Here’s what it was like. (We did this in Greater Cincinnati, so obviously the details may be different depending on your location, but I just wanted to give people an idea of what the process is like)

First, the burial ground is a beautiful and peaceful meadow that is also a nature preserve with hiking trails. Scattered around the meadow are little mounds with grass growing out of them where folks have been buried. So it doesn’t feel like a cemetery—there are no rows of granite markers or anything—it just feels like a field.

My mom’s body was in the back of the hearse, wrapped in a (thick and definitely not see-through) shroud that was in a big wicker basket. Me and five of my relatives moved the basket onto a little wagon, and I pulled the wagon to the gravesite. Once there, we lifted the shroud out of the basket and placed it on planks that were over the grave.

My mom’s priest said some words, and a representative from the place said some words. We had a moment of silence and listened to the breeze and the birds flying overhead. There were straps under the shroud, and we grabbed those and held my mom’s body up while the staff pulled the planks away. We then used the straps to lower my mom’s body into the ground. And then a mix of staff and relatives grabbed shovels and filled in the grave. (It was hot and I was in a suit, so I did one shovelful. Some of my relatives really went hard on the shoveling).

I’ve been to a fair amount of funerals, and this felt much better to me than seeing a body in a metal casket lowered into a concrete vault. My mom’s body quite literally returned to the earth, and in a few years there will be nothing left of her as the matter of her body will have become the soil that feeds the grass. There will be a marker—a little stone flush with the ground that has her name on it. Like, a literal stone, not a granite monument.

Once the grave was filled in, they gave me a rock to place on a cairn that was made up of rocks placed in honor of everyone who’d ever been buried there.

I was really struck by the beauty and simplicity of the entire process. It felt very natural and respectful, and at no point in the process did I feel like anyone was trying to upsell me in that “Don’t you want the $500 pillow for your loved one?” way that funeral directors so often do.

Throughout the day afterward, people kept coming up to me and saying how much the appreciated the green burial and that they’d never heard of it but now wanted one for themselves.

I should also mention that the entire process cost about half what a traditional burial would have cost.

There aren’t too many places that offer green burials yet, but I think as more people experience green burials, more people will want them. If you’re have questions about the process that I didn’t answer here, please feel free to click on the ol’ contact me link above. I’m just a consumer here, but I think this is a really nice process, and I’d like to help people who are interested.

Michael Jackson was a gifted singer (for a while—more later) and performer, but he was not a musical genius. The musical genius was Quincy Jones. That’s why the three albums Jackson made with Jones are classics (kind of—more later) and the ones he made without Jones are…not classics.

I don’t know exactly what the process was in shaping those records, but my theory is for the songs he wrote, Jackson came in with a melody and some extremely unremarkable lyrics and Jones made a hit song out of it. (Again, see Dangerous, et. al for evidence of this theory).

But let’s look at those classic albums. Not one of them holds up from start to finish. There are some awful duds on each of those records. Admittedly, the hits are mostly absolute bangers, though if you can stomach a pedophile singing about a pretty young thing in 2026, you’re either tougher than I am or in serious denial, and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is basically a retread of “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground” and “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” with a little ripoff of “Soul Makossa” thrown in.

But nobody is cueing up “Speed Demon” or “Liberian Girl” or “The Girl is Mine” in 2026. The record industry blueprint for an album at that time was “hits and filler,” and while these records certainly had more hits than most, they are all about half filler.

So, okay, he couldn’t make a good album without Quincy Jones and he couldn’t make an album that holds up start to finish even with Jones’ help. But still, a great singer! Right? Well, yeah, until he destroyed his ability to sing. Go listen to “She’s Out of My Life”—flawless vocal performance, and one of the things that makes it work is that he had a gorgeous vocal tone. You can hear this in all of his pre-Thriller work. He had a beautiful voice and made great choices.

And then he decided to do violence to his face, specifically his nose, where that gorgeous voice resonated. I mean, not just his—your nose is key to your vocal tone. That’s why Barbra Streisand never got the nose job that probably would have helped her acting career—she didn’t want to ruin her voice. Michael had no such reservations.

Which is why, on Thriller and everything after, he starts with the hee hee chicka chicka bullshit. He can no longer depend on his voice to sell the song, so he starts making weird, desperate choices to try to put the song over. And we never got the equal of “She’s Out of My Life” out of him again.

I can’t fault his unparalleled talent as a performer. He not only commanded a stage in a way few artists have ever been capable of, but also created a “bizarre manchild too pure for this world” persona to disguise the fact that he was a monster. The man’s entire adult life was a performance.

But let’s be clear-eyed about not only his life, but also his career. In a solo career that lasted over 30 years, he released about 15 great songs, or enough to fill a single CD. Admittedly, that’s 15 more great songs than most artists release, but simply not in the same league as Stevie Wonder or Prince.

Michael Jackson was incredibly popular for about ten years. His songs are inextricable from the lives of an entire generation of people. But that doesn’t make him a genius.

The Jockey Club was a dive bar where someone had convinced the crochety old owner (known only as “Shorty”) to let them book punk rock shows. It was not a nice place. But it was fun and weirdly wholesome. There was sometimes overly enthusiastic moshing (which we called “slam dancing.” This term inspired the title of Wayne Wang’s underrated 80’s film noir Slam Dance, starring Tom Hulce!), but otherwise it was just a bunch of kids hanging around enjoying the music and thinking they were sophisticated as they sipped from bottles of Guinness or oil cans of Foster’s Lager.

The venue made a little money because people would pay to see this kind of music that couldn’t get booked at any other clubs. And people started and joined bands because they knew they’d have a place to play. That’s how you get a scene of independent artists doing their thing without corporate attention or interference.

This isn’t a lighting in a bottle phenomenon. It just requires cheap rents. The recent documentary Secret Mall Apartment shows how a similar art/performance scene grew up in disused warehouses in Providence. And then got displaced by development, which is what’s happened in so many cities.

Cheap rents are in extremely short supply in most major cities in the USA, and art and culture have suffered as a result.

But last night, I went to a pro wrestling show in Elmwood Place, a small municipality northwest of Downtown Cincinnati and got some hope. I pulled up in front of an empty storefront church. You could see the pews through the windows, and the owner had put up a big sign that said, “FOR RENT: RETAIL ONLY.” I passed two more empty storefronts on my way to the venue, which was an unmarked storefront.

I paid ten bucks cash at the door and walked into the venue. Grimy wall-to-wall carpeting covered the floor. The walls were stained enameled cinderblock. There was a tin ceiling that was rusted in spots and had paint peeling pretty much all over. And in the center of the space, a wrestling ring. Oh yeah, and like most indoor athletic facilities, especially carpeted ones, this place had a certain funk in the air—it smelled like feet and shaving cream.

I pulled up a chair in the front row next to a couple of kids who had brought signs. “This,” I thought, “is where the real shit happens.”

And it was! I enjoyed a really fun wrestling show with about 30 other fans, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Jockey Club. Not only because of my physical surroundings, although also that, but because I was watching art that people were making for love.

The gate from this event was probably 300 bucks. They might have cleared a little more than that from concessions, merch, and the 50/50 raffle. Nobody was here trying to make it big—they were just making art for people who loved it.

Now don’t get me wrong—I do believe artists should get paid. But, and I speak from experience as someone who was a professional writer, as soon as money enters the picture, it demands changes and compromises, and while you can still make great art under those circumstances, the lack of money allows you to be weird as hell, to say, yeah, I’m making this thing, and you can like it or not, but it is EXACTLY what I want it to be. It is what I want to put into the world.

Now look—maybe indie wrestling isn’t your thing. (though, if it is, head on over to kayfabe.ink and sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be writing up this very show in the next couple of days!) But somewhere near you (and, admittedly, if you live in a major city, it’s probably not in your city), people are making cool, weird, authentic art on a block where you can’t get a good cup of coffee. It’s not corporate, it’s not capitalist, and most importantly at this point, it’s not fascist, because of course fascism is all about conformity and cruelty.

Find the weirdos and go dig their art. Or, better yet, be one of those weirdos. Go start your own band! Put on a play! Paint something and hang it on the wall! Art makes us human and makes life bearable and meaningful. Go make some!

Just had to point that out. Anyway, Sign O’ The Times is one of the best albums ever, as is Dirty Mind. And of course “Purple Rain” is one of the best rock and roll songs ever recorded.

Prince’s output, ‘79-’88 has never been equaled by anyone, including him. In my humble opionion, he never again put out an album that holds up end-to-end as many of the albums from his Golden Age do, but he did release some absolute gems in the 90’s. (Maybe after then too, but I’m only one man! Somebody else is gonna have to do the 2000s). It’s easy to find places to start with Prince’s 70’s and 80’s output, but the 90’s is trickier, so I’m here to help!

(Note—I am not counting the B sides that were released on full length albums for the first time on 1993’s The Hits/The B Sides because most of those are from the 80’s. But I encourage you to check out “Horny Toad,” “Feel U Up,” “Erotic City,” and especially “She’s Always In My Hair.”)

What follows is 80 minutes of Prince goodness as curated by me. I will not assert that my list is definitive because people seem to really respond differently to Prince’s music—I was floored when a ton of people named “Adore” as their favorite of his songs after he died because that’s my least favorite song on Sign O’ The Times. But this is the stuff I like best.

Here’s a link to the Spotify playlist, and yeah, I know Spotify is evil, and I do buy new music on Bandcamp, but I’m not re-buying stuff I already own and I don’t know if there is ethical listening under streaming, but anyway, yeah, if there’s a streaming service that is less evil, let me know.

1. Endorphinmachine—Hard rockin’ party track that opens “The Gold Experience” I like the rockers, what can I say?

2. Gett Off—One of the things I love about Prince is that he was absolutely unafraid to be ridiculous. Which makes even his horniest songs strangely charming.

3. P Control—Prince’s attempt at a feminist anthem, which, okay, I’m not sure it works on that level, but it’s a fun song and finds its way onto my mental jukebox all the freakin’ time.

4. Prettyman—Prince gave most of the songs in this vein to The Time, so it’s fun to see him inhabiting the egotistical Morris Day-esque persona. Also this is funky as hell and Maceo Parker guests on sax!

5. Tangerine—Just a really pretty, melancholy little number.

6. My Computer—though it references outdated technology with the AOL sample, the idea of being lonely and looking for solace on the internet is still incredibly relatable. A duet with Kate Bush, but Prince doesn’t let her shine here.

7. Damned if Eye Do—Prince decided that each of the 3 CDs of the Emancipation album should clock in at exactly 60 minutes, which leads to some songs going on a little longer than they should, as this one does, but I still dig it.

8. In This Bed Eye Scream—Prince doesn’t do vulnerable all that often, (I’m not saying never—there are 2 more examples on this very playlist!) so I find this song about a guy who’s filled with sadness and regret over a breakup and seems to hold out some vain hope that it’s not all over particularly touching.

9. Face Down—a colossal fuck you to everybody who told Prince he couldn’t change his name to that symbol and who basically wrote him off. Also I love when he calls out “Orchestra!” and this cheesy synth riff responds.

10. Love Sign—I dunno—I’m sick of evil knocking on my door, so maybe I relate. Duet with Nona Gaye.

11. Cream—see horny, ridiculous, charming, above.

12. Calhoun Square—a real place in Minneapolis, apparently, but I love the idea of this kind of party utopia. c.f. Utopia’s “One World.”

13. Dolphin—lyrically revisits territory he covered in “I Would Die 4 U,” but the melody is irresistable, and this is one of my favorite Prince guitar solos.

14. The Truth—the best of the solo acoustic songs from the album of the same name. About mortality, and…some other stuff. I love the guitar riff and the vocal here.

15. Eye Love You, But Eye Don’t Trust You Anymore—Prince, piano, and acoustic guitar (courtesy of Ani DiFranco!). I was stunned by this when I first heard it because I think Prince usually hides behind a variety of personas, and this just seemed like a straightforward (and beautifully sad) song about a guy whose heart is breaking.

16. So Far, So Pleased—a new relationship seems to be going well. A fun, upbeat song with an irresistable guitar line. Also a duet with Gwen Stefani, which was a much cooler move in 1999 than it would be now.

17. Gold—I mean, look, yes, it’s clearly an attempt at another “Purple Rain,” and I guess it suffers a little bit in the comparison, but if you just take this as its own song, it’s a pretty groovy anthem. Also I like that he was still swinging or the fences in 1994.

18. Nothing Compares 2 U. Live duet with Rosie Gaines. I used to play this version for musician friends, and when Rosie Gaines’ mic is turned up at the beginning of her verse, they’d go, “wait, is this LIVE?” Yep. That’s just how incredibly tight the NPG was. But also a complete reimagining of the song that is completely different from Sinead O’Connor’s (also excellent) version.

Brendan Halpin, author of the ALA-Alex-Award-Winning Donorboy, the ALA Rainbow List titles Notes from the Blender (with Trish Cook) and Tessa Masterson Will go to Prom (with Emily Franklin) as well as a dozen other novels and memoirs, made his final sale to a traditional publishing house in 2012 with A Really Awesome Mess (with Trish Cook).

Two years later, he emerged on the New England independent wrestling scene, wrestling under the name “John Cocteau, the enfant terrible of wrestling”. His finishing move involved jumping in the air and using both left and right feet to deliver kicks to the opponent’s groin in quick succession. He dubbed this move “The Cocteau Twins.”

COVID-19 put an end to his wrestling career, but in 2022 he emerged as a member of an all-male Go-Go’s tribute band called “The Bro-Bro’s.” He is the Bro-Bro’s lead vocalist, performing under the name “Brolinda Carlisle.” The band has had great success touring the East Coast and has even drawn the attention of the original band, with Jane Weidlin posting a link to the Bro-Bro’s performing “Head Over Heels” at the “Gen X Prom” in Ho-ho-kus, NJ with the caption, “Who the hell are these assholes?”

Brendan lives in the City of Boston.

From Patricia Luca lucapatricia682@gmail.com

To: brendan@brendanhalpin.com

Subject: Invitation to Feature Shutout in Our 2026 Reading Challenge

Date: Monday, April 06, 2026 9:06 PM

Size:17 KB

Hello Brendan Halpin,

I hope you are doing well. It is a pleasure to connect with you.

My name is Luca Patricia, and I’m reaching out from the Blooming Books Reading for Growth community, an active reading challenge and book club with over 3000 engaged readers.

We are currently hosting our 2026 Reading Challenge running from January 1 to December 31 2026. This initiative highlights books that spark meaningful engagement, emotional connection, and immersive storytelling across many genres.

Here is my website for more information about the challenge: https://www.the52book.club/2026-reading-challenge/

Participating authors benefit from ongoing visibility through reader discussions, reviews, and sustained community interaction throughout the year.

At the end of the challenge, our readers will identify the most discussed books, with selected authors receiving special recognition including an official award presentation on January 2 2027. In addition, the first group of authors whose books generate strong engagement will receive early spotlight features within the community.

I recently came across your book Shutout and was immediately drawn to its heartfelt and relatable coming of age sports narrative. The story captures the emotional intensity of friendship and competition through Lena and Amanda, whose bond is tested when soccer begins to change the balance between them.

The shift from being an inseparable team to facing uncertainty after team selection creates a strong emotional core, especially as Amanda struggles with feelings of loss, comparison, and change while Lena moves forward in a new environment.

The themes of friendship, identity, and growing up make Shutout a meaningful and engaging read for audiences who enjoy realistic fiction with emotional depth and strong character relationships.

We believe your book would resonate strongly with our audience and would be a compelling addition to our reading challenge.

Would you be interested in having Shutout featured in this year-long reading experience and introduced to our engaged community?

I would be happy to share more details if this opportunity interests you.

Warm regards, Luca Patricia

Book promotion specialist

*see below for note about the image

Something about Luca, or possibly Patricia’s email didn’t feel completely right. I sent the following response:

This is an excellent scam, and I commend you for the work that obviously went into it. The AI summary of my book is integrated perfectly, and playing to the vanity of writers is a pretty solid business strategy.

I assume if I went for it, you'd tell me about the fee you're charging for participation. I'm guessing you prefer payment in crypto?

Unfortunately, the link you sent leads to a book challenge, but not the one you introduced. In fact, the only Blooming Books Reading for Growth community seems to be a group of adults who read business books.

Oh yeah, also, you do not appear to exist or to be clear on whether your name is Patricia Luca or Luca Patricia. Anyway, I wish you the worst of luck in your scamming endeavors.

They quickly replied:

Same to you

I then poked around The 52 Book Club and found this page in which they alert authors to the scam. It looks like this has caused Luca, or possibly Patricia, to change tactics and claim they represent a different organization.

So if you’ve written a book and Luca or Patricia or anybody else sends you this email, don’t let ‘em getcha!

*Alt text: a middle-aged white woman with glasses on a chain with orange beads, an orange silk flower in her hair, and an orange cardigan over a black shirt.

I haven’t done the whole Catfish reverse image thing, but I assume this image is stolen from some innocent librarian’s facebook page or something. Or maybe they just fed “librarian” to an AI image generator and it kicked this out. So I don’t think this is a real picture of the scammer. I’m including it here because WOW does this look EXACTLY like someone who would run a book challenge, so they may attach the photo to a different name because it lends their scam credibility.

Now, Alpha School is a private school charging between 40k and 70k a year, so at least they’re not trying to tap into public money. Yet. More on this later.

But there are a number of HUGE red flags about this place that folks should know about. I mean, apart from the whole “The magic of AI will transform school” nonsense, which would be a red flag for many people. If you want to read what this looks like in practice, here’s a Wired article from last year. It’s kinda harrowing stuff. (And here’s an article about the article, expanding on some extremely problematic stuff that’s only mentioned in passing in the Wired article).

But even if that doesn’t convince you that Alpha School is a bad idea, dig this:

The school was co-founded (and presumably funded) by billionaire Joe Liemandt. It should by this point be axiomatic that billionaires are people of low moral character, but in case you think Liemandt is an exception, here is an article from Forbes about how Liemandt’s second career was starting a “digital sweatshop.” Yep, he made his money by firing tons of people and replacing them with low-cost overseas workers who he subjected to constant digital surveillance.

The only way you become a billionaire is by treating people like things. Achieving billionaire status indicates an empathy deficit that is most likely pathological. Such people are simply not to be trusted around other people’s children.

Note—I am not saying Liemandt is in the Epstein Files (he’s not—I checked); I’m saying that it is extremely unlikely that he is capable of viewing Alpha School students as human beings rather than as numbers on a spreadsheet, and this cannot be good for them.

But maybe you still want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for your kids to go to a school run by a probable sociopath. Well, consider this. Speaking at the info session were Liemandt and a guy named Michael Horn that the Alpha Boston website identifies only by “Harvard GSE.”

Which is technically true, but he’s an adjunct at Harvard GSE. His main career is thought leader huckster. He is the founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which is apparently a real thing, though it’s certainly giving “Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.’ Anyway, listing his only affiliation as Harvard GSE is techically true but also kind of deceptive, which is a bad way to start a relationship with parents.

In search of more red flags, I looked up Alpha School’s Form 990 to see how much they’re paying people and where their money comes from. And guess what? There isn’t one! That’s because each Alpha School is incorporated as a for-profit entity in the State of Texas.

This has several really bad implications. One is that these schools’ primary purpose is to generate a profit. So when doing what’s right by students conflicts with making a profit, students will lose every time.

The other concern is the complete lack of transparency that a private LLC affords. Nobody outside the company can see the financials. But it’ll probably be fine! What could possibly go wrong?

Since the ed reform grift has been always primarily been about getting access to that sweet public money, it’s a little odd to me that the new grift seems to be setting up private schools that are “disruptive innovators.” But I think this is really just a long con.

Here’s how it works. Since the SAT primarily measures household income, people who can pay 40-70k per year will probably have kids who score pretty well on it. So then the private, for-profit schools can take that data and go, “Look, our disruptive AI-centered teaching leads to high SAT scores!” and credulous local politicians will presumably fall for it and start writing them checks to run public schools. Especially since none of their other data will be public. How many kids leave the school? How many are suspended? How many English Language Learners and students with disabilities does the school serve? The public cannot know the answers to these questions, so all we’ll have is smooth talking hucksters and some anecdotal evidence in the form of testimonials.

It’s kind of funny how the “data driven education” people are now deliberately obscuring their data. Presumably because they’ve figured out that their disruptive innovation doesn’t actually work very well.

Which, of course, doesn’t matter. Because these schools are in business to generate a profit. So it ultimately doesn’t matter if the product is good, as long as you can get the marks to keep lining up to buy it.

Her response was to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to get some folks together who knew about school budgets so she could listen to us and learn. Some time later, I got people who knew a LOT about school budgeting (I was in touch with such people then because Twitter facilitated building communities of like-minded local folks to get stuff done, which is probably another reason Musk wanted to kill it) together and we met with then-councilor Wu in the meeting room at the JP Library. She took the T from City Hall and walked 15 minutes from Green Street to the library. And she really listened. And took notes.

And so this is how I came to break one of my own rules, which is “don’t stan politicians.” I volunteered for Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor and really believed that, unlike Marty Walsh, she cared about people who live in Boston, not just people who use Boston. She had all kinds of cool progressive ideas for making the city a better place, so much so that she was derided in right-wing circles as a “radical left mayor.” (This was mostly because she opposed the secret police rounding up our brown neighbors.)

And then, running for a second term, she absolutely, conclusively THUMPED Josh Kraft in the primary, which is effectively the final in Boston because we are not electing Republicans here. So now she’s been unleashed to really enact her progressive agenda!

Except…it’s not happening. She’s frozen work on a bunch of safe streets projects. (i.e. projects that may inconvenience car drivers in order to make the street better for people walking, biking, and using public transit.) The city may lose federal funding already allocated to these projects if they are frozen too long.

The new city budget (the council technically votes on the budget, but the way Boston is set up, the mayor has a ridiculous amount of power over the budgeting process, so I’m laying this at her doorstep) eviscerates the schools. Hundreds of young teachers across the city are losing their jobs. Class sizes will increase. The quality of education will decrease.

Meanwhile the Wu-appointed school committee voted to give Superintendent of Schools Mary Skipper a 15% raise. (!)

Oh yeah, and the Boston Police Department is level-funded. (The BPD’s overtime budget, which is primarly spent on having cops stand around and do nothing outside of construction sites, eats up 100 million dollars per year.)

So—keeping the city car-centric and prioritizing policing over education. Actually over pretty much everything else, as most city departments have had their budgets frozen.

Man, I’m glad we didn’t elect the billionaire!

So why, with an absolutely absurdly strong showing in the recent election, has Michelle Wu suddenly abandoned the priorities she professed? Well I have an idea.

We know she’s ambitious, which I do not hold against her. She doesn’t want to be Mayor of Boston forever, which I think is a good thing. The city certainly didn’t benefit from being Tom Menino’s personal fiefdom for 21 years. We also know she’s a mentee/former student of Elizabeth Warren, whose current term will expire in 2030, after she turns 81 years old. Perhaps Warren has given Wu the heads up that there’s going to be a vacant Senate seat in 4 years, and Wu, who is widely loathed in the suburbs, is selling out Boston in order to win over the suburbs. And the wealthy suburbanites who bankroll Senate campaigns.

The sad thing about this is that abandoning making Boston a better place to live does absolutely nothing to shore up Wu’s chances with people who will never forgive her for being “from Chicago.” (She is originally from Chicago, but has lived in Greater Boston for nearly 20 years and chose to settle and raise a family here. People who complain about her being from Chicago use it as code for other facets of her identity they’re not allowed to complain about openly, at least in Massachusetts.)

Another incredibly dumb thing about this strategy is that it follows the conventional idiocy of the Democratic Party, which seems to be “don’t do anything that might alienate Republicans.” But people are hungering for politicians they can support who seem to actually have principles and who are willing to ruffle feathers in order to get things done. Wu is a skilled politician who has the ability to explain progressive policy choices, and people like the idea of a politician who stands for something!

Instead, it looks like she’s decided to follow the failed Democratic playbook of pretending to be progressive and then being centrist. Thanks, Obama! No, literally, thanks, Obama, who won the presidency in Michelle Wu’s sophomore year of college by pretending to be progressive and then proceeded to be a moderate conservative President.

Nobody can predict the future, and it may well be that Wu’s intelligence and charisma and the fact that she’s both a woman and a Chinese American will give her the appearance of progressivism to the statewide electorate while not actually ruffling the feathers of the big money people who are ruining everything. Good luck to her, I guess.

But damn—is it so much to ask that Democratic voters actually get the candidate we voted for? People on the right vote for hatemongering theocrats and by and large get exactly that. And hatemongering theocrats who fight like hell to enact their troglodytic priorities! Where the hell is that energy from the Democratic party?

I’m going to continue to vote because I believe that it’s foolish to abandon any of the tools at my disposal to make the world better, but I have probably knocked on my last door as a campaign volunteer.

I say that, though the next time we get someone posing as a progressive running for mayor, I’ll probably support them enthusiastically as well, hoping, like Charlie Brown, that this time I’ll finally get to kick the fucking football.

Though The Croft School is a private school, I smelled “education reform” when the story came out, so I did a little research. Sure enough, Croft School founder/alleged fraudster Scott Given has deep roots in the “ed reform” community.

After getting his MBA at Harvard, where he apparently fell under the sway of then-Gates Foundation anti-public-ed person Stacey Childress, Given worked at The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, with future “Democrats for Education Reform” guy Liam Kerr. He then was a Broad Academy fellow (this is an anti public ed program run out of Yale). He was then a teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School, the principal of Excel Academy Charter School, and finally the founder of UP Education Network, a school management company that takes over district schools and tries to “turn them around,” usually by gutting labor protections for faculty and instituting draconian discipline procedures for students. Given “stepped down” from the organization he founded in 2016, shortly after their absolutely wild suspension numbers became public. (All this info comes from here.)

So why did I smell ed reform on the Croft School scandal? Because one thing ed reformers and the ed reform movement in general hates is transparency. In Massachusetts, Charter Schools are governed by self-appointing boards, the overwhelming majority of which have no parent representation. The only way charters are accountable to the people and communities they serve is through the charter renewal process, when the Department of Education rubber stamps a renewal every ten years. When I worked at a charter school, the board hired a new head of school who decided that this 200-student school needed 10 administrators. (Hey, he had cronies to hire!) Because there wasn’t any parent or student representation on the board, there was no pushback about this wildly irresponsible spending.

Anyway, so having one guy in charge of the money who was accountable to no one felt very ed-reformy to me, as indeed it was. (Indeed, the co-founder whose name is also all over the official paperwork for this organization is MATCH founder Michael Goldstein. He might wanna remove this section from his personal website:

And then I found out something even shadier. The Croft School, unlike the vast majority of private educational institutions in the USA, is a for-profit company. As a private company, it’s accountable to no one and is not required to be transparent about anything to anybody, except in its tax returns to the IRS, which are not publicly available. So salaries, expenses, all this stuff is a black box inside of Scott Givens’ head. Or possibly in the correct set of books he kept while showing the cooked books to the board.

Oh. About that board. Because Oxford Street Education, which operates the Croft School, is a private for-profit company, it’s not actually required to have a board. I noted that the note sent home to parents was signed by the “Board of Managers,” which sounds official but is not a legal title in Massachusetts. While said “Board of Managers” says they have fired Scott Given, they don’t have the authority to fire Scott Given and, indeed, his name is still listed as the principal (in a corporate sense, not an educational sense) on the LLC paperwork.

I do feel bad for the parents and students and faculty of The Croft School. Given insists that all of the secret debt the company is stuck with was plowed into school operations and he did not personally benefit from it. (surejan.gif) Color me skeptical because if you weren’t planning to profit, why’d you incorporate as a for profit corporation? Riddle me that!

Maybe he didn’t have any shady intentions in incorporating this way other than the arrogance and contempt for parents and students that is endemic to the ed reform movement. Why should you idiots have a say in your child’s school? I went to Harvard! Yeah, Given never said this, but also he didn’t have to. And trust me as someone who worked at a charter school, this is the sentiment behind the entire movement.

I don’t know what to conclude here other than the fact that the entire ed reform movement is shady as hell (it’s also rife with astroturf “organizations” consisting of a couple of people who pretend not to be funded by ed reform billionaires). And, if you’re enrolling your child in private school, ask about the financials. If you asked anyone in Croft School admissions if you could see their form 990 (the public financial document required of all nonprofit organizations), they’d have to tell you there isn’t one. Nor is there an annual report with any numbers because this isn’t a public company. And then you might ask them why that is. I wonder how they’d answer?

The movie is GORGEOUS. Just an absolute super-saturated feast for the eyes. Luhrmann and Elvis seem to share views about subtlety, which is to say I’m not sure either was/is familiar with the concept, so subject and filmmaker are a great match. And it’s a bold move on Luhrmann’s part to try to redeem the most widely ridiculed and derided stage of Elvis’s career. And, for the most part, he succeeds.

We see the band being loose and having fun in rehearsals, and the joy Elvis got from performing is infectious to the band, the live audience, and the movie audience. And God knows we all need a little joy these days.

So far so good, though I have one quibble with the performer and one with the filmmaker.

Elvis loved performing and would often make jokes, often at the expense of the material, to entertain the audience, as when, in EPIC, he changes the “Are You Lonesome Tonight” lyrics to “do you gaze at your forehead and wish you had hair.” This makes him a fun performer to watch, but it means that he, and therefore the audience, are kept at an ironic distance from the songs. Which is a shame because he was a gifted singer who could wring something real even out of bad material. The performance of “Suspicious Minds” in this movie shows what he can do when he’s actually trying, and it’s spectacular.

Still, if you go into this movie as a non fan trying to understand why Elvis mattered, this movie probably won’t help you understand. I encourage you to seek out the sit down shows from the comeback special—they didn’t give Elvis a guitar strap, so he had to channel all his energy into the songs. It’s stunning.

As for Luhrmann, he’s kind of mistitled this movie. I don’t think theres A single song that we get to see performed start to finish without interview voiceovers or cuts to rehearsal footage or other footage of Elvis working the crowd or fleeing the crowd or driving around Vegas, etc. So it’s not really Elvis Presley in Concert, because at a concert you get to hear the whole song.

Still, it’s been a rough week, and this movie made me happy for an hour and a half, which, in the year 2026, is about the highest recommendation I can give.