brendan halpin

I’ve been feeling frustrated that leadership at every level of government isn’t responding to the obvious climate emergency with any increased sense of urgency.

Multi-year plans and modest emissions reductions are insufficient. We need emergency action to combat the climate emergency.

Now, there are a lot of things we can and should do that will require time to put together. Center lane busways on every 4+ lane street in Boston, for example, while far less expensive than new rail lines, will still take time to put into place.

But there are two things that Massachusetts can do right now in order to help respond to the climate emergency. The first is to free the MBTA. Bus, subway, ferry, commuter rail—make the whole thing free. Denver saw ridership increase 22% when it made public transportation free for a month in 2022. Making the T (and, for that matter, every other form of public transportation in MA) free will ease traffic and reduce carbon emissions and make the entire Greater Boston area more liveable.

“But how are you gonna pay for it?” Same way we paid for throwing millions of dollars at GE to not build a headquarters in the Seaport, I guess. But also, eliminating fares will save tons of money on fare collection. No more machines, no more server farms running the fare system, and far less stress on bus drivers, so less turnover. (Also, going fare-free helps improve bus efficiency, since all doors can open at every stop. This saves on fuel costs.)

The second instant emergency climate change-fighting measure is such a no-brainer I can’t believe nobody’s even proposed it yet: close Hanscom Field.

Hanscom Field is an airport in Bedford, Massachusetts, that is the primary airport for private jets in Massachusetts. In fact, it’s almost exclusively dedicated to private aviation.

Even in the best of times, the idea that Massachusetts taxpayers should fund a landing strip for the 1%’s private jets is pretty onerous, but during a climate emergency, it’s inexcusable. No one needs to travel by private jet.

I believe private aviation should be banned altogether, but that’s something that needs to happen at the federal level. The least Massachusetts can do is shut down the airfield that makes this an attractive place to fly private jets in and out of.

Maybe there are better ideas. If so, I’d love to hear them. More than that, though, I’d love to have someone acknowledge that the situation we’re in is an emergency.

#Massachusetts #ClimateChange #MBTA #Transportation

Went to the Castle Island brewery in Norwood, MA last night for a Chaotic Wrestling show. It did not disappoint!

One match featured the Hispanic Mechanics, Jos A and Jos B, vs. two members of The Unit, Trigga the OG and…um, the other guy. The Hispanic Mechanics delivered the dance moves, the charisma, and the victory. I’ve seen Trigga the OG at every event I’ve been to, and he works really hard and is a great heel, and I’d like to see him get more attention.

God’s Greatest Creation was another tag team that won. The gimmick seems to be that they’re militant Christians who are also gay? (one of their opponents, I’m sorry I don’t remember the name because they were also really great, was sporting a Pride flag armband. I will say again that Chaotic does a great job of being an inclusive promotion that manages to put larger-than-life characters together without relying on lazy, hateful stereotypes.) Anyway, great match.

Paris Van Dale defended her championship in typical style—by complaining that she wasn’t getting sufficient respect, attempting to walk out of the match, and ultimately winning due to an illegal eye poke. Great stuff—I think she’s the best heel in the promotion.

Brad Cashew defeated hockey-themed newcomer Stan Copley in a “hockey rules” match. Copley did use the hockey stick against Cashew, but of course good prevailed. I would like to say that Cashew’s preening confidence only needs to be kicked up one notch to preening arrogance to make him a heel. Praying for a heel turn, but, as you can probably tell, I mostly like the heels.

High-flying Shannon Levangie defeated Che Long in a very entertaining match. I feel like Shannon has really grown into her persona and is now my favorite face. Also fun to see Che Long, who did his first match with Chaotic in May, find a great heel character and really embrace the dark side. Also he complained of an injury that left his back “construed” and that his opponent from the previous night had ruined his spray tan.

In an “international match,” a new guy representing Puerto Rico (lost the name—sorry!) took on The Israeli Action figure, who proved a very sore loser! Fortunately Flip Gordon came out to stop the post-match beatdown!

The main event featured Flip Gordon vs. sneering heel Ricky Smokes. Here’s how good Smokes is—when he did his entrance schtick, he walked around the outside of the ring and passed three ten-year-olds who were wearing his merch, looked at their outstretched hand, and said, “Like I would even think of high-fiving you!” Great stuff. Gordon, a charismatic face with absolute tree trunks for legs prevailed with an assist from Shannon Levangie, who stopped Ricky Smokes from kicking Flip into unconsciousness outside the ring.

If that sounds like a lot of entertainment, it was! And if you catch Chaotic at one of their bigger venues, like the Sons of Italy in Watertown, you’ll get another full hour of wrestling goodness.

Non-corporate wrestling is punk as fuck and an amazing entertainment bargain besides. Support your local indie promotion!

Who doesn’t love some gothic goodness? Spooky old houses! Repressed sexuality! Dread!

I recently watched The Haunted Palace with Vincent Price. It’s about how Vincent Price inherits a gigantic castle in Massachusetts(!) and gets possessed by the evil spirit of his ancestor who originally owned the joint!

It’s a fun time, if not as colorful as Masque of the Red Death. Kind of like a Hammer movie with less cleavage. For a fun bonus, it features a couple of guys who were on every TV show in the 1970s! (If you watch the movie, you’ll know them immediately, and look them up on IMDB trying to figure out where you know them from, then realize it could be literally any network TV program from 1970-80!). There’s a pretty big plot hole, but the end is great and it delivers the spooky atmosphere. Disappointing that Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth are mentioned but never make an appearance in the film. Whaddya got against elder gods, Roger Corman?

The Last One Left is a gothic novel by Riley Sager about a home health aide who comes to care for an old woman who may or may not have killed her parents and sister years earlier. It’s a pretty engaging read, but…well, there are many pleasures to be had from reading, and, in the mystery genre, I realize that what I really like is spending time with a cool protagonist while they try to unravel the mystery. I’m less interested in the solution.

Well, this book is all about the solution. The protagonist isn’t much of a character—just kind of an information-gathering machine. The solution is unexpected and brilliantly constructed, but…there are like five big plot twists in the last quarter of the book. After the first one, I was like, “Oh, cool!” by the fifth one I was like, “Really? Another one?” Ultimately the whole rest of the book is setting up the cleverness of the last quarter. If you like a clever solution and multiple plot twists, this is a good pick for you. If you’re like me…well, it’s still a very entertaining book. But be forewarned you may be rolling your eyes at the end.

#Review #movies #books #gothic #mystery

Back in February, I wrote about how several Boston charter schools were facing a crisis of declining enrollment. It seems the crisis hasn’t abated.

If you don’t want to click through to the old article, here’s why declining enrollments matter: in Massachusetts, the money follows the student. So every open seat in a charter school represents lost revenue for the school. Lost revenue leads to budget cuts, budget cuts lead to worse schools which lead to more open seats. This is the death spiral that charter schools were intended to inflict on real public schools. But now it seems to be happening to them.

As of August 17th, six months after the charter school lottery was held, eight of Boston’s sixteen charter schools still have open seats. Find the whole list here. (Don’t worry! I’ve got screenshots if they take it down!)

This matters, of course, because it shows that the charter school narrative that people are lining up to get in and we should really expand the number of charter schools is false. If you live in Boston, you’ve probably seen the ads urging people to enroll in charter schools. If a school is in high demand, it doesn’t need to advertise. (Also, I don’t believe even nominally public charter schools should use public money to advertise, but I’m old fashioned like that.)

But I started to get curious about why charter enrollment is falling. My theory is that the charters that started in 1995 have been around long enough that they’ve got substantial numbers of alumni who are parents…and choosing not to send their kids to charter schools because of what they experienced there.

So I decided to reach out to a bunch of charter school alumni to see if my theory was correct. This was in no way a scientific survey, and most people are busy and not as obsessed with education as I am. Two folks wrote back to me to say they had good experiences at the charter school where I was their teacher. This didn’t surprise me. The charter where I worked served a small subset of students very well. I think that’s true of most of them.

But then I also got this, from City on a Hill alum Tonya. I’m using her name and story with her permission. I’ve edited her response for length.

To be 💯 with you but when I was a sophomore at COAH, I was treated like shit. The only one that supported me and didn’t look down on me was Ms. Jamison.She told me that I would succeed even being a teen mom. I had teachers and administration tell me I wouldn’t be anything and I would end up working at McDonald’s and I should leave COAH and get my GED. I was misrepresenting the COAH mission statement and was told I needed to leave and go to a secondary maternity school for pregnant teens. I wasn’t even given the proper education there or all of my school requirements from City on a Hill which led to me getting kept back. I was supposed to graduate in 2004 but I transferred out my senior year. It SUCKED ASS for me and I felt like a failure. 1 because I was pregnant and

2 Because I felt like I was purposely kept back. I got straight A’s in my secondary school COAH transferred me to and told me I would be able to graduate with my class. But when it came down to it out of nowhere I didn’t have enough credits. So I happily left COAH permanently. I wasn’t going to be a statistic like admin was saying to me. Mr. Hays wasn’t telling me I wouldn’t be worth anything but he supported his peers and I looked up to these individuals. I PRIDED myself in being a charter school kid because it wasn’t BPS and I knew the requirements and high expectations. I love a challenge and love to prove people wrong when I’m being looked down on. I had a blast friends wise at COAH. I have amazing memories with my peers. But the way I was treated like a piece of trash and then shunned like a stain on their reputation was degrading. I was putting pressure on myself because I knew the obstacles I’d have being a teen mom but they didn’t make it terrible for me like I was a mistake.

Charter school in that phrase to me sounds like “elite”, or “thorough bread”, “smarter than” “better than”, and as much as the mission statement sounds cool and jazzy, it’s bullshit. It’s like a corporate office job that says all these amazing things to get bodies through the door then when you are hired to work their you realize it’s just for show.

I graduated public school with honors and held my “mistake” on my hip and in my class speech I told in short words that I was holding my daughter as a middle finger to everyone that said I couldn’t do it in school.

Now, obviously Tonya is only one alum. I won’t say her story is representative of everyone’s experience, but Iknow for a fact that it’s far from unique. I will never stop feeling ashamed that I sat silently in meetings while students with ed plans were “counseled out” of City on a Hill because the school wasn’t willing to meet its legal obligation to serve their needs. Students usually left those meetings in tears.

Would you send your kid to a school that had, in Tonya’s words, treated you like shit?

(If you’re a charter school alum with a story to tell, click on the contact me link at the top of the page. I have often been guilty of writing about charter schools by the numbers, and I think it’s important to remember that every one of those numbers is a person.)

#Boston #Education #CharterSchools

Just back from a delightful week in rural Maine, not far from the New Hampshire border. I’ve got some thoughts about rural life in general, but the first thing I will say is if you choose to ignore TLC’s advice as I did, Sabbaday Falls in New Hampshire is a VERY cool waterfall, just a short walk into the White Mountain National Forest.

The first thing that struck me about rural life is that you just have to freaking drive EVERYWHERE. Over the course of a week, I got used to driving between 15 and 45 minutes to do pretty much anything. Want a cup of coffee? 15 minutes away. Ice cream? 15 minutes in a different direction. Grocery store? half an hour.

You get the picture. You just have to spend so much time in the car all the time. These folks cannot give up their cars. Which makes it all the more important for those of us who live in cities to try to drive as little as possible and to fight to take our cities back from cars so that they (and the planet in general) will be more liveable.

(aside—You can’t be serious about climate change if you don’t address the incredible carbon footprint of the US military. We need to stop maintaining a global empire in order to save the globe. But I can’t make the DC establishment kick its defense contractor money habit, and I might be able to move the needle on driving a little bit. So we do what we can!)

Also, a lot of us anti-car folks should, I think, include a recognition of this reality of rural life when we talk about this issue. If I had to depend on a car to make my life livable, I too would probably be pretty hostile to anti-car rhetoric. I know there aren’t, percentage-wise, that many people in rural environments, but I think they could use some reassurance that we don’t want them stuck in their homes forever.

Also—while I did see some “Don’t Tread on Me” flags in Maine, once I got into New Hampshire, the fascist symbols multiplied, like, exponentially. In a supermarket in NH I saw a guy with a trucker hat bearing the Punisher Skull logo with the fascist “blue line” flag pattern and a swoop of orange hair atop the skull. It was like a parody of fascist merch, but this guy was not wearing it ironically.

I don’t know why New Hampshire is so much more fascist than…well, any other New England State, but in light of the Don’t Tread on Me flags, I started thinking about the many ways rural residents are subsidized by city residents. For example, in the Maine towns where I was, there were basically no roads—only state routes. The rural towns don’t have any roads of their own, presumably because they don’t have the tax base to maintain them. So they just build houses off the state route, paved, maintained, and plowed by the state, and therefore subsidized by people who live in non-rural areas.

Same with the power lines and cable internet infrastructure. A mile of power line on a state route in Maine might serve a hundred customers, but I feel like the actual number is far less than that. So either the state or the ratepayers are subsidizing the power and internet lines going to areas where it probably costs more to maintain the lines than the companies make in revenue from having them there.

Now, I’m not going to use crappy GOP rhetoric about freeloaders or whatever because I believe we should all take care of each other. And so I don’t think it’s wrong or even bad that rural infrastructure is subsidized by urban residents. But maybe rural residents could recognize this and a) stop demonizing the cities whose tax revenue makes their lifestyle possible and b) stop with the “independent homesteader” cosplay and recognize that you’re not some lone wolf living on the frontier. You’re someone driving every day on a road someone else paid for because they think you should have roads to drive on.

Well, I can dream.

#transit #fascism #cars

I was sucked in by the setup—in 1968, a teenage boy searches for his missing sister. He knows she was kidnapped, but the cops think she’s just another hippie who dropped out, so he has to find her. For the most part, the novel delivers on the premise. What kept me from loving it was that the author seems to be interested in making this a coming-of-age novel in addition to a mystery, so the search for the missing sister unfolds at a pretty slow pace as the protagonist does some teenage boy coming of age stuff that was less interesting to me than the mystery.

REFLECTIONS THAT MAY SPOIL STUFF:

For a book that takes place in the 60’s underground and, for the most part, paints cops as ineffectual at best and malicious at worst, this takes what seems to me a pretty sharp right turn (politically speaking) at the end. Trotting out the right-wing myths of people on acid thinking they can fly (I mean, I guess it might have happened at some point?) and protestors greeting returning Vietnam vets with abuse (particularly weird in this book because how do the protestors know when the bus is coming with the returning soldiers on it?) both make an appearance, and, in the end, the problem can only be solved by men with guns.

Also, it has to be said that there is not a single well-developed female character in the book. We come closest with the mom, but even she is pretty one-note in the end.

So, overall, it was entertaining. Would have been better if it were a hundred pages shorter.

#review #books

…and the bookstore is playing hits on their sound system. Now, we’ve been in other stores and have heard music ranging from tolerable to loathsome. But as we wander the aisles in this joint, we hear The The’s “This is the Day” followed by Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear us Apart” followed by The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” followed by New Order’s “Ceremony.”

I was enjoying the groove when one of the two people behind the counter asked if she could give my dog a treat. Like his owner, he only says no to a treat if he’s feeling extremely ill, so I gave an enthusiastic yes. Now, this particular woman was white haired and in her late 50s or early 60s. The other person behind the counter was a young woman in her 20s, so I figured the person in front of me had chosen the “alternative hits of the 80s” playlist.

So I said to her, I said, “you’re playing the soundtrack to my adolescence here! I wanna go sulk in my room, ha ha!” Not the greatest joke in the world, sure, but mildly amusing, to me anyway.

But not to the bookstore clerk who responded thusly: “Oh, I’m too old for this stuff. I feel like it just kind of meanders. And I’m like, why?”

Reader, I was outraged. First of all, this woman was certainly not too old for this stuff—she was probably just listening to different music when “Love Will Tear us Apart” came out. Second of all, this is an inappropriate response to someone’s enthusiasm for a work of art!

Full disclosure: I had to edit this piece twice to remove my own snarky dismissals of the kinds of music other people enjoy. Perhaps what I really meant was that it was an inappropriate response to my enthusiasm for a work of art.

Today I logged my tenth short story rejection in the last year. (Not all for the same story—I am, apparently a glutton for punishment, but not that much)

Now, I got published a lot in the early 2000’s. But I haven’t sold a book (or story) since 2011. I’ve now been dealing with rejection for longer than I dealt with acceptance. Writing-wise, of course.

So I’m a bit of an expert on rejection (in the fiction realm—there are lots of other ways to get rejected that I don’t know much about!), and I’d like to share some of my hard-earned wisdom!

First and foremost: you know this already because you’ve read an embarrassingly bad book or story that was traditionally published, but, at any level, the business of publishing is not about judging the quality of the work. So the fact that you got rejected by an agent or editor does not imply that your work isn’t good. Really. So let’s go through the people who may reject your work and look at what their reasons are!

Agents

This one’s easy because legitimate agents only get paid if they sell your book to a publisher. Which means this: they will only agree to represent your book if

a) they feel like it’s a sure fire bestseller. (Note: screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim about Hollywood applies to publishing as well: nobody knows anything. So this is an agent making a guess that this is the right moment for this particular book.) This is rare.

b) They love your book. Now before you get offended that they didn’t love your book, think about how many books you’ve read in the last year. How many did you love? For me it’s about ten percent of the books I read. It doesn’t mean that the others aren’t good—it’s just that I am one particular person with a particular bunch of experiences and preferences, and some books are really going to speak to me and other aren’t.

This is the same case with agents, only I suspect the percentage of books they love is even smaller. And remember—if an agent agrees to take on your book, they’re agreeing to work on it for free. They’ll only get paid if they sell it. So that’s a pretty high bar to clear. They’ll read many good books they just won’t love enough to work on them for free. Fair enough!

Editors (magazines)

If you’re submitting to one of the big professional markets, you need to remember a couple of things.

One is that these editors are saving spaces in every issue for established writers. Is your name on the cover going to move copies? Nope! But if Stephen King’s name is on the cover, people will buy it. (This, of course, benefits new writers—if people pick up the magazine to read something by Stephen King, they might wind up reading yours too!)

Also: they have a vision for what their publication is. And your story might not fit into that vision. Some of the speculative fiction publications are clearly focusing on stories that ignore or subvert familiar tropes instead of using them as a framework. So your perfectly cromulent space opera story might not find a home there. The mystery publications often have the opposite focus—I suspect their readership skews older, and so they do a lot of stories with familiar settings and tropes that feel more comfortable than challenging. Your story might be great, but if they judge that it doesn’t fit the vision for their publication, or that their readers aren’t ready for such a departure, they’re not going to publish it.

Editors (novels)

As with agents, editors acquire for two reasons.

a)They think it’s going to sell really well and make everyone a lot of money (but remember: nobody knows anything)

OR

b) it’s the kind of book that is going to make them feel like their job is valuable and important

So if you don’t have a high-concept bestseller, you have to hope your book hits reason b. And the editor, like you, is a person with a specific set of preferences and experiences that may or may not align with your book.

In my experience, it never gets easy to get rejected. But for so many of us, every submission feels like a referendum on the quality of our work. I hope it’ll be helpful to you to know it’s not.

#writing #publishing

I really enjoyed this show, the rare comedy/mystery that works really well as both. The first two episodes are really funny, and the remaining ones are intermittently funny as the focus shifts from comedy to mystery.

It’s about a small town in Tasmania that is rapidly gentrifying thanks to an influx of lesbians from the mainland, one of whom is long-suffering cop Dulcie. This is a great performance from Kate Box (Good God, imagine how hard middle school was for this woman), who essentially plays the straight man (comedically speaking) to most of the rest of the cast of quirky characters, led by Madeleine Semi as foul-mouthed, horny mainland detective Eddie. It’s kind of like if Northern Exposure was about a serial killer instead of some will-they-or-won’t-they bullshit.

One of the things I really love about crime fiction and television is that it allows for exploration of social issues without didacticism (usually). Deadloch does this really well, highlighting the aforementioned gentrification as well as the mistreatment of the indigenous people and the paternalistic cruelty of wealthy white people who do philanthropy for them. And, of course, how women are mistreated by men in their personal and professional lives. The only stumble, in my opinion, is this: Dulcie sees one of her indigenous neighbors has sprayed ACAB on their garbage cans and just kind of gives it an exasperated eyeroll. For a show that clearly sets out to skewer a lot of injustices, it’s a weird blind spot. Why even bring it up only to dismiss it?

My slight political objections aside, I still give this a full-throated recommendation. It’s one of the best crime shows I’ve watched in years. I’m really hoping for a season 2, though I suspect this is a lightning in a bottle situation that won’t be repeated. Catch it on Prime.

#TV #Review #Cops #Crime

I watched all 3 episodes of House of Hammer (Not to be confused with Hammer House of Horror, which is also great) this weekend. It’s a riveting, disturbing documentary.

Of course it’s about sexual abuse, so it features survivors telling their stories in graphic detail, so if that kind of thing is going to send you spiraling for a few days, please do not watch it.

I found it gross and awful and couldn’t stop watching. I very rarely watch TV by myself, and yet after starting this and getting about 15 minutes in, I found nearly 3 hours to continue it.

So: an excellent documentary with a huge content warning for sexual assault. That’s the review. Now the reflections.

I hope that as stories like this continue to emerge, we’ll start to change our perception of the ultra rich. The Hammer dynasty (Armand, Julian, Michael, Armie. Not MC, who is, as far as I know, a decent guy) is comprised of shockingly horrible people. And I don’t think they’re alone. For one thing, becoming ultra rich seems to require a lack of empathy for other humans that is almost certainly pathological. For another, with apologies to Master P, growing up with no limits seems to break something in the human brain. In short, the people who amass huge fortunes probably have serious personality disorders, and even if those aren’t passed down genetically, growing up ultra wealthy seems to lead to people becoming awful. So maybe we can stop lionizing these folks. They are the absolute scum of the earth, which is not the kind of term I throw around lightly.

It’s impossible to adequately praise the courage of the women who came forward to detail what Armie Hammer did to them without slipping into cliche. But to survive that kind of horrible trauma only to be targeted by horrible fans? To know that the person you’re exposing has enough money to both smear you and evade consequences for pretty much anything forever? That really is a profound bravery, and ultimately, self-sacrifice. Because they face the public vilification in hopes of saving other women from enduring what they endured.

This is in no way to diminish the aforementioned incredible courage, but something I noticed was that one of the Armie Hammer survivors was the CEO of an app company (so just regular rich, not ultra rich), and was able to just take off for multi-week vacations on a whim. I firmly believe in most organizations, the more money you make, the less important you are to the day to day functioning of the place. The boss never has to find anyone to cover their shift because it doesn’t matter if they show up or not.

Circling back to the toxic fans. I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to be able to admit when we’ve been conned. Armie Hammer successfully conned people into believing he was a certain kind of person (not a monster), and people who invested so much into admiring him would rather publicly attack a rape survivor than admit they were wrong. But here’s the thing. Cons, scams, cults, whatever—they don’t just work on stupid people. They work on all of us because they use the good parts of our personalities against us. So giving people the benefit of the doubt, showing forgiveness, believing in the necessity of working for a better world—these are all good things we don’t want to lose, and as long as we have them, people will con us. Armand Hammer didn’t amass a huge fortune by conning only dumb people. He conned everyone. I pride myself on my cynicism and was succesfully conned by two different employers, each one peddling idealism they didn’t believe. I’m susceptible to being conned again for the same reason.

Also, if you’re not a sociopath, they’re hard to spot. That’s why they can do so many crimes and become super wealthy! I, like most people, consider myself a good judge of character but was completely stunned to find that someone I used to work with was credibly accused of two violent crimes. Up until I read the details of their alleged crimes, I would have told you they were a warm, friendly, and very good-hearted person. But I appear to have been wrong about that. Or, anyway, those qualities somehow coexisted with violent rage. I would like to encourage us all to have some humility about our ability to judge people and not see our inability to immediately spot horrible people as our flaw. It’s not. It's the very qualities that make us not horrible that make us fall for these people. The problem isn’t us. It’s them.

#Review #EatTheRich

#TV