Newsletter
Cinemadope: Food for Thought
We in the Valley may have an above-average awareness of food co-ops. Take a Sunday drive around Western Mass, and you’ll find co-ops dotting the landscape, serving local communities and offering an alternative to the big box grocery chains that might not find it...
Scene Here: Easthamptonshire
If Frodo had been living in Easthampton’s new Mill 180 Park when Gandalf stopped by, he probably would have turned down the wizard’s all-powerful ring. Hidden inside an old mill building — with food, lawn games, coffee, beer, and wifi at your fingertips — it’s already...
News of the Weird: Pot for Pets
As nine states next month ask voters to approve some form of legalization of marijuana, a “new customer base” for the product — pets — was highlighted in an October New York Times report. Dogs and cats are struck with maladies similar to those that humans...
O, Cannabis: Worried About Weed? Then Legalize It
A stoner buddy of mine recently shocked me when she said she has no intention of voting on Nov. 8. Weed is already practically legal, she argued, and both the presidential candidates are duds. I reminded her that Question 3 on the ballot may set more humane standards...
The V-Spot: My BF Is About to Leave Me; What Do I Do?
Hi Yana! My boyfriend and I are approaching our four year anniversary. He recently called me and asked if he could vent to me about what he’s been feeling. He got diagnosed with anxiety and depression this past summer, but stopped going to therapy when he went back to...
Between the Lines: Are the Elections Rigged?
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has spent the last several months asserting that the Nov. 8 election will be rigged against him.He doesn’t have any evidence to support this claim — except for all the polls that say the real estate developer and reality...
Lip Bomb: Is This What I Signed Up For? What happens when college isn’t ‘perfect’
Remember applying to college? I’m sure you recall the glossy promotional packets you received in the mail from schools trying to win your application. There was always a picture on the front that looked like this: a group of college age kids sitting in a circle on a...
Back Talk: Charter schools and third party candidates, questions this years election brings
Charter schools hurt larger society Certain institutions should always be public. Social Security, prisons and education are three of them. We dodged a bullet when Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. People realized that the financial industry would be taking 31...
This Week: Greenfield Annual Word Festival
Take a Page from Greenfield’s Book Got something to say? Sitting on a heretofore untold story, just biding your time for the right moment? Now’s your opportunity to stand up and share. The Greenfield Annual Word Festival has come back around again, providing visitors...
Best of 2016 Readers’ Poll Winners (Now a Board Game!)
Game by Kristin Palpini, Kyle Olsen, Jennifer Levesque, and Hunter Styles In celebration of the Annual Manual — a condensed version of the Advocate’s yearly Best of the Valley Readers’ Poll — we’ve created a board game featuring some of the Best Of...
Saturday at the Calvin: Comedian Mike Birbiglia’s Insults and Insights
Rolling with the Punchlines A football team needs a good offensive line. So, too, does the lone, lowly comedian. That’s what Mike Birbiglia has been seeking, and perhaps has nailed down — depending on whom you ask, and how touchy they are. The mission of his new show...
Stagestruck: Fierce Visions
Last week Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, came to the Smith College campus to unveil her vision for the renovation of the venerable Neilson Library. Coincidentally, in Boston a new play was unveiled which recalls Lin’s uphill battle to fulfill...
Staff Picks: Fall festivals, and Fear Nuttin Band’s last leg
Halloween Thrash Bash 3 • Friday Maximum Capacity’s 3rd Halloween costume party is among us. Come dressed as anything but yourself! I may be in attendance sporting a blue wig. Drink specials all night and not to mention a killer line-up who may appear on stage in...
Basemental: New small urban festivals ditch the corporate music vibe
A few years ago, Valley musician Mike Parham came back from South by Southwest (SXSW), a music festival in Austin, Texas, and described it to me like the Wild West —somewhere between an underground music festival and a business convention.Some see SXSW as their ticket...
New Albums by Local Artists: Parsonsfield, Julie Cira, and Old Red Dog
BLOOMING THROUGH THE BLACK Parsonsfield Signature Sounds Leverett has fewer than 2,000 residents, so it’s kind of a miracle that it has launched a young bluegrass folk band as well-toured and nationally recognized as Parsonsfield. Then again, the cute, quiet town has...
Cinemadope: The Vermont Yankee Story screens Sunday
Yankee No How Live in the Valley for any length of time, and you’ll soon know of Frances Crowe. The diminutive white-haired woman is something of a local celebrity, thanks to a life spent in activism, where her infectious cheer is matched by her uncompromising (and...
Back Talk: Climate change, pipe-dreams, and kids with weed
Bad Seeds? Kids and Weed Comments left on “Bad Seeds: Will legal recreational weed lead to more stoned students?” at valleyadvocate.com. Paul Hurteau: Ask a politician if they are pro-choice … Wait for their answer and then ask them about marijuana. Ian James:...
News of the Weird: Extreme Hobbies
John Weigel and Olaf Danielson are engaged in a frenzied battle of “extreme birdwatching,” each hoping to close out 2016 as the new North American champ of the American Birding Association, and a September Smithsonian piece had Weigel ahead, 763 to 759. Danielson is...
BTL: Seeing Is Believing, Springfield needs to release police video
Video footage has emerged in court proceedings that defense attorneys say shows Springfield Police Det. Gregg A. Bigda threatening two teenage suspects in an encounter last winter. According to local media reports, the lawyers who obtained the videos said they show...
The V-Spot: Let’s Do Munch!
Hey Yana, I am totally new to BDSM [bondage and discipline/sadism and maso- chism]. Someone told me about a “munch” happening locally tomorrow night. They found it through the FetLife website and suggested I go. Do you know anything about these “munch” meetups? How...
The Pour Man: ’The Little Cursed One’ Makes a Good Wine
The Spanish native Garnacha is a little grumpy. The grape is thin-skinned and sensitive. It’s hard to cultivate, and its vines are low yielding. At one point in its history, it was even considered a weed, and for the last 30 years or so, many Spanish farmers have...
Free Will Astrology, Oct. 20-26, 2016
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the 1980s, two performance artists did a project entitled A Year Tied Together at the Waist. For 12 months, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh were never farther than eight feet away from each other, bound by a rope. Hsieh said he tried...
Scenic Easthampton, Meet Weird Ballet
Send in the Frogs Now we come fully into October, when the autumn breeze skims through the changing leaves, and the sun’s cold sheen casts the hills of the Valley in a light we’ll miss come winter. You’d be nuts, in other words, to miss taking a few long walks. The...
Stagestruck: A Perfect Fraud
“Consider Lucifer,” says Han van Meegeren, huddled against the grimy wall of his prison cell in postwar Holland. He’s awaiting a summary trial and probable execution for allegedly having sold a previously unknown Vermeer to a Nazi officer during the occupation. The...
Artifact Cider Project pours local heritage by the glass
Good Apples A scientist and a farmer walk into a bar. The scientist orders a pint of craft beer, locally made and small-batch brewed. The farmer, on the other hand, can’t drink beer — he has just been diagnosed with Celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder caused by a...
One Night Only: The First AIDS Show Ever Written
In Sickness and in Health On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report describing cases of a rare lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), in five gay men in Los Angeles — all of whom were young and previously...
Ras Spectiv Brings Reggae to Bishop’s
Marley and We Reggae legend Bob Marley’s prolific career is hard to quantify, brimming as it is with huge-hearted songs and a diaspora of music fans, inspired musicians, and lifelong revolutionaries. The Hartford-based band Ras Spectiv celebrates the music of Bob...
Fruity Beers That Don’t Suck
They’re out there… and they probably don’t use blueberries When Erik Jensen took over as brewmaster at Green Flash Brewing at the beginning of this year, he knew he had some big shoes to fill. The San Diego brewery had become one of the biggest in...
Emo Core
He has played multiple instruments, in multiple bands, for multiple decades. The sum total of all these multiples? Scene stalwart Henning Ohlenbusch has played with or supported acts of almost every genre in his prolific career. Rock, pop, surf, psychedelic… You...
Jenni Sussman’s “Mask” Paints Our Faces
Do I Really Look Like That? The contemporary art gallery at Historic Northampton shows an artist each month who draws on local history or artifacts for inspiration. Enter Jenni Sussman, townie abstract painter and sculptor whose series Mask riffs on the faces and...
Bad Seeds: Will legal recreational weed lead to more stoned students?
Rachel Desmond had her first smoke when she was 16. For the next six years, marijuana was a big part of her life. “It was easy to get,” she says, sitting outside of the Frost Building at Holyoke Community College, where she is studying. And she says she needed it to...
Between the Lines: Valley Series Exposes Poor Treatment of Immigrant Workers
The dream of America, for most immigrants, is the dream of a better standard of living, earned through hard work in a country where employment laws apply to all regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation — or immigration status.Equal treatment is a cherished...
Back Talk: Cyclists Beware and Holyoke Charter Schools
Vertical Grates a Danger to Cyclists The last part of my bicycle commute from Greenfield to Gill is the Gill-Montague Bridge. I had been enduring black hole potholes, asphalt that was worn down to dirt, and trucks and cars barrelling within feet of me. My vision of...
The V-Spot: Help! I’ve DepoShot my Libido in the Foot
Hi Yana,I’ve been on the Depo shot for two months now and I have no sex drive. No desire whatsoever. I Googled it and it’s normal for women on the shot to feel this way.Do you have any tips or sex hacks to help me and my BF out? I’m sure he’s tired of coming home to...
Cinemadope: The Nanny’s Gaze, discovering the secret world of little known Chicago street photog Vivian Maier
A lifetime ago — maybe two lifetimes now — I was an art school student. I was a hard worker but probably too concerned with what others thought of my work, and even then I knew that was a problem. That feeling seemed confirmed by the work being done by a classmate of...
Down to Earth: A Vote for Clinton is a Vote for the Environment
Our natural environment needs us now, and the stakes have never been so stark. I’ve been frustrated this election season at how little attention the environment has gotten. In the first presidential debate, moderator Lester Holt didn’t ask a single question about...
News of the Weird: Frontiers of Science
Large kidney stones typically mean eye-watering pain and sudden urinary blockage until the stone “passes” (often requiring expensive sound-wave treatment to break up a large stone). Michigan State University urologist David Wartinger told The Atlantic in September...
The Pour Man: California Red, Family Style
Sometimes finding the right name for a child, a pet or even a wine can be difficult.Naming can take long, grueling hours of trotting out candidates only to have them dismissed by others for lacking originality or humor, or being downright dumb. The process can take...
Fall Arts Preview: Top Valley Events (Oct-Dec 2016)
Olive’s Indie Sound GardenEvery time the electronic looping pedal wings back around and resets, some new element enters the songs played by Olive Tiger: maybe cello, or violin, or a hooky new techno beat. This inventive band, based in New Haven and Brooklyn, calls...
Q&A: The World According to Dar Williams
Dar Williams came to the Valley in 1992 to put down roots and start a career. Between then and when she left in 2000, she became a bonafide folk rocker, touring on a wave of good gigs that carried her to a breakout moment in 1996 with Mortal City, an LP that became an...
Scary Movie Club: The (New) Blair Witch
Spoilers ahead!In this newest installment of the Advocate’s Scary Movie Club, two staffers — horror movie buff Jennifer Levesque and total wimp Hunter Styles — made the trek back into the proverbial woods for Blair Witch, the new sequel to 1999’s The Blair Witch...
The Masters of Jackson
J’ome On! This Friday night: The whole Northampton/ Has to answer right then/ Just to tell you once again/ Who’s bad Did MJ just moonwalk into your heart? Do “the kick” right through your eardrum? Or crotch grab into your … Never mind. The point is Michael...
Saturday: Four Great Bands at the 13th Floor
Temper Anthems So many buildings are missing their 13th floors, who knows what’s knocking around inside that metaphysical space? The 13th Floor in Florence, for its part, seems committed to capitalizing on that mystery by packing multiple acts — often new bands...
One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer: George Thorogood and the Destroyers take the Big E
If anyone can lay claim to writing the neo American classic drinking songbook, it’s George Thorogood and The Destroyers. The band’s hits include “I Drink Alone,” “If You Don’t Start Drinkin’,” “Bad to the Bone” (that’s pronounced “B-b-b-b-bad to the Bone”), “Move it...
This Weekend in Greenfield: Blues, Brews, and BBQ
Here’s the Beef It’s hard to believe that Greenfield’s Riverside Blues, Brews, and BBQ Festival is already in its sixth season. We’ve barely finished the heaping pile of brisket on our plate from last year. But it shouldn’t be too hard for us to get back into the...
Stagestruck: An Immersive “Winter’s Tale” in Greenfield
Walking Through Time “In Scene 13, Leontes mourning his wife, things get a little more dialog-y. That needs to be run and worked on today,” says John Bechtold, creator of the immersive production of The Winter’s Tale that performs in downtown Greenfield this weekend....
Not Just Duck Lips and Avocado Toast: Instagram for Western Mass Artists
Jeff Kelley, a Northampton post officer and owner of the Instagram account @postaljeff, scrolls through months of his posts, reaching a series featuring a red phone. He stops at a post with the phone dangling off a tree by the cord, it was photoshopped by another...
Nightcrawler: The Big E … DM
Any calendar will tell you Sept. 22, is the official date of the fall equinox — which is fine, for those astronomically-correct types. But this year, I prefer to think of the solstice as happening on Oct. 2 when the Big E in West Springfield hosts an EDM concert...
37 Shakespeare Plays in One Night?!
T’were Well it Were Done Quickly Any back-row slackers in the house? Remember wishing your high school humanities professor would just get on with it and fast-forward to Act V of whichever godforsaken Shakespeare text you were all reading out loud, line by line? It’s...
Million Dollar Quartet: Four legendary musicians, one fateful day
It sounds like the beginning of a joke: So, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis walk into a recording studio …. But in December of 1956, this foursome just happened to all be in the same recording studio — Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in...
Cinemadope: Going Wilder
When the world lost Gene Wilder a month ago, it was a bit of a surprise to many — he hadn’t appeared onscreen in quite a few years, preferring to devote himself to the books he wrote later in life. But if it was a surprise, it also stung. For myself, and I suspect for...
Ride the Rails (If You Dare!)
Full Scream Ahead “If you want to be scared half to death, Rails to the Darkside is for you,” boast the organizers at the Connecticut Trolley Museum. And they’re not kidding around — this event, geared toward adults, is not recommended for young children. We can see...
Basemental: Inside the mind of PussyVision
20-Something Vision It’s an amazing feeling to bear witness to art you feel moved by — especially when that art is ephemeral. And it’s no less amazing to see a side of someone that you didn’t even realize existed. This is what happened when I first heard Pussy, a self...
Scene Here: Rent Rally
Several dozen protesters gathered this past Friday at Mason Square in Springfield, chanting What Do We Want? Affordable Housing! When Do We Want It? Now! and carrying signs down State Street — through one of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods — to Court Square in...
Between the Lines: E-ZPass and the Impending Robot Takeover
I’m soon going to have to decide if a pull towards convenience outweighs my fear of a total robot takeover of the world as we know it. I may get an E-ZPass transponder. The decision should be made simpler by the fact that the state of Massachusetts isn’t...
The V-Spot: I’m Dating Three Women; Does That Make Me Polyamorous?
I’m a 38 yo male currently involved with three women. One is a long distance relationship. We met at a concert and had one night together and stayed in touch. We speak regularly on various chat and texts. Two is a nonsexual relationship. She spends the night and...
Backtalk: Immigration celebration, saving water, and love for old lesbians
Celebrate Immigration I think the people of Northampton and the whole Pioneer Valley should take the lead and turn the arrival of refugees to our area into a celebration. Our country’s founding principles are based on no discrimination. Instead of fearing these...
Brace Yourselves: Nostalgia is Coming
Fall in Love Now that I spend a good five minutes a day sweeping dry leaves out of our back entry, I think it’s safe to finally say it: autumn is upon us. And I’ll take it, dry leaves and all. Nestled between the smothering humidity of our summer and the desiccating...
News of the Weird: Insanity Defined
Police and prosecutors in Dallas, appropriately sensitive at having been the site of the 1963 killing of President Kennedy, have apparently taken out their shame on assassination buff Robert Groden. As the Dallas Observer reported in September, Groden has been...E-Edition
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