Apr 28, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, News, Scene Here
Lively organ music floated through the air, and I followed it in from the parking lot. Why, exactly, had I opted to spend Friday night at the circus? I wasn??t sure, other than the fact that I was drawn here to the Eastern States Expo in West Springfield by faint,...
by Hunter Styles | Apr 28, 2015 | Articles, Featured, MGM Springfield Casino coverage, News
On March 24, cannons shot confetti over the heads of shovel-wielding politicians and corporate executives in a vacant lot in Springfield’s South End. Around them, hundreds had gathered to celebrate the official groundbreaking of the MGM Springfield casino, which is...
by Hunter Styles | Apr 21, 2015 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News
Kamil Peters steps away from his metal shop to lead me on a walk through 17,000 square feet of new working space. He saunters from room to room in a cavernous old industrial mill building along the canal in Holyoke, pointing out the work spaces for artists: an oil...
