The Top Left Corner

Editor’s Note: The following article is derived from officially released information, published with few or no editorial changes. The Greylock Glass  occasionally provides our readers with such content if the information is factual in nature, and requires little to no interpretation or analysis, often when original reportage would not provide additional relevant information.

(See below for rough transcript, very rough, of our interview with Local 2110 UAW rep Chelsea Farrell.)

NORTH ADAMS — March 26, 2024 — Unionized staff of MASS MoCA, members of UAW Local 2110, voted today to ratify an agreement on wages that will end a three week strike.

The  Agreement will settle wages for the next two years.  58% of the unit, currently earning just $16.25 per hour will immediately be increased to at least $18 per hour. Full-time staff will receive general wage increases of 3.5% in each of the two years, and some workers will receive additional equity increases based on seniority and level of responsibility. Average pay for the unit will increase by 12.1% by the second year of the Agreement. The Agreement also includes additional holiday pay and establishes overtime pay for any shifts that last over ten hours in a day. 

The Union Bargaining Committee issued a statement, saying: “We are very pleased to have reached an agreement with the MASS MoCA that raises minimum pay rates and improves working conditions. We are looking forward to getting back to the jobs we love.” 

Hear our 2022 coverage of Local 2110 UAW’s one-day walkout.

NORTH ADAMS — March 6, 2024 — Unionized employees of MASS MoCA went on strike starting Wednesday, March 6 after no agreement on wages was reached with the Museum. Employees began picketing the Museum starting 8 am on Wednesday, March 6 and say they will picket daily until an agreement is reached.  

The employees’ union, part of Local 2110 UAW, was originally formed in April of 2021. After a one day strike in August of 2022, employees reached an agreement on a first contract which allowed them to re-open the agreement in October 2023 to negotiate further wage increases. Negotiations on the wage reopener have been ongoing for four months but no agreement has been reached. 

A post shared by MASS MoCA Union—Local 2110 UAW (@massmocaunion)

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of the 120 employees are earning just $16.25 per hour, according to the UAW. Average pay for full-time employees is $43,600.  According to The Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator, for a modes living in Berkshire County, a single individual with no children needs to earn approximately $47,000 per year while a family of four needs about $118,000. The Union is seeking to raise the hourly minimum rate to $18.25 by October of 2023 and is also seeking a minimum 4.5% increase this year. 

MASS MoCA sent out a March 1 email to union members characterizing its rejection of the Union’s offer: “The Museum cannot agree to terms that will diminish our mission or operational sustainability, upend vital partnerships, reduce our programs, or fundamentally change our creative workplace culture. Simply put, MASS MoCA has been and will continue to be moved to adopt proposals that are balanced, fair, sustainable, and honest.”

The Union says the difference between its and the Museum’s base wage proposal is only an additional $150,000 for this year, and that workers need the money just to make ends meet. Moreover, the Union asserts that the Museum has increased the number of higher-paid management positions at the expense of the unionized staff.

“MASS MoCA seems out of touch with our needs and concerns as employees,” said Meg Labbee, a 25 year employee of the Museum who works in Artists Services. “They say the arts and artists come first but they need to show some regard for the people who work here. We love the work but we deserve respect and fair conditions.”

MASS MoCA responded to a request for comment by e-mail, saying:

November 2023 marked the one-year anniversary of MASS MoCA’s 3-year contract with the UAW Union Local 2110. The institution says that it continues to promote both a spirit of optimism and a commitment to bargaining as a mutual responsibility. Since the wage negotiations reopened on October 1, MASS MoCA maintains that it has been engaging in negotiations in good faith, proposing wage adjustments for all employees.

On February 20, MASS MoCA presented its most significant offer to date at the bargaining table — retroactive to January 1, 2024 — which included a 3.5% across-the-board salary increase, select equity increases averaging over 5%, and a minimum hourly wage of $17.25. The museum notes that this proposal for the minimum wage is higher than any state-mandated minimum wage across the country and aligns with MASS MoCA’s focus on prioritizing wage and equity increases that have led to a 39.6% growth since 2018.

“We are extremely disappointed that the United Auto Workers union has decided to reject our wage increase offer by taking action against MASS MoCA in the form of an indefinite strike,” said Director Kristy Edmunds. “What so many people make beautifully possible here — year in and year out —  is the beating heart of why we exist as an arts organization. In the span of three years, we have implemented equity increases at every level, continued to stay ahead of the Commonwealth’s minimum wage, ensured no disruption in health and retirement benefits, and funded a variety of innovative employee support programs that include student loan, elder and child care offsets. At this post-pandemic juncture, we are building a future of financial resilience — including significant investments in our people — and cannot agree to contract terms that will diminish our ability to do so holistically.”

MASS MoCA’s complete response to the UAW action is detailed here.

Labbee, who is from the nearby town of Adams, adds, “Many of us live locally and our pay has not kept pace with the cost of living. By raising pay to something more livable, MASS MoCA would not only be supporting its employees, but helping lift the community, MASS MoCA’s rejection of our reasonable proposal has left us with no choice but to strike the institution we love.”

The March 6 strike deadline is not the first time bargaining with the Museum has been contentious. In 2022, during initial contract bargaining, the Union filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board over the Museum’s bad faith bargaining, and employees engaged in a one-day strike. Then, this past November, the Union filed a complaint against the Museum with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) when the Museum ordered workers to remove flooring contaminated with loose asbestos without proper equipment or training. OSHA has since issued test results  confirming the presence of asbestos, cited necessary corrections to the Museum and is conducting an ongoing investigation. 

In April 2021, the MASS MoCA staff voted overwhelmingly to unionize with UAW Local 2110. The bargaining unit includes approximately 120 employees who work as educators, curators, custodians, museum attendants, box office staff, art fabricators, technicians, and other administrative and professional staff. UAW Local 2110 is a technical, office and professional union that represents many museums and cultural institutions in the northeast including the Museum of Modern Art, the MFA, Boston, the Portland Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Jewish Museum, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and other non-profit and educational institutions.

Top Left Corner:  And with me on the line is Chelsea Farrell, representative of the local 2110 of the UAW. Welcome to the show, Chelsea.

Chelsea Farrell: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Top Left Corner: Well, I got your I got your your your message, about this potential action that’s going to take place starting 8 a.m. in front of MASS MoCA tomorrow morning. That’s a March 6th. Wednesday, March 6th. And I have to say, I’m not too, too surprised by it, but I haven’t heard a lot about it either. So let’s see if we can’t rewind a bit on a link to the coverage that I did in in 2021 of the forming of this union at MASS MoCA. But why don’t you give us bring us up to speed? Where where did this come from? And what’s the history here?

Chelsea Farrell: Yeah. So we formed a union a couple of years back, I think in May of 2021 now. And our union is, some folks refer to as a wall to wall unit. This means just about everybody who who isn’t a boss or a manager is included in our union. And this includes a lot of the very traditional museum titles, like educators, gallery attendants, curators, but also performing arts, art fabrication, buildings and grounds and custodial staff as well. I think forming the union back in 2021, it was it was really, I think, a part of this, this wave of museum unionization over these past couple of years where I think a lot of museum workers, especially in the light of the pandemic really understood how precarious and how vulnerable they were without union protection, so we did really see, especially in the Northeast, in New York an explosion of the union organizing. And folks at MASS MoCA, I think, were largely responding to a lot of those those issues that, again, were really crystallized by the pandemic. So, we entered our original contract negotiations, maybe six months after that. And I think as you’re, as you’re alluding to, it was it was a fairly tough road the first time where ultimately our union had to call for a one day strike in order to settle our first contract.

Chelsea Farrell: Which we did fortunately settle in November of 2022, and part of that contract was, each year of the contract, we agreed to reopen the contract and bargain exclusively over wages, and one of the reasons why we did agree to this was, frankly, MASS MoCA was unwilling to put enough on the table for the second and third years of the contract. So we did agree to, to reopen, and that’s that’s sort of where we are now as of October of last year. We’ve been in contract negotiations to, to get better wages and better conditions for folks at MASS MoCA and the negotiations themselves. They’ve been fairly slow moving, definitely very tense where, frankly, some of the museum’s offers were still lowball that they, they really didn’t even seem like realistic offers to us. And I think this wage negotiation is. It’s not just. You know, looking at the money on the table and what that means for people. But it is really colored by, I think, frankly, this question of union power and how where our union stands at MASS MoCA, because unfortunately, I think this strike is also a culmination of really anti-union, divisive tactics that we’ve seen from management over the.

Top Left Corner: Sure. Sure. Let’s start though. Let’s talk about some numbers. I want to get into the tactics. I want to get into the atmosphere and some of the other questionable activities of management. But let’s let’s give people a sense of what these numbers are. In your information, your documents, you say that 58% of the 120 employees are earning just $16.25 an hour. Break that down for us. And these mostly part time workers, full time workers, temporary workers. Who are these folks and what do these numbers mean?

Chelsea Farrell: Yeah. So these these folks at $16.25, it’s not just part time workers. There are full time workers at this level as well. And obviously this is really problematic. I think not just for the workers themselves, but for the museum field in total It’s it’s not unusual for museums to really operate off of a lot of low paid, frankly, very exploitative part time labor. That’s a really common model that unfortunately exists. So a lot of the folks in these positions, they’re they’re young folks maybe just out of college, folks who who are interested in the arts, interested in moving up in museums. And this is sort of this, this theater position, but at the same time, as I said, there’s there’s full time folks earning, earning this rate, right? So only $16.25 an hour, that’s that’s just over $30,000 a year. That’s really just not anywhere close to a livable or sustainable wage for folks.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. I mean, if we’re just talking about, say, rent, okay, in the area you can find, I have seen one bedrooms as low as 750 bucks in North Adams. Not saying you want to live in them. Because some of them are pretty, pretty dodgy. I would say that the average standard apartment, one bedroom apartment is going for around 1,200 bucks. I mean, and that’s even that’s pretty modest. That’s that’s nothing fancy. So 1,200 bucks already. That’s nearly half your your take home pay. So and that and I should I should point out many years ago, when I was young, the recommendation was that your rent should be or your, your living, your housing should be about one quarter your salary. Now, I’m hearing from people who are making things like 16.25 an hour that they’re paying half and sometimes more than half their, their wages on, on just a place to live.

Chelsea Farrell: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the housing cost is I mean, I think for most folks in the Berkshire County, they’re aware of this problem, but we hear it from members all the time that like, what what’s happening is that a lot of these single family homes are, or even multi-family homes are being converted to Airbnbs. Yeah. And people are being really priced out. And because of the limited housing stock, there’s nowhere for people to go that that’s affordable. We hear that all the time from members.

Top Left Corner: So yeah we’re not even talking about the food costs that keep going up and up and up and clothing costs and, well gas is not too bad now, but it was up there pretty high for a while. So yeah, there’s just an amazing amount of nothing left over at the end of the month on on pay like that. Let’s talk about the museum’s response. They sent out mass Moca, sent out a March 1st email to union members characterizing its rejection of the union’s offer. Quote, the museum cannot agree to terms that will diminish our mission or operational sustainability, upend vital partnerships, reduce our programs, or fundamentally change our creative workplace culture. Simply put, MASS MoCA has been and will continue to be moved to adopt proposals that are balanced, fair, sustainable and honest. And I’m going to take you at your word that this is an accurate quotation. And what do you say to that?

Chelsea Farrell: What can you say to that? You know the line that, I mean, there’s a few lines that that really sort of, I think stick with me and I think really, frankly, fall flat with membership as to how tone deaf the organization works. Sounds by by saying this, I mean even just like, again, this this question of sustainability. Please explain to me how these low wages are sustainable for the folks actually earning them. I really feel this statement is, frankly, tone deaf. And this on top of, again, what folks really feel as seeing on the ground is more and more over the past year and a half, two years, we’ve seen an increase of high level management positions, positions that are newly created, positions that did not exist before that are easily earning close to six figures, if not well over that. Right. And it to be told that ask here in the proposal is going to upend operations. It’s. I don’t know, it’s pretty offensive to hear because to us it’s it’s a clear, clear question of. You know, operational priorities. And certainly it’s a signal to me that the museum does not prioritize our workers.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. And of course, I want to I want to just note that very last word in that that response that there moved to adopt proposals that are proposals that are balanced, fair, sustainable and honest. That’s a kind of an odd word to throw at the end of that, as if there might be something dishonest about your proposal. I’m not sure what that would be. I think the facts at play here are their numbers. There’s no there’s no wiggle room, there’s no subjectivity. $16.25 an hour. And I say this a lot, and I know that some of my regular listeners probably are tired of hearing it. But when I was 16, back in, in the dark ages, I got paid. At this gas station that I. This is when you used to pump gas for people, you check the oil, check the air in the tires, all that jazz. Full service station. I got hired, and this was in Connecticut back in the 80s. And it was the minimum wage was four and a quarter an hour. Right. And my boss paid me $6 an hour, which I thought was great. Being 16. I thought that was fantastic, right? I said, but like, there’s another shop up the up the street that pays minimum wage.

Top Left Corner: I mean, I want the money, but why are you paying $1.75 more an hour? And he turned to me. He said, “Do you handle money all day long?” I said, yeah. He says, “Do I expect the drawer to equal out at the end of the at the end of the shift?” I said, yeah. He said “Do you have to give customer service? You have to be nice to people?” I said, yeah. “You have to know how to check oil, check transmission fluid, check air? You have to clean windshields if they ask you to it?” I said, yeah. He said, “Do you have to stand out in the hot sun in the summertime and in the winter, you know, when it’s freezing, all day shivering in your soaked feet?” He said, “Yeah, well, that’s not a minimum wage because you’re doing all these things.” Minimum wage. Then he pointed out, he drew my recollection to a fellow who basically pushed a broom in town. He was a World War Two vet, older guy, and he’d taken some shrapnel and he wasn’t ever going to be the same. So he had a job at minimum wage.

Top Left Corner: Of course, minimum wage didn’t even exist then, but he had a job at minimum wage, he said, because it was all he could really do, sort of push the broom and do an odd job here or there. But the minimum wage protected him, and it gave him an income so that his parents weren’t entirely dependent upon him. And when they were gone, he had something to keep a roof over his head. So that conception of minimum wage, I think, since the 70s, certainly has gone down and down and down and down to where it is the employers. It describes what the employer wants to pay, not what the work entails. Do you know what I’m saying? So a lot of these workers who are making $16.25 an hour, they have high levels of customer contact or visitor contact. They’re certainly responsible for maintaining either the security or the facilities of MASS MoCA. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff in there that it’s worth money, and so the idea that you would want to pay as close to 15 bucks an hour as possible seems to be missing the point of what minimum wage is meant to do. Thoughts?

Chelsea Farrell: Yeah, well it’s an interesting story to hear you tell. I hear a lot of offhanded remarks about the minimum wage. You’ve probably heard them yourself, “minimum wage, minimum work.” And this sort of idea that if you pay so low, you should the quality of work should. I think it’s an interesting, offhanded remark because, regardless of the work that you’re doing, obviously there’s dignity in all work, right? And everyone deserves a fair wage. Even if this $16.25 is  $1.25 over the minimum rate of 15, I think most folks would agree that 15 isn’t enough.

Top Left Corner: And in 2021 now. Yeah.

Chelsea Farrell: Right. Because, I mean, I think about the fight for 15, and the slogan of raise the minimum wage that. I mean, that slogan I feel like was maybe 2010, if not before then. Yeah, right. And states didn’t achieve that until just a couple of years ago, I think Massachusetts probably has one of the highest minimum rates in the country, but it obviously still is not a wage that is at all livable or sustainable for a single person.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. I mean, I’m looking at advertised jobs, say in convenience stores. I mean, I just was at the Stewart’s on the way into Pownal on Route Seven. They’re paying 18 bucks an hour to start. So, I mean, granted, you’ve got to scoop ice cream sometimes for eight hours at a clip, but still, I mean, they’re paying much more. You know, they’re paying $3 an hour more than minimum wage. And I can tell you that as as nice as most of the people are there, they don’t have to be. I mean, they can be pretty pretty deadpan and unfriendly if they want to be. And nothing happens to them. You you give bad service at a museum. People are going to hear about it. You’re going to going to get ripped.

Chelsea Farrell: I think too, to your point, $16.25, these are the folks leading the tours with the school children. These are the educators, right? So obviously, you’re not just letting people in the door. There is a significant amount of care and education and work that goes into these positions. And I mean, with that, I think, too, the folks at MASS MoCA, they do really care about their work. And they do want to do the best work that they can. It’s just that these wages do not actually show you their value and their contribution to the museum. Right. I don’t know, it’s just it’s unfair. It really is just an unfair situation. These folks are a lot of work is expected out of them. A lot of care, a lot of knowledge, a lot of training. And to be to be only paid 15, 25 to know that you could go down the street to Walmart and make more money. It hurts, you know, I think it really does hurt.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. And this is not to disparage anyone who works at Walmart’s or Stuart’s or anybody anywhere. This is just the fact that everybody has to keep a roof over their heads. So.

Chelsea Farrell: And I think, too, I mean it the reason why I think it hurts at an institution like MASS MoCA and other museums is that they really purport themselves to be like progressive institutions, or like more socially conscious or like, not corporate. And to see them rely on, if not the same, but in some cases worse practices than corporate tactics, corporate playbooks, it does really hurt.

Top Left Corner: That’s why I can never decide whether I can’t stand liberals or conservatives more, because at least when when it’s coming from conservatives, you expect it, right? But when it’s coming from at least it’s honest the. Yeah, exactly. When it’s coming from the nicey-nicey class, you’re like, oh, okay. So I don’t actually matter to you. So I just did the numbers here. And if you’ve got 120 people and I said that their average 30 hours a week, I don’t know if that’s anywhere close to true, but that’s somewhere between part time and full time, and they’re making an extra $2 an hour that works out to 7200 bucks a week. Is that going to break MASS MoCA, do you think? I mean, is that going to what do they say diminish their mission or operational sustainability? Do you think 70, 70, 200 bucks a week is going to is just going to be the, the straw 7200 straws that are going to break that camel’s back or what.

Chelsea Farrell: I’ll say I’m obviously not a mathematician, but by my calculations, the union’s proposal in the first year and management’s, it’s a difference of I think, $150,000, which I think is, maybe 1.5% of MASS MoCA’s operating budget. And, yeah, a worker at MASS MoCA just said to me the other day that’s he’s like, so if I have 100 bucks and you ask me for $1.50, I say, I don’t have that. He’s like, that’s what that means, right? And I was like, yeah, that’s it. And he just laughed. Right. Yeah. I think that’s like when you think about it in that sense, it’s somewhat laughable.

Top Left Corner: Well, it’s also I think it is comparable to the argument about why a flat tax is not a good idea. I mean, a lot of people say, well, it’s fair. Everybody pays the same percentage. Well, a tax 30% of the wages of somebody making $30,000 a year is is a huge chunk of their salary, whereas, and it really bites into things like, how much can they afford to spend on their kid’s shoes and clothes and things like that. But 30% of somebody who’s making $300,000 a year, sure, it’s a big chunk, but they can still eat, they can still easily make the car payment or the house payment. So when you’re saying you’re looking for two bucks an hour more. That makes a real difference in people’s lives. I mean, and it should. It’s almost it’s almost perverse. It’s almost there’s something perverse about it that if you’re working 40 hours a week, an extra $80 can can make your life that much easier. I mean, that’s, to me kind of twisted, frankly. I mean, 80 bucks is, for many, many people in a certain set in the arts and culture world, 80 bucks is, that’s not even their drink tab on a Friday night. They spend that on lunch. So I think that this notion that it’s going to break them. I find it highly suspect. What evidence have they given to show that they can’t afford this? Or are they just telling you they can’t afford it?

Chelsea Farrell: You know, I think again, MASS MoCA claims that they have been running a deficit in their operating budget for the past four years, and I think, look — No one at, I guess I should say no one in our union works at these these jobs at museums because they’re planning on getting rich, right? It’s like you work here because you care about the work. You care about the job, but to think that, again, that our proposal is going to, like, rupture the museum somehow. I agree with you. It’s it’s suspect. But, like, again, like, over these past year or so, it looks like money is going everywhere else. Instead of going to our members, it’s going to high paid management positions going here, it’s going there. And the last priority on the list is, is the union members. And that’s that’s really how it feels for folks. And that’s that’s how it looks. You know, and management doesn’t dispute that they have hired more management people. They claim it’s necessary. They claim they need it for the museum, but like at what cost?

Top Left Corner: Hmm. Yeah, it’s it’s funny when you talk about minimum wage and. You say? Well, but the mom and pop shops. Restaurants, gift shops, retail, independently owned joints, that they’ll be hurt if the minimum wage goes up. And it’s not untrue. I mean, there’s truth to that, but nobody thinks. And the answer is often, well, if they can’t afford to pay their workers a decent salary, then they shouldn’t be in business. I mean, that’s part of doing business, but people don’t seem to say that about things like about museums and educational institutions, it seems to be this. Well, we should give them a break because because they’re doing good work. And and I think it does really, really speak to the sort of lopsided opinion. Public opinion about what? You know. What the value is of having such a large employer. Downtown if it’s keeping people in poverty. I mean, because really we’re talking about either poverty or very, very close to poverty. And I’m not sure that the people who visit the museum want to think that. You know, it’s rice and beans every single night for for some of these employees. Ramen noodles. Let’s talk let’s switch gears back to this. A subject that you brought up a little while ago about their tactics and the atmosphere.

Top Left Corner: I know when I spoke with some people back in 2021, they wouldn’t go on record. This was especially true when it came to the issue of Covid 19 and the museum’s response to Covid 19 and, and how they dealt with the closure of the museum and paying employees and promises that were made. All this I’m sure you’ve heard all about it, but the the thing that struck me is that I couldn’t get. Almost any employees to talk on the record. They were terrified, and some of them told me they wouldn’t go on the record. So, I mean, here I’m just sort of throwing this out there with no actual documentation to back it up. But they were saying that they were afraid because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to get jobs anywhere in the arts if they spoke out. And to me, that was the thing that was really horrifying, that there was this self-censorship because they thought that if they stuck up for themselves about, the conditions and treatment at MASS MoCA that their careers could be jeopardized. So we know that there was that somehow they really put the fear of God into these workers. Talk about the the environment and talk about MASS MoCA’s tactics today.

Chelsea Farrell: Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s really interesting to hear. And, just to to touch on that a little bit, as I said, like it was really during the pandemic that folks reached out to local 2110 wanting to organize. And I think a lot of a lot of workers in that same place. And it’s great when folks want to organize, want to move this forward. But it is usually like we need the union. Yesterday is generally the the mentality. Right, and so I certainly hope [this increases] the popularization of unions across the board in the country. But absolutely, the museum field helps dull that mentality that if you speak out, if you’re a part of your union, you’re not you’re not going to be blacklisted, so to speak, because obviously, especially in the museum field, unions are popping up everywhere these days, which is, which is really, really excellent, but in terms of what we’re seeing at MASS MoCA, I think again, like there’s this background, but this is all playing against, again, this idea that folks really feel like money is going elsewhere. It’s not going to care for workers. You know, more and more every week you’re seeing a new management position pop up. You’re seeing another position be filled that’s not in the unit. Right. So you’re seeing this constantly over the past two years, year and a half at this point, at the same time we’re seeing a distinct from a union standpoint.

Chelsea Farrell: You know, management really tried to obstruct and go around our union any time they can. You know, just about every grievance we’ve ever filed is just denied, and even in these grievance meetings, we ask questions and often management can answer them, but you can’t even have a conversation over what the grievance actually is. And I see it as a very clear tactic to sort of, frankly, make the grievance procedure a joke for people to think that it’s futile. It’s not actually going to change anything. And management doesn’t actually listen. Right? So, we see that going on all the while. And like, again, our union feels like it’s just been. You know, the runaround around us. They try to obstruct information. They don’t share information unless they’re explicitly asked, and then we get to the to the table and they have, frankly, a very anti-union outside negotiator who’s there, who I think has really done work to toxify the relationship. I also understand that they’ve recently retained, um, an attorney from Littler [Littler Mendelson P.C], which is a well known management firm. You might recognize them from being the firm that works at Starbucks. Right? So a firm that has a reputation of of being a union busting firm, to be blunt.

Top Left Corner: That’s really bad optics. I mean, those are just such bad optics. I mean, I cannot imagine why management and the board, let’s not let the board off the hook here, why they would allow an infamous, a notorious firm like that to represent them in these matters when it’s so clear what they’re trying to do. Unless they just don’t care. Unless they just figure people don’t care, and that it’s never going to change anything. Talk to me because I. I didn’t hear about this. I must not have been paying attention that week or that month for who knows, I don’t know. I’m looking at something having to do with loyal workers being asked to remove flooring tile, something that contained asbestos. And they were given no training. They were given no equipment. And OSHA has since issued test results confirming the presence of asbestos. What the heck happened there?

Chelsea Farrell: Yeah. And again, this is just another situation that I feel is really emblematic about how management feels about some of their workers here is, frankly, being expendable. Frankly, I think anyone who really knows anything about constructions, buildings and grounds, old buildings. There should be an obvious assumption with the with the building, with the facility as old at MASS MoCA, that if you’re going to pull out flooring, if you’re going to do work in the ceiling tiles that you better be sure that there is no asbestos there. Because just given the age of the building, it’s generally an assumption. You know, you go to the agency to herself. If the building is older than 1980, you should assume there’s a substance here.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. Asbestos and lead paint.

Chelsea Farrell: Right? Right. And this was a tenant operated space. I do want to be clear that the museum, the spaces to the public have been remediated have been surveyed. I don’t want folks thinking that they’re going to visit MASS MoCA and be exposed. So I do want to be very clear about that. But our workers were tasked to go in and remove floor tiles. You know, we understand even some workers raised suspicions that you’re not sure we should do this, and it wasn’t until a worker did finally reach out to the union… obviously we reacted immediately. Ask them to stop and filed a complaint with OSHA, who’s currently conducting an investigation, but OSHA, of course, found that none of the buildings and grounds staff were even given a basic asbestos awareness training, and so MASS MoCA has to at least comply with that.

Top Left Corner: It’s just inconceivable, to to quote Wally, they’re inconceivable. 

Top Left Corner: Yeah. I mean, these are the sorts of things where they suggest anyway that. That management at MASS MoCA just doesn’t take the union seriously. And doesn’t seem to think that. I mean, as you said, they try to get around the union every chance they get. That’s somebody who doesn’t take it seriously. I’ll tell another little anecdote. My father worked in manufacturing, and he was he was in management. He’d worked his way up from the shop floor. One day he took me in. On a Saturday. I guess you wonder, was a take take your kid to work Saturday and this real. Tough. Middle aged, just massively huge muscled black guy came over to my father and started calling him racial epithets for Hispanic. And then they laughed and then they hugged each other. And I thought that was really weird. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be ready to run or defend my father or something, but turns out that the guy was the union steward and they had a relationship. And this is slightly different climate, manufacturing in the 70s versus museums in the 21st century. But the the idea here was I had heard my father talk about this guy at the dinner table and the things that he would call him after a tough day of negotiations or just him busting his, you know, he was talking about how the union is busting his stones all the time.

Top Left Corner: And. I said on the way home in the car, I said, I thought you hated him because they were laughing and talking and everything. I thought she hated him. He said, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t ever mistake what I have to do to to support my company with his value, making sure that the people who work there get what’s coming to them, get their due. And I was so confused about that until probably I was an adult anyway, how you could have such  two different whole two different truths and have and both of them be true that you can understand that the union is there and necessary, because my father clearly understood that, but you know that you have to fight them all the time. It doesn’t sound like the former mentality exists over there, because maybe it’s because the union hasn’t been there long enough for it to be sort of baked in to the to the organization. Do you get a sense that things are better, at least in terms of massmoca accepting the fact that the union is here to stay? Or do you think there’s still kind of a denial?

Chelsea Farrell: I think they are still kind of in denial. And I will say like I. It’s definitely my experience that, even if you’re not necessarily like in negotiations that are amicable and even if you are like yelling and frustrated with one another, it doesn’t mean that like relations between the union and management have to be like acrimonious and terrible. You know, they could still be honest and truthful, right? You can still obviously get very heated on these things. And I just feel like, for MASS MoCA to go back to that, that comment on your word, honest it. You know, there’s very few folks in management that I feel are honest dealers. You know, it does always feel like they are trying to get the one up. It does always feel like they’re not actually trying to negotiate in good faith. It feels like they’re trying to they’re trying to trick you, and I do think it is because they not only do they not take the union seriously, but they they don’t want the union there. And this goes to, I think, like as I mentioned, I understand they’re working with, they’ve recently retained an attorney from Littler. I don’t know how much that costs. You know, I really don’t. But to think that MASS MoCA is willing to put into the bad investment to pay for an attorney from Littler, what that says to me is that they’re willing to put in that investment to weaken the union, so they don’t have to take the union seriously so they can bust it so they can go around it, as opposed to putting in that investment to to the staff who actually make the organization run.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, I’m guessing that it’s probably costing more. And this is just a guess to retain Littler. Then it will. Would to just pay that $150,000 a year? Maybe. I mean, I’m just I’m just thinking. Because really, what what’s going on here is, is. Is. I mean, anytime there’s this real struggle to keep the union out or to to crush it or to weaken it so that it doesn’t have the, the impact that it should. I mean, the whole point is that you want to make sure that. Not just that you have control over what you’re paying your employees, but you’re having control over everything that there’s nothing that the union is ever going to be able to say about choices that management makes, and that’s really what they’re paying littler for. They’re paying littler not just for the extra to try to stave off paying extra an extra two bucks an hour. They’re basically if they can win, then the union has been dealt a blow. And that blow will cause people to question whether or not the union has the sufficient strength to represent them. And that’s always the fear, right? Because when the nurses at Berkshire Health Systems went on strike, and this was a couple of years before that, I think it was like 2017 or 18 or something. They did not succeed. And of course, since then there has been just a wave of nursing unionization all over the state and all over the country. But Massachusetts especially has been just really I mean, nurses in, in medical institutions everywhere are just voting to unionize.

Top Left Corner: So let’s talk a little bit about what might happen after. After tomorrow, you’ve got a one day strike in the in the cooker. And what do you hope that will do? And if it doesn’t succeed in achieving those results, what next?

Chelsea Farrell: So just to clarify, it’s not a one day it’s an all out strike. Okay. We’re calling for, how you sort of just summed up like, how you see management’s position of trying to just deal blows to the union to make them so weak, frankly, like, discourage folks. I, I think that’s that’s really to what’s going on with this strike as well. Like obviously the it’s only the economics directly on the table. But I think I said this earlier, it is really a question of where our unions stands at the organization and our demand to be taken seriously and to have our workers taken seriously and know that that manage has to deal with us. Right. So, obviously we want to see this settled. You know, you don’t organize a union to go on strike. You organize a union to get a contract. You know, we want to get this settled. Folks want to go to work. You know, striking. Striking is a really serious sacrifice, but I do hope that it the contributions and the values of our members is very obvious starting day one. And pressures the museum to give us a fair offer.

Top Left Corner: Well, I can tell you that this global warming may not be good for much, but at least it’s going to give you some decent weather for for for striking tomorrow. When I, when you last struck back in 2021, it was a one day and I know that The GreylockGlass.com’s official pizza, Christo’s pizza — and they have been our official pizza ever since this day — they sent over pizzas to help feed people over on the line. If people want to do that, should they do that? Should they be prepared? Be prepared to do that tomorrow. Send pizza. Coffee? What do you think? What could people do to sort of encourage and support? Go ahead.

Chelsea Farrell: I will say for the first day of the strike, some union supporters, actually, former union members have already donated Christo’s Pizza to the line. And I understand Christo’s threw in a few free solidarity pies. So Duncan’s great. They’re still they’re still doing the good work for us. But we are planning for each week a seven day picket, but a good place for folks to go if they do want to get information is our Instagram page, which our handle is @MASSMMoCAUnion. There’s information there about the picket, but also information for pledges and a hardship fund as well for folks to donate, if they can, to the hardship fund, but also like information about how to donate food or other supplies to the line.But anything folks want to bring by — food, water is absolutely appreciated, because we are, as I said, obviously, we want to settle, but we are prepared to be out there for the long haul.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. I am sorry I made the mistake about thinking it was a one day. I guess I was reading about the 2021 strike and that stuck in my head. So yeah, this is one of those things where it can get grueling and people can really end up in a situation where, I mean, because it’s an endurance game. I mean, it really, it’s like a siege, except that you’re on the outside, but you’re still the one being sieged because it’s the aristocracy on the inside, on the top floor, on the management floor that is deciding how long you’re going to sit out there. I mean, ultimately, it’s a battle of wills and being able to, to count on your community as as people did in the stop and shop and the strike against stop and shop back in. I can’t remember when that was. Very few people crossed that line to go stop and shop and stop and shop. It was it was really an intensely gratifying thing to see. And I don’t even think that those stop and shop workers were prepared to see that level of community support. So perhaps we’ll have that this year as well.

Chelsea Farrell: I certainly hopeful hope so. I mean, I always think this is true about our membership. You know, they really do have the upper hand in that because they absolutely not only are the community themselves, but they have, there’s enormous community support for our union and even just the visitors to the museum were out there a lot leafleting, sharing information. And like folks are usually shocked to hear about the conditions and very, very supportive of our workers. And I mean, again, I think that’s true about unions across the board and strikes across the board. You know, the the UAW strike in Detroit a few months ago, I think I saw a poll that 75% of Americans supported the striking workers, which is pretty incredible. So, I mean, I think not just for MASS MoCA workers who support, but there’s a lot of growing support for workers across the board.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. It’s it took a while. I mean, it definitely took a while. The. And we’re not there yet. I mean, I think it’s still only about 15% of Americans excluding civil service police, things like that are unionized. So a long way to go. But it is growing. And who knows, maybe we can get maybe we can get Joe Biden to show up on the line and show his support for for museum workers. We can we can give him a call and see what he see, what his schedule will allow. That’s probably not something he’s going to do, because, yes.

Chelsea Farrell: Hey, feel free to reach out if you got a number. Right.

Top Left Corner: Um, yeah. I’ll just ask his press people. From what I understand, he’s actually not even publishing his schedule anymore. He’s he’s having something of a tough time every time he goes out in public these days. So probably hanging out on Holden Street is not not a up his alley. No, but you never know. So anyway, I’ll put the link to your Instagram in the show notes, and I’ll put, I’ll put a very, very rough transcription of this.  I’ll reach out to to MASS MoCA as well, the last back in 2021, they had no comment, and I assume they’re going to have no comment as well this time. 

Top Left Corner: Well, Chelsea, it has been a real pleasure. If I can get down there tomorrow, I will I will get down there and snap some pictures I went to the challenge of that is that I was paying for my existence and this news organization by driving Uber from about 11 p.m. till dawn and then working on the newspaper all day. I hit a deer back just before Christmas last year, and since then I’ve had no car, and I’ve been working on trying to solve that problem. But it ain’t easy. So if I don’t show up, it’s literally because I just can’t get there in a convenient way. There is a bus, I think once an hour. But that’s that’s something of a challenge. 

Chelsea Farrell: We’ll be out there, we’ll be out there more than one day. So.

Top Left Corner: That’s right. That’s right. I’m sure I could probably, maybe I can get an Uber to take me down there because they’re trying to get unionized too, right. So who can say? I mean.

Chelsea Farrell: That’s I mean, that’s another conversation, but that’s a pretty, pretty atrocious system, I can.

Top Left Corner: Tell. Hey, listen, I lived it for a year. I can tell you anything you want to know. That could be a conversation that you and I have when we’re sitting there on the line looking for something to do. Sounds good. 

Top Left Corner: Hey, again. Thank you. I’ll send you a link when this show is live. And hey. In solidarity.

Chelsea Farrell: Thanks a lot.

Top Left Corner: Bye bye.

The broadcast premier of Razing Liberty Square can be viewed on PBS. on January 29, 2024. A streaming release for this powerful award winning documentary feature film directed by Academy-Award nominated filmmaker, Katja Esson will also be available.

RAZING LIBERTY SQUARE had its world premiere at the 2023 Hot Docs Film Festival, then went on to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and won the Changemaker Film Award at the Woodstock Film Festival. 

RAZING LIBERTY SQUARE highlights the current and compelling problem when community displacement and local neighborhood gentrification meets climate change.  Miami is ground-zero for sea-level-rise. When residents of the historic Liberty Square public housing project learn about a $300 million revitalization plan for their neighborhood, which has long suffered from disinvestment, they know that this sudden interest comes from the fact that their neighborhood is located on the highest-and-driest ground in the city. Now they must prepare to fight a new form of racial injustice – Climate Gentrification. 

Editor’s Note: Below is something very close to a verbatim transcript of the recent conversation with our guest. If you follow along with the text as you listen, you will discover that you are NOT reading a word for word record of the discussion. We know this. We think you’ll approve of the reason why.

We use Artificial Intelligence first to process the audio from the recording to create a transcript that’s about 85 – 95 percent accurate. The problem with that level of accuracy is that it also captures most of the “uhs” and “ums.” It also doesn’t remove all the false starts or other kinds of word salad we humans pass off as communication every day.

Then we run it through Chat GPT4 to remove all those vocalized pauses and verbal detritus. I have refined the AI prompt to the point where the result is what people hope they sound like, without too noticeably changing the actual language used, other than to get rid of what nobody would be able to understand were it written out anyway. Next, I go through the transcript line by line anyway and decide what bits really need an edit, so the process does spare my arthritic hands a bit, but is still quite time-consuming.

Back in the dark ages, digital recorders were big bulky things most of us lowly reporters couldn’t afford. Speech-to-text transcription was something even the intelligence community coveted. We used reporters notebooks (I still always carry one) and a ball point pen (I don’t always remember to steal enough from the bank to keep my car stocked), and what we typed up in the articles that got published were quotes as accurate as our penmanship (or shorthand) allowed. Politicians and business leaders told us, “Make sure you make me sound good,” and if you didn’t at least try not to make them look like idiots you could count on interviews with them months later. You certainly didn’t stick in a bunch of “wells..” and “you knows.” That would be a waste of everyone’s time. In truth, most printed interviews were just close approximations of conversations, at best.

So why does any of this matter? Firstly — transparency. We want you to know how closely we hew to reality, how well we mirror the actual events and statements that matter. Also, we want you to be educated about how the sausage is made. When you know what goes into the final product you enjoy reading or listening to, we think you’ll be in a better position to value our work properly. Thirdly, we’re also kind of geeks and like to brag about how much tech we throw at our work. If you have any questions or comments about this, or any of our editorial policies, please e-mail us at [email protected].

Top Left Corner: Katja Esson is an Academy Award nominated filmmaker born in Hamburg, Germany. After graduating from secondary school in Hamburg, she moved to the United States to study film, earning her bachelor’s in Motion Pictures and Theater at the University of Miami, Florida. Esson began her career in Miami as production assistant for the notorious rap group two Live Crew. Now based in Miami, she’s known for her intimate, character driven documentaries tackling race, class and gender. Her credits include The Women Make Movies Release Fairy Tales in 2003, which was nominated for an Academy Award. More recently, she’s known for Skydancer in 2011, backroads USA in 2013, and American Rivers in 2016. Her films have screened at The Motion at the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian. Koch’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Knight Foundation, ITVs, Ida enterprise, Nysca, the Redford Center, Sundance, and the Ford Foundation. Now, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the show Katja Essen. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Katja Esson: Katja Esson: “Happy to be here. Good morning.”

Top Left Corner: “We spoke a little bit in our digital green room before I hit the record button, and we started to talk about so many things that we could go just about anywhere. So why don’t we start with one of the first things you did out of school? What was it like working with Two Live Crew?”

Katja Esson: “I know that it helped me with my street cred a little bit with this film. But when I could drop it, and actually, this morning, a big article came out in the Miami Herald, and they mentioned that too, you know, that’s something that is very important here. Of course, I had no idea. I just had come here. My English was very bad. I was a film student, and they were looking for free PR for these music videos. And I was like, ‘Here, here, I’m doing it.’ I remember, I was a production assistant, so, I was doing everything from getting water to whatever was needed. And I remember not understanding the lyrics and asking the DP, who is still a friend and also worked on this current film, in my bad German accent, ‘What are they singing about?'”

Top Left Corner: “And he just…”

Katja Esson: “Refused because the lyrics were so raunchy. He wouldn’t… Yeah, I have some really funny anecdotes with Uncle Luke, with Luther Campbell, that I won’t share here right now. But looking back, I had no idea. I did not understand. I was still too fresh in this country, in this city, to grasp where I was, you know, and how it connects to Miami. There was a feeling of danger at that time, late ’80s, in the neighborhood. But I didn’t really put it together until much later.”

Top Left Corner: “I’m glad you didn’t, because you might have run away if you had known. So you ended up easing into understanding that very unique urban scene in Miami. Why Miami, by the way? There are a lot of film schools in the United States. What attracted you to Miami?”

Katja Esson: “Good question. That was also a friend of mine. Complete coincidence. A friend of mine who is a producer, actually, that I’ve worked with for many years, who is also a producer on Raising the Producer. Carina Sager had gone to that same university and convinced me, and more importantly, my parents, that it was a fantastic film program and a fantastic university, and it was worthwhile. And that’s at that time, it was very difficult in Germany to do both, to study film and theater at the same time. So that’s how I came here. But I was always thinking I would come back to Germany. Little did I know that I would be stuck here, you know.”

Top Left Corner: “Stuck. And I’m sure a lot of people are saying the best ways because you’ve done some really amazing work. I mean, I mentioned some of your projects, like Skydancer, which was a very gripping documentary on two Mohawk steelworkers, wasn’t it? Correct. And that was maybe one of the first things that really grabbed national attention. And then of course, Backroads USA and American Rivers, both five-part series, which I have not seen, I’ll admit, but I’m going to now because they seem sprawling and expansive and wonderful. So you have this love of the United States, it seems, that managed to earn you the distinction of being the only female German filmmaker to be nominated for an Academy Award. How does that feel?”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah.”

Katja Esson: “The only female for documentary, yes, yes. It feels… It has been a long time ago now, and I was very much at the beginning of my career at that point. And, yeah, it feels, it is great, of course, but making documentaries is extremely hard, you know? So, if people sometimes think, oh, you know, that being nominated should make it so easy, you know, that’s not the case at all. It’s a great title to have, but the work to get your film funded and get it distributed is as hard as ever.”

Top Left Corner: “Don’t all the doors just fly open and the gold coins don’t just all roll in? Oh well, it’s a shame that it’s the case because it sounds like you do work that really means a lot to you and to the subjects that you cover. The only other thing that I want to ask about before we really get into Raising Liberty Square is Women Make Movies. I saw that, you know, you have a nice biography there on their website. Tell us a little bit about what they’ve been doing for the last 50 years, I guess.”

Katja Esson: “They have been absolute champions of films by women about women. And, like you said, for the last 50 years. I mean, they are, they have been so intricate in really pushing for films by women, through the gatekeepers, you know, making sure they are at certain festivals, sitting on jury panels, who’s getting funding. I know their work has been amazing, you know, and they have paved a really great wave. And they now have an amazing catalog of films, of great films. So I, I absolutely love to work with them. They have been amazing. And I think, yeah, all of my films are distributed by them, you know, for educational purposes. So yeah, I love working with them.”

Top Left Corner: “That’s great. It’s great to know that the women had the foresight 50 years ago to say, you know what? If we’re going to move the needle, we got to start now. And that’s awfully handy, because Lord knows Hollywood, for example, has not really earned itself a very good reputation when it comes to that. So this is great. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about Miami. Let’s talk about Liberty Square. Obviously, people can get this when they watch the trailer, which we’re going to embed in the show notes. But give us just the backstory. I guess it was 1937 that Liberty Square became one of the first public housing projects in the United States. Tell us a little bit about what that meant at the time and how it grew into the center of a much larger community.”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah.”

Katja Esson: “At that time, the Miami downtown had a segregated area called Colored Town, and it was bursting at the seams. And, okay, this is now there are different versions of why, during the New Deal, the government said, hey, we have to create better living conditions. You know, if it was really to create better, better living conditions or to say, hey, we need more space for our white business district that wanted to expand to. But anyhow, you know, they created this colony, outside way outside of Miami city limits and very far inland, you know, away from the precious beaches. And that’s where Liberty Square was originally built, in the middle of nowhere. So they were without political representation for decades. Now it was what happened is that it became such a successful public housing development for black people, so segregated that teachers and nurses and policemen, you know, like a middle class black neighborhood started growing around Liberty Square. And that’s where the golden age happened in the in the 40s, 50s in the neighborhood. 60s, that you also hear the elders talk about in the film and they say those were the golden years. I mean, this is where it was a vibrant, culturally so important place. You know, with the Hampton House, there was a film called One Night in Miami that took place, and the Hampton House, you know, Martin Luther King Jr had gave his first the first version of I Have a Dream speech at the Hampton House.”

Katja Esson: “Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali in, you know, right next to the Hampton House, all in Liberty City. So it was this amazing neighborhood where also all the stars that were invited to the big Miami hotels at Miami Beach to play for the white audiences there. But they were not allowed to stay during segregation. So they all had to come back, and they all went and stayed and then jammed in Liberty City. So it was an amazing time. But at the same time it was segregated. And it didn’t have political representation. So there was a chronic underdevelopment, underinvestment, and neglect by the city so little. And also, you know, that what is really known nowadays that public housing developments all over the country have just been not kept up. So it fell little by little in disrepair. And it also the city decided or the county decided, government decided to place basically nearly all other public housing projects around it, you know, all in the same area, which then created. And this is a term that’s loaded, but it’s created, like Aaron also says in the film, concentrated poverty, which then led to middle-class black families moving away. So Liberty City became a very low-income, impoverished neighborhood. And that led then also to the first riots in the 60s and finally led to the really horrific McDuffie riot in 1980.”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah, yeah. So basically, it sounds like in the early couple of decades, it became a vibrant community, despite the lack of upkeep from the government. It became a cultural center until, as you said, they started putting other projects around it. Aaron McKinney, the development coordinator for Urban Related, the private development company that won the bid to redevelop Liberty Square, seems to be an interesting figure. In some scenes, he appears to be a Judas, betraying the neighborhood he calls home, but at the same time, you think that in some part of him he believes that the redevelopment will have a positive effect. When did public officials start talking about tearing down Liberty Square and redeveloping it?”

Katja Esson: “That was, I think, even before my time. The neighborhood has been challenged, for years known as the most dangerous zip code in the United States. Officials have talked through the years about needing change. There was an attempt to tear it down many years before, stopped by the community. This redevelopment was approved in 2015 and started in 2017 with the demolition.”

Top Left Corner: “So like many such projects, it seems when they bring the community in for a meeting to get input, all the details have already been worked out, like just pushing the start button. Is that how it seemed to the community?”

Katja Esson: “That’s what I’ve heard from the community. There was a long process of canvassing the community and asking what is needed, what people wanted, but according to the community, it wasn’t really taken into account. That’s your impression, and that’s what I heard from people, that it was not built for this kind of community.”

Katja Esson: “So there’s a lot of directions we can go here, but let’s stick with those meetings. There were people who said, all of the planners live outside Liberty City. Why are there no people who look like me? That affordable housing slogan is just a systematic way of removing black people from the community. That seemed to be a common sentiment. The idea of having mixed income housing, did that come to pass or did these apartments mostly go to people who could afford it?”

Top Left Corner: “So, did this diversity, this mix, actually get achieved in the end?”

Katja Esson: “You mean, was this mix achieved? That’s a good question we’re all asking ourselves. Keep in mind, when the film was completed, of the nine city blocks that make up Liberty Square, a huge area, only three blocks are done. Six are still being built. We have a new local HUD director working with the organizing team associated with our film. Before that, local HUD wasn’t forthcoming with information. We, as a film team, and the local NAACP wanted to know the numbers, who’s there, who’s still there from the original residents, what exactly is the mix now? It’s not transparent.”

Top Left Corner: “You, you mentioned in the film, towards the end, there were some figures, some follow-up information. I don’t think it was even a dozen families who had moved back in, a really tiny number.”

Katja Esson: “When we stopped filming in the summer of ’22, local HUD informed us that only five of the families that had left had returned. That is a tiny number. The hope is that more families will return. Many people are pushing me to do a follow-up, because the truth about this right to return will be evident in a couple of years. Like the Scott Carver project mentioned in the film, which took 12 years, and of around 1100 units or families, only about 300 returned. Local HUD hopes more will return, but we don’t know.”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah. The concept of the right of return is going to define our times, internationally even. Right of return means that the conditions must be such that what you want to return to still has room for you. When you’re talking about rural America, areas are being hollowed out, farms sold off, developed. So even if you could go back to the zip code plus four, even if you go back to that very, you know, latitude and longitude, what you had culturally, historically, communally doesn’t necessarily exist. And I think the thing that you did and you did it just brilliantly. The clotheslines.”

Top Left Corner: “You started with the clotheslines and. It was just as you would imagine. People did their laundry on Saturday. What does that mean? I mean, I know that our audience probably can guess, but to those residents, to you as you discussed it with them, what did that what did they represent?”

Katja Esson: “Yeah. I mean, for me, they represent the community, of course. And that was and that is also a little bit I mean, that is sad for me now when I, for example, I just saw Miss Gaines again, the woman that holds on to the clothes pin in one of the scenes she was I just picked her up and brought her to the premiere, and she basically has no interaction at all anymore with any of her neighbors. She’s only inside, kind of cooped up inside, you know, the washer.”

Top Left Corner: “And dryer.”

Katja Esson: “With her washer and dryer. She was so worried about the electric bill, and that’s another issue that’s happening there now. But the fact that people have no porches, no clotheslines where they met and talked, it’s a very different way of living now. I’m from Hamburg, Germany, but I’ve lived here long enough, and I’ve talked to people about the southern way of life, of porches, of barbecue, and all that. That’s just not possible anymore there.”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah, they aren’t even allowed to have chairs and things outside, other personal belongings. And the barbecue grill, I mean, it’s the South, for crying out loud.”

Katja Esson: “Yeah. Yeah, it’s sad and makes you wonder. Was this really thought through? What about these cookie-cutter buildings that are put there now? Was that the right way to go? I mean, we’re in Florida, for crying out loud, why are there no solar panels on the roofs?”

Top Left Corner: “Wow. Yeah, it almost kind of makes you wonder if isolating people wasn’t the point all along.”

Katja Esson: “Yeah. Aaron said this one line that really struck with me. He said, ‘I hope it’s ignorance and not by design that certain things are done.’ But there are so many books now written about mixed-income developments, like in Chicago, for example, there are whole case studies that describe what you have to make sure to preserve so you don’t alienate the original residents.” Yet, I’ve heard from some who said, ‘No, we’re not going back there. Why would we deal with this kind of management and treatment there? We’re not going to go back there because it’s not our community anymore. You know?’”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah, I think this is really representative of taking something that was public and privatizing it in a way that not only allows politicians to wash their hands of it, but also allows for less and less transparency.There is a company, a corporation here that runs some of the, they’re for seniors, but also for people with disabilities. They would have been, you know, senior housing run by towns — and in some places here in New England, you do have the towns themselves running the senior housing, and the residents have far more access and far more ability to have a say in what goes on. But here you don’t even know who actually owns it. It’s in trust. There’s the same thing. You’re not allowed to have stuff out on the porch. You’re not allowed to have a grill. You’re not allowed to have other things. I mean, it’s just one of those things where… Okay, you know. Yes, these seniors who live here are in new housing, which of course, in the beginning also leaked because of shoddy workmanship. But then there is an isolation factor that seems almost intentional, and it’s heartbreaking because you know that once that ball got rolling, there was no stopping it. There was no way for people to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Let’s talk about this’ because everything had already been decided. Except there were people, and there still are people in Liberty Square who are fighting. I just love, I’m sorry, I loved the school principal.”

Katja Esson: “Samantha.”

Top Left Corner: “Samantha Quarterman, the MEYGA school principal.”

Katja Esson: “MEYGA, MEYGA.”

Top Left Corner: “MEYGA, MEYGA, yeah. What’s her take on what’s going on? She’s fiercely proud of that community and the kids she teaches.”

Katja Esson: “No, she’s passionate. We’re posting about her on social media from our hometown premiere panel. She’s clear about the importance of her school for the youth and how she’s frozen out, starved out. She’s the only organization standing against the development company. The new HUD director and our mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, are working hard to support her and get her a new facility. But none of the promises from the developer have been kept.”

Top Left Corner: “Even though the mayor, um, was it Jimenez? Who was the previous mayor?”

Katja Esson: “Um, uh, Carlos Jimenez.”

Top Left Corner: Yeah. I mean, he said in the film, ‘We’re going to make sure that the promises are kept by the city and by the developer,’ and obviously that didn’t happen. There are two women that I loved in this film. You bring them in pretty frequently. They almost act as de facto narrators or the Greek chorus. Melba Rose and Anna Williams. What made you choose them? And what is their role in the film? Am I right in seeing them as a narrative force?”

Katja Esson: “Yes, you used the word we actually used in editing. It’s mainly them, but also the Walkers, Philip and Hattie Walker, and the Tree of Knowledge, all the gentlemen that sit under the tree.”

Top Left Corner: “Yes, yes.”

Katja Esson: “Retired community members. They’re all elders and former Liberty Square residents. They grew up there, made successful lives, and remember the golden years, as Melba says. They are still fighting. They have an organization called Friends and Family of Liberty Square. They’ve been in touch with the developer from the beginning. They tried to stop the demolition, arguing for historical designation, but it wasn’t done. They insist on preserving the community center and staying in touch with former residents, giving scholarships to current students. In the film, they are our Greek chorus, bringing in history, context, and community.”

Top Left Corner: “I loved everything they had to say. The pragmatism you get after seeing the best and worst of times, repeated over and over. The cycles you see after 70, 75 years. They have a realistic attitude but still a fire in their belly for justice. There was a woman at one of these community meetings, not one of the older women, middle-aged or so. She said, ‘We really don’t care about a shopping area. We want our history to continue.’ That was so powerful. It’s about holding on to our humanity. It seems like the planners were hoping to buy people out with convenience, offering a shopping area. But that’s not what people wanted. It’s one of those things where people would say, ‘How much do you want for your house?’ And they’d say, ‘I’m not selling.’ And then they’d come back and say, ‘No, no, no, how much really? How much do you want?'”

Top Left Corner: “Well, let’s talk about Valencia, the climate justice organizer who moved in amidst all of this. She decides to move in. What attracted her to the area enough that she would stay and fight, even though it wasn’t her original upbringing?”

Katja Esson: “”But it was. And this didn’t make it in the film. But this house is her grandfather’s house that was taken over by the bank.”

Top Left Corner: “Oh, okay.”

Katja Esson: “Yeah, it’s her grandfather’s house. Her family is from Liberty City.”

Top Left Corner: “Okay, I missed that then.”

Katja Esson: “Yeah. No, no, that’s not in the film. I don’t think that’s in the film. I have to go back.”

Top Left Corner: “I might have missed it too, but the point is, she’s a young person, and she seems to really want to provide a lot of energy in a realm that wouldn’t even have to be discussed for this to be a powerful documentary. But when you add climate justice to it, it opens up a whole new dimension. Was she successful in educating people about the impact of the climate crisis on their community?”

Katja Esson: “Yeah. And she, she just, I just heard her talk again on that panel. She saw, she said the community knew this. They were sitting high, the beach is flooding, hurricanes are tearing everything down, and here in Liberty Square, not a shingle is off. So the community was aware and she says now they do with climate gentrification. She has been very successful and is growing to an international level, always going back, concentrating on local work. She just opened the Freedom Lab, her office for her organization, right there in Liberty City. She’s growing, from setting up barbecues and feeding the community during power outages to talking on a national level to government. She’s extremely successful, powerful, and people listen to her. She has connections to government and media, wielding some power.”

Top Left Corner: “I have a feeling that when you’re talking to her personally, you can almost feel the electricity coming off of her. There were just two things that struck me. The idea that one of the first things to go into this new development was a pet shelter, an ASPCA boutique shelter. That would have been such a slap in the face for the residents. As much as I love cats and dogs, putting animals before people.”

Katja Esson: “Right. Yeah, that’s what people from the community are bringing up now that they saw the film. A lot of people thought this clinic, I mean, it’s like 27 million for a vet clinic. It’s really, I mean, and of course, they connected the dots and said, yeah, they’re getting ready for the new residents they’re hoping will come here. There was talk about a Whole Foods. I don’t think that’s gonna come anytime soon. But I heard that too. I was like, what? You know, who are you building this for? So yeah, that upsets people a lot.”

Top Left Corner: “Was it, am I wrong, was it not ASPCA or was it? Yeah. Oh, it was.”

Katja Esson: “Yeah it was. But it had state-of-the-art operating tables and everything. You know, it was a clinic.”

Top Left Corner: “So a very boutique kind of clinic though. Got it, interesting. And of course, the idea that you’re going to throw a Whole Foods in there. Yeah, that doesn’t send any kind of a message at all. So, the last point I want to bring up, and I started the conversation with this, Aaron, he seems to be the most uncomfortable figure in every single scene. Like, he just realizes there is no easy way out for him. He is going to be perceived as a stereotype. He talked about what people called him, and ‘Uncle Tom’ was the nicest thing a lot of people called him. What did you make of Aaron? Did he change? I mean, a lot of characters in film, in fiction, are static characters, but he doesn’t seem to be. He seems to be a dynamic character who goes through an evolution. Did he change? That’s the way it appeared in the film, but did he change as the filming went by?”

Katja Esson: “Uh, I mean, he is, of course. I mean, I am in such awe of Aaron because, yes, he’s the easiest to attack, you know, and he is guarding himself and he knows. And there was a moment at the Miami premiere, you know, where people kind of said to him, ‘Hey, man, you should have known that they were using you.’ And he gave a really good answer. He said, ‘Look, I’m not naive. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I have a lot of experience in this field.’ He does have a lot of experience in real estate, in policy, in social work. And he really believed if he could get a seat at the table, he could make a difference and watch out for the community, which is his community. And he tried. And I saw him try. We saw him try and he was shot down. He had all these plans that he wanted to do to fuse these different groups together, and there was no interest from the development company. I was on a journey with him because I started this film believing that this could be different. It was lauded as this completely new concept because of the unique way that Liberty Square is so huge. There were a lot of empty units, enough that an entire block could have been placed in the empty units. Then you do a block by block demolition, so nobody has to leave. That was transformational, that idea. So I went on that journey with him, with high hopes and then saw the hopes being shattered, and that was the journey of Aaron, the journey of the film, my journey, and the journey of many in the community who also had a lot of hopes.”

Top Left Corner: “Yeah, I mean, you really have to feel for him, because it looked like he was hoping to throw up some buffers to soften the blow of what was happening. But what you capture in the film says it all – the incessant steady crunch, crunch, tear of the equipment into these houses as if they were made of papier-mâché, as if they were made of tissue. And knowing that if you are in an apartment across the courtyard from another house that’s being chewed up, it’s demoralizing. You see the inevitability of it. That constant chewing, tearing, and rending, razing, since that’s the name of the thing, maybe that should have been exactly the message that Aaron and others took from it. I wanted to make sure I give you time to speak about this. You spent a lot of time on this project. How many years in total? About five?”

Katja Esson: “Six.”

Top Left Corner: “Six years making this film. After that kind of commitment, that kind of expenditure of your life, what do you want people to walk away with after they see it?”

Katja Esson: “Yeah. I really would like to move people to engage in conversations about how families are impacted by both the climate crisis and the housing crisis and how they intersect. I want audiences to understand that climate gentrification is an existing dynamic right now, whether it’s sea level rise, wildfires in Hawaii, drought, or extreme heat, that will eventually impact all of us. I hope the film contributes to changing narratives and misconceptions about Liberty Square and its history, and other housing communities, not just in Miami but around the world. And then, a big learning for me was really thinking about housing as a human right. The contradiction of a private company or government handing the responsibility of housing over to private companies. I really would like audiences to look critically at the current models of so-called revitalization of low-income neighborhoods by building mixed-income development, not just in Miami, but everywhere. Like in Chicago, this model is used everywhere. And that’s what I would like people to take away from the film.”

Top Left Corner: “Well, that film is going to be shown, its broadcast premiere is January 29th, I believe.”

Katja Esson: “Correct.”

Top Left Corner: “On PBS. Mhm. And I really encourage everybody to, if you don’t have PBS, sign up for it now on your local cable because this alone is worth it. Well, hey, you know, you can sign up month by month. So, spend the five bucks, watch the film and learn something, and be moved, be enraged. I got to tell you, Katya, after this film, I felt so many emotions. I felt frustration and anger and melancholy. But at the same time, seeing some of the people who were still out there slugging it, like your teacher and your climate justice activist, I also felt some hope. So, you really took me on a roller coaster of a ride there. And I thank you for it, even if it does a number on my emotional state. Let’s do this. I would love it. We have this little art house theater here in Williamstown. It’s one of the oldest in the country, over 100 years old, called Images Cinema. I really hope you can come back. You mentioned that you know the Berkshires. We’re up here in the northern Berkshires. It would be fantastic if you can find a way to get this film, and I’ll help coordinate in any way I can. We would love to have you do a talkback at Images Cinema. So if we can make that happen, that would be fantastic. But in the meantime, folks can watch it on PBS. There are a lot of ways to get in touch with you, a lot of ways people can follow you. What would you say would be the best way?”

Katja Esson: “The best way — probably is our website. It’s the title of the film, RaisingLibertySquare.com or .org, or on Instagram, Liberty Square Raising. Sorry, I’m not so good with social media. It’s RaisingLibertySquare, that’s our Instagram handle. And also on Facebook, any of these are great tools to get in touch with us.”

Katja Esson: “Can you tell that I’m not so good with, like, social media? It’s RaisingLibertySquare. Um, that’s our Instagram handle. And also on Facebook, any of these are great tools to get in touch with us.”

Top Left Corner: “Got it. Alright, well, I have to say it’s been a real pleasure and honor spending this hour with you, Katja. Thank you so much for sharing this. And thank you so much for the work that you’ve done here, and in the future and going back all the way to some of your early works. Any hints on what’s next, or just maybe a vacation?”

Katja Esson: “Well, I’m doing something else in Florida, but also, we are having, you know, this film has started its impact campaign and that I will be very much involved for the next months. But then I’m doing a three-part series on trying to figure out why Florida is so crazy.”

Top Left Corner: “Well, we’ll be on the lookout for that. Shoot us an email and maybe we can get you on the show again. Katja, again, thanks so much and have a great rest of your winter.”

Katja Esson: “Thank you very much for having us. Bye!”

I walked south on Water Street, searching for the strangely elusive location where David Stuckenberg was to announce his candidacy for President of the United States shortly. I’d had to get up and out the door by 6:30 a.m. to make the 11 o’clock beginning of ceremonies in Plymouth, Mass. I got there just in time, but was told by a crusty old blue-blood that I couldn’t come in because she’d never heard of me. I went ‘round back of the mansion overlooking the Atlantic and found a group of other journalists she’d never heard of denied entrance.

Eventually the six or seven of us made enough commotion laughing and carrying on that some guy came out and told us to keep it down, but also that the woman was just with the venue and had no right to prohibit our entry, and sorry about all that. Oh, and by the way, the opening speech is over and the first set of reporters are almost done asking one-on-one questions. Do we still want to go in? We’d have to wait until a break to enter the main event room, of course. 

You’re probably wondering why a reporter from the town farthest north and west in Massachusetts travelled diagonally across the Commonwealth as far as one can go without getting his socks wet. To cover a presidential campaign launch. Of a Republican.

Easy.

It’s good to know what all sides are thinking. And from the press release I’d received the week before, I sensed that this primary challenger from Florida was more than capable of some high-level thought. The research I did on Mr. Stuckenberg (Dr. Stuckenberg, to be accurate) left me with mixed emotions. Where his positions diverged with my leftist outlook, such as the answer to America’s immigration challenges for example, or U.S. involvement in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the gap was wide enough to drive a truck through.

The ideological overlap, however, surprised me. His views on natural resources, agriculture, and fresh water protection were based in science. The America First rhetoric was not a cynical jingoistic play — long-range calculations have clearly been brought to bear on the question of who the beneficiaries of the nation’s productivity and prosperity should be.

And let’s be clear, this candidate making a bid for Trump’s long-cooled seat cushion has bona fides that any candidate would envy, and that should aggressively capture the attention of the media:

Military Background: Stuckenberg is a Major in the US Air Force-Air National Guard and a decorated veteran pilot who has flown over 150 combat missions.

Education and Thought Leadership: He holds a Ph.D. in international affairs from King’s College London and is recognized as a “Young Disruptor” by NATO and lauded by senior military leaders and intelligence officials for his strategic acumen.

Entrepreneurial and Business Experience: As the founder of Genesis Systems, he has developed technologies for generating drinking water, addressing global water scarcity.

Policy and Security Expertise: Stuckenberg has experience in nuclear weapons treaties, national critical infrastructure, and has founded national programs for security and strategy.

Now for the (ahem) elephant in the room: Why in the actual hell is mainstream media lavishing so much attention on candidates who lack the credentials, résumé, or even natural charisma to warrant serious consideration by the voters? Why are they so focused on the horse race and the personalities and the drama? Wait. Don’t answer that. That was a rhetorical question. Here’s the answer, though, if you are still scratching your head:

 Mainstream media requires insipid popularity contests between increasingly unqualified candidates whose wooden heads make them natural conversions into the puppets that allow the oligarchs to keep control of the levers of power, because if they had to start covering contenders with actual ideas and positions, they’d have come up with some fast explanations about their role shilling for the corporatocracy for decads and providing cover for more and more unsavory deeds every year.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I found a smoldering intensity in Stuckenberg’s gaze that hinted at a mind continuously occupied with working through problems and solutions, seldom at complete rest. I have no doubt that his powers of imagination and conception easily exceed those of any other candidate on the Republican ballot this year. When I brushed up on his background, I came to the conclusion that it might be nice to have a President versed in game theory, diplomacy, and military strategy. When was the last time we had that? Maybe with Pappy Bush, but I wouldn’t credit him with exceedingly high levels of creative thinking.

The other reporters and I could see that the buffet has been laid out already, and I could smell both barbecue AND clam chowder distinctly (how is that even possible?) All the respectable reporters were trapped in the hall unable to access the virgin banquet table, and we low-lifes were trapped in the room adjacent to it. It seemed to me the easiest way to keep my mouth quiet was to stuff some ham salad on brioche in my face while my chowder cooled. My very first editor forbade her reporters from scarfing so much as a munchkin while covering an event. I’m getting paid less than I was back then almost 25 years ago, so I kinda now say fuck it, and let other people’s catering budget help subsidize my work. Besides, the very best free cheese platter, Chardonnay, and crudité won’t be able to sway my journalistic objectivity, although substandard vittles almost certainly will.

The legitimate press finally finished up with their interviews (I have a video of half of that, and the campaign managers running this show got around to letting us in the hall. I was to be given an audience after these two chaps from a local radio station (I have most of that on tape, as well). During that questioning, a staffer pulled me aside to tell me that one of the crews also waiting was some muckety-muck who had to be back on a plane in an hour, and did I mind being bumped to the end? Not being one to upset apple carts or muckety-mucks, I said, no, by all means. I’m only going to end up sitting in traffic on the Pike for a hundred hours now anyway, so why should I mind sitting on my ass here instead?

I wolfed down a fabulous rare roast beef and Swiss with a divine horseradish sauce on a Kaiser roll while I listened to some stuffed shirt ask cloying questions crafted to let the current GOP leadership off the hook while also welcoming the fresh, bracing breeze of neoconservatism that Stuckenberg represented. I recorded that interview, too, and may release it one day.

After that session ended, people starting packing up. Everything, up to and including the Danishes that I knew better than to leave there, because now it was ME who was trapped, blocked off from the delicious and expensive repast. I stood there in the corner for a minute like a forgotten puppy as the boom mics and tripods and light stands migrated out of the room like giraffes from a dried up oasis, and the extension cords slithered away in front of my feet. I finally caught the eye of one of the handlers (the one who’d gotten me a cuppa coffee once I was allowed in and he nodded his head vigorously from across the room and left for a moment. He poked his head back in a moment later and waved me to him, back up the stairs where the first interviews had taken place.

There, in the little hall, was a very tired looking David Stuckenberg. He’d actually had to remain on and engaged the entire time, smiling incessantly like a guy who’s not used to smiling for six hours at a clip. He was re-arranging his family back into their positions in the chairs they’d been in before, I assumed to assure me that I’d have every ounce of attention that the first 40 reporters had. And they really were an exceeding handsome group. His oldest boy was perhaps 20 and looked every bit a chiseled Teutonic page, if not a full knight. His two daughters in their late teens, pretty and composed in the practiced professional politician’s kids’ manners of young ladies with many times their experience on the campaign trail. A firecracker of a wee lad was dressed in suit and tie like his big brother, but, having reached the end of his composure, was  trying to slough off the whole affair like any grade school kid would do after being compelled to model as a member of America’s next first family for half the day.

I was trying to insist to the very lovely Mrs. Stuckenberg that all this recomposure was unnecessary, and why don’t they get some food before it’s all gone? She asked me about Plymouth and the Greylock Glass and the Berkshires as the three oldest children did a remarkable job looking interested. Then David Stuckenberg strided over to me, offering a warm smile and a firm handshake and we both sat down. He gathered himself and projected an air of a man who was energized and at the beginning of a long session of media glare rather than the end of it. Because I’d been recording everyone else’s interviews, my phone was now down to 20 percent battery. The candidate did, in fact, give me his full attention for over half and hour, and I managed to record all but the end to his answer to what would have been my final question. That conversation is what you have here, either as a podcast or in the embedded video. Enjoy.

Sorry I didn’t save you any smoked turkey or tuna salad wraps. They were pretty good, too.

UPDATE! This show is looking for members of the community to participate on stage— no performance experience required. Contact Alexander Davis to be a part of the magic!

From the website of the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance:

Boston-based Alex Davis‘ This Show is available for Touring, presents a comedic solo (with twelve backup dancers) that features the collaborative contributions of students and community members. Davis’ performances illuminate the innate theatricality of everyday life, drawing from pop culture, memes, reality television, improvisational techniques, community building, and lists. There is a post-performance Q&A on February 10th.

Friday, February 9th – Saturday, February 10th
8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Adams Memorial Theatre, ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance
$3 – $10

The Queering Perspectives Festival interrogates conventional, culturally normative performance. We want to create a platform for the othered, experimental, and subversive, pushing the boundaries of their form in pursuit of new research and artistic production. QPF has the agenda of sparking new conversations about performance on campus. We want performance to be a springboard for conversation into sexualities, genders, bodies, races, ethnicities, abilities, and desires.

Editor’s Note: Below is something very close to a verbatim transcript of the recent conversation with our guest. If you follow along with the text as you listen, you will discover that you are NOT reading a word for word record of the discussion. We know this. We think you’ll approve of the reason why.

We use Artificial Intelligence first to process the audio from the recording to create a transcript that’s about 85 – 95 percent accurate. The problem with that level of accuracy is that it also captures most of the “uhs” and “ums.” It also doesn’t remove all the false starts or other kinds of word salad we humans pass off as communication every day.

Then we run it through Chat GPT4 to remove all those vocalized pauses and verbal detritus. I have refined the AI prompt to the point where the result is what people hope they sound like, without too noticeably changing the actual language used, other than to get rid of what nobody would be able to understand were it written out anyway. Next, I go through the transcript line by line anyway and decide what bits really need an edit, so the process does spare my arthritic hands a bit, but is still quite time-consuming.

Back in the dark ages, digital recorders were big bulky things most of us lowly reporters couldn’t afford. Speech-to-text transcription was something even the intelligence community coveted. We used reporters notebooks (I still always carry one) and a ball point pen (I don’t always remember to steal enough from the bank to keep my car stocked), and what we typed up in the articles that got published were quotes as accurate as our penmanship (or shorthand) allowed. Politicians and business leaders told us, “Make sure you make me sound good,” and if you didn’t at least try not to make them look like idiots you could count on interviews with them months later. You certainly didn’t stick in a bunch of “wells..” and “you knows.” That would be a waste of everyone’s time. In truth, most printed interviews were just close approximations of conversations, at best.

So why does any of this matter? Firstly — transparency. We want you to know how closely we hew to reality, how well we mirror the actual events and statements that matter. Also, we want you to be educated about how the sausage is made. When you know what goes into the final product you enjoy reading or listening to, we think you’ll be in a better position to value our work properly. Thirdly, we’re also kind of geeks and like to brag about how much tech we throw at our work. If you have any questions or comments about this, or any of our editorial policies, please e-mail us at [email protected].

Top Left Corner: Alexander Davis. It is so good having you on the top left corner. Welcome.

Alexander Davis: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. It’s a wonderful thing to be located in an area with so much arts content, so much diversity in the arts. And the 62 Center, which is in the midst of the Queering Perspectives Festival, is really a good representative of that, maybe even the local champion of diversity in the arts. I want to talk about your show that’s coming up, which is this show is available for touring on February 9th and 10th. But first, I want to hear a bit about Alexander Davis and the Davis sisters.

Alexander Davis: Yeah, I’m happy to talk about it. Thanks again for having me. My name is Alexander Davis. I use he/him or they pronouns, or Alex is also fine. I’m a Boston-based artist, primarily, but I’m not unfamiliar with the Berkshires. I’m an alumni, a very proud alumni of Jacob’s Pillow and the school of Jacob’s Pillow. I’ve also just finished up my MFA at Smith College. So the western side of the state has definitely felt like a second home to me. Whenever I get the chance to come out here and show work, and connect with other artists, it’s always a joy. I’m primarily a dancer, performer, choreographer, and theater maker. Most of the time, I do that through a company called the Davis Sisters, a duet project in full collaboration with my best friend and soulmate, Joi Davis, who is one of the greatest people in the world. And anyone who’s met her would agree. She is with me in everything I do, even if it’s not a Davis Sisters project. This project, in particular, is a manifestation of my research and time at Smith College, getting my MFA. The work that I’m going to be presenting on February 9th and 10th is a furthering of work that I was making while in Northampton, Massachusetts. So it was born in Western Mass and is continuing to have a life out here.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, Northampton is a funky place. I love the five colleges area, not just for the funkiness, but what it represents. It’s a bastion of collective effort. For those who don’t know, if you’re a student at any of the five colleges — and I’m going to see if I can get them right — it’s UMass, Smith, Amherst, Hampshire College, and Mount Holyoke — you can take classes at any of them. That’s something special.

Alexander Davis: That’s it. Ding ding.

Top Left Corner: Ding bam. I win the $60,000 question. Nice. So, those five colleges, if you’re a student at any of them, you can take classes at any of them, which is fantastic.

Alexander Davis: And beyond that, the dance departments are a consortium, more connected than the traditional five college model. The dance departments share resources, faculty, and are connected by an organization called Five College Dance. So the five college consortium feels extra strong in the world of dance.

Top Left Corner: I had not realized that.

Alexander Davis: I think the only other department that is connected that way is astronomy.

Top Left Corner: Maybe you should do something based on astronomy. That way you can get all of you together. I’d love that.

Alexander Davis: Joy Davis, the other Davis sister, is a huge astronomy and astrophysics person. In addition to the work we make together, we do make work separately. I still very much feel her voice and her presence, often in the work I make outside of the Davis sisters and vice versa. She has a beautiful collection of works that are very astronomical.

Top Left Corner: I can see it. In fact, if you send me a link to any work she’s got online, I’ll happily put it in the links mentioned in the show notes. Choreographed by the stars, I like it. Let’s talk a little bit about the origins of the show. Now, I noticed that here at Williams, it is entitled “This Show is Available for Touring.” What I saw online on YouTube, it was “This Dance is Available for Touring.” How did it start out, and what was the intent of it? What were you trying to get across, and how has it evolved?

Alexander Davis: Yeah, the title did shift a little bit as I transferred it. Part of that was opening up the perception of what performance is. When I originally did it at Smith College, it was presented as my thesis for my MFA in dance. It was important to contextualize it as dance. I generally think my work is more successful when people go into it expecting dance, and then I can play with and subvert their assumptions. Randy Randall, the producer at the 62 Center who’s so generously connected us and is presenting this work, and I had a lot of conversations about whether it’s a show or dance. In the end, we went with ‘show’ just because when sourcing community members, as I’m sure we’ll get to, there are community members who are part of and perform in the work alongside myself and a few other core professional dancers. ‘Show’ felt potentially more accessible to people. If people heard about the opportunity to participate in a dance, some might count themselves out, thinking dance is this big revered, untouchable, inaccessible thing. I was experimenting and hoping that the word ‘show’ would maybe bring in musicians, theater artists, jugglers, or people who otherwise wouldn’t want to be part of a dance process.

Top Left Corner: I love that analogy, especially of easing yourself slowly into a cold pool. It makes it very visceral. But as we all know, eventually, you ease into a cold pool or pond, and before you know it, you don’t notice the temperature. You’re just having a good time moving, flowing. What was the hope that you had? What did you want to project, create with this? What do you want the audience to take away from this?

Alexander Davis: “This Show is Available for Touring” is literally a show that’s available for touring. It has several aims, but one of them is to really implicate the audience as an active part of not only a show’s aesthetic success but also its cultural and economic success. During the lockdowns, everybody turned to Netflix, television, streaming services, art, literature, arts and crafts, movement practices like yoga in their living rooms, and meditating for the first time. There was just this instinctual turn in this moment of tragedy and trauma collectively towards these cultural and embodied experiences. It’s important for folks to remember that art isn’t something you’re just passively engaged in, even if you’re not actively on stage performing it. You are actively implicated as a member of a community, whether that’s choosing to attend or not, how you cast your vote at the ballot box, how and where you choose to spend your money. Conscious consumerism is such a thing right now. People think about shopping small and buying from businesses that share their value systems. We can take that thought process one step further into how we integrate the arts into our lives, because everybody is integrating the arts. Some people are just doing it more passively than others.

Top Left Corner: I agree, and I want to go back a little bit to what you had said earlier about how every bit of movement can be stylized. I think it was either 2017 or 2018 that William’s dance department created a performance based on the movements of the food service staff members, right? Yes, yes, Forklift. Good memory. And that was an amazing illustration of just that because when we work physically with our bodies, with our hands, sometimes just to make the time go by, we add a little flair, a little panache to even mundane tasks. To keep our minds active and flexible, we sometimes add little flourishes here and there to what we do.

Alexander Davis: Absolutely. So, Forklift Danceworks, is a really wonderful company. And this piece, “Served” it was called, was coordinated by Allison Orr and Kristy Marty. And I think part of the success is not only bringing attention to the performers, in this case the dining hall workers, the cooks, showing that their movement has value and cultural implications, and that there’s artistry in their flourishes, but it’s also reminding the audience of something they might take for granted. I know I did as a college student. You take a dining hall for granted and then you get out of college and realize, right, someone made that food for me for four years. By elevating it in the eyes of the audience as well, we’re bringing a new kind of communal attention to something that might be forgotten.

Top Left Corner: No, you’re absolutely right. And I think that partly the occupations that we feel are okay to just sort of forget about are those whose movements are intentionally invisible to us. We pay attention to the movements of doctors, surgeons, because those movements are crucial. We pay attention to tree workers, watching them climb and hoping they don’t drop a tree on our house. That’s what we pay them not to do. But in other situations, we don’t think much about the movements that go into the job, which is really eight hours out of the day for someone working. These movements are intimately intertwined with the end result and the process. And, not sure if this is the best segue, but I did see the intro and finale of “This Dance is Available for Touring” on YouTube. If it’s okay, I’ll put a link to that as well. It appears that it’s being created and choreographed in real time, impromptu. Was that intentionally part of the process?

Alexander Davis: Absolutely. The piece itself is a pitch for its own existence, in a way. It spends its entire run, about 50 minutes, trying to justify why you’re watching it in the first place. That’s very much how I feel as a queer person right now in this country, swimming my way through academia. Within an academic setting, I often felt like I was trained to over explain and justify everything, which has its place. I’m grateful for the education and experiences. Yet, I feel like my identity as a queer person is something I’m constantly having to justify, sometimes literally just for existing. In the darker moments of this country, and we’ve got it pretty good compared to other parts of the world, I have to explain what I’m doing just for existing. I think that’s relatable not just to the LGBTQ+ community but to anybody who has held a marginalized identity or questioned why they’re doing something.

Top Left Corner: Well, this was a turn I was going to take very soon, and I’m glad you prompted me to make sure I do. Since this is part of the Queering Perspectives Festival, we haven’t discussed any reason that the show has a justification for being in such a festival. Let’s take that turn and talk about having to justify your existence as an artist, as a queer person. I know you mentioned just a second ago that, compared to other places, we have it good here in America where we can, in many places anyway, safely express our queer identities. However, some might argue that placing it on a relative spectrum is not necessarily the answer. When you should not have to say, “Well, I’m lucky because I won’t have my head cut off.” Like, that sounds absurd to say we’re lucky here, you know? Go ahead.

Alexander Davis: Yeah, I appreciate that reality check. When I think of the word ‘queer,’ in terms of art and queer art, there’s art that is queer in its content, maybe about same-sex attraction. It’s maybe about a coming-out story. But then there’s work that is queer in structure and presentation, which to me means it’s existing outside of a normative theatrical experience. Maybe non-linear, in direct conversation with itself, violating what you might expect in a traditional dance setting. This dance does, in moments, directly address queer content. And I think even more than that, it is queer in the way it’s constructed, in the way the energetic ride of the whole thing feels. It violates a lot of what I was taught to think of as traditional contemporary dance making techniques or contemporary theater techniques. The ending is a great example of that. As you mentioned, the ending is proposed to the audience as being created and choreographed live. That’s not a lie by any means. There are essentially a menu of things that could happen, based on both my ability to make choices and each individual in the show’s ability to make choices. What always emerges is something so much better and more exciting than I could have choreographed, because what we’re doing is setting up a different kind of stakes.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, and there’s a fearlessness… maybe not fearlessness, but courage, in saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to be looking at ten minutes from now.” But everybody, you know, the 400 people in the audience, or 800 people in the audience, has an expectation.

Alexander Davis: Eight hundred. Eight hundred people in the audience.

Top Left Corner: There’s going to be 800 people in the audience, and they’re all wondering, “Am I going to get enough entertainment for my buck, or for my time?” And the idea, of course, is that they will. Almost anything that happens with that kind of chaos on stage is going to be worth seeing. But I do want to talk about this notion of queer art, and this is tangential, so don’t think there’s any real strong connection to what you’ve said. There’s a movie, about 15 or 20 years old, the first action lesbian movie. Imagine an action movie where Bruce Willis has to rescue the damsel in distress, except it’s a lesbian couple, and one is an ex-Marine. Throughout the entire movie, nothing is ever made of the fact that they’re lesbians. It’s just an action movie where the two main characters happen to be two women in love. I thought that was so much ahead of its time. I almost never see art where you don’t have to justify your existence as a member of the queer community. Tell me, do you feel like when you are queer and an artist, you feel a certain pressure to always be messaging?

Alexander Davis: God, yes. And what I’m thinking about is there’s something extremely queer about just putting a queer person on stage and not mentioning it. There’s something so, like, subversively gay about just putting, like, me going on stage in as myself, which I do in this dance, which is, I don’t know, not to sound like “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” but like going on stage as myself is difficult because it feels way more vulnerable than if I were to go on stage and be like, hey everybody, I’m doing a funny voice and I’m doing a funny walk, and I’m clearly communicating to all of you that I’m heightening something or pretending to be something I’m not as a layer of protection, which, you know, it’s something I fall back on all the time. But this dance, I really, really have to calm myself before I start this dance, and I kind of chill by myself. So there, you know, when I originally performed this piece, there were 26 other people in it, and we’re building up a community. I’m not sure when this is going to come out, but if folks are interested in participating, they can totally reach out. We can put my email in the show notes and folks can reach out. And I’d love to have anybody involved who’d like to be. But before I perform this dance, I kind of take a second by myself and just calm my nervous system and try and imagine that I’m about to have a conversation with one person instead of 800 people.

Top Left Corner: I thought it was 1200 people.

Alexander Davis: Yeah. Thank you. Right. Sorry. Got 1,200 people, right? 1,200 people.

Top Left Corner: So while you’re while you’re talking yourself, you know, not exactly down off the ledge, but maybe it’s okay to be on the ledge, what do you … what are you telling yourself? How are you, sort of soothing your nerves.

Alexander Davis: I’m thinking about what I have to do as a task. So every. Throughout the the show. I have things I need to accomplish. And so I really just try to think of, like, okay, like the very beginning of the show, I think I’m gonna walk out and I’m gonna greet the audience, and I know I have to talk about where the emergency exits are. I need to remind them what the website URL is. I need to thank them for coming, and I need to, like, it’d be great if I remembered to make x, y joke. So I’m not going out with a script that I’m reciting. I’m instead going out with like a to do list, and that’s really how I choreograph as well. So in the opening section while the community is doing this walking pattern, I’m doing this very slow roll from upstage to downstage. And even though there are pathways that I repeat that whole time, I’m just thinking about, my task is to roll and to take this six minutes to get from one end of the stage to the other. Mhm, mhm. And so I ground myself by just reminding myself of like the literal thing I’m doing instead of trying to think of like the big thing I’m trying to do or that, that the, that we’re all trying to do as an ensemble.

Top Left Corner: So basically filling your brain with the mechanics of that first six minutes so that by the time you get to the end of it, it’s really too late to back out and you’re just there and it’s all happening.

Alexander Davis: Oh, yeah, absolutely, too late. But yeah, there is, I do think, this expectation for artists with marginalized identities to represent because they maybe haven’t been given a platform as consistently as other voices. And when you do have that opportunity, you think, “Well, what do I value? And what am I trying to say?” I know artists who really resent that. I know artists who ignore that, who just say their identity might be present, but it’s not the content of their work. For me, it’s kind of what I’m talking about anyway. I’m just talking about pop culture, and I feel so welcomed, safe, and grateful for my community of queer folks. It feels so normal and natural to include it in my work.

Top Left Corner: No, that makes perfect sense. I don’t want to suggest that anybody should or shouldn’t alter their performance or any of their artistic creations. I’m always fascinated because it’s similar, as you point out, with any marginalized community, whether you’re Latino, black, Native American, or even just women. How many women have had to justify being the director of an action movie, or an Asian director in charge of a typical Western movie? I’ve always thought that there’s got to be a perfect world, maybe some thousand years in the future, ten years, or maybe tomorrow, where no one has to feel the pressure to represent. They can if they want, but it would be wonderful if we don’t have to. And I feel like sometimes we’re in this bubble of the Berkshires where it is much safer, but it’s only safer sometimes than places a half an hour’s drive away. It’s weird in this plurality of a country where communities just a stone’s throw away have different levels of assumed safety and welcome. That level of assumed safety is not something you would take for granted.

Alexander Davis: Go ahead. I think, with my queerness, I carry many privileges. Part of something I can do is try to welcome in those communities, half an hour outside of the Berkshires, who maybe feel, for whatever reason, that they’re not welcome in a queer space. Obviously, hate and discrimination aren’t welcome. But I often wonder how I’m participating in deepening isolation between communities. That’s something I’m grappling with. Can I be doing more? Not necessarily bridging that gap, because I don’t know how much it is my responsibility to go up to a bigot and say, “Hey, I’m a queer person you haven’t met before, let’s be friends.” But I also think I have a responsibility to not deepen that isolation.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. Even if it’s a matter of there being people here in the Berkshires who have no deep connection to the queer community, but also no animosity. They just happen to be the sort of people who would say, “I’d like to try being on stage,” and this is a way to do it. It’s not asking me to be anyone other than who I am. It’s just that there will be some straight people and some queer people, and we’re going to be on stage, moving and creating art together. Isn’t that cool?

Alexander Davis: Right. And there are going to be disabled people, tall people, short people, young people, older people. I often think that people change people’s ideas. When queerness or the LGBTQIA+ community is perceived as outside of you, it’s easier to demonize it. But if you know a queer person, if you love a trans person in your life, that’s going to open you up to change how you think about the LGBTQIA+ community because it’s no longer that far out of you. So many of these folks with opinions about polarizing issues, which to me don’t seem that polarizing or complicated, like issues of bodily autonomy or LGBTQIA+ equity, maybe don’t realize that they love somebody who has had an abortion, or is trans, or is living with HIV.

Top Left Corner: You know, I think you really hit it on the head. If we can strengthen these epicenters of acceptance, like the Berkshires, Boston, and a lot of college town type places, we can create a culture that recognizes the people in our lives who may be members of groups we didn’t identify with before. If we can strengthen these epicenters of acceptance, tolerance, and love, maybe we can grow it out at the edges a mile every year, until it’s not just the Berkshires but most of the northeast. I kind of look at it as a conquest thing, using the principles of conquest to make a more equitable world.

Alexander Davis: Mhm. Interesting.

Top Left Corner: [Laughter] I should probably edit that out.

Alexander Davis: But with all that, I wholeheartedly believe that people change communities and that individuals make up communities. Communities are made up of individuals, and it can be easy to lump large groups together based on geography, identity, belief systems, etc. But at the end of the day, communities are made of individuals. I hope that both on stage and in the audience, I can bring together a group of individuals that maybe hasn’t shared space in that way before. It’s about joy, silliness, and it doesn’t have to be that serious or deep. At the same time, I take the potential power of performance and the outcomes of art very seriously, but I don’t take myself that seriously. That feels like an important distinction. I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility when I have a captive audience, but I’m just an asshole who wants to make people laugh. It’s always this balance of heart and poignancy, but also silliness and play.

Top Left Corner: Sure, you could be mad serious about being mad silly.

Alexander Davis: Yes, yes, yes, I take play very seriously, all that stuff. And I also think that humor just opens people up in a new way, in a different way. So if I can use humor to facilitate somebody through a thoughtful experience, then yeah, I’m happy about that.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, I guess. I mean, for me, I’m just so, I watch the news, I read the news, I listen to the news, I absorb what’s going on in all media, and from all perspectives. I try to study the current events. Well, I’m a journalist. I guess I’m supposed to do that. But I have to say that one of the things that has run through my mind really, over the last several years, but especially this week, given all the talk about what’s going on in national politics, you know, the presidential elections coming up and the Iowa caucus results and all that jazz, I cannot help but feel that the arts are needed now more than they have been since, like the Vietnam War, to demand that people open their eyes a bit. And we’ve already said almost everything that I would have said about it, you know, in the last 15 minutes or so. But tell me if you would, just what your sense is of the responsibility of art to awaken people, to demand that they open their eyes with song, with dance, with movement, with visual.

Alexander Davis: Yeah, I think all art is inherently political because it’s particularly dance and live performance, since the body is so politicized. So there’s no avoiding the politic of an individual work of art. It’s then the artist’s decision how directly they want to engage with or bring out that political perspective that’s inherently embedded in every work of art. Because even something that is, you know, a supposedly apolitical is political in its privilege of not having to engage with politics. Right? So if you, I heard a great term thrown around on the internet recently called recession pop. And it’s being used to describe this very particular kind of pop music that was happening between like 2008 and 2012, which I look back on as this really wild, specific moment of pop music for my generation that, the music was all like, throw your hands up, let’s party, the world is ending. And in retrospect, when we look back at that time period, something that in the moment felt apolitical or maybe felt like escapism, right now to me carries this very specific political connotation.

Top Left Corner: I mean, for me, I’m just so, um, I am, I watch the news, I read the news, I listen to the news, I absorb, um, what’s going on in all media, uh, and from all perspectives. I try to, to study, uh, the current events. Well, I’m a journalist. I’m. I guess I’m supposed to do that. Um, but I, um, I have to say that one of the things that has run through my mind really, over the last several years, but especially this week, um, given the all the talk about what’s going on in, um, in, you know, national politics, you know, the presidential elections coming up and the Iowa caucus results and all that jazz, I cannot help but feel that the arts are needed now more than they have been since, like the Vietnam War. Um, to to. Demand that people open their eyes a bit. And we’ve already said almost everything that I would have said about it, you know, in the last, you know, 15 minutes or so. But tell me if you would, just what your sense is of the responsibility of art to awaken people to, to demand that they open their eyes with song, with dance, with movement, with visual.

Alexander Davis: Yeah, I think all art is inherently political, especially dance and live performance, because the body is so politicized. In my opinion, there’s no avoiding the politic of an individual work of art. It’s the artist’s decision how directly they want to engage with or bring out that political perspective that’s inherently embedded in every work of art. Even something that is supposedly apolitical is political in its privilege of not having to engage with politics, right? So, I heard a great term thrown around on the internet recently, ‘recession pop.’ It’s being used to describe this very particular kind of pop music happening between 2008 and 2012, which I look back on as this really wild, specific moment of pop music for my generation. The music was all like, ‘throw your hands up, let’s party, the world is ending.’ And in retrospect, when we look back at that time period, something that in the moment felt apolitical or maybe felt like escapism now to me carries this very specific political connotation.

Alexander Davis: So sometimes the political nature of a work of art is not revealed until it’s contextualized by the future, until it’s contextualized by the artists. I’m almost more interested in an audience’s responsibility. Okay, I think the artist has a lot of responsibility already to make the work of art, to facilitate its creation and execution. And every artist should be purposeful about how they’re engaging with the inherent politic of what they’re making. I would maybe turn it onto the audience and ask, ‘What do you want out of a work of art? How are you choosing to engage with this political work?’ Because I’ve seen a lot of work that claims to lead with its political perspective, but at the end of the day, it’s just a way for white progressives to continue to feel good about being white progressives.

Top Left Corner: Mhm. Yeah.

Alexander Davis: Yeah.

Top Left Corner: So you get a point there.

Alexander Davis: Like what.

Top Left Corner: You’ve got a point there. Yeah.

Alexander Davis: There are definitely films, television, and media that exist to affirm people who already believe they’re doing what they need to be doing. So, I turn it back on the audience and encourage folks to see a show that they don’t think is for them. Be okay forming an opinion about that. See a show in another language and accept that you’re going to be sitting through a show that you maybe don’t understand linguistically. Go see a movie that’s in a different language, listen to music from another country. Especially in this world of algorithms where we are just being fed more of what we like, and our tastes are being crafted by these algorithms, like Spotify, TikTok, that we already like. I think it’s a wildly political and brave act to put yourself as an audience member into a situation that you don’t think is for you. Go to a museum show that you don’t think is for you, or see something in a language you don’t speak. And just see what that feels like in your body, like maybe you’re like, “I have no idea what that movie was about, but how did it feel to sit in a movie theater and listen to another language for an hour and a half?”

Top Left Corner: I think that’s brilliant. I really do. To your point, there’s plenty of art out there that is there to make white progressives feel good about themselves. All 12 seasons of The West Wing probably fall into that category. Sorry, Alan. But, you know, it’s no secret, I support my journalism by driving Uber at night, and one of the things I do is offer my passengers full control of Spotify. My last customer asked for a playlist of international death metal. From the Berkshires to New Jersey, I listened to death metal in everything from Korean to Russian to Spanish to English. I can’t wait to see how Spotify’s algorithm handles this. I can just see the smoke rising from Spotify International headquarters.

Alexander Davis: Yes. And so I think, yeah, exactly. That’s a beautiful, simple act, just trying out different music, something you wouldn’t normally watch. Going to see something that was not tailor-made for you, because we’re in such an age where content is so accessible with streaming and everything. You kind of have to go out of your way to be challenged by art and media.

Top Left Corner: Sure, sure. Because eventually, they pigeonhole you so much that you get the same 12 songs over and over again. So, let’s talk a little bit, before we go, about how people can get involved. You said it’s on the audience, and in this case, you give them a chance to be on stage, interacting in ways they might not normally think of themselves, with people they might not normally interact with, other than running into them at the supermarket. How do people get involved with “This Show is Available for Touring”? What’s the level of commitment?

Alexander Davis: Oh, yeah, very good, very nice. It means being available for the two performances on February 9th and 10th, first of all. The performances are at eight. I would probably start to get nervous if you weren’t there by seven, so let’s aim for 7:00 at the latest. We’ll do a group grounding exercise and then work backwards. Any availability in the evenings of the 8th, 7th, 6th, or 5th would be helpful, as we’ll be in the theater checking with lights, sound, and putting all the pieces together. You don’t need to be completely available those days, but some availability would be helpful. And then otherwise, I’m holding community rehearsals on the evenings of Monday and Wednesday at the 62 Center at Williams College, this coming week.

Alexander Davis: So let’s aim for 7:00 at the latest. We will do a group grounding exercise and then work backwards. Any availability in the evenings of the 8th, 7th, 6th, or 5th will be helpful. We’ll be in the theater, checking with lights, sound, putting all the pieces together. And otherwise, I’m holding community rehearsals on the evenings of Monday and Wednesday at the 62 Center at Williams College, this coming Monday and Wednesday and the following Monday and Wednesday. All are welcome. You really only need to attend one of those rehearsals. I can teach you the score or the walking pattern, and we’ll have a chance to run it before the show on the 9th. It’s going to be a good time. If folks have a big performance background and want to be more involved, we can make that happen. I’m super flexible and can work with people’s availability. If you’re even mildly interested, reach out to the email. I’d love to connect and meet you. Even if it doesn’t work out, I love meeting folks like you, Jason, and connecting with people in the community. I love the journalism you do and the hyperlocal perspective you bring. It’s easy to get lost in national and international news outlets, but nothing beats the town beat.

Top Left Corner: I’m sorry, this coming Monday and Wednesday or that week?.

Alexander Davis: Monday. Both. Both. Okay. The coming Monday and Wednesday and the following Monday and Wednesday. All are welcome. You really only need to be able to attend one of those rehearsals, and I can teach you the score or the walking pattern. We’ll have a chance to run it before the show on the 9th, and it’s going to be a good time. If folks have a big performance background and want to be more involved, we can make that happen. I’m super flexible and able to work with what people’s availability is. If you’re even mildly interested, reach out to the email. I would love to connect and meet you. Even if it doesn’t work out, I love meeting folks like you, Jason, and connecting with people in the community. I love the journalism you do and the hyperlocal perspective you bring. It’s easy to get lost in national and international news outlets, but nothing beats the town beat.

Top Left Corner: Thank you so much. Of course. And as you hinted at earlier, when you say anyone is welcome, you mean anyone, including folks who might fear there wouldn’t be a place for them if they had a disability. No problem, you can figure it out.

Alexander Davis: If there are folks who use wheelchair or other mobility assistant devices, uh, the 62 center is accessible, and we can work with you to easily get you to and from rehearsal and on stage. Um, so all all are welcome if you can, if you can traverse space. It’s what I would say. I know, I know, I’ve used a word, I’ve used a word walking a lot and that’s, you know, how we refer to the section. But there’s definitely space for folks who are rolling for folks who are hopping, for folks who are just moving through space and folks who are, you know, walking on their hands, I don’t know, I’m down for anything.

Top Left Corner: Sounds great, I love it, I really do.

Alexander Davis: Thanks. And all ages as well. Um, so please, uh, if you’re if you’re under the age of, I don’t know, 16, you should probably have an adult with you, but, you know.

Top Left Corner: Nice.

Alexander Davis: And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I never want to get on stage,” please check out the Queer Perspectives Festival. It’s not just my show. There’s a month’s worth of curations exploring different queer perspectives, musical events, theater pieces, dance pieces, some really cool and exciting things coming up. I hope you get to talk to some of those artists too.

Top Left Corner: I hope so, too. I really, really do. Well, Alexander Davis, it has been such an honor to have you on. Thank you for your generosity of time and information. We got a lot deeper than a lot of people are willing to go, and I appreciate that. It means a lot. You mentioned this isn’t like some talk show. We do try to get the NPR quality right here on the local podcast. You have performed admirably, and I appreciate that. Thank you. I will send as many people as I can. How many would be too many? I mean, you need about eight, right?

Alexander Davis: Too many.

Top Left Corner: Like if 50 people showed up, you’d still probably do it, right?

Alexander Davis: 50 people would be a dream. I mean, we might need to have them sit in the audience for part of it just to fill some seats.

Top Left Corner: We’ll do it.

Alexander Davis: Yeah. 50 people.

Top Left Corner: Alright, we’re going to work on that, getting them on stage with you. And until then, thank you so much. Stay warm, stay dry. And we look forward to seeing you on the 9th.

Alexander Davis: Thanks, Jason. I’ll talk to you later.

Today’s guest is Robin Chadwell, who is helping spearhead a campaign for peace in the Middle East. A letter she has been circulating is garnering an increasing number of signatories as the situation for Palestinians, both in Gaza and in the occupied West Bank grows more dire by the hour.

Robin Chadwell (she/her) is a farmer and caregiver for adults with developmental disabilities in Great Barrington, MA. When she isn’t working, she plays pick-up soccer, writes poetry, and watches reality TV. 

Jay Velázquez: That is correct. In fact, this is episode 183 of the top left corner right here on The Greylock Glass GreylockGlass.com, the Berkshires mightiest independent alternative news thing. Welcome. I’m your host, Jay Velázquez, known in an alternate zip code as the Mongrel. It’s great to have you with us on this November 1st. Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit. Good luck. 2023. It’s a Wednesday and if you looked out your window, you might have seen that it was a snowy Wednesday. Tell you what, those trick or treaters dodged the bullet last night, but boy was that a shocker. This morning, I know that. Climate scientists have predicted that because it’s going to be it is an El Nino year, that the winter is going to be milder. But if this is if this is how we’re going to lead into it, I don’t know, you know, could be could be anything and it’s anybody’s game anyway. Right. This is New England. This is what we get. We don’t get upset. Today is going to show us. Really.

We’re actually not staying local, at least not in terms of the topic we’re going to be discussing the conflict. In Gaza right now, at least 8000. I think 400 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s assault, which was a response to the attacks by Hamas on. Well, first military bases and then innocent civilians in the West Bank.

And if innocent civilians in towns surrounding the Gaza Strip, some 1400 civilians were killed by Hamas fighters. And the retribution has been swift. It has been certain. And it is being called genocide by many, many level headed people. And this is a conflict that has the potential to spin way, way out of control, as we know. Israel is a nuclear armed state, though not officially. Iran may be a nuclear state. We’re not sure about that. We know that Pakistan is in support of Palestinian right now, and they’re definitely a nuclear armed state. And. Russia and China are. Not in favor of what’s going on. So we have all the makings of some geopolitical flash and. And spark, and we really would like to see that not happen. You know this this is a nice planet. I like this planet. I don’t want to see it exploded, but that is only going to happen, or that’s only going to be prevented if people speak up.

And my guest today, Robin Chadwell, who is a farmer and caregiver for adults with developmental disabilities in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Robin has. Um, started a letter and has. Written an open letter in support of a of a piece, and she has managed to get lots of signatories. I know she’s also got some help from from other folks in this endeavor, and she’ll describe that.

The idea here is that she feels, as do the signatories of this open letter, that people have got to speak up if they don’t like what they see going on. Don’t like our the United States involvement in it? It is, after all, mostly our weaponry that is being used in this conflict that is killing innocents. We know that at least. Well, just about half of the population of the Gaza Strip are children, and pretty much half of the of the casualties can be expected to be children. We know that there have been around 8500 casualties so far. Civilian casualties. And that number rises. In fact, we don’t even know for sure how accurate that is. It might be much higher. So without any further ado, because I think the the interview is going to speak for itself, let’s get to that conversation with Robin Chadwell right here in the top left corner.

Top Left Corner: And with me on the line is Robin Chadwell of High Spirits Community Farm. Robin, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Robin Chadwell: Thank you, Jason, for having me. I appreciate it.

Top Left Corner: Well, this is an issue that I have been struggling with how to cover. I’ve written a little bit about it in the glass, but I don’t feel like I have really done. Enough to to shine a spotlight on the real tragedy that is the conflict between Israel and. Excuse me. Israel and Palestine. And your letter. Your letter to the editor. And? And I wouldn’t call it a petition. Exactly. But your your open letter demanding change is just the sort of impetus that I needed. So why don’t you, first of all, tell me a little bit about how you came to find yourself motivated to to to care. First of all, just to care about this issue.

Robin Chadwell: Sure, sure. Um huh. That’s kind of a that’s an interesting question. I think that the the motivation to write this open letter and reach out to my community members for help in crafting it came honestly from just like this feeling of desperation. Um. You know, this has been like a long time coming, but the the attack. From Hamas. On October 8th, you know, that really it’s it really kind of brought into focus what the actual conversation in this community is around Zionism, around Palestinian liberation. And I was a little bit shocked at how imbalanced that conversation seemed, and I didn’t really know where to find my community members that were also, you know, in support of a free Palestine and in support of. Ending the occupation of Palestine by the State of Israel. So, you know, I felt pretty helpless. And I thought, you know, I’m an okay writer. I could I could write something and send it to friends in the community. And. And thankfully, some really brilliant folks who live in Berkshire County. They reached back out to me and they said, yes, let’s do this. And I assure you, they have a much more thorough understanding of the history of this issue than I do, and I’m just so grateful for their help and their knowledge in. And it really became like a pretty. Yeah, it became a pretty, pretty great catalyst for for organizing in this community.

Top Left Corner: So yeah, I think I’m trying to find the both sides ism argument and and seeing whether or not it’s justifiable. Obviously nobody nobody is for the slaughter of innocents. And the Hamas attack, while not justifiable, might be a symptom of the the very desperation that the Palestinians are experiencing at this point. So when I asked why, how did you come to care about it? I’m actually even wondering how you what you’ve heard about it, where you’ve heard about it, because the majority of Americans have really not paid attention to it at all. So like, when did you first start becoming aware of the situation?

Robin Chadwell: Yeah, I first started becoming aware of. Yeah. The occupation of Palestine. Probably back in college, I’d say. I think I have a pretty, maybe a cliché story of political radicalization in that I went to college and I joined a socialist organization, and a big part of that organization was about membership education. And so I found myself reading lots about Palestine, learning a lot, didn’t know anything prior to that. Um, and I think what really? You know, kept it. Central in my mind over the years has been the parallel that you can draw between the occupation of Palestine, the slow motion genocide of Palestinians over the last 75 years. The parallel you can draw between that and the history of the land that you and I are sitting, standing, talking on right now. They’re not totally different. And now, you know, we can see we can see the perpetrator of one genocide. The United States, we can see that perpetrator now giving support to another, smaller but very powerful state who is interested in doing the same thing, committing genocide and and and taking. Taking the land of the Palestinian people. So yeah, it all started started back in college. But it’s been, you know, in my mind for, for many years now and I think. I am still very much learning. I started learning a while ago, but I’m still putting the pieces together and I think that’s okay. I think one of the most important things for people to realize when it comes to this issue is that you don’t have to be an expert to to start to start talking about it. You don’t need to know every detail. I think that’s kind of a trap that people fall into, and it actually pushes people out of the movement in a way that is pretty counterproductive.

Top Left Corner: I agree with you. And and I certainly would not classify myself as an expert. I’m just shocked that there’s so much that goes beyond what any of us would tolerate if it were happening to our, our communities and our family. And it’s been going on for so long. And as you point out in your open letter, the United States has been giving 3 billion plus dollars a year to Israel, mostly in terms of military aid. And so we’re really we we are not. The objective bystander that we’re that the say the Biden administration is pretending to be. What is your sense about the average American’s understanding of the situation and and their sympathies just based on what you see? Am I am I right in assuming that that there’s a that they’ve been kind of brainwashed?

Robin Chadwell: Yeah, that’s a good question. My sense is that. Folks who. And maybe this is naive. Maybe this is a little bit. Yeah. We’ll see. I’ll say it and we’ll see. My sense is that, um, a lot of people are scared of saying the wrong thing. Naturally. Me too. And for that reason, may not be outwardly supportive of Palestine. You know, I think there’s the risk. You run the risk right now of if you come out in support of a free Palestine, you run the risk of being called anti-Semitic. You run the risk of painting yourself in a way that, you know, just being misunderstood by other people. So I think, you know, it seems it’s pretty mainstream popular right now to have your sympathies be with the state of Israel. And I want to come at that from a place of compassion and believe that people believe that people are trying, trying. To do the right thing, trying to follow what the thread is in terms of who deserves justice, who’s being oppressed here. And I think, unfortunately, you know, we live in a place we consume media that has, just like you said, has been totally skewed in favor of the Israeli state.

Robin Chadwell: So I think people have been consuming information that has that has misled them. But I think that there is the capacity within those same people to change their minds. And I don’t think people can change their minds unless we kind of meet them with compassion and understanding. I think it’s possible. I think it’s important to remember that, you know, we’re all kind of products of circumstances. And maybe if I didn’t end up at the university I ended up at in the socialist organization, I ended up in, like, who knows what I would think right now. I feel so I feel so blessed that I have followed the trajectory I have. But I don’t think that’s a sign of any sort of intellectual or moral superiority. I think it’s just I was in the right time at the right place. I think there are a lot of people out there who are misguided and also have the ability and hopefully the bravery to change their minds.

Top Left Corner: I think that we all want to know what’s happening and we don’t want to as as an Al Jazeera reporter was quoted on Democracy Now! This morning or no, actually it was Thursday. She was saying, do we not report on missiles that land in Israel? Do we not report when Hamas does, you know, conducts, you know, inhumane attacks on innocents? Yeah. I mean, we do that. So so why is it that, you know, when we report on one thing, we are to be lauded and when we report on something else, you don’t believe us? I mean, Biden said last week, he said, I have no notion, quote, I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. Biden replied, quote, I’m sure innocents have been killed. It’s the price of waging a war, end quote. What is your response to that?

Robin Chadwell: Uh, rage. Um. Pure rage. Um. Yeah. I mean. I’ve been, honestly. I mean, I think we’ve all known for a long time that Biden is no friend of the truly, you know, no friend of the movement for liberation. Certainly. But I have been. Somehow still shocked at the way he’s handled this situation. The way he’s responded at least expected him to feign a like, feign sympathy for Palestine, or feign some sense of even neutrality about the issue. Both of those. I would have, of course, have been in genuine, but still I expected him to at least try to fake it. So. Yeah, that that questioning of the death toll. Uh. Yeah, I mean, it makes me extremely upset. It’s. It’s an active. I mean, it feels like an active cover up of an ongoing genocide. It’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that he could could say that. But, you know, we’re not. Those of us who have been in this movement for a long time and struggling for. The liberation of all peoples. We know that we we never thought that Biden was an ally to that struggle. So. Yeah. I mean, it’s I guess it’s par for the course, you know, like one empire supports the other.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, yeah. And certainly Israel is acting very much like a colonialist power in Palestine. Secretary-general Antonio Guterres said this was also last week he called for a humanitarian cease fire, and that has been rejected by the United States. Russia, China and others have put forward a referendum to have a complete humanitarian cease fire, which has been rejected by Britain and the United States. The United States put forward a humanitarian pause, which I’m not even nobody’s even exactly sure what that means and why that’s different. But this comes after Biden says that now is not the time for a cease fire, which I thought was interesting because I always thought it was always a good time to stop the flow of blood. But, you know, I guess sometimes, no, that’s exactly what you should be doing. But Guterres said, quote, it is important to recognize to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence. Their economy stifled, their people displaced, and their homes demolished. That is the head of the United Nations and in the United Nations, 120. Member states voted to for an immediate cease fire. And I think it was 14 largely sort of client states that that depend on on the United States. You know, money basically voting with the US and Great Britain. What about this notion of the United States being one of the only countries on the planet to support Israel? What should that what should that be telling the world, and what should that be telling our own populace?

Robin Chadwell: I mean, I’m no expert, but I’ll tell you what. What my gut reaction is is that. You know, for the US too. For the US to say that it isn’t right for Israel to occupy Palestine, for the US to acknowledge that, in fact, like, this isn’t a war, this is genocide. For the US to acknowledge that Israel is a, you know, a colonial force that’s aiming to eradicate an entire people, to expand its own empire. That would mean that the US would have to look at its own history. Right? Like that would mean that the US would have to acknowledge what it has done.

Robin Chadwell: Indigenous people of the Americas and I don’t I don’t think the US is willing to do that. So it’s kind of like a house of cards if the US admits. Admits to what’s going on in Palestine, then their whole story kind of falls apart. Um, you know, their own self narrative falls apart. So I mean, I’m sure that’s not that’s not all there is to it, but.

Top Left Corner: I think that’s a lot of it. I think that’s a huge amount of it and maybe even sort of the, maybe the early underpinnings of a lot of our foreign policy in, in this conflict and in others, we basically are willing to support those who have, who behave the way we have behaved. And I think that there are a lot of folks who want to do something. What is it that your letter urges people to do?

Robin Chadwell: Yeah, yeah. Um, so our letter has three calls to action, and I want to first just name how instrumental the folks over at Freedom Farm in Sheffield, Massachusetts have been the folks over at Finca Luna Bajo. They have been incredible in crafting this letter and were instrumental in naming these three actions. So the first one is. You know, and urging people to contact their government officials daily to demand an end to the US, aid to Israel. To demand an immediate cease fire. And on top of that, to end the occupation of Palestine. That’s number one, very basic. Calling your government officials there. Information is out there. Leave them voicemails, you know, tell them that they won’t have your vote if you if they don’t make these demands and use their power in the right way. Tell them that you will organize against them in the next election, because we will. The second call to action is for folks to educate themselves on what’s happening while centering the voices of Palestinians. So there’s a great a brilliant resource list, um, linked to in the letter, which I’m guessing folks can find in the show notes, which the folks over at. Yeah. Which the folks over at Finkelman BuJo put together. It’s brilliant. It’s extensive use that. It’s incredible. And then the last one is maybe the most important one. Know, calling is really great. Reading books is really great, but we’re just asking people to, you know, find the protest that’s happening in your town or the next town over. Find the vigils that are happening, come together in community and keep keep coming together. Keep being loud, keep making noise. Keep disrupting status quo until until Palestine is free. You know, this goes beyond the ceasefire. Like that. Yes, that’s number one ceasefire now. Absolutely. Um, but let’s not have a ceasefire and then have everything go quiet for the next four years and then watch this all happen again. We have to keep going until the illegal occupation is ended.

Top Left Corner: That’s, I think, such an important, such an important facet of this, that it’s almost as if people are counting on the glazed form over our eyes and the wax, the wax to build up in our ears because. The occupation. It’s not like it’s newly illegal. It’s been illegal all this time. And people have had Free Palestine bumper stickers, you know, on their cars since, well, since as long as I can remember. It’s the, it’s it’s the case that, you know, like you said, you have to keep at it. We don’t have a peace movement in this country to speak of, at least not a robust, you know, sort of muscular one that can really force conversation on the issues. Do you think this might be the thing that’s going to change and maybe get people back into an anti, if not a peace movement, you know, with the patchouli and the beads, at least an antiwar movement for the for the very pragmatic reasons.

Robin Chadwell: I mean, I certainly hope so. I think movements like that are the culmination of years of an ebb and flow of political consciousness and. I think every time we enter into a moment like this, a moment that really just feels. Uh, like the definition of crisis, right? Like where it feels like we’re we’re on a clock right now to to end the occupation of Palestine, or else there’s going to be grave consequences that already have been. But I think each time we enter into a moment like this, we get closer to. Oh, I don’t know, like turning that corner from political complacency into, you know, kind of bringing issues like this into the mainstream. I think that’s another thing that I’ll say about, you know, the whole hope of this, this open letter that so many folks contributed to it. The idea was that. I think that in our little Berkshire County bubble, some mainstream neo liberal type folk might imagine that activism, that the antiwar movement, that the liberation movement exists only on the fringes of, of their county. They don’t necessarily imagine that it’s their neighbor or the farmer that they buy their CSA from, or the person who serves them. Coffee at fuel. Right? Um, yeah. It’s we’re not on the fringes. This movement is central. To this country and this county. And I think that, yeah, I think that it we’re getting closer to a more consistent, ongoing antiwar movement. Um, who’s to say? I just hope we don’t lose momentum.

Top Left Corner: Um, this letter, obviously, we’re going to be, you know, putting it in the show notes as you as you correctly guessed. And we’re going to be making sure that link to the additional resources is is intact and people can click on that. What other ideas do you have that that may be visible that may be in person? Do you have any other events planned or anything like that, or is this sort of still the first, first stages?

Robin Chadwell: Um, this is still kind of the first stages. I think the only, the only other thing I’d say is to echo the other folks who have contributed to this. I think it’s important to all of us that the people who are maybe listening to your podcast or reading this letter, it’s important to us that they know if they disagree with us like we. Like we’re here. We’re here to talk this through. We’re your neighbors. Like this is an attempt to.

Robin Chadwell: Keep our wits about us and remember that we’re we’re neighbors. We’re we’re friends. We’re all community members. And, um, this is not meant to be divisive. In fact, it’s meant to, uh, bring people, bring people together kind of toward, like, some sort of common compassion. Um.

Robin Chadwell: Yeah, we’re in the beginning stages, but I know for a fact that some of the folks who have signed this letter are involved in organizing rallies, and I know there are more to come. So I’d just say stay tuned, keep an eye out, keep an ear out, and I hope to see you there at the next rally.

Top Left Corner: I hope to be there and I hope to promote it through all of our channels. And I just want to leave people with this one. You know, from my part, I want to leave people with this. One last point yesterday. Well, yesterday. But their time today. Our time. Turkey’s President Erdogan said at a press conference, quote, as was the case yesterday, Turkey continues to stand with its Palestinian brothers and sisters today as well, doing unconditionally what this requires. However, the Western world, particularly European countries, has once again failed the test of humanity in Gaza. Look, children have been dying, women have been dying, and hospitals have been are being have been bombarded for 25 days. And he goes on to say that preventing the Gaza massacre is their top priority. Um, I think it it should be noted that Turkey is a nuclear armed state. As is maybe Iran, that we don’t know that for sure. And we know that Israel is also a nuclear armed state, although not officially. And if you don’t like the concept of of a nuclear holocaust, then probably the first thing to do is to start preventing a humanitarian holocaust in Gaza, because the little hand on the doomsday or the large hand on the doomsday Clock is, I think, at less than one second to midnight right now. So it’s probably a good idea to read this letter, sign on to this letter. How can people sign on to this letter, by the way?

Robin Chadwell: So this letter, we have submitted it, our hope is that it can be submitted as or published rather as a press release or a letter to the editor. However, local newspapers want to frame it. Our hope is that it’s, you know, it can be published any day now. We’ve been walking this line, trying to balance, uh, trying to balance, waiting to send this out to publishers so that we can accumulate as many signatures as possible. Balancing that, and the fact that this is an extremely urgent issue and it needs to go out yesterday. Right. So the letter has already been submitted. But people I mean. People are welcome to follow Pal action on Instagram. A lot of our community members who have helped with this letter are involved in Pal action. And, you know, I just encourage you to yeah, again, just dive deep into that resource list, that pink bujo listed in the letter, because it will it’ll direct you to the resources you need in order to get more involved.

Top Left Corner: And people can always sign on in spirit by, I suppose, adding their their thoughts in the comments below. And that way they can sort of be, you know, in spirit signing that letter. And we can keep checking back and see how long it grows. Yeah. Well, I have to say, you know, this has been this has been a really great conversation. We could go on for a day easily because there’s so many issues to talk about. But you’ve hit the main points and with your three actions that you want people to take, I think that there’s a good that’s a good start. So, Robin, I want to thank you for coming on the top left corner and keep us up to date with anything that that comes up, you know, in the way of events. Certainly.

Robin Chadwell: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Jason.

Top Left Corner: All right. Take care and I’ll let you get back to the farm.

Robin Chadwell: Thank you. Appreciate it.

May this message meet you in solidarity. As we come together to take action, we are trembling at the same time. There is so much pain, trauma, and tenderness at this moment, and it is challenging to find the right words to respond to it. We hope you read this and remember that humans who love you wrote it. 

We are your neighbors, farmers, caregivers, friends. We pray that you are finding ways to hold, support, and hear each other during this time. We have been in community—in protest and prayer—these last days. We have been educating ourselves about the conditions that have led us to what we are witnessing today. We have been deeply introspective so that we may actually feel the gravity of what is happening here.

We mourn the deaths of each and every being. We grieve and are enraged as the Israeli government wages a genocidal war on the people of Palestine with the full financial and political support of the United States government. We grieve for the land taken from Palestinian tending, the olive trees cut down, the land burnt, fenced and walled, the air heavy with contamination from bombs (many manufactured in the US), and the ongoing contamination and deprivation of water to the Palestinian people. 

“Our federal taxes contribute $3 billion yearly in military and economic aid to Israel. Over $200 million of that money is spent fighting the uprising of Palestinian people who are trying to end the military occupation of their homeland. Israeli soldiers fire tear gas canisters made in america into Palestinian homes and hospitals, killing babies, the sick, and the elderly…Encouraging your congresspeople to press for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and for recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, is not altruism, it is survival. ”

— AUDRE LORDE, OBERLIN COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, MAY 29, 1989 

That was in 1989. Today, according to the Congressional Research Service, “the United States has provided Israel $150 billion (current, or non inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. At present, almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.”

We call on our community members to take action in the following ways:

1. Contact your government officials DAILY – demand an end to US aid to Israel, an immediate ceasefire, and an end to the occupation of Palestine. 

Solidarity until Palestine is free.

We are asking you, in the face of unimaginable tragedy, to take up a practice of fierce compassion. We know that to do so is no small feat and requires deep courage. But we, your community, believe in our collective strength to do this. 

Finally, we leave you with the words of Palestinian poet and activist, Suheir Hammad: “Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.

And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and you refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.”

In love and solidarity,

Signed:

Robin Chadwell, of High Spirit Community Farm

Lesley Eshelman, Great Barrington, MA

Abi Childs, Berkshires DSA Chair

atalanta sungurov, from Finca Luna Búho 

Fran Sequeira Calderón, from Finca Luna Búho 

Hanyil López Lira, from Finca Luna Búho 

José Gutierrez Calderón, from Finca Luna Búho 

Sunder Ashni, Mumbet’s Freedom Farm

Jennifer Maas, Cheshire, MA

Kamaar Taliaferro, Pittsfield, MA

Anaelisa Vanegas, Manos Unidas Co-op

Kristina Cardot, Corazonidos Community School

Joe Scully, Lee, MA

John Prusinski, former Berkshires DSA Co-chair

Hunter Pratt, Cheshire, MA

Marina Fortier, Cheshire, MA

Maddie Elling, West Stockbridge, MA

Abe Hunrichs, West Stockbridge, MA

Hugo Wasserman, Housatonic, MA

Sara Wallach, Great Barrington, MA 

Hannah Walker, Housatonic, MA

Mae Whaley, Housatonic, MA

Geneva Gray, Great Barrington, MA

Alejandro Hernandez Chavez, Great Barrington, MA

Clemente Sajquiy, Housatonic, MA

Rebecca Strout, Pittsfield, MA on unceded Mohican land

Julia Keenan, Great Barrington, MA

Michael Vincent Bushy, Pittsfield, MA

Honora Toole, Great Barrington, MA

Cara Petricca, Cheshire, MA

Hedley Stone, Richmond, MA

Sarah Kate Hartt, Great Barrington, MA

Becca Litwin, Monterey, MA

Sean Stanton, Great Barrington, MA

Lillian Volat, Housatonic, MA

Meg Bantle, Full Well Farm

Laura Tupper-Palches, Full Well Farm

Elizabeth Caldwell, Great Barrington, MA

Jay Velázquez: Sobering, sobering discussion there with Robin Chadwell. Remember that there are resources that link to resources in the show notes. If you are listening via one of your podcast apps or Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Be sure to check out the show notes for that information and to read the letter that Robin is discussing.

And if you happen to be on the page on the podcast page at GreylockGlass.com, leave a note under the under the show notes. Leave a comment. Add your name to the letter if you agree. If you don’t agree, then post a a civil, um explanation as to why. For now, that’s this show and we will talk again soon. I’m not sure what the subject is going to be. I do know that there’s been some discussion.

People have asked me, why do I keep calling this show the top left corner, which was originally meant to be sort of a, you know, North County, the very top left corner of Massachusetts. But it is true that I keep talking about things that may be Mid County, South County. Or no county. Not sure what to say about them. Not sure what to do about that. Maybe we need a different name for this show. Tough to say, but we’ll keep chewing on that. Maybe we need to keep this show and keep it local, hyper local and have a new show. Hit me up with your opinions if you think that’s the case. If that’s what we need. Editor at GreylockGlass.com I always love to hear from you. And until next time, stay safe. Be good to each other and go easy on yourself. Bye now.

Jay Velázquez: And this is the Top Left Corner. Episode number 183 here on The Greylock Glass, GreylockGlass.com The Berkshires’ mightiest independent alternative news thing. I’m your host, Jay Velázquez, known in an alternate zip code as the Mongrel. Welcome. Welcome to the show. This is going to be a great show we have for you today. A former Pittsfield Select Selectboard Council, city council member, media personality and mayoral candidate John Krol with us today. It’s going to be a great conversation. Didn’t pull any punches. I asked the tough questions and I’ll let you decide for yourself how he did. Um, before we get to that conversation, though, I do have an announcement from one of our sponsors, the Foundry West Stockbridge. But I’d be telling you about this even if they were not our sponsors. Because this is great stuff. This month there is a residency at the Foundry, and I’ll tell you about it. This fall, the Foundry continues to support organizations that align with their mission of giving platform to often unheard voices. The first couple of weeks of September, the Foundry has offered an in-kind contribution of space to hold a theater residency in development through a collaboration with Second Street Second Chances in Pittsfield. The nonprofit’s mission is to provide a central point of access, where formerly incarcerated people of Berkshire County connect with the tools, programs and support to encourage a successful reentry into a more welcoming community with dignity and sustainable opportunities to thrive.

Jay Velázquez: The resulting performance is going to be held at Berkshire Community College at the end of September. I think it’s September 22nd. But let’s see. I think I’m going to have it over here. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I can go on a little bit further because the program Hear Me Out is the process of inspiring trust and creative risk taking, telling stories and sharing dreams and aspirations. The participants will find narrative threads, identify themes, and build the world of the play they have generated. The goals of this, this is this issue. Whatever of release are using the power of live performance to provide an outlet for presently and formerly incarcerated individuals to share their stories and life experiences through devising and shaping an entirely original, entirely original piece of theater, and to educate the public on the issues of incarceration and reentry. In a highly personal way and challenging our stereotype of this population. Performances will take place at the Robert Robert Bowlin Theater at Berkshire Community College on September 20th and 23rd, 2023 at 7 p.m. and September 26th. At 2 p.m. They will be free and open to the public. Each show will be followed by a talkback where audience members can ask the cast direction questions, directly facilitating community dialog. And this is co directed and facilitated by, well, two of my favorite names in the theater world in the Berkshires, Amy Brentano and Sarah Katzoff.

Jay Velázquez: So this is going to be a really I have a feeling I’m moving show, bring your hankie because these types of things, they just hit me hard, hit me so hard. So that is a really fascinating way of putting theater to to to great social use. Now let’s get on with our conversation with John Kroll right here on the top left corner.

I’m a proud Dad, husband, small business owner, and an advocate for my community. I live in my hometown of Pittsfield with my wife, Cara, and our five children, Sophia, Ricky, Arden, Everett, and Beckett.

As the owner of my own marketing agency, One Eighty Media, I’m the director of accounts and lead communications consultant. I suppose that’s a fancy way of saying I work with my clients to give them exactly what they need to bolster their marketing – a fresh new website that works how it’s supposed to, a beautiful new brand, literature that pops and hits the target, intelligent digital marketing campaigns – all that good stuff.

When I’m not working with clients and my professional team, you’ll find me out and about coaching my sons’ baseball teams, sometimes giving well-honed advice on Pokemon trades, helping out with homework and driving the kiddos to skiing, soccer or Sunday school. Family is my foundation, and Pittsfield is our home. My Mother and Father, Beverly and John Sr., raised me and my siblings here and I’m proud that my children are growing up in our fine city.

After attending the Pittsfield Public Schools and graduating from Pittsfield High School in 1996, I spent four years in Philadelphia to earn my undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. My first profession after college was as a journalist, first in newspaper, and I later moved into commercial and public radio. But to be completely honest, through my five years’ work as a reporter, I learned I could do far more for my community by jumping into the arena myself.

(Editor’s Note: The following transcript, generated via AI, is very rough. We’ll try to edit it as time allows.)

Top Left Corner: John, thanks so much for being on the top left corner.

John Krol: Hey, Jason, it is a pleasure to finally meet you, at least virtually. And I look forward to the conversation.

Top Left Corner: The feeling is mutual. I can’t believe in all this time we haven’t we haven’t crossed paths before. I think I’ve run into I’ve seen you across the room at different events, but we’ve not gotten a chance to, to, to meet. So. Yeah. So a virtual handshake and and a good to meet you. You actually this is going to be I think The Greylock Glass is last candidate interview during a campaign. I don’t I enjoy them. I enjoy them but they’re really it’s tough to put together especially a one year. We had, I think, 12 candidates in North Adams for city council and that just about killed me. But you are not just the the mayor of a of a small town amongst many towns. This is the county seat we’re talking about. What happens in Pittsfield affects what happens throughout the county. So I think it was really important at this sort of pivotal election, which I think it’s going to be no matter who wins, to get a good sense of who the candidates are. So, John, let’s for those who don’t know you, could you give us a sort of your or your superhero origin story, let us know where you’re from and how you got to where you are now. I know that’s a big chunk, but.

John Krol: Oh, yeah. I mean, well, hey, you know, um, we can crunch it down. Um, thank you so much for. For the opportunity. You know, I. I was born and raised in Pittsfield, and I had a wonderful childhood here, um, raised by my two parents and one brother and two older sisters who kept me in line. But I can tell you that really, this city is at the core of who I am. You know, we have a city that is wonderful and supports each other. And also, hey, you got to say, there’s a little bit of chip on our shoulder in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. And that’s that’s a piece of where we are today, economically and otherwise, with a legacy of GE, but also with the opportunity to position ourselves as the true Berkshires city. And I believe that’s something that we’ve never truly been able to attain to elevate ourselves as the hub culturally and economically in in the city, at least for the last three decades. We got close a couple of times, but I really want to finish that that job. So I was able to, after going to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2000in Philadelphia, I came back and became a journalist and I was at the old North Adams transcript.

John Krol: That was my very first job out of college, and I was a reporter, and that’s where I really cut my teeth. On understanding town government, municipal government budgets, understanding line items, understanding how it works with state funding, understanding the powers of even what the Board of Selectmen have in small towns, and ultimately understanding what a mayor does. For instance, in North Adams, as I covered John Barrett, the third was the mayor at the time, and later I went into radio and was able to work under the Thurstons at Wnyw and Wmnb in North Adams under the old Berkshire Broadcasting. And that was a wonderful experience. That was the first opportunity where I had to interview people. It was the opinion program, the legacy talk show back at the back in that time, and that was a wonderful experience, which then led me to WAMC, Northeast Public Radio. I was the Berkshire bureau chief for about a year before Jim Roberto, the mayor of Pittsfield, asked me to come work for him. He loved my writing. He loved what I did as far as our stories about Pittsfield and sort of taking it to a new level and deeper understanding for the WAMC listeners. And and really, at first I didn’t think I was going to take that job.

John Krol: I really didn’t think I was going to leave broadcasting. But then I got quiet and really thought, Wow, I have an opportunity to do something special for my hometown. And to some extent the rest has been history, because that fire that started then still burns today. I really believe that our city has an opportunity to elevate to a new level. Um, you know, I became a city councilor. I was there for a decade on the dais, and I had two terms as the vice president of the council, we were able to get Taconic High School built. We were able to do some wonderful things for my ward in West Pittsfield, Ward six. And and ultimately, you know, as a profession, you know, I have my own small business that I’ve had for about a dozen years. I started that time ago and also have worked in the corporate world, in addition to working in City Hall for those two years with Jim Roberto. So I know there’s a lot to unpack there, but I am a dad, which is most important. I’m a husband and I’m also a baseball coach and I’m very committed to my children, my family, and certainly this community.

Top Left Corner: I don’t know that anybody could summarize their their life story so succinctly. So that was great. I know on your website there are some more details and we’ll put a link, of course, to that in the show notes so that people can dig deeper if they if they feel so inclined. But that was that was a pretty comprehensive rundown of experiences. And I do want to comment because this is going to sort of be my first question or topic. You were in the news media for a while, which is as you’re no stranger to the to this, the news media across the country, the local news media is taking a beating we’ve lost since 2004 across the country, about 3000 print newspapers. And there is really almost no way to know how many digital papers like The Greylock Glass or I Berkshires have have sunk since. 2004. But, you know, we’re talking at least 3000 local news sources. And that leaves a huge gap where people used to be there to be the watchdogs for the public when it comes to things like corruption, government efficiency, government spending, self-dealing. Tell me something in your time as a journalist, your time in city hall and your time in business, what’s your take on the. The corruption level in the Berkshires. I have heard things that sometimes just shock me and I try to investigate them as much as I can. Difficult being a one man operation. But what is your take on the corruption in the Berkshires and what can we do to combat that?

John Krol: That’s a really interesting question because there’s there’s two there’s two sides to this from from my perspective. And that is, is it is it likely that there is corruption? The answer has to be yes on some level. However, how much do I know about it or am I aware of it? Not much, because, you know, only the corrupt are corruptible. And so, you know, in my time as a city councilor, I have never been approached with something that that, you know, would would, you know, be a smoking gun as far as that goes. So that’s that’s the kind of challenge that I have when I think about these things. Um, you know, when you look at it here, here’s the thing. You have millions of dollars that are being divvied out every year, grants and federal funding and all kinds of dollars and a lot of power when it comes to contracts and bidding and things along those lines. You know, so the answer, I guess, is it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t some level. To what extent is it? I don’t know. And certainly I can’t, you know, name names or anything along those lines. But but I can tell you that when it comes to the local media, you are 1,000% correct that the dearth of local media does open the door more to these kinds of things because simply it is volume.

John Krol: So when you get a tip. All right. And you have one major newspaper that only has basically one reporter to cover a city and then maybe small newspapers, and those are drying up. It’s just it’s just a question of capacity. And so, you know, it if you worked in the newspaper world or or even in radio, you pretty much have a quota. You got to you got to have your two stories a day. And so when you’re doing that and you’re pumping out content, you’re pumping out these stories to sit back and breathe and be able to get a tip and be able to follow up and be able to ask the tough questions and be able to go and do the FOIA requests and everything along those lines. That takes time. And that is time, unfortunately, that a vast majority of journalists do not have. That’s sure. So so when you say that you are 100% correct and and it’s very, very sad because that is the check and balance in in government to be able to to combat corruption.

Top Left Corner: When I was my first job, my first newspaper job, I was a reporter for the Sentinel Enterprise out in Worcester County, which is a little bit larger than the Eagle, but not much. It’s about the same. And I covered as bureau chief the city of Leominster alone. It’s a city of 55,000 people that I covered alone. And no matter how many hours a day I put in, I could only do the bare minimum. I could only report on what happened at city council meetings or school committee meetings. I couldn’t necessarily analyze it, couldn’t make any sense of it, and certainly couldn’t spot, you know, more than a little bit of suspicious activity. I guess as the mayor, you know, if you were to win, you could certainly set a tone. You can certainly make it known that you don’t put up with.

John Krol: Let me tell you. Yeah, let me tell you, Jason, and this this may or may not be helpful as it relates to that sort of investigative piece, but I do intend on being the most accessible mayor in the history of Pittsfield. And, you know, there’s a few components to that. But one of those component is to have an open press conference each and every week. No topic, no particular focus just every week, say Thursday at 3:00. I don’t know. Pick a time. You know, we will have any and all journalists who wish to be a part of it come in and ask questions and have a conversation. I think that’s I think that’s old school. I think, you know, politics has been so controlled, it has become so staged that we forget that it wasn’t long ago that JFK would just sit there and take questions from 100 reporters out there and and take real questions. And they weren’t, you know, and they and there was nothing staged. Um, you know, we can we can do that in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. That’s that’s easy. Um, you know, I, I really enjoy talking to journalists because I understand the perspective that that you come from. I think it is a critical piece for people, not only just to feel that they have access, but to actually provide that real understanding of, Hey, this is the everyday. And hey, we did say last week that we are going to work on this project. We tried. We really didn’t get much progress this week, but we’re going to keep at it, you know? Just be honest, you know, just be honest. And and when we screw up, we’re going to admit it, you know, and and I feel like people respect that. People really want to see government more open and accessible. And so that’s what I really want to bring to the table.

Top Left Corner: That’s, that’s a good answer. And I like the idea of bringing back the old school weekly press press conference that that is an amazing suggestion. And I hope if you win that you’re able to follow through with that. I started with corruption because to me, everything else that you and other candidates say you’d like to see in Pittsfield depend on on transparency and on honest government. You talk about bringing business back into the Berkshires, and I think that you need to have a fairly clean landscape. You know, it’s got to take root in good soil. You know, that’s that’s what business needs.

John Krol: Amen.

Top Left Corner: When you’ve got when you’ve got the we’ve got the real estate, the commercial industrial and residential real estate. We’ve got, you know, we’ve got colleges that are able to help train people and high schools. We’ve got some tech schools there. There’s a whole bunch of opportunity that has not really garnered the sort of results that I know a lot of people are desperate to see. What is your vision of what a a a thriving or an on its way to thriving business community would look like?

John Krol: Well, that’s a wonderful question. And first and foremost, when I look at business, first we have to look internally and say, how are we doing as it relates to encouraging businesses to set up shop in Pittsfield and also to help them grow in Pittsfield? And honestly, Jason, right now we are not doing a good job with that because our permitting process and our building inspections office is clunky at best and at times can be very, very difficult. So no one in any way, shape or form is saying that we have to not follow codes. Of course we have to make sure we maintain safety and codes and and all of of that. However, there is an approach as far as your culture, and we need to shift our culture to one in which we are working with businesses, working with contractors, working with architects and engineers to find solutions to make it work, as opposed to putting up roadblocks. That’s a very key part of what we are proposing in this campaign, and I think that is if you talk to business owners in Pittsfield or people even attempting to do business in Pittsfield, this is clear that there are real challenges there. So that’s going to be one of the first things that we address under under my administration potentially. I look at Pittsfield, like I mentioned, in the heart of the Berkshires, we have a downtown that’s unlike Lenox, unlike Great Barrington is is devoid of foot traffic in a real sense. And yet we have the core components of it here. We have a Tony Award winning theater company. We have a six screen stadium seat, movie theater.

John Krol: My gosh, you know, a hotel that is is the envy of of many small communities, a boutique hotel that’s world class, a downtown hardware store. We have so many key components. But in between, we don’t have the level of retail that gives us the foot traffic, I think, that that we can attain. So there are some things that I would like to do. You know, back in the early 2000, we had a project called the Storefront Artists Projects, which was remarkable. Maggie Mailer was the leader with Peter Dudeck, and it was innovative and it brought life to those empty storefronts. And I think there’s a way we can revitalize that concept today to bring new life to those spaces. But also it’s time to really get serious about recruiting businesses back to Pittsfield. And gosh, I mean, think about it. We don’t even have a bagel shop in downtown Pittsfield. You know, we could use a chocolate shop. We could use a toy store, we could use a bakery. So that’s one component because the downtown is your front foot step. And there are some business owners who have said, hey, John, you’re focusing a little bit too much on the downtown. You know, don’t forget about us over in the Allendale Shopping Center and don’t forget about us. About us, about the, uh, at the Downing Industrial Park, these sorts of things. And and I agree. However, the downtown is the front doorstep. So I think we need to start there and re-energize our efforts there. And then finally, you raised a an idea about workforce. And when we built Taconic High School, um, it was made very much for this.

John Krol: That is, we have a desperate shortage of plumbers, electricians, carpenters and car mechanics. There are so many of these positions and there is so that there’s a demand for these positions that I think to kind of high school is going to play a key role in that. And the more that we can do between Taconic High School, working with Berkshire Community College, that is where some of the magic can happen. So so my goal will be to elevate that, as you know, to kind of high school. We made a bit of an error when Taconic High School was first built, that when it was first built, we had all these students from Reed Middle School who were like, Wow, we got a new high school. Of course we’re going to go to the new high school. And the principal at the time said, Yep, bring them in. But the problem was we brought in a lot of traditional students who weren’t career tech students. So the school committee ultimately made that change. So we’re 100% career tech, which I think ultimately is going to be helpful as we look to address these challenges. There are so many great opportunities for the trades. And I talked to gentlemen in tradesmen in our unions and they say the same thing, that, gosh, if we could produce 50 more plumbers, 50 more electricians or more. That would make a huge impact and help business and help a lot of families grow and prosper in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. So that’s something that is absolutely going to be a focus.

Top Left Corner: And that’s a great high school, by the way. It’s just a fantastic it’s a fantastic structure and it’s really well designed. It’s attractive. But I think there’s there’s a side of the bringing businesses in. That it’s going to happen, but there’s also generating business here at home. New York State has this really neat program wherein they give out grants to. Groups of people, mostly in the trades, who are looking to start worker owned co-ops and that say it’s a business where everybody gets you know, everybody puts in and everybody gets an equal share of the profits and things like that. It works really well with things like, you know, stores like like a co-op, grocery stores. It works really well with restaurants, farms, but it could just as easily work with, say, a small boutique furniture company wherein we have you could probably find 25 people who are great woodworkers who would, you know, potentially get together, start a shop where they can even perhaps have a storefront on Main Street as well. You know, sort of the the Ethan Allen Jr. Of the Berkshires. And I know that this can work because there’s a there’s a fellow over in Shelburne Falls who is selling $25,000 kitchen sets. And so I know it’s possible I think and this isn’t obviously you didn’t have any chance to review this this notion. So I’m not going to ask you to comment too much on it.

John Krol: Jason, I’m very I’m very aware of that concept and that model. And I want to tell you that there I think over time has been opportunities where if we were creative, that that was something that perhaps we could have worked through with some innovation in the past. But but here’s the thing. The great thing about a model like that, a worker owned model, is that, first of all, it makes sure that those profit margins stay in the pockets of local people. So that’s incredibly important. So the time, effort, energy and the skills that individuals are putting in to to building things, to creating a product that has value, that it stays in this community. And I am a huge supporter of anything that we can do that is sustainable in that way that the dollars circulate back here, for instance, I think that taking the steps to food sustainability is a huge opportunity right now.

John Krol: I don’t think there is a better time to take the first real steps at bringing back food sustainability than now. You have people getting crushed at the grocery store with the inflation. We’re also understanding how unhealthy corporate food is ultimately for our people. And when it comes down to it, we have land, we have the expertise, we have the knowledge. Then think about how do we organize this in a way where we can scale. So I’ve had some conversations with our friends at Roots Rising and and others. And you know, this this is real. If we can take the steps and put ourselves in a position that we can really create this at a level that’s just beyond a community garden, which are which are also great, by the way. Um, but, but I think we can scale it to a place where it can really make a positive economic impact in our community. So anything that we can bring local worker owned within our own ecosphere, that’s a positive step.

Top Left Corner: That’s an excellent point. And I think that we already have so much of the infrastructure in place right now to build upon, to to make it, you know, to make it grow. Yeah. The the great thing about it is and you could have worker owned farms as well, worker owned farm stands. The great thing about the worker owned model, too, is if you’ve got, say, a shop with 25 people working in it, let’s say you’ve got 20 or 30 of those shops, if 2 or 3 of them don’t make it, that doesn’t bring the whole economy down. You know, that’s that’s a few shops. That’s not like, you know, watching, you know, 3000 jobs just get sucked out to either down south or overseas, which is, you know, obviously kind of where the entire industrial ecosphere of the Berkshires has has gone. I mean, it’s really a staggering thing. We’ve done a lot to mitigate, but that’s only in part because we’ve lost so many people over the last 30 years, especially in places like North North. Adams But Pittsfield is a as I said, it’s a it’s the hub. And you mentioned that some people say that, John, let’s let’s not forget about, you know, the other parts of town, whether it’s South Pittsfield or East Pittsfield. Um, and that’s true. But it is the case that for visitors downtown is that’s the face of the city. I mean, that’s the forward looking, public facing zone. And there are a lot of. Challenges that any incoming administration is going to be facing that have been dealt with to greater and lesser degrees by past mayors. Let’s talk about let’s talk about homelessness. Let’s talk about the the drug problem. Those are two things that every. Every visitor can’t help but run across if they walk up North Street a few blocks.

John Krol: Yeah, it it definitely is a challenge and it’s something that we have to address with empathy and compassion. But also I, I think just with a level of sensible accountability, I feel as though, um, having downtown foot patrol will be helpful, not in a punitive way, but in a way that is able to increase communication between the business owners and individuals who need help. And I feel as though working with the social service agencies is really important. I’m not sure if you’re aware, I’m sure you are, but it is a six month wait in order to get a mental health appointment. If you have mass health at the brain center and the brain center is the provider for those with mass health in those particular cases. So we’re talking about mental health addiction, kinds of challenges. So looking at that backlog, we really got to have a heart to heart conversation here with our state legislators, you know, with our friends at the brain center. And I have spoken to the executive director there about those challenges, that there is a massive amount of turnover in the social service world when it comes to those frontline engagement positions.

John Krol: And, you know, basically a social worker at the at the Breen Center may be there for about two years or so. And at that point, they receive a higher license and often they will leave at that point, partly because they can get a higher wage and partly because, frankly, there’s burnout. It is a tough it is a tough job. There’s no question about it. So I think. Masshealth reimbursement is something that we need to look at and advocate for, but also understand, okay, how how are these funds being used and and what are the wages based on the overall allocation of these resources. So I think that’s a big it’s a pretty complex conversation. I’ve worked in health care in the past, so I’m very familiar with these kinds of things and and reimbursements and such. But I feel as though that we’ll never really address these challenges unless we’re able to make sure we have enough resources and enough people in these positions in our social service agencies, because there is a lot of need there, there’s a lot of addiction. Um, certainly homelessness, as you mentioned, and, and mental health challenges, no question about it.

Top Left Corner: I’m glad that you started off from a place of empathy because I think that’s critical, whether it’s whether you’re dealing with addiction, whether you’re dealing with mental health issues, whether you’re dealing with homelessness. You know, I have heard I follow this issue almost maniacally really, because I always feel like there’s got to be a solution. We are have an amazing amount of resources in this country. We have an amazing amount of data. And yet people don’t come up with solutions. You know, once upon a time and you can tour the Berkshires tour of Massachusetts, Connecticut, a lot of New England towns and the towns have a. A often have a road called Town Farm Road. And a lot of folks don’t know what Town Farm Road comes from. But like a lot of great things that you see in New England, towns like the Gallows Road, if you think about it, it comes to you. Town Farm Road typically indicates that at one point in time it was a farm that was owned by the town, some property that was a place where those who had no means could live. They wouldn’t have to pay rent, they would work on the farm.

Top Left Corner: They’d basically sell. They would grow the food for themselves to to feed themselves and to sell for whatever they needed. Now, it wasn’t intended to be punitive and it wasn’t a workhouse to speak of, but it was the case that if you happen to be, let’s say, a, oh, I don’t know, a soldier who, you know, you’re 75 years old, you’re a veteran, you’ve got nowhere to go. This was a place that you could have a little cabin and you could be cared for and it could give you some dignity. You know, in tough times. I often wonder if if and this is maybe a much larger. Well, it’s definitely a much larger conversation. But if you couldn’t combine our agricultural capacity with social services, health care, mental health services, addiction treatment into a sort of a town farm model where people can have dignity, they can learn skills, they can get, you know, get the help they need, and also do it in a place that’s sort of holistic and do it in a place that’s a natural setting, just something to sort of tuck into your into your subconscious there when you’re looking for solutions.

John Krol: A key there’s a key value there that when you talk to people who work in addiction recovery fields, often what they talk about for people who go and they relapse. And this may sound simple, but, you know, again, I’m not I don’t I don’t work directly in this field. But this is what I hear from individuals who work in that field. Often people relapse because they don’t have something to do. And I know that sounds very, very simple, but but it’s actually quite deep in the sense that, okay, there is nothing ultimately that provides perhaps purpose and purpose is the key. So, you know, as I understand it and how I feel about this. So individuals who are recovering from addiction, for example, or many of these challenges, mental health, homelessness, you know, if you provide purpose. I think that’s what you’re talking about in part. And and it is an amazing concept. So I feel as though that’s wonderful. And whether it’s a farming aspect or whether it’s cooking, you know, teaching, you know, something that’s tactile often is is helpful. You know, these kinds of things. So that’s absolutely the frame of mind that I have in working with the people who are the experts in this. Don’t, you know, make no mistake, I’m not an expert in this. However, I think I, I and I do think that this is the role of the mayor, even though the mayor is supposedly the I mean, the role is that you are the CEO of city services and the city budget and and you have that sort of corner of work to do. I look at the mayor’s position as as an expansive role. And the mayor ought to be providing guidance on these types of things. So so I really appreciate that that idea and that concept. And when it comes down to it, it is about it is about purpose. And if we’re creative enough, we can find a way that that purpose enhances the community as a whole.

Top Left Corner: Well, that would be that would be an ideal situation. And and the last question that I’ve got for you, the last topic I know that I promised I wouldn’t keep you too long, but this is this is the this is, to me sort of wraps it up. We have an amazing, uh, an atrocious, really economic divide in the Berkshires that goes that is so invisible to so many people. You’re never going to eliminate poverty, but certainly through jobs, through better education, you can mitigate it a little bit. But rather than talk about the most abject poverty or the things that we can do to to mitigate it in the short term, what can we do? To bring people who are at the at the the lower income levels of the local economy in Pittsfield into the mainstream so that they feel they are part of the community. Do you know what I mean? You know, once upon a time, if you look at a Norman Rockwell painting, okay, the painting, the freedom of speech, you know, it’s a little town, a little town hall, and there’s a guy standing up and he’s speaking and he’s clearly some sort of a mechanic or something. And he’s sitting next to some guy in a three piece suit. It speaks to a time when everybody felt like they had the right to participate. Maybe the responsibility to participate and that that they weren’t going to get chased away. The people I talked to often feel and I talked to a lot of people, especially in the service economy and landscape as waiters, you name it. When I asked them, how do they feel about, you know, the ability of the the city to to make a comeback, They always talk about it in terms of what other people are doing. How do we get people to the point where they feel like they can and should and would be welcomed to join in to these these processes?

John Krol: Wow. That is that is a wonderful question. And we probably could could have an entire forum and and three hour podcast on this. But just looking at it from the political perspective, I guess this is also framing the challenge as well. When you look at running a campaign, how do you approach things? There are many campaigns that simply go to what are called super voters, you know, so and they’re going to spend all their time. Trying to engage and trying to get those people who vote all the time into the political process. And I find that incredibly unfortunate because what happens is then that just leads into a vicious cycle of people being involved and continuing to be and then those who are not involved continuing to feel as though they are not involved. So you can kind of take that concept. And the reason why I mentioned that is because you can kind of take that concept and relate it to all kinds of different areas, economics. You can look at education as well. Um, you know, it is my goal for sure to engage the full spectrum of our community in this campaign. I feel as though that when it comes to the economics of our downtown, for instance, yeah, there’s been a history of, you know, saying, okay, well, we want to position ourselves in the cultural heart of the Berkshires. But at the same time, we’ve also had third Thursdays that were perhaps the most diverse events that this county has ever seen. And it was a huge success for many, many years on that level.

John Krol: So I think that tapping back into that community and that in that sense and saying we are we are open and we are going to engage. I represented the West Side for a decade, and there are people who today in the West Side neighborhood still feel as though the kids do not feel comfortable, for instance, going to the boys club. They would they they want to have a community center in the west side because they feel as though that it is not fully for them. You know, there as you said it, there are divides. There are definitely definite divides. Um, I feel as though that that there are great opportunities to bridge that divide. Um, there’s no silver bullet to it. There’s no solution. But I think it’s a but I think it is a mentality coming into this, you know, that, that who are you representing and what is the city of Pittsfield And the city of Pittsfield is the most diverse municipality in the Berkshires by far. And so having represented the West Side neighborhood in the past, you know, I have a unique insight into this divide to some extent. Um, and I think there are opportunities, but I, I don’t have a great answer, Jason, on how to do it. It’s just doing it at every single pass and having that in mind and having that be a part of the ether as you approach every single day in City Hall.

Top Left Corner: All right. Well, I think I think, you know, as I said, it’s it’s a huge topic. And I didn’t expect a formula, you know, a recipe to just sort of come pouring out. And so but no, I think I think the idea that it’s an attitude, it’s a I think he’s used the word mentality. I think that’s if that is your mentality to be inclusive and not just as lip service because we hear that word so darn often and I don’t always see that the results of inclusivity end up being with a whole bunch of people included. And so it’s got to be more than a buzzword. It’s got to be something that you that you live and that you practice. And it sounds like you’ve got some experience doing that. So that’s that’s encouraging. I want to thank you so very much for taking this bonus time. You realize I’m going to have to give your opponents the same amount of time now, but, you know, let an informed public is.

John Krol: The more time, the merrier.

Top Left Corner: Fantastic. Um, you know, I had an acquaintance who told me once, if you ever really want to get to know somebody, talk to them for 20 minutes, because for 15 minutes, they can hold their crazy in after 20 minutes, the crazy. The crazy starts to leak out. So you did pretty good. That was about 45 minutes. But you’re a professional, so, you know, you’ve got the you’ve got the skills. I guess I should ask you, you know, you’ve got the media, you’ve got the journalism, you’ve got the political things. You’re not just trying to become a new Jerry Springer because, you know, he was the mayor of Chicago.

John Krol: Thing is, he was mayor. He was mayor first. And then he became a…

Top Left Corner: That’s true. Well, we could do worse. Well, there you go. All right. Well, once you give listeners a chance to to know where to go to find out more.

John Krol: Our website is Kroll for pittsfield.com. That’s Kroll for Pittsfield. And we’re also on Facebook. John Krol for Pittsfield mayor, also on Instagram and certainly LinkedIn as well for you folks who are in the professional world. Don’t post quite as much on LinkedIn as the others, but primarily it’s Facebook and Instagram. But certainly we would love to hear from you. There is plenty of opportunity to communicate through the website, Facebook and Instagram. I look forward to meeting anyone who wants to sit down and have a coffee, tea or any other warm beverage.

Top Left Corner: Well, we will put links to all of these things in the show notes. We will be releasing all interviews on the same day. I have made the mistake of doing one a day and then every single successive candidate got to refine their their speech, their shtick based on what the previous candidates said on my show. And we can’t have that. So we’ll be releasing them all at the same time so that people can have probably like a four hour listening session of all the all the Pittsfield political dreams and schemes that could ever want. So for now, John, stay, stay. I guess we can stay cool. I was going to say stay warm, but it’s the summertime now. Stay cool and we will talk to you soon.

John Krol: Oh, Jason, what a great pleasure. Great meeting you and a lovely conversation. And I look forward to meeting you in person soon.

Top Left Corner: Likewise. Take care.

Jay Velázquez: This is the Top Left Corner. You’re listening to episode number 182. I’m your host, Jay Velázquez. And this episode dropped Thursday, August 10th, 2023. Sometimes the content is evergreen, sometimes it’s time sensitive. In this case, it is time sensitive. And that topic is the Berkshires Academy for Advanced Musical Studies, located at Building 6 Furnace Street and Heritage State Park, North Adams, Mass. I’m going to be speaking today with two people who provide a lot of the driving force behind this this initiative, which is now in its third year. I thought it was two years that they’ve been around, but turns out it’s three. Amazing how time flies when you’re. In a pandemic. And it’s hard to even count the days. We’re going to be speaking with Richard Boulger, founder and executive director, and Jane Forrestal, director of development and communications. They’re going to be talking about all sorts of things under the sun having to do with the last few years and the successes that they’ve had. And they did. I think Jane sent me a some follow up information that we just couldn’t cram into the half an hour or so that we talked. I’ll try to tack that on at the end because it doesn’t make any some of it won’t make any sense until you’ve heard the rest of the show.

Jay Velázquez: But before we even say anything, I do want to make sure that you know that there there are some great events coming up at. Well, not at but in connection with Bams. And they’re going to be fund raising events that would be great, whether they were fund raisers or not. So the first one is going to be jazz duo Charles Blenzig and Richard Boulger teaming up at Studio nine, which is a just an amazing audio space at porches in North Adams. And then on Wednesday the 16th, there’ll be a faculty performance at Mingo’s Sports Bar and Grill on 41 Roberts Drive, North Adams. You can see it right there off Route two as you drive by. So those two events, I’m going to put links to them in the show notes. Links to everything you need to know in the show notes. But for now, let’s get to that conversation I had with Richard and Jane.

Events

August 14 @ 7:00 pm – 10:00 p.m.
Jazz Duo Charles Blenzig and Richard Boulger

August 16 @ 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
BAAMS’ Faculty Performance

Program Registration

• BAAMS Summer camp registration — a few spots left!
berkshiresacademyams.org/berkshires-summer-jazz-day-camp

•  Fall registration to study after school and on Saturdays
berkshiresacademyams.org/class-registration

Support BAAMS!

• Donate to BAAMS (it can be one-time or monthly).
berkshiresacademyams.org/giving

Alternatively, a check may be made out to:
BAAMS and mailed to:
529 Main Street
Williamstown, MA 01267

(rough transcript)

Top Left Corner: And with me on the line this morning from the Berkshires Academy for Advanced Musical Studies is Jane Forrestal and Richard Boulger. Good morning to both of you.

Jane Forrestal: Good morning, Jason. Jason, Thanks for having me.

Top Left Corner: You’re very welcome. I’m glad to have you here. Thank you. We’ve spoken in the past a little bit about Bams as it’s affectionately known. But let’s let’s talk a little bit let’s get a little bit deeper into how things have gone since you’ve opened. It’s been, what, two years now?

Jane Forrestal: It’s actually been three years. We just passed our three year anniversary in the spring, but it’s been a year since we’ve moved into our new facility at Building 6 in the Heritage State Park, North Adams And I got to tell you, a lot has happened in that one year.

Top Left Corner: Well, let’s talk about it. It’s it’s been it’s been a very welcome addition to the Berkshires scene. I know that the Berkshires is has always been known for theater and museums, music less so, at least until fairly recently. What what were some of the triumphs? What were some of the challenges? Just getting the school opened?

Jane Forrestal: Sure. Well, we moved into a building that had been empty and unused for quite a number of years. So there was a big cleanup push. We did a lot of painting and cosmetic work organizing. We were able to secure donations from various people and organizations. A couple of pianos, desks, chairs, etcetera. The essential items, file cabinets. And then we just simply opened our doors and began to operate. We had our first we had our fourth jazz band day camp in this facility last August. And now we’re about to have our fifth. And then through the school year, we taught lessons after school and on Saturdays throughout the school year from September through June.

Top Left Corner: Wow. What were some of the real, maybe unforeseen challenges that you that you faced getting the school up and running?

Jane Forrestal: Well, obviously, there’s there are start up costs with any any venture, any business like this. And when you take on a building, you also take on a huge liability and renters policy things that you have to budget in for electricity and heat. Et cetera. We installed a security system. Let’s see. You know, it’s everything imaginable that anybody deals with when you when you open a sort of school building. We also encountered, you know, the unexpected things like freezing pipes and things like that. But, you know, you cope with it and you move ahead and everybody’s been great. We’ve had a tremendous amount of help. We’re just so thankful to be here. The nice thing about this location, Jason, for people who have not been to Heritage Park, is that we have all of our own free parking. It’s private. We’re at the very end of the park just at the end where the pedestrian footbridge drops off, right? And we’re in downtown North Adams so we can see the back of City Hall and Hotel down Street. It’s a great location.

Top Left Corner: Now, the question I have, too, is what about neighbors? I know that some venues face challenges in that neighbors want to ensure that they don’t have an increase in volume of sound. Do you have neighbors close by and have you or did you have to do anything to sort of mitigate that?

Jane Forrestal: No. Interestingly, yes, we do have neighbors very close by and everybody’s been so welcoming and we haven’t heard we’ve heard not a word of complaint. And actually, this building used to be Berkshire Community Television Station.  So I have a feeling that noise was always a factor in its operation before. And to be honest, we just we haven’t heard a word from anybody but positive feedback.

Top Left Corner: Well, that’s great. I know that a lot of the community has really been pleased to see that you’ve moved in there because there’s been how do I say this delicately? It has not been the sort of cultural. In a springboard that people have wanted it to be. I know there were some plans to have other things go into into the Heritage Gateway Park there. And this this means that really that facility is is in keeping with with its intended use to be a community of benefit. Richard, let me talk to you a little bit about the opening here. You have you you’re a musician. What what was your experience getting the show on the road for a place like this? Had you ever undertaken any projects of this nature?

Richard Boulger: Sure, Jason; prior to coming back home to North Adams, I spent, goodness, 20 plus years working primarily in New York City, in Brooklyn, close to 30 public schools in underserved neighborhoods, if you will. Very challenging dynamics. A lot of the kids, when we would show up, didn’t even have musical instruments. So for me, a lot of these kids were in gangs. We got them out of gangs. We introduced them to playing instrumental music. And over a period of six months to a year, you’d see dramatic changes in the kids, not only musically, but how they would perceive themselves and go back into their communities. And so building on that success and coming back home, it was sort of a, you know, the thing about what we’re doing here at BAAMS, there’s no cookie cutter approach to working with students. Every one of our kids is is unique and has its her or his own way of learning.

Richard Boulger: So the challenge is always to to tap into their kind of get to know them and what makes them tick. And one of the first questions I always ask all of our young students is what type of music? What kind of music are you listening to right now? Sometimes there’s a, Oh, it’s a jazz academy. No, we we teach music and that means all types of music. So tapping into our young people and really finding out what makes them tick is a big part of what we’re doing here. I’m not sure. I may have drifted off topic a little bit, but that’s really what’s the driving force, you know, years of working in with young people and seeing the success. For me personally, I was very fortunate to study with two masters, Freddie Hubbard and Donald Byrd. And they really gave me a lot of insight. And I’ve developed a a teaching process, the learning process that really seems to help young people have success doing.

Top Left Corner: Describe that process for just a bit because I know that I’m not familiar with it.

Richard Boulger: Sure. Well, the first thing is that we start with the premise that each of our students, that the musical instrument, whatever you have in your hands, whether it’s a flute, a trumpet, a guitar, the drums or a kazoo, it doesn’t really matter. It’s really just an amplifier of what they are hearing, what they’re thinking and ultimately what they’re feeling. So I’ve developed a series of exercises that really always say it all begins with a single note. So we literally start with one pitch, one note, one sound, and have that student match that sound. So we’re not from day one, we don’t have kids staring at a music stand or reading out of a book. We empower them that the music, the source of the sound ultimately comes from within themselves. So it really is from that one, just all these different exercises help them to develop the skill. And after a series of months in this past year here at BAAMS, we’ve had six of our students create record, compose record and now have finished product of original songs. So, you know, we’ve got kids that are ten, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old who all are now creating their own original music. So that’s just a small look into this process. But it is a whole process where we can literally start with someone who really doesn’t have much of a background in music per se. Give them the tools and then let them develop at a pace and ultimately to help them who they are becomes, you know, express that through music.

Top Left Corner: In the setting that you’ve got in North Adams, How many students do you typically have? How many do they work together in groups? Is there like a one culminating project that everyone participates in, or is it individually based? How do what’s the experience like for the students? And and just more generally, what is the experience like for the students who who sign up?

Jane Forrestal: So we typically have through the week, you know, around 20 students week in and week out, the Saturday Ensemble Group is between 6 and 8 students, depending on who’s enrolled and who’s around at the time. We’ve also brought our faculty into area public schools, and that has resulted in us being able to reach many, many more students, probably upwards of 60 to 70. And the stars residencies that we held this past April did culminate in a final performance, a celebratory performance on that final day, which was attended by lots of families and city officials and area folks who were interested to see what we what we do in terms of the typical day, the the way a student enrolls is they sometimes parents will call. They have questions they want to know answers to before they enroll their children. And then other times we just simply receive a registration online and then they come. Usually there’s an individual meeting so that Mr. B Richard can get to know the students and their interests and their experience, background and what they’d like to get out of learning from, from bands. And then we just move forward. It’s a pretty simple process what we have developed because as you can imagine with our being a young, relatively new nonprofit organization founded in the middle of the pandemic, our funding is not huge and we cannot afford expensive advertising. So all of our students seem to come to us through word of mouth, which is a great thing, which means they’re very informed about who we are and they come through the door hungry for for what they can learn here at bands.

Top Left Corner: That is a really great that’s a really great picture of, of what must I’m sure by the end of the experience feel like a community even a family of musicians. I know that there’s something about performing music together. I’ve been in a number of bands when I was younger and when I was even younger than that, I was in concert choir. So I get the the experience of of creating sound together. It does something to to bring people together. That is, it’s I call it a bio magical because it resonates literally with the with with the flesh, with the bones within us. And it also resonates emotionally, mentally. What do you hope? Aside from just the musical musical skill, what do you hope that students come away from BAAMS with?

Jane Forrestal: Well. I’d ask Richard to chime in in a moment, but I just want to say one of the things that I noticed is there’s a combination of, number one, having a lot of fun. There’s a lot of laughter and humor, but also a strong focus on learning the foundations, the fundamentals. And then just encouraging freedom. And so by doing that, students are learning how to recognize what they’re interested in, what sounds they want to make, what rhythms they’re interested in, what they want to communicate through their music, and then learning to advocate for it. You’ll have a student who is who is confident enough to say, No, no, no, that’s not what I wanted. This is what I want, and here’s what it sounds like. So they begin to develop that that strong sense of of the the artist’s sense of themselves and mission and being able to advocate for their creativity, which will help them in whatever they do through the rest of their lives. But if let’s get some comment from Richard.

Richard Boulger: Well, yeah, building on what Jane said, very well. I would say another thing that we really love to do here, and we do do this by design is we always ask a lot of questions, a sort of Socratic method, if you will. And in that we, for instance, how was your day? And we’ll ask our students and they’ll raise their hands and give us brief explanations. It was whatever it was. The question is then, well, what does that sound like? You know? And so what does sadness sound like? What does Joy sound like? So we’re taking the student’s experiences in their lives and we’re giving them an outlet to express these these these experiences. And I think that’s really I love how you use that phrase bio magical. I think that’s very hip. And I think that’s we sort of have that in the air here at BAAMS. There’s a certain for the upper it’s an example like the upcoming jazz camp coming up this next week, August 14th to the 18th. There’s a certain unknown factor here for us. We’ve got yes, we’ve got incredible artists coming up, faculty to teach. We’ve got a rough blueprint of what we’re going to be working on. But in this course of this week, we’ll probably have 3 or 4 original songs that will be created by the kids interacting and playing with each other in the moment. So that’s I love that. Again, that bio magical dynamic.

Top Left Corner: Anytime you want, you can use that word not trademarked yet. Let’s talk about some of the there’s a lot of output. I mean, what I’m hearing is there’s a lot of energy, there’s a lot of product, there’s a lot of creativity that puts out from the school. And I’m guessing that that requires a lot of inputs as well, inputs of time and talent, obviously. But this can’t be a this cannot be a cheap endeavor that you that you’ve set upon. You said you’re a nonprofit organization. I’m guessing that the cost of of tuition, the cost of attendance does not cover all of your operating costs.

Jane Forrestal: Well, right. It’s like any other nonprofit. I mean, certainly the operations if you were to go to Mass MoCA and pay your entry fee and tally up everybody who visits the museum and numbering in hundreds and thousands, it doesn’t begin to cover the expense of organizations like ours here at BAAMS either. And so we do work 12 months a year, sometimes seven days a week, to garner support through donations.

Jane Forrestal: They can be anything from $25 to $2500 to grants, to business sponsorships. And we do collect tuition. Of course, when families can afford to pay. But our tuition is already reduced to an affordable rate. We don’t want one of the first things that the kids do, they grow up pretty fast and they know what their economic their own economic picture is. And children will ask right away how much does it cost? And they’ll calculate whether or not their family can afford it. And they’ll they’ll back themselves out of an idea right away if they think it’s not within reach. So we try to communicate with folks that will do everything in our power to help them meet the cost of tuition. And we also have had this is one of the very nice things we’ve had recently is there are other charitable civic organizations who have said to us, if you have students who can’t afford the tuition, send them our way and we’ll just ask them to provide a little bit of information and we’ll cover it. So there’s a there’s a number of ways that that this can be handled, but there’s also planning for the future. Jason And we are we are in high fundraising mode right now to look for some large dollar donors to begin to build our coffers to weather those those frozen pipe situations and other things that come up and also be able to buy equipment, make improvements to the building, perhaps do some advertising, etcetera, and get all of our staff paid, which as you can imagine, sometimes you can go a long time with no paycheck or in-between paychecks.

Top Left Corner: Sounds like you might as well work for a local news organization. It’s about as lucrative, Right. But the the the work is important. And, you know, exposing more kids to not just musical creation, but but also performance, because performance, I think is is really helpful in developing self confidence and a certain composure that you don’t get in too many other places. Maybe public speaking is one, but to perform in front of people and to hear applause especially, it does something it lasts a lot longer than than just the houselights going down. It can send a kid on a different trajectory. Even so, I know that this work is critically important. You have some, some you’ve got. Well, first of all, you’ve got benefit concerts coming up now the next couple of well, I guess really the next week. What what do you have coming up that people can not just go and feel like they’ve helped but also go and really dig it because you’ve got some some big names here?

Jane Forrestal: Sure. Sure we have. Because all the musicians are in town teaching at the camp. We try to make part of our mission here at bands is to provide cultural and musical events for the public to hear and attend at either no or reasonable cost. So fulfilling that mission we have Monday night will be at Studio nine at the Porches Inn on River Street in North Adams, which if you’ve ever been inside of it, is absolutely gorgeous. Acoustically pure space. We’ll have jazz piano from Charles Blenzig and of course, Richard Boulger on trumpet. They’re going to do some jazz duo work in the beginning of that show. And then they’ll be joined by Alex Blake on bass and Tony Lewis on drums. That will be a phenomenal show. That’s $20 at the door. And then we’ve got Wednesday night in the tent outside, very festive atmosphere. So much fun to perform. The whole band will be there Wednesday, August 16th, and that’s coming right up. That is a free admission event with donations suggested to bands. All proceeds go to supporting our programing here at the music Academy. Now with that said, we also have the culmination of the entire camp five days on that Friday night. We always have the Friday night gala, which is simply the students and the faculty perform together.

Jane Forrestal: It’s a rousing show. Audiences are just wowed by it. And in all these instances, what we what we find is people just they’re like, I can’t believe it. I had no idea. I didn’t know that you guys did this. And and it’s a lot of fun. So it’s a great way to also reach. Larger audiences. Sometimes you have people find out about us through those events and suddenly you’ve got a new student coming through the door. We recently performed during the 4th of July Parade. At the end of the parade at the bottom of Spring Street. We had the opportunity to perform for crowds there. This past July 4th. It was so much fun and people were coming up to me and saying, When’s your next gig? And handing me $20 bills and saying, I love what you’re doing. Thank you so much. So it is very uplifting. We do have kids that say, Oh, I wish my parents will say I wish my four year old were old enough to come to BAAMS. So I say, hang in there. Just come knock on our door in a few years and we’ll welcome you in.

Top Left Corner: It’s so good to hear that the community has been supportive. And you know, a lot of it, too, is time, right? I mean, it’s getting the word out over consistently over time so that people they they are aware of what you’re doing and have been exposed to what you’re doing. It’s one thing to know that you exist. But then, as I said, to hear it and to maybe experience some of that bio magic because, you know, the audience gets gets pounded with with the full force of creativity and and and and especially youthful performance vigor. I think that you can’t really. Walk away without. Without. Feeling like the world is a better place for an organization that molds minds, molds, hearts. It’s been a delight to hear people talk about what you’re doing over there. So one of the things that I’m wondering about is. It’s a busy summer. The Berkshires is always, always, always jam packed. And there’s a lot of people doing fundraising now to other organizations. Let’s say that somebody’s got their calendar already booked for next week. They can’t make it to the shows. How can people contribute? Even if they can’t be there in person.

Jane Forrestal: Sure. Sure. Well, if you go to our website. I’m not sure if you’re able to put that up for folks, but if you go to our website. Which is BerkshiresAcademyAMS.Org. We do have a donate button right on there which allows people to make an online donation. You can also write a check and mail it. Make it out to be a m as in Mary S, as in Sam, and mail it to our corporate offices, which is 529 Main Street, Williamstown, Massachusetts. 01267. And then there’s also a conversation. Some people want to become more involved. Some folks, by the way, the option with the online donation. We recently had someone set up a monthly payment. So they’re sending in a small monthly payment each month, which is going to be a huge help. So there’s all kinds of ways to make a difference.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. I was going to say, the sustaining members, they can really become the backbone of support that you need to keep going. As you said, there’s always those and we hate to even, you know, raise the specter of them, but there’s always those frozen pipe moments and you do want to have a bit of a war chest to deal with them so that you don’t have to reach out. You know, on the spot at the moment and saying, hell, because that’s that’s never easy to to be fundraising and fixing the problem at the same time. Um, you know what? I would love to, to see, you know, YouTube has a there’s this I guess it’s an integration that’s built in there called Super Chat. And I haven’t used it, but I’ve seen it when I’ve been looking at various, you know, shows on YouTube where people can donate as the as the whatever the content is, is going on, is being performed or being done. I would love to see maybe not this year, but some year where you can broadcast performances and get them out to a potentially global audience so that people can actually just hit the donate button on the super chat as they’re listening.

Jane Forrestal: That’s a great idea, Jason We actually we admired so much when Questlove did that for the fundraiser for the middle school in Pittsfield, when he did his broadcast, he made a like a rent rent party. The students down there were learning about that. And I think he made in in under two hours. He earned $5,000 for that school for their their elementary jazz program, which is very impressive. We have had some live stream events. We’ve rebroadcast events and we’d like to do that further. So I think that’s a terrific idea. The other thing that we have found is really helpful is partnering with other organizations. There’s there seem to be logical partnerships that crop up and people willing to work together and they share the same vision. And recently we held our third anniversary benefit concert in Adams with the Adams Theater back in May. At the end of May, it was it was a huge success. We were able to hold a VIP event prior to the concert. Then General Admission folks came in and they their tickets were very affordable between 20 and $40 to see not only the musicians. We had a seven member band playing all of our faculty and a few other additions and we had special guests, some students, one student played and we had a live painting experience going on in the second half of the show, and those paintings are for sale. We had the artist Tom Reyes of Visible Sound come from Tokyo.

Top Left Corner: So cool. Now I a lot of people don’t know this, but I also run radio free berkshires.com which is a 24 hour seven day a week streaming radio station. So perhaps one day radio free Berkshires can team up with BAAMS to do some some live broadcast some streams not broadcast, but streams right from the comfort of people’s own couches, iPhones, whatever. We’ll have to talk about that in the future. Well, let’s let’s do this. I’ve got to I’ve got the information that I’m going to share. The the links will be in the show notes. The address for people to send in a check will be in the show notes. Do you have any more room in this in this season for more campers or are you are you booked.

Richard Boulger: We we’ve got a few more slots still open. We’re at 30 campers jazz students for this next the upcoming jazz camp. But we we’ve got a few more slots.

Jane Forrestal: And we’re looking for bass players.

Richard Boulger: Yeah. Imagine the chance to study with the great Alex Blake which he just a huge opportunity and certainly transformational. So we do have a few more openings if folks want to come on check us out on our website. They can sign up and go through that process. I would like to say one more thing that’s really special about this year’s camp, and that would be that this is the first year that we are now having two of our graduates from previous camps and from bands, if you will. They’re both now freshly just finished their freshman years and studying music at their colleges of choice. And now they are coming back to work with the faculty as apprentices. So they’ll be working with us. So it’s so important that we have this connection generationally. So you have a master drummer, Tony Lewis, working with one of our recent graduates will be an apprentice and he in turn will be working to help Tony to work with the young people who are just starting out. Some of our kids are 12 years old and just. Learning how to hold, just beginning to sit down at a drum drum kit. So the the passing of the torch for us is very, very important.

Top Left Corner: That is so astounding to hear. And that’s the way music is supposed to be, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be something that we share generationally. It’s supposed to be something that we give back. You know, and music is one of those things that you can do that with. There’s a lot of other professions that you don’t really get that chance to to perform your work together. I mean, you don’t see a lot of, you know, heart surgeons jumping in and working together on a on a patient generationally. But you do see people getting up there and wowing crowds. Do you do you think a lot of these young people, do they how many of them know? How rare of an opportunity that they have with working with some of these musicians. Do they do they do they get that in the beginning or do they just have to? Do they end up realizing that at the end or maybe not even?

Jane Forrestal: Well, we do, we do a little bit of our humble bragging, obviously, in our in our publicity. So there’s a clue there for people to follow up on. Some of that depends on the kid’s family. Sometimes their parents will recognize names and they’ll the students themselves, sometimes they’re very good researchers and they jump on the computer and do some Google searches to find out the bios and backgrounds of our faculty. But they do recognize it. Oftentimes we hear comments like, I can’t believe I get to study with so-and-so. I just had the we had one say thank you for giving our son the best week of his life. I mean, it’s just been it’s been a really great experience. And the reason why I personally feel it’s so important in this region is we don’t live near Boston. We don’t live near Albany, close enough to Albany, rather, or New York City, greater New York City, New Jersey area. We are here in the Northern Berkshires and we feel that students here deserve this type of education. Top tier musicians teaching young people who are motivated and interested. And what happens is.

Jane Forrestal: Suddenly you’ve got a population of kids who maybe really couldn’t compete for seats in music, music, schools and music colleges who who do have the experience under their belts, who when they put this on their college applications and on their resumes for experiences that they’ve had coming up in music, it’s very impressive. People recognize our name already. And further to that, we have students this summer. Of course, the majority come from this region, but we’re talking from Clarksburg to Lennox, but also beyond. We’ve got students coming from Binghamton, New York, Providence, Rhode Island, Cambridge, Mass. So word is spreading.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, you bring up a really good point. There are there are historically, there are some sort of centers, cultural centers when it comes to music that that give young people more exposure. And what you’re doing is is something that North Adams has not had, this region hasn’t had. And also just giving young people the idea that it’s possible. Right. I mean, that a career in music is, you know, it’s not going to be easy. And it might you might not be we might not all grow up to be Taylor Swift, but we can grow up and we can it can be a realistic prospect for us. And to have been involved in a program like this makes you think, yeah, yeah, I can do that. And and that’s that is. Well, you’re basically paving the way to some some of these young people’s dreams, which is you can’t really put a price tag on that.

Top Left Corner: But people can certainly go to the website and put their own personal price tag on how much they can help make this happen, how much they can help it continue to grow. And as you said, get the word spread. When I used to work for Shakespeare & Company and turns out there was this one family and they were there from I think it was Belgium or no, the Netherlands. They used to come to Lenox every year just because they wanted their kids to do the theater programs at Shakespeare & Company, so they would take. Yeah, I mean, they did this for like 12 years.

Jane Forrestal: I believe it. I believe it as a swim team parent. I spent 11 years traveling to pools around New England. But, you know, it’s exciting that, as I mentioned, we have students coming from far away and so on and so forth. But as you’ve mentioned in our conversation, we’re all here together in this space at this one time, and it’s magical. Each year there will never be another fifth Berkshires Summer jazz band day camp ever again. It’s one time the people who are in the room are the people who are in the room and incredible stuff can really come of it. I’m so excited for the coming week. We start off Monday morning and Friday night with our gala performance, which will be held this year because we’re not going to risk weather issues in the Church Street Center at MCLA starts about 6:30 p.m. and it’s going to be a fabulous show. You know, interested people from from the region should come on in and take a look at that. If they want to have a rollicking good time hearing the music and get to know.

Top Left Corner: Us well, we’re definitely going to get the word out here at The Greylock Glass. Jane, Richard, I thank you so much for the work that you do for the great effort that you put into really elevating music in this community, which is something that we’ve needed for a long time. And I just want to thank you for your generosity of time and and knowledge today.

Richard Boulger: Well well, Jason, we thank you so much for your continued conversation and support ongoing and we really do wish you all the best. And we hope that we invite everyone to come on down and join us at BAAMS. And, you know, they say if you build it, they will come. And we’re just going to keep going here with a big positive heart and lots of joy and positive vibrations in every way. We’re really looking forward to it.

Top Left Corner: All right. Well, we will talk to you soon, and I’m sure I will see you at at least one of these events this summer. Take care. You, too.

Jane Forrestal: All right, Jason, thank you, Jason.

Jay Velázquez: It really is just so exciting, isn’t it? This, this. This entity that sprung up seemingly out of nowhere. don’t really remember. Even hearing much about it too, too long before it happened. But it’s changing lives. It’s definitely changing lives. And think about and this is something we didn’t talk about in the show, but think about how we’re increasing the saturation level in the area of young people with serious musical chops that can only lead to good things in the future.

Jay Velázquez: Hopefully lots of garage bands popping up here and there. So some of the other items that Jane and Richard wanted you to know about are having to do with the building. They write that our space at Building 6 is also phenomenal and that it came to use fully handicapped, accessible no stairs inside the entire building only ramps with handrails two unisex handicapped restrooms, restrooms with grab bars and the rear double door entry is a ramp, which is very important. And that they can accommodate students with disabilities as well as visitors, grandparents, etcetera. And it also makes moving heavy equipment in and out much, much easier. Yeah, music is one of those sectors where you’ve got heavy equipment. Also, they mentioned that many of the jazz campers come back year after year. They have several veterans returning again next week. Jane says that that sense of community and even families really being built and over time, the mentoring relationships just get stronger and stronger. And we didn’t make this point in the show, but it’s it’s a day camp that they run at BAAMS not no overnights and they don’t serve meals. So if a student comes from a distance, they offer to help find accommodations for them.

Jay Velázquez: If there are any nearby. So those are things to take into consideration. Again, very important to remember that we’ve got these two great shows coming up in the next week, the first being the jazz duo Charles Blenzig and Richard Boulger at Studio nine at the Porches in downtown North Adams. That’s Monday the 14th, and then Wednesday, the 16th. BAAMS faculty performance at Mingo’s Sports Bar and Grill on Roberts Drive, just off Route two in North Adams. So do check those out. One of them, 20 bucks, the first one. The jazz duo, 20 bucks a head at the door. Great, great price for a great, great show. And the next one, as mentioned, is open. There’s no admission fee, but I’m sure the hat, the guitar case will be open and people are encouraged to drop, you know, big bills in there, you know, big denominations, 20 tens and and maybe even just whip out your checkbook and drop a nice fat check in there because this is an organization unlike any other in the Berkshires and they’re doing fantastic work and we really want to support them. Well, that’s our show for the day. I do thank you for tuning in, as always. Until next time, stay safe. Be good to each other and go easy on yourself. Take care.

Editor’s Note: Stephanie Boyd declined to provide either a photo or short bio.

Top Left Corner: This is the top left corner right here on The Greylock Glass GreylockGlass.com, the Berkshires mightiest independent alternative news thing. I’m your host, Jay Velázquez. And as always, it’s a pleasure to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Top Left Corner. It’s episode 181. Can you believe it? And today is Monday, May 8th, 2023. On this episode, we are continuing our very short series of interviews with the candidates for the Williamstown Select Board. The election is is Tuesday, May 9th tomorrow. So I guess it’s good that we’ve only got two out of the four candidates because that means you have plenty of time to listen. The candidates are Stephanie Boyd, Andy Bryant, Andy Hoagland and Paul Harsh. Paul Harsch neglected to get back to me. So we’re not going to be hearing from him. Andy Bryant did respond to me via Facebook, but at the time she had dropped out of the race due to a death in the family, which of course, everybody understands. But she has since decided to rejoin the race but did not get back to us about this interview. She did about a five minute statement that you can catch on willing net. So by all means, go listen to that. So we basically had Andy Hoagland last episode, and today we have Stephanie Boyd, who declined to provide a photo and bio after repeated requests. So if you don’t know what she looks like, you’re going to have to Google it because I’m not running photos or bios that are not sent to me directly or as part of an EPC electronic press kit. I like to do things professionally when I can, when I’m not, you know, flying by the seat of my pants.

Top Left Corner: But I guess this time it just didn’t work out for me. So Google, if you need to know what Stephanie Boyd looks like, Google it. I’ll put a link to her campaign page as well. So that’s about it. All I can say is listen to these episodes and I hope it helps you make some decisions about who you want representing you on the select board. With that, let’s get right to that conversation with Stephanie Boyd here on the top left corner.

Don’t forget — Elections are only half the fun! The Town will meet at Mount Greylock Regional School, 1781 Cold Spring Road, on Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. to decide on a bunch of issues. Which issues? Why, they’re listed in this PDF of the Warrant we’ve so thoughtfully provided!

Stephanie Boyd: Oh, well, good morning, Jason. Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Top Left Corner: Well, it’s been a while, I think. I think we actually spoke many years ago about pottery, so this is probably about 70 years after that. So it’s good to talk to you again on the show. Thank you. So you I’m going to give you first a chance to just sort of tell us, you know, why you’ve decided to run. You could you could certainly have peace and quiet in your studio and not be bothered by the cares and concerns of Williamstown politics. Why did you decide to jump in?

Stephanie Boyd: Well, as you mentioned, I’ve been on the planning board for a while, for about five years, and that term is coming to an end. And I think my experience on the planning board, living in Williamstown for 20 years, I just feel that I have something that I could probably offer this town. I’ve become more and more intrigued with the issues of our town, and I’d like to be involved with making it a more welcoming community and seeing what I can do to help make it better.

Top Left Corner: What would you say are the areas top three strengths and what would you say are three areas you’d like to see improvement?

Stephanie Boyd: Top three strengths in Williamstown.

Top Left Corner: Yes.

Stephanie Boyd: Okay. Oh, well. I mean, the first thing top of mind is a beautiful community in many ways. Both the people are wonderful and our physical environment is so nice. I just came back from a coffee meeting out at Five Corners in the southern part of town, and it’s just such a delight to see the sun shining and our hills and it’s a really great place and I love working with and spending time with the people that live here. Um, I think that we have a lot of people who care about each other and care about the issues in the world. So it’s really great to have conversations with people and to work on projects with people in town. Um, we live in an area of the country. I think that is a nice place to be. Um, so on the weaknesses side, let’s see, I think. We inadvertently possibly are not as open to. A wide variety of people, diversity living here. And when I say inadvertently, it’s because I think housing costs and the type of housing that we have here limits who can live in this town. We lack employment. You know, over the years, males have disappeared. Hospitals have reduced their services. And so it’s difficult for people to live and and work here. And I’m not coming up with a third weakness. I think those those are I think in general in the world, we are also working on how do we become more welcoming to diverse populations. And we’re just trying to figure out what that means in our community now.

Top Left Corner: Okay. Well, I, I guess we’ll talk about growth first, because this is something that you’ve actually addressed on your your own website. And since we are on that topic now, what is how do people get to to your website? What’s the address?

Stephanie Boyd: Yeah, I put together a little website to share some of my ideas. It’s easy to find just WW w Stephanie boyd.net no spaces or anything.

Top Left Corner: Okay so and we’ll repeat that at the end the the idea of growth is on a lot of people’s minds. We see it going on everywhere around us and various factors have limited the amount and types of growth here in Williamstown for for a long time. Um. I think that no one would argue that we can use a little more of this or that, whether it’s commercial, residential or industrial, But there isn’t a lot of widespread agreement on the best way to do that. Why don’t you give us your take on what. A sustainable growth plan would include.

Stephanie Boyd: I’m glad you used the word sustainable growth. Growth is such an interesting term because I think when we say it, we all think we understand each other and what that means. But even if you just look at town planning, what are we talking about in terms of growth? Is it is it more houses? Is it more people? Is it more expensive buildings? So it can mean a number of different things. And also if we look. Worldwide, our economy has been based on on growth. And we feel that we are not making progress unless there’s growth in the GDP, etcetera. On the other hand, this continual growth has severe impacts on our planet where we’re running out of fossil fuels, we are contaminating the air, we are causing greenhouse gases and planetary climate change. So there are problems with growth. But if we come back to Williamstown, what what are we looking at? I think we possibly need to have a different kind of development in town. We have limited through our zoning, etcetera, that housing developments are, for the most part, single family homes on relatively large lots, and that is really not serving us today. People have different lifestyles.

Stephanie Boyd: We’d like to have a diversity of housing types. It’s expensive. People can’t afford to build new single family homes on large lots. And so I think we need to allow a different type of housing development in town to provide the housing needs for our community going forward. We’d love to see more commercial development. As I mentioned earlier, we just don’t have really much of an economic base in Williamstown or major employers, Williams College, which is really great to have our town anchored in a in an institution that has such stability and longevity. But I think we need more of a variety of commercial development. So I think we also need to protect our environmental and agricultural resources so that area farms, we’ve been losing farmland not only in Williamstown but across the state and and the nation. And we really need to work to protect and maintain them, let alone have a growth in that industry. It would be actually fascinating and I think helpful to our economy to help farms develop in what types of products and services they could offer. I would love to see some growth in agritourism, etcetera.

Top Left Corner: And I have I have read about and actually witnessed some of the, you know, public private partnerships and, and, you know, grant programs, community, you know, grant programs that have allowed farms to take advantage of, say, the, as you said, agritourism is a is a booming industry. I first heard about it many years ago. I have a small farm out in Franklin County and I have had a website where I advertise grass fed beef and somebody drove all the way from Boston because he and his wife, they spend their weekends visiting small farms around the Northeast. That’s their that’s their fun. Some people do antiquing. Yeah, they do agritourism and they go and they bring a cooler and they they shop and they, you know, they talk to, they take pictures. They were hoping that I had maybe a bed and breakfast. I did not. But, you know, at the end of the day, they bought almost $200 worth of beef just because because I was able to reach people who were interested in sustainable local agriculture. So, yeah, I think there’s definitely a market for that. I do want to use that as a pivot point for a somewhat controversial. Zoning change, proposed land use change you have supported decreased frontage, road frontage, size lots and also. And also multiple units on lots like apartments, for example. Now, I can certainly see how this could be a good thing.

Top Left Corner: And as some have pointed out, maybe that could even be a way that farmers could have, you know, help staying right there legally living on their farms. I do have this interesting perspective, though. Ever since starting to drive Uber to support The Greylock Glass, I drive usually until one 2:00 in the morning from about 2:00 in the afternoon. I drive all over the Northeast. I drive to Boston, I drive up into Vermont, I drive to Connecticut, I drive to Albany. And you know what I see in the former pastures of farms on the outskirts of towns, everywhere I see little apartment farms. They are chopped up, former farmland with apartment units that look kind of like like triplexes. And they’re just pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup, pup. No trees, no landscaping. Just just little parcels with apartments, apartment facilities, you know, like I said, duplexes, triplexes. And they are taking up farmland forever because you’re never going to reclaim that farmland because it’s cheaper to build new than it is to restore. It’s cheaper to build new on the outskirts of town than it is to try to build up, you know, maybe in in in town. So what would you say to and I’ve had guests on the show before that are concerned about that exact thing that what it will do will be a good idea, perhaps abused in the hands of for profit developers.

Stephanie Boyd: So you are right. We do. The planning board is bringing a couple of warrant articles related to housing to town meeting next month. One of them or two actually have to do with allowing multi-unit housing by right three unit and or four unit. There’ll be two separate articles, but we are not. We are only proposing those for general residents. So that’s the more densely populated area of Williamstown, not on the farmland. That’s called general residence in our zoning parlance. So that would not be an allowed use in on the farm, on the farms. So we do think that in town, in Williamstown, there is a shortage of apartments or condo like buildings that are attractive to a number of different groups, young professionals, people who can’t afford a large house. And now even seniors who no longer need a large house with their empty nest, etcetera. So it’s a housing type that we do not have enough of in Williamstown and that there is a demand for. So that’s why the planning Board is proposing those, but not to allow it to, you know, encourage loss of even more farmland. Well, I’m sorry.

Top Left Corner: Go ahead. Sorry. No, I’m just so glad that you cleared that up. I was not up to speed on that that stipulation. So go ahead.

Stephanie Boyd: We are proposing a housing type, though, that we would allow in the rural areas. So another interesting article we have is allowing manufactured housing, formerly known as mobile housing, on any building lot within Williamstown. So in the GR the general residence area or in the rural areas currently you could only have manufactured or mobile home in a manufactured home community and we see that that could possibly be a really good use in the rural areas where you may have a farming family that is rich in land but not so rich in cash, and the grown kids want to stay on the farm. And this would be an inexpensive way to allow that to happen because manufactured housing are substantially cheaper.

Top Left Corner: I have not heard of many topics that generate the NIMBY not in my backyard response from people like like mobile homes. I know that at least one of your opponents in this race is dead set against this. What do you tell people who say that it’s going to bring down the the character or the the value of Williamstown?

Stephanie Boyd: Well, I’d first like to comment on an erroneous statement that that was made recently that affordable that manufactured housing decreases in value. I mean, people have that idea that it happens, but studies show that in fact, they increase in value very similarly to stick built homes. Okay. So yeah, so I wanted to correct that. So bring down house values. You know, I’m I’m not sure we have any evidence that that happened. Manufactured housing is very similar to any, you know, modest kind of bungalow type housing. We. You know, there’s a I think many people would like to see efforts to support affordable housing in Williamstown and in other communities. And we only have so many mechanisms that we can do that we can provide subsidized housing that we pay for out of our taxes, municipal and and state. We have programs such as Habitat for Humanity that are essentially subsidized with free labor through people who volunteer to build those homes and low interest loans. And then we have the ability to oh, there’s also some tax programs where you can collect a surcharge off of real estate sales and use that money to help fund affordable housing. But by allowing this type of housing, manufactured housing is really a way that we can provide a path to homeownership without having to pay for it out of our tax revenue. So so, you know, I haven’t seen evidence that it brings down House values. And I think it’s really a great opportunity for us to help people live in our community.

Top Left Corner: Well, it is the case that you can’t both ask the question, why can we not get any help, any. Why can’t we fill these positions in the service industry and also say, but we don’t want them living here. You know, we don’t want people we don’t want the same groups of people who would be filling those jobs. And I’m not trying to blunt this at all, as you can tell. You know, we if there is to be a service sector, which is primarily what we have in Williamstown, if not for the college, then people have to be able to afford to live here. You know, and that’s just the case.

Stephanie Boyd: I can appreciate when people are concerned about their house values For for many of us, one of our major assets is is our house. And we want to be very careful about anything that may threaten the value of that. So it’s completely understandable when a new idea comes up that people go, Hey, you know, what’s going to happen? I think we also sometimes have a tendency to overly exaggerate or overly worry about what what may transpire and how that might affect us. So, yeah, I have found the people of Williamstown, after some thought and reflection, realized, yeah, this this is something that we need to do to support our our neighbors.

Top Left Corner: Now, I want to use this as, again, sort of a pivot point because you talked in one of your pieces, one of your essays about potentially finding ways to make it easier for seniors who are homeowners in the town to stay in their houses. I don’t want to talk exactly about that, but I want to I want to shift that to the seniors who are not homeowners. We have, as you know, both Highland Woods, which is the newest, you know, project for primarily seniors and disabled residents, and also, of course, Proprietors Field, which has been around for a long time. Those house dozens of seniors who are not homeowners. It’s a little bit of a different situation than, say, Shelburne Falls has a similar community, except it’s owned and operated by the Shelburne Falls Housing Authority, which does some interesting things which actually creates some interesting differences. Did you know, for example, that once you’ve been in Highland Woods for a year and this is it’s a private corporation, it is not a non you know, it’s not like a charity. It’s not any sort of charitable or government run organization that runs Highland Woods. Once you’ve been a resident, it switches you to month to month status and those seniors end up. Living at the whim of the management. Unlike at in Shelburne Falls senior living community, they’re not allowed to form a tenants union. I mean, they could form one, but they’re not recognized by law. If you if your property, if you’re living in a housing authority unit, you have the right to form a tenants union and you must be recognized here in Williamstown.

Top Left Corner: Those seniors do not have that right. And leases can change month to month and they’re individual. So each tenant could conceivably have a slightly different lease. And it also means that when you sign that lease, you are agreeing that the terms of that lease can change anytime with or without your permission. So what happens is they decide that somebody in one of their properties in Pittsfield scorched the side of his house with a, you know, a grill, you know, outside. Nobody can have grills. Somebody trips over a walker in the hallway. Nobody can have a walker in the hallway. Somebody doesn’t like the way some chaise lounge looks outside. No one can have lawn furniture that stays outside. It is a highly authoritative state, and they don’t even follow their own rules. Did you know that it claims to be a nonsmoking community yet they built a smoking shelter outside and people continued to smoke in the units. I am personally offended and and shocked at the number of seniors who are actually living in conditions that are they’re almost punitive. I mean, it’s almost carceral. Um, have you have you have you talked with the seniors who are living in these housing or have you talked with seniors in general? Because that’s the one thing I find lacking in every single candidates platform, a real discussion about a huge population and a growing population here in Williamstown.

Stephanie Boyd: Well, we should have had this interview next week because I do I do plan on talking with the with the folks at Proprietors Field next next week. But I and I recently was just involved with an issue at Sweetwood another um, independent assisted living facility in Williamstown where the owner of that property was wanting to change the zoning so that they could potentially rent to non seniors and have a multi-generational facility up there. So I did start to learn a little bit more about the month to month type of renting situation, etcetera. I do. I’m also, as you know, working on the comprehensive plan for Williamstown. And I recognize that seniors are a significant percentage of our population. We you know, we have this kind of large group of people, 55 and over, and they’re a very important part of our population. And I think the needs of seniors are changing over time. I was just reading about the Boston Marathon where, you know, the 75 year old woman just, you know, had an incredible pace doing that race. So we we have seniors that have a variety of different needs and different health issues and different housing needs. And it is extremely important. And we will be working through some of those issues on the comprehensive plan. And then part of my goal is for for running for the select board is to be there on the ground ready to start implementing the the actions that we put in our comprehensive plan. Sure.

Top Left Corner: Sure.

Stephanie Boyd: I completely hear what you’re saying. I have heard some of those issues that you have cited, what to do about them. I don’t have an answer at the moment, but it will certainly be top of mind.

Top Left Corner: Well, it’s a quality of life question. I mean, to me, it’s a quality of life question where it is not acceptable to just shuffle people off and treat them like like, like toddlers. Right? You know, you just don’t get to do that. You know, not with people who have put in their time, in many cases, served their country overseas in many cases served their countries at home. You know, there are teachers who are living in senior houses. There are, you know, town administrators who are now living in senior housing. They’ve put in their time. They’ve made their contributions. I would say, as you pointed out, you mentioned that 75 year old in the Boston Marathon. Um, you know, I have seen senior centers all over the country where there are there’s fitness equipment and there’s pools and there’s outdoor fitness parks that are specially designed for seniors that have, you know, equipment that is allows them to do like step exercises and things like that. Um, our senior center is, you know, it’s we have one it’s a bit skimpy, I would say. And the Council on Aging is also well, it’s, it’s hard to say their names on the town.

Top Left Corner: Website, but the only contact information is for Brian O’Grady, who is the director of the Senior center. And he’s also the contact for the Council on Aging, which seems odd since the senior center director is supposed to answer to the Council on Aging. So I’m not really sure that the transparency is what we’d like it to be on that issue. So I would just like to see I would like to see a heck of a lot more done for seniors. And I wonder if you would commit to looking into expanding. Obviously, you can’t do everything, but I would like to see I would like to get a commitment that you will look into expanding the facilities available for seniors because, as you said, not everyone is just sitting around not I shouldn’t say just not everyone is sitting around just being sedentary, doing, you know, stereotypically senior things. Some people do want exercise. Some people are able to run a mile or a marathon. And I just feel like we need a commitment from the town leadership that the seniors are not going to be forgotten once again for an entire term.

Stephanie Boyd: You know, I think what I can commit to is. Looking out for all of our vulnerable populations. Yeah, that’s.

Top Left Corner: Not the question, though, Stephanie. It’s not the question. I’m a journalist. I’m not here. I’m not a I’m not a cheerleader. I’m a I’m asking the question, can you commit to at least looking into what’s available to the seniors now and recommending improvements?

Stephanie Boyd: So I can actually tell you that we are looking into that. So as I mentioned, one of the things that I’m working on is the comprehensive plan, which is a look into all of the needs of our community, including seniors. We are looking into what are the facilities needed in our community for seniors, for young people, for low income people, for diverse populations, so that the.

Top Left Corner: So that so that plan comes out in June.

Stephanie Boyd: It was originally intended to be in June. We’re going to take a little bit more time, probably early, early fall.

Top Left Corner: And so there will be recommendations in that on what to do with the senior center.

Stephanie Boyd: There will be. So we by law, you’re mandated every so often to do what the state calls a master plan. We’re calling it comprehensive plan. And they we have to look at public facilities. So our senior center is a public facility so that I’ll.

Top Left Corner: Let you off the hook.

Stephanie Boyd: For that.

Top Left Corner: But I’ll be I’ll be definitely I’ll be definitely looking into the finalized version of that plan. I do want to move on, though, because we have very little time left. My last question is, is really about climate. Well, I mean, I would love to have more questions, but we got to keep this, you know. Well, the other end of the spectrum is going to be youth. And I don’t think we’re going to have time to talk about the youth population. But I do want to talk about climate because that affects everybody. Um, there are towns that are conducting climate ready, you know, climate mitigation plans and climate readiness plans. Um, I am not aware that Williamstown has the sort of robust climate investigation that some other towns have. I could be wrong about that. But what we know is that like most small towns, we have a fairly understaffed, under-resourced fire department. We know that we are expecting just an awful, dangerous fire season this year. We know that there are people who are moving here, looking to move here from the city who do not want to be sitting through another hurricane that hits, you know, New York or Boston. And they’re looking to move to safer places like the Berkshires. We don’t have the medical staff to deal with the influx of people that are potentially expected to be moving inland.

Top Left Corner: And we don’t have the housing. Um, you know, obviously if we have more units per acre that could be good. But then again, it could end up just being expensive housing for people who are looking to relocate from, you know, grossly expensive areas like, you know, Manhattan. Um, so I’m just wondering, you know, and then of course, with the farming issue, you, you’ve really made me very happy that you’re concerned about preserving agricultural land. But we have this situation where we’re not going to be able to necessarily depend on other parts of the country and world for food. We already know, for example, that Ukraine, which produces more wheat than anybody, but the United States has had a real tough time getting its wheat to market, causing worldwide shortages. We don’t have the luxury of thinking that we can live this provincial life that is unaffected, untouched by what’s going on in the rest of the world, particularly as it relates to climate change. What do you know about Williamstown Williamstown’s readiness to adapt and to make long term plans, and what would you recommend that Williamstown do to make long term plans to address the climate crisis?

Stephanie Boyd: Okay, that was a long question.

Top Left Corner: So I like I like to give you the exact context.

Stephanie Boyd: Thanks. Thanks. So a couple of years, two years ago, I think Williamstown voted in a net zero resolution at town meeting. So we are committed as a community to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Since that time, the school committee, of which I’m a part, has been working to bring together community members to craft a net zero plan. How do we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in town? Nancy Nyland is working right now to. Put together a grant proposal to green communities to get some funding to help with some of our efforts there. We’ve been working with Berkshire Regional Planning on putting together that plan, and so that is moving forward. We’ve also had studies with the Berkshire Regional Planning on climate resilience, like what do we need to do to improve some of our infrastructure such as culverts and whatnot, to help with potential flooding? So there’s that. The new fire station is in a sense, a an effort that will contribute to our ability to be prepared in in the sense of emergency. So there is definitely more that we can always do. But I think we do have some really significant efforts underway with some really great people doing the work.

Top Left Corner: Mm Well, I think that certainly on a global level, you know, trying to be net, you know, carbon neutral is great. You know, net zero is great. I think that’s, that’s good. As part of a broader effort and nationwide. Worldwide, I’m not sure. I don’t know I guess I’d have to check take a look at what the Berkshire regional planning’s documents look like. I, I think I have seen other towns in Massachusetts that are taking sort of a more. Well, a more intensive look at the specific things that could fail. I mean, really, when you’re designing any system, you don’t you design the system and then you ask what will fail? Culverts, flooding, all those things. Yes, for sure. I think that none of us actually are. There is no town that is fully prepared and we’re all going to be learning, learning as we go. I just feel like we have the resources. We have this college that actually has a great science program and I would love to I would love to see the town maybe work together with Williams if if that’s possible, to maybe do a study, much like on Cape, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, which works hand in hand with FEMA and MEMA, has produced climate resiliency studies with various towns on on Cape. So they have a, you know, sort of a federal slash, academic slash municipal partnership going to come up with really comprehensive plans. I’d love you to see it because it’s it’s it’s intense. They really have covered all the bases. And, you know, the students were doing it as a yearlong project. So it was really intensive. Right.

Stephanie Boyd: I mean, in many ways, I think the impacts on the on the Cape to climate change could be worse because of their proximity to to the oceans. I certainly I found it very interesting, you know, during the dark period of the pandemic, how grateful I was that we had local food supplies here and also. It was interesting to see how many people were coming to Williamstown to either spend time on our trails or coming to work here from other parts of the country because it was just, you know, better to be here during a pandemic. So I think all of those things have given us insights into what may happen when we have like climate crisis in our country. And yeah, I alluded to some work that was being done more towards working to prevent climate change from happening, which clearly. We are going to have little success.

Top Left Corner: Well, I mean, if everybody yeah, if everybody had a cool committee, then we’d be we’d be in much better shape. Not everybody is even recognizing that the danger and you’re correct, there are certain there are certain hazards to living in a coastal community that are different than ours. But for example, Cape Cod has a huge amount of freshwater. A lot of people don’t realize how many, how many lakes and ponds there are, so they actually have no shortage of freshwater. The Berkshires is entering its seventh year of drought. Seventh year of drought and we are not going to be able to make up for the losses of last year with the paltry rain that we’ve had. So if we do increase amounts of of units, for example, more people relying on the public water supply, more people drilling wells, our hazard to climate change might be that we run out of fresh water. You know, so everybody every everybody has every area has its own and unique and special risks that they have to confront. So, yeah.

Stephanie Boyd: Williamstown is interesting that our water supply comes from a deep aquifer, so that probably. Slows down when we’ll be impacted on shortage of water supplies. But if we’re surrounded by communities that are using surface waters, of course what happens around us to our neighbors will then impact us. Because what are all part of one community?

Top Left Corner: What a what a complicated little machine this planet is, isn’t it? Yes.

Stephanie Boyd: And we’ve done a good job of making a mess of it.

Top Left Corner: So let’s talk I just want to give you the final word here, because I know there are some things that I did not ask that you would probably like the the voters to know some of the things that we haven’t covered. What should the voting public of Williamstown know about you and your bid to to land this seat for for one term or more.

Stephanie Boyd: Um, probably more. Personal things on how I tackle issues. I am really dedicated to making Williamstown a better community. I approach problems or issues from as many different angles as I can. I talk to people, I try to get all the perspectives and I’m just really willing to dig in. And I really just love helping people and helping our community grow to its full potential. So I think that’s the message that I would love to give people, that I’m here for them and I will do my best to make this a place they would like it to be.

Top Left Corner: Excellent. Excellent. I think that most people, if you ask them what’s important in a candidate, the answer is usually that they have to actually care. They want authenticity and they want genuine concern for the community. And I would say you embody the concern and the sort of community spirit. The way I would say all of the candidates do in each in their own way. And so I think that it’s great that we have people stepping up. I read all the time about towns that have so many unfilled seats, even at the select board and city council level. And it makes me sort of sad that civic engagement is so low. But here in Williamstown, we seem to be doing okay, although there are a few few empty seats here and there. But but better than many places. So once again, give us your contact, your email or your your website address.

Stephanie Boyd: Okay. You can reach me and find out what I think about things at W-w-w dot Stephanie boyd.net. And there’ll be a field there that you can send me an email. So I would love to hear from you and I hope you all have a great day.

Top Left Corner: Stephanie Thank you so very much for being on the show and and being so thoughtful in your answers. I’m looking forward to to interviewing the rest of the candidates, lining them up and making them available to the public. Hopefully next week, hopefully next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday is what I’m shooting for. So we’ll get to hear them all then. Until then, have a great weekend. Enjoy the weather and we’ll talk to you soon.

Stephanie Boyd: Okay. Thank you so much, Jason. Thanks.

Top Left Corner: Bye bye.

Stephanie Boyd: Bye.

Top Left Corner: That’s right. This is the top left corner Episode 180. I’m your host, Jay Velázquez, and I do thank you for tuning in this Monday, May 8th, 2023, for what is bound to be a great show. This is part of our election coverage election for select board here in Williamstown, Massachusetts. We’ve actually kind of gotten Williamstown a short shrift when it comes to election coverage. But I guess, guess we have to change that. And this is part of that. We have a conversation with incumbent Andy Hogeland, who is going to spend a few moments, I guess about 45 minutes or so, discussing why you should give your vote to him for another term on the select board.

Top Left Corner: Also in the show notes, we have a short bio for Mr. Hogeland and photo if you need to know what he looks like. The bio is going to be a fairly condensed bio. I asked him to talk about his background in the show during the interview, and it’s pretty extensive. So I guess read, listen and decide for yourself. We have only one other interview and that’ll be coming up. And I guess what’s going to be part B of this episode with Stephanie Boyd, who declined to send an image or a bio, so I can’t show you what she looks like. But you can definitely Google her and I’m sure you’ll find a picture of her all over the place. We’ll be speaking with her next. I tried to ask the same basic questions and try to cover the same basic material for both candidates to make it as fair as possible. Obviously, it’s going to stray a little bit here and there, but we does what we can. The other two candidates, Paul Harsh, did not get in touch with me at all, did not respond to requests for an interview. And Andi Bryant responded to let me know that she was not running — this is when she wasn’t running — and was not interested in discussing things generally.

Now she is running but did not get ahold of me to to have this interview. She’s got about a five minute statement on Willinet and you can check that out if you like. But right now, let’s get to our conversation with Andy Hogeland right here on the Top Left Corner.

Don’t forget — Elections are only half the fun! The Town will meet at Mount Greylock Regional School, 1781 Cold Spring Road, on Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. to decide on a bunch of issues. Which issues? Why, they’re listed in this PDF of the Warrant we’ve so thoughtfully provided!

My name is Andy Hogeland, and I’m running for re-election to the Select Board. I have lived here with my wife Anne since 1994, and our three daughters attended WES and graduated from Mount Greylock. I practiced law for over 30 years, and have substantial experience serving in our town government. I have served on the Select Board for several years, including twice as Chair, and before that as Chair of the Finance Committee. I’ve chaired three committees where you can see the results: planning the new police station, making the Spruces a community resource, and chairing the high school building committee for its first five years. 

I am a member of state-wide organizations where I advocate for our interests in Boston. I am President of the Massachusetts Select Board Association (MSA), and am a member of the Governor’s Local Government Advisory Commission (LGAC). We meet regularly with the Lieutenant Governor and Cabinet officials.  In these roles, I speak up for the needs we share with other towns such as more funding for our schools and local road projects. If re-elected to the Select Board, I can continue my advocacy on Beacon Hill.

I am the Chair of the Affordable Housing Trust, and a former board member of the local Habitat for Humanity.  I believe that finding ways to make housing more affordable is one of our top priorities. 

For more information, please visit my website at andyhogeland.com

Andy Hogeland: Thank you for having me. And thank you for your interest.

Top Left Corner: Well, it is sort of a new era, I guess, for the town. And it is, I think, incumbent. It is It behooves people who who care about what’s going on here, who have op inions about what’s going on to to pay attention during this this season. Because I think that the next sort of phase of the town’s development is is really going to kick into high gear, not just for the new blood that may come onto the into the process, but also this is really the first sort of almost post-pandemic year. And I think that I can detect that there’s a lot more activity even now early in the season than I’ve seen in a couple of years. Why don’t you do this even though we’ve spoken before and and you’ve probably given me a rundown of your past before, just if you wouldn’t mind saying a little bit about how you came to this position. You know, what what interested you and what makes you think it’s worth pursuing another term?

Andy Hogeland: Sure. Of course. My wife Anne, and I moved to Williamstown in 1994, and I’ve been doing public service work here for, you know, almost half of that time over the years. And I think I kind of got that from my parents. They were both involved in local public service. It was kind of part of what was in the house, and it appeals to me. It’s a way to work on local problems with people we know. And if you actually work on a problem, you can see the result. It’s not like, you know, state or national politics where you can bang your head against the wall for long periods of time. It’s a it’s my version of think globally, act locally. So it’s kind of a nice match for me. I started in town government here on the Conservation Commission and the Planning Board, and since that time have been on the Finance Committee, including as chairman, Select Board, as chairman a couple of times, and a lot of special purpose committees on the high school building committee, the committee to make the SPRUCES a good resource for everybody and for finding the police station. So sort of a variety of things that interest me and I hope are productive for the town. And one of the one of the current parent efforts is we are reviewing the charter and co-chair, along with my colleague Jeff Johnson, undertaking the first comprehensive review of the charter since 1956. So kind of overdue, some would say, Wow, it’s for me, just interesting work to see how you can make government work every day. And the charter review makes you step several steps back and say, well, how should this government be structured in the first place?

Top Left Corner: You know, that’s that’s an issue that I think I’m going to have to follow because, yeah, most people don’t don’t think too, too much about the importance of of the charter and the fact that it is the, you know, the bedrock document and revisiting that. We’ll have to talk more about that. I want to hear I want to hear about that just just for now. How long is that expected to take?

Andy Hogeland: We started in September and the goal is to have it ready for town meeting in 2024. So a year from now.

Top Left Corner: Wow.

Andy Hogeland: So we’ve been we’ve been on schedule plowing through, you know, 3 or 5 issues every month. And these include issues like why do we have a strong town manager form of government? So our town meeting be open or representative? What board should be appointed or not appointed? Should we have two town meetings a year or just one? Should we have a recall provision? So a lot of sort of fundamental structural questions, many of which I think will be resolved by saying things are fine, but there are going to be some where we think we can maybe try something different. So stay tuned. Come back a year from now, we’ll do another story.

Top Left Corner: That’s Well, I’ll tell you, I mean, it’s it’s a big deal. Will the does the public have any input in this? I mean, obviously, you’re going to be talking about this during select board meetings. Are there any issues that you think are. So important that you would want the town to weigh in.

Andy Hogeland: Uh, we’re going to want to kind of weigh in on everything as we go along and also at the end. These are not Selectboard meetings. The Selectboard formed a charter review committee. So this is a separate group of seven people who have a lot of experience in in town government. And so our task is to spend the time from last September through next May putting together proposals as to what we think should change. So, okay, all of our meetings are open to the public. They’re all on Zoom. We are getting to the point where we’re going to plan to have some particular public forums, I guess, in the fall to say, here’s here’s our thoughts on ten or 15 or 20 issues. What do you think? Public. Wow. And then we’ll take that input back into consideration and come up with recommendations for town meeting, especially for your listeners, is that we put together a survey which went out with all of the tax bills, real estate tax bills, all landowners got it. I also went through a bunch of other addresses and came up with about 600 tenants which got mailed The survey and the survey is also online at the at the town’s webpage because that gives us, I think over around 3000 people we’ve asked their opinion of. So the results are still coming in, but we like to be able to plow through that data probably in a month or two from now.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, it sounds like some of the these items are are. Are instruments of town government that really do affect a change could really affect how things run. So I’m excited to learn more about that. Let’s let me ask a question. Since you are an incumbent and you’ve been through some you’ve sailed through some fairly choppy waters, municipal waters, during some some rough patches, there was the issue of the police department, the chief of police there was the town manager. Sort of friction. Why don’t you give us a sense of some of the things that you’ve learned, some of the nuggets of wisdom that you’ve picked up during those those those, you know, fairly fractious periods?

Andy Hogeland: Yeah. Well, I of downplayed them the nuggets. But I’ll tell you what I got two things come to mind. The first thing is eternally always the value of listening to people. When the police trauma first came to light in the middle of 2020, I guess it was it was a surprise to everybody. People were very upset with what they heard. And so a lot of the work for that first six or so months was listening to the concerns of the community, understanding what they wanted, listening to the police department to understand their view of things. And I think if you spend enough time trying to learn what’s on people’s minds and be committed to working collaboratively toward some good solution, that’s sort of one way that I always like to go. And the second lesson I think, is patience. There was a lot of outcry at the beginning for immediate action on a variety of things, and we kind of put our heads down to do the homework and do the investigation that needed to be done. The I organized that. The investigation gave us a better sense of what happened and what actually didn’t happen in many cases and helped us decide what should be the consequences. We then kind of buckled down again and went through several difficult personnel decisions. And I think the result is we’re coming out on the far end, far better off than we were before we went in.

Andy Hogeland: I think the confidence in the police department has been well restored. I really give a huge amount of credit to Chief Mike Ziemba for all the work he’s doing. I think we’re lucky to have the right person in the right position. At the time we needed someone to step in, so that’s been great. About a week or so ago, there was a celebration at the log about a partnership program which he initiated to develop better relationships with the community. And it was just really I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to me to see what had happened over the prior year in terms of people coming together, coming up with solutions for how the police can interact differently, what kind of wellness programs they needed, how they should do better outreach in the community. So it was a tough sailing for most of the year, but I think in the intervening almost two years, things have changed rapidly and I think much, much for the better. So yeah, so back to your questions. I think listening well and being patient and deliberative in terms of making sure you think things through and not not doing things that are a knee jerk reaction, I think no one’s ever accused me of being jerky on my knees too much in terms of doing things off the cuff. I think thoughtful, well-researched approach kind of is kind of how I built.

Top Left Corner: Would you say that the right level of transparency was was maintained throughout the processes?

Andy Hogeland: Uh, I would. It would have been nice to have been able to have been more transparent. But, you know, the, the challenge was and this was something we wrestled with is what can we say? What can’t we say was the crisis was brought about by litigation. Right. And in litigation, when you are a party to a case, you need to be careful what you say about the case because anything you say can be twisted or moved or used against you or used for you. So we’re trying to be careful of that. And also the people who were being accused both ways have privacy rights. So we couldn’t be open and carefree about what we said. We had to be careful and people would have preferred to have learned more sooner. But again, we took the deliberative approach and did a very comprehensive investigation. And I think that investigation left, I think no less. I can think of some no questions unanswered. So transparency came, I think, at the right time. It would have been nice to have done it more quickly. But given the constraints of litigation and privacy and personnel actions, you got to go through a minefield.

Top Left Corner: Now, it sounds like it. It sounds like there’s a lot that a lot of eggshells that you have to try not to step on on the on the way to getting through it. So I guess there are a number of things that are on the public’s mind. As I mentioned, in in our digital green room before the show started, there are three major issues that I’m going to be talking about because there are issues I’m going to be that I’m concerned with here in town and I’m going to be following in The Greylock Glass, and I’m sort of making sure that I ask the same questions, basically, of of all the candidates. And the first one is the issue of of land use going forward, of zoning, of lot sizes of multiple units on. On one parcel. There’s a lot of back and forth about that. There’s some misunderstandings about what has been proposed this. Is has caused some real hard feelings in certain quarters. Can you give me your take on this issue and where you think the town needs to go, what direction the town needs to go through if we’re to find a good a good, happy medium here?

Andy Hogeland: Uh, I think that anybody who wants to look at these issues needs to anchor in to kind of fundamental facts, which is we don’t have much available land in Williamstown. It looks rural, but a lot of that land is tied up because it’s owned by the state or it’s subject to different kind of restrictions or conservation restrictions. So it looks like a beautiful open space, which indeed it is, but a lot of it’s not available. So there’s a there’s a shortage of of land for any kind of development. And the second fact is, I think we need to do more all the time on making more housing available for people, housing which is affordable for all ranges of people. I think mistakenly think affordable housing means subsidized housing or really low income housing. I think we need housing which is affordable at a range of income levels. So between a shortage of land and a need for probably more land for housing. That’s the dilemma that we’re into. I’ve done, I think, a fair amount of work on making housing affordable. I was one of the directors of the local Habitat for Humanity chapter for four years until about a year ago. We spent a lot of time doing fundraising and permitting work on the two houses being built at the corner of Cole and Maple. So the result of that work is there’s going to be two families. One’s already there, the other there probably within the end of the year. Two families now own houses in Williamstown, which otherwise would not have happened. While I was also there, I negotiated with the Turner House for Veterans, which was a charity going out of business, negotiated an arrangement with them where we would get about half of their remaining assets and we would use it for housing projects for veterans that needed home repairs or mortgage assistance.

Andy Hogeland: And so there is now a Habitat for Humanity Veterans Home Program. And I’d say anybody who knows a veteran who needs home repairs, home assistance, please contact the northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity chapter to see if they can help you. So that’s been that’s one way to try to do housing. The other avenues on housing are I’m working on as part of the Williamstown Affordable Housing Trust. I’m chairman of that now the trust before my time purchased vacant lots and helped fund the construction of by habitat over those two houses at Cole and Maple. There is another project going to start, I hope, next year on Summer Street. And they also have housing programs which don’t require that kind of big capital investment. And these are mortgage assistance program. These give grants to prospective homeowners of Williamstown who are income qualified and help them with things like down payment or closing costs. So a lot of people at that income level can make the leap from paying a monthly rent to a monthly mortgage. But they don’t have the $15,000 or so to do down payments and closing costs. And that’s where the trust has stepped in. They had a parallel. And actually 21 families in Williamstown now have bought their first home because of this program. There’s a parallel program for emergency rental and mortgages, rental assistance, which has helped. And it’s up to 18 income qualified residents hurt by the pandemic maintain their rental apartments. So these are examples of where you can take funding and sprinkle the benefits out among a lot of Williamstown families. So I’m pretty happy with those.

Top Left Corner: Now, what specifically about the idea of reducing the frontage requirements and the ability to buy right build multi or multiple multi unit structures on one one parcel? What do you think the effects are going to be of that if that goes through? And and do you support that?

Andy Hogeland: Uh, I support all of them, but I think that the practical impact of them is really varied. You know, changing the allowable lot sizes in the general business district just means initially on a map, every lot can be smaller. But the problem is we’re talking about a built environment where the lots are occupied by houses and driveways and garages. So I think the the the changes that will be affected by changing the allowable lot size are going to be pretty marginal. Not to they’re fine, but they’re not. I think they’re very impactful. I think the the two proposed articles which might have more impact would be to allow either a three family house or a four family house to be built wherever you can build a single family house as long as your setbacks are right. And that probably does open up more opportunities for the creation of more housing. So it helps to solve that problem. So I’m in favor of that. I’m conscious that the bigger these multifamily structures are, the less automatically comfortable some of the neighbors might be. But I think these things can be designed tastefully. The setbacks are still going to be required. So I think it’s an experiment we should undertake because as I said for a while, we need more housing and this is a way to get it. And the last the last one which you didn’t ask about, just make sure it gets covered, is a proposal to allow manufactured homes formerly known as mobile homes to be put anywhere. You can put a single family house, I think, to create housing. That’s helpful. But I think that the neighborhood push back on that is probably going to be the subject of more discussion.

Top Left Corner: Sure. Sure. Well, I think it has been said by by some folks that they’re basically just glorified campers. Now, I have spoken with people who have quite a bit of experience with manufactured homes, and some of them basically have the same design. They have capes, they have bungalows, they have ranches. And the difference is that they’re assembled, they’re shipped in in chunks and pieces, and they’re put together on the, you know, on site. And they can have foundations, which is a misunderstanding. They can be placed on foundations. They don’t have to be on a slab. And some of them look, you know, indistinguishable from a stick built. Well, I mean, they are stick built, but they’re stick built in the factory. They’re indistinguishable from something that was that was erected, you know, on site. So I agree that there’s there’s a way that you can do it. And and I’m sure that. Most people have an understanding that we need. More housing that is, you know, accessible, I guess the biggest. The biggest fears that I’ve had because I do a lot of driving around. I’ve taken to doing Uber driving to pay for the GreylockGlass.com and the last year, six months or so. So I do a lot of driving and I do a lot of driving and places like the outskirts of Albany and Troy and Hartford and Boston and a lot of other places, Springfield. And I see a lot of farmland being turned into apartment farms. These are structures that look basically like houses. They don’t they’re not ugly. They’re just they’re just sort of popping up out of the ground with no actual sort of out of context. There’s no trees, there’s no, you know, landscaping. They’re just fields of these little two and three bedroom duplex and triplex houses that are apartments and farmland is being chewed up pretty quickly by some of these. I have been told that, in fact, that that can’t happen here in Williamstown, that farmland is not at stake in this in this change. Should it go through? Would you say that that’s accurate? Are we not worried about farmland being being turned into little, little McMansion fields?

Andy Hogeland: I wouldn’t phrase it as an absolute statement about nothing’s at risk or it’s all at risk. I think every lot in town, wherever it is, has a different constraint on it. Some farmland is it’s for farming and it’s preserved that way and you can’t do much else on it. Other farmland isn’t preserved. You can do other things on it. And there are fields out there that looks like a farm to you, but it actually may be someone’s big old backyard. So I think if we’re worried about where homes might be built, you’ve really got to do a more a deeper dive than just say, oh, it’s a big area. Must be a lot of houses or absolutely no houses can be there. I think also going back to your original part of your question on the on the manufactured home aspect is they 50 years ago they had a bad reputation. I don’t know why it came up that way, but we need to acknowledge that they were not deemed to be popular in some communities. I think people need a voting machine to do some research. Look at the things you’re looking at now. Open your eyes. Take a look what’s being made today. Look at what it looks like today and rethink the thoughts that maybe might have been made or true or not, 50 years ago. These things are different today. Take a look at them. And I think the other concern is people are looking at like, what are you talking about? Where these are large multi unit properties being chewed up. We’ve got ten, 20, 30, 40, 50. That’s not what this bylaw does. If unless I got it wrong. This file says you can put one of these wherever you could put a house. So you’re still subject to limitations on space? I think because of the past prejudice against that type of architecture. You’re going to have some of that coming through. Can’t argue with that. But I think all I can ask is people take a look at today’s version of these structures and see if you feel the same way.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. Yeah, I suppose the the fact of the matter is, you know, you’re right. We have a lot of land that’s tied up and others it’s has agricultural preservations or forest, you know, it’s under conservation restrictions. Some of it, as you said, is owned by the state. So yeah, there is I think that we’re still going to have the rural feel more or less the the thing that I hope is that because because these sort of local food movement was just a little bit behind the eight ball starting in the, you know, mid 90 seconds, early two, thousands long after farming had become unviable for a number of families. I feel like there’s a lot of folks who would love to be farming here, would love to have a stall on Saturday morning at the at the farmer’s market. We’d love to be able to have CSAs where they deliver food, you know, to local residents. It would be a shame if we lost. If we lost an opportunity for that sector to grow right, when people are most interested in it. And so I’m hoping that that, that that doesn’t happen.

Top Left Corner: Um, now. The question that I could talk about housing forever. I used to be a tax assessor and I could go on and on about various questions. But the fear that I have, too, is that. With so many people looking at the Berkshires as a great place to relocate, I don’t see any reason why without some form, without something to compel developers to make a certain amount of the housing affordable, I can’t see that new construction is necessarily going to be. Along the lines of affordability, you know, at least not affordability by by the by the standards that most people in the bottom 80% consider affordable. You know, we’ve got plenty of homes that are available that pop up on the market for, you know, a million plus. But I’m thinking about the homes that a family of four might be able to afford on a fairly, you know, lower middle class income. Do you have any concerns that the construction that’s coming down the pike, if and when it gets here, is just going to create homes for other more wealthy people?

Andy Hogeland: Well, I guess I go back to your premise about there’s not a way to force people to to build affordable housing as part of a project. That’s actually how we got most of our affordable housing in town is because you can force that there’s a state statute called 40 B, which essentially says that if you’re going to commit a certain percent of your units to affordable housing, which income qualified, affordable housing, you can bypass most zoning requirements. That’s how cable mills phase one came to being with 13 units in it. That’s how Highland Woods came into being with its 40 units. I think the 380 Cole Avenue is all affordable units. It’s about the same number. And they are able to do all that because 40 B lets developers build housing as long as a certain number or in some cases all of them are said as affordable. And in cable mills, they’re they have a phase three proposal which is going through the hoops now and it’s going to be 54 units and because of 40 B and the state regs, half of those are going to be designated to be affordable units for people at various levels of area median income. So that is how we do things. Well, it is the thrust is working on not working on, but supporting on Green River Road, which would be 16 units, four of which have to be affordable. And so there is there is a tool available to do that. Right? Right. They they take a developer. That’s what we’re usually missing. And what’s hard to find is a developer. If you can find a developer and give them some guarantee of land or financial support, people can make it happen. But putting a project together is not an easy thing to do. I like other programs where you’re basically helping first time homeowners or tenants, you know, find a way to have housing here without going through the expense of building one. But let me.

Top Left Corner: Ask you this. How is the how is the the range of affordability calculated that’s based on on housing stock locally, is it not?

Andy Hogeland: It’s based on area median income.

Top Left Corner: Area median income. So when we’re talking about when we’re talking about the cable mills, I mean, I’m at their Web store right now. They’re saying flats from the high 400,000 seconds, lofts from the low 500,000 townhomes from the mid 600,000. That doesn’t sound like affordable housing to me at all.

Andy Hogeland: Well, those units aren’t the affordable housing units. If you go deeper into the process and after the call, I can direct you to where to find the. There are 13 units in the first phase which are set aside for affordable buyers, affordable housing buyers, and those prices are down in the under 200 range. I think I’ll have to check the number, but they were constructed in a way that they had to be affordable first as rental units. Now they can be on the market as purchase units, but the affordability restrictions remain in effect. So they’re not the prices that you just quoted me. They’re much less than that. And I’m sorry, I can’t bring to mind the exact number, but that’s fine.

Top Left Corner: I’m just I’ve just heard from people also about the the Cole Street, the new Cole Street development, how you know, I think that they were saying that a one bedroom bedroom is around $1,000 and they’re paying for their heat and hot water as well. So, I mean, that’s that’s still pretty pricey. I mean, I’m just saying, one of the things that people say, the reason that we need affordable housing in part is because we don’t have the people to work in some of the jobs that are hard to fill because they pay her on minimum wage. You see what I’m saying? We’ve got these these tons of service jobs. No one is filling them because no one can afford to live around here. But coming up with a one bedroom apartment for 1000 $1,200 with heat and hot water, that’s not included. You can’t you can’t make minimum wage and afford those two things. Those two are not compatible. So I guess.

Andy Hogeland: That’s a challenge because there’s a fundamental reality that to build an apartment or pay an apartment or pay off a mortgage costs a certain amount of money. And the the tenants you’re talking about, even $1,000 are not paying the full cost of the whole thing. Right? There are subsidies or state grants and stuff that make up the difference between to get the rents lower and lower. Just it keeps running into development costs and the limitations of grants and funding to offset those development costs.

Top Left Corner: Um, well, I guess, I mean, that’s true. I mean, there’s I mean, my father was a homebuilder, so I know what it costs. I worked with him for a number of years. I know what it takes to to build housing. And I know that it’s it’s not getting any cheaper for the builders, for the developers.

Andy Hogeland: And by by way of comparison, I do a lot of state level stuff on this, which I do when I get to at some point. And you know, people are quoting Western mass development costs are about $500,000 per unit. Right. So, you know, unless you get substantial funding from some source. It’s hard to get the rents down to $1,000 a month for that.

Top Left Corner: Yeah. The next question that I’ve got next topic, I guess, is, is the issue of it’s partially related, but there’s there’s more to it is senior housing. A lot of people don’t know that the Highland woods. It’s not. Um, it’s not a government agency really, that runs it. It’s not the housing authority. Like, for example, in Shelburne Falls. In Shelburne Falls. That property, the senior housing there, is owned and operated by the housing authority. The housing authority must recognize a. A tenants association at Highland Woods at Proprietors Field. These are these are privately owned. There is no opportunity. For the seniors and some disabled living there to form a union, a tenants union and tenants organization and advocate for their for themselves. Um, this is a problem because so many people applauded when Highland Woods was constructed. Notrillionealizing that in some ways it’s, it’s it’s not desirable when you are a person who wants to have some say in your living, you know, for example, they’re able to change because once you’ve been there for a year, it turns to a month to month rental agreement, a month to month agreement that can be changed. You know, every 30 days. And the tenants there sign the the rental agreement saying that they accept that, you know, so in other words, they can say we don’t like.

Top Left Corner: We don’t like lawn furniture, we don’t like plants, we don’t like bird feeders. We don’t like. And month to month, these seniors and there’s a lot of them living in these units, these seniors have to put up with arbitrary and sometimes capricious rulings. And and I have heard from a few of them that they’re afraid to even open up their mouth for fear of retaliation. What what are we going to do going forward when the in the future, in the next 20 years, the population of Williamstown is expected to gray even further to make sure that seniors have a place to live that is not just affordable, but also protects their dignity, that acknowledges their lifelong contributions. I’m very the things that I’m hearing about what’s going on there just disgust me. There’s supposed to be a smoke free property, yet they built a smoking shelter on the property next to which you have to walk by. I mean, it’s just it’s a sham from what I understand. So. Can you can you comment about about the. About how seniors are going to figure into the town planning going forward. The town, for example, the 15 year plan. I mean, what what what kind of protections? What kind of. Respect are we going to be giving seniors in going forward?

Andy Hogeland: Well, it sounds like somebody’s complaining to you about Highland Woods or Ferris Field. I haven’t heard those complaints, so I can’t comment on them. So let’s catch up later on if you want, because, you know, I’ve not heard anything like that. So I’d have to get some information to find out how to assess it better. But on your broader question about seniors, anything before I leave that part of it is there there are different housing models in each of them comes with different housing benefits and detriments. We do have a housing authority, which probably also has rules and a tenants association. We have.

Top Left Corner: But it has. It has. It has. No, no, it doesn’t have any effect over the Highland Woods or the proprietors field. I didn’t say it did. There’s. Well, you’re saying there’s a tenants union. There’s no tenants union in William. In Williamstown.

Andy Hogeland: Well, in the Williamstown Housing Authority, not private field. There’s a tennis representative on the board of directors. So they’re represented there. That’s one different that’s a model of how housing works there. The model at Highland Woods Proprietors Field is different because it’s private, as you pointed out. And the model at any kind of other private thing is tenants. They’re kind of subject to a lease or at will. So there are different ways of providing. Houses come with different pluses and minuses on them. In terms of your broader question about seniors, you know, Highland Woods was designed for seniors. That’s kind of the target population to make sure that there’s a place for them. And that’s that’s allowed. And I think we should be happy that that was able to be built based on cooperation of a lot of people. The other thing which I would like your listeners to know about is on this year’s warrant for town meeting, there is an article on this which I initiated and drafted which would provide greater property tax relief to seniors. We have a property tax relief program here which was put in place decades ago. So it’s really outdated and it gives some very limited property tax relief to people over 70 with limited income and limited assets. The proposal, which is on the warrant, would be to lower the eligibility age to 65, increase the limits on assets and on income, and then make all of that tied to automatic increases in the CPI. So this is a way to try to get some relief to to those seniors.

Top Left Corner: I mean, that sounds great. That sounds super. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what the ratio of of seniors who own seniors who rent. I do know that I know a number of people who they place their property in their children’s name long before 65, you know, as a way of protecting it. I think that’s a great thing for those seniors who do own property. Do you have any number of, say, units that this is that this is going to affect in Williamstown, how many potential people this is going to? Impact.

Andy Hogeland: It’s a little bit hard now, under the current strictures of the program, there’s only six people take advantage of it. And this is what the. So the question is, how many more will you get if you lower the age and increase the limits? There is a national survey. The name of which I forget, but there’s a housing needs assessment on the. Affordable Housing Trust website, which contains acres of data, and that says that there are about 76. People in town over the age of 65 who are at or below the poverty level, which is about the level we’re talking about. So that would be another 70 people based on age, but an income. But it doesn’t say anything about what the assets are and doesn’t say whether they actually own a house or not. So the universe seems like it would be fewer than 70 people. But you know what? That’s what the state would let us do. So that’s what I’m proposing we do. That’s the best we can do under the. Wait a.

Top Left Corner: Minute. Wait a minute. I’m sorry. So you’re saying that there’s 76 people at or below the poverty level? Over 65 over 65? I mean, that could be largely accounted for by proprietors Field and Highland Woods. I mean, that could, you know, or and.

Andy Hogeland: Why I’m saying it’s an outside number because it doesn’t tell you because we don’t have data on whether which of those people own a home and which those people have more assets than. Sure.

Top Left Corner: So when you. So you authored this this. This initiative. Yes. And we know that there are six people currently who fall under the they own a house and they’re over 65, but we don’t know.

Top Left Corner: Over 70. But so so we don’t know then how many people between 65 and 70 own a home and would be affected by these. This this change.

Andy Hogeland: Right. But but because we we do have these estimates or numbers on how many people are 65 below poverty level. We know that it can’t be more than that number. Right. Because that number will go down. If you don’t own a home, it will go down if you have more assets than you’re allowed to have.

Top Left Corner: Okay. So but it could also be three people. Right. I mean, it could be three additional people. Who are own a home and our 65 to 70 and who meet the income criteria.

Andy Hogeland: It could be none. It could be three. It could be 50 or 60. Right. And another thing I would caution is. Uh, it’s not clear to me that everybody who’s eligible for any of these kinds of programs actually apply and take advantage of them.

Andy Hogeland: We might have low income seniors who don’t know about it, don’t want to take a handout from the government. So I think all we can do is the best we can, and that’s why people agree with this measure. I agree. It’d be nice to do a lot more, but for this particular avenue, these are the I’m pushing for the lowest age and the higher limits I’m allowed to push for sure.

Top Left Corner: It just it will be interesting to know. And as far as handouts go, I think that most seniors, when they get to that point and if they’re faced with having to stay in their home or sell it so they can pay the their entire life savings to, you know, facility, I think that chances are that the term handout isn’t really going to be isn’t going to apply. Um, you know, the.

Andy Hogeland: Different attitudes about that. I’m just saying, you know, we can’t assume that everybody who’s eligible is actually taking it for whatever reason.

Top Left Corner: I mean, we, you know, we know that there are people who don’t who qualify for SNAP benefits, who don’t don’t sign up for them, too. I mean, there’s plenty of reasons that people don’t don’t do that. And sometimes it’s because they don’t know that they could that they do qualify. So I guess, you know, I don’t I don’t want to say too, too long on the topic of seniors, but I have seen senior centers. I’ve lived in different parts of the country, different parts of the state. I’ve seen a lot of actually senior centers. And there are there are everything from just a little a little shack, a little little cottage that has a couple of tables and a chess board to really impressive facilities with latest state of the art exercise equipment, yoga classes, um, you know, various, you know, continuing education classes. Um, I think that our given, given the senior population that we have here in Williamstown and given the. The fact that it’s going to grow. I feel like the senior center that we have. Could be a bit more a bit more full featured. I mean, for example, it could have.

Andy Hogeland: I disagree because I could be it could be a lot more full feature, not just a bit. I think I think it’s it’s it’s an okay, fine facility. I think we could well use something which is much better than that.

Top Left Corner: Okay. Yeah. I always have to be careful how radical I sound, I guess. But, you know, the. The fact is. Seniors could have. I mean, we could start with things as simple as outdoor. There’s some really cool outdoor exercise equipment that’s it’s a permanent fixture. It helps in stretching, step by step exercises, balanced exercises. You can look it up. There’s some really cool outdoor exercise equipment that there’s room for. There’s room for over there. Certainly right now there is a common room, but there are never any tables and chairs out. So if you go there, there’s like there’s no. You know, unless there’s something going on, you’re not going to be comfortable, you’re not going to feel welcome going in there. I mean, it’s like it’s not like it’s the place that just, you know, people go and hang out. Now, there are you know, there are coffees and breakfasts and, you know, occasional things and speakers, but in terms of a place that you would hang out. I’m not seeing it. I’m just not seeing it. What can we do going forward to maybe take a look at what would improve that situation? Would you be in favor of doing at least a minimal sort of survey of of what features we could add?

Andy Hogeland: Yeah, I think there’s been starting a couple of years ago. There are growing conversations like the ones that you just had about can we do better for senior centers or even just a broader scale community center? Because we have a youth center, which is a really nice facility, but and the senior center, which is, I would say not quite as nice of a facility. So I think it’s a it’s a very good time to well, actually, it’s a bad time to ask a question, but it’s a good question to ask about what can we do to have better facilities. And the timing issue is, of course, we’re paying for a police station and a high school and a fire station. So, you know, coming up with capital funds for things like this, it’s a matter of timing. And I think this particular year is a bad time to pay for anything. But I think and but you know what? These things take years to put together. So starting that process now of analyzing what do we need, what do we want, where would it go? How would we pay for it? Starting those conversations now and I’m all in.

Top Left Corner: That’s good to hear because I turn 55in a couple of months and AARP has been hammering me lately with the the don’t forget you’re going to be eligible now. So I of course, I’m thinking about my own senior my own sunset years there. Um, the last thing I really want to talk about here and I know we’ve gotten a little bit longer than I intended was. The issue of the climate and climate readiness. There are.

Top Left Corner: There is some work being done to assess the readiness. I know that the Berkshire Planning Commission is is doing some work in that area. I’m wondering, though, if we are taking the situation as serious and if we’re looking at as many angles as we should be thinking about, for example, all the people who are living in coastal areas, New York, Boston, who are moving are moving this way. I mean, they have said, I’ve met multiple couples who said after Hurricane Sandy, that was their decision to move to the Berkshires. And I think that if we have another couple of more hurricanes, for example, you’re going to be seeing a lot more influx this way. What is your assessment or just sort of your thoughts on Williamstown’s readiness for the various changes that are going to be coming down the pike due to climate change?

Andy Hogeland: Um, I feel pretty good about them. But the problem is, it’s. It’s such a huge threat which could arrive in various ways. It’s hard to know if we’re doing the right thing. So the town is doing things they’ve done. If you’ve read this a it’s called a municipal vulnerability assessment. They kind of go through all of the ways climate change might affect us. A lot of it’s geared towards roads and sewers and how those things need to be either constructed better or in a different location or culverts and bridges need work. So it’s really a public works view of how climate change would affect us. But it was a comprehensive plan that finished up not that long ago. So I’d encourage you and your listeners to take a look at that to see what the town has for ideas on it. I’m a select board member far from the coast. I can’t really opine too much on what coastal communities should or shouldn’t do. If you’re worried about people leaving coastal cities to move here, that gets us back to the housing discussion again. Where are they going to go and are they going to take all the high end houses and price everybody else out of the market?

Top Left Corner: Yeah, I’m aware of the the vulnerability assessment. And I think it’s it’s woefully inadequate. I really do. I think it does not address so very many of the things of the sort of direct and indirect pile on effects of climate change. I mean, you know, it doesn’t address things like what is going to happen to our local food systems. I mean, what we know right now is that the West Coast and the Midwest have been struggling to produce in the last decade. They’re being hit by droughts just as we are. Of course, they’re hitting a lot harder. They are being hit by torrential rains in the Midwest that are wiping out hundreds of square miles of corn, soybeans, other crops. And it’s driving up food prices. And I think that the pandemic showed us that we can have empty shelves in as little as two months. Right. So we’re not even talking about massive sort of things on a geologic scale as climate change, where we are already having we’ve got a shortage of nursing staff of medical personnel. Climate change is definitely going to drive those numbers even to a more stressed point. We’re talking about things like cooling centers. The heat is going to be going up and up and up. Air conditioning costs are going to be going because the electricity went up 60% last year. It’s going to go up 30% this year. A lot of people are going to choose not to run their air conditioners because they can’t afford it. And those are things like seniors. And right now, there is not a single cooling center, official cooling center other than the police department in Williamstown. So there’s all kinds of things that are. Not even being conceived of that. And I’m just throwing these things out there off the top of my head. Um, I just. I’m wondering if. If maybe we need to do better to look at some of the effects that are not just the size of our culverts, because to me, that is a 90 that is a 20th century way of looking at a real 21st century disaster coming down the pike.

Andy Hogeland: Well, I think the answer to the question, can we do better? The answer to that question is always yes. In almost any context. So, yeah, of course. And I agree. That’s why I said I think the vulnerability assessment is really based on a public works approach to things, which is a part of the story, but absolutely not the whole story. So you give the example of food uncertainty. That’s why we need to be preserving farmland around here and supporting the farmers so that they can grow crops. And that’s why so much of the farmland is preserved. You know, the rural lands just bought ten acres of farmland to keep it as farmland. You know, people seem to be ready to support that because it wasn’t it was particularly suitable for housing anyway, at least not for affordable housing, which is my primary concern. So yeah, I think the town has to do things on an array of issues. The MVP covers some of them, but I agree, not all of them.

Top Left Corner: Yeah, I guess what what gets to me is that Williamstown is so perfectly situated to to mitigate and to plan for. Climate change in ways that that other communities just don’t have the luxury. I mean, we have a fairly good supply of water. We have a you know, we have we still have seasons, four of them at least for now. We have a lot of arable land. We have good quality, good quality land. And we have very an unusually thoughtful population and a population that is willing to work together to get over to get over various crises. I just I want to make sure that we don’t drop the ball. You know, we’re not a coastal community so we don’t have to worry about, you know, the seas, the sea coming and swallowing us up. There’s just all those other indirect things that can, you know, they can add up. Okay, well.

Andy Hogeland: Let’s not let’s not forget things that we are doing. I mean, there have been a couple of rounds of solar panel programs. The town has co sponsored. We just agreed to pay about $1.4 million extra for the fire department so that there could be solar panels on the roof there. There’s a lot of solar panels out at the landfill. So, you know, we’ve been doing parts for a long time. There’s electrical charging stations which are hadn’t been, you know, years ago. Right.

Andy Hogeland: So, no, I think, you know, I, I give us credit for doing what we’re doing. And if you if you want to say, yeah, we should do more, well, of course, you know, we can always do more, but let’s not let’s not pass by the things that people have done and how we’ve actually invested money in things like the solar program, the Charger program and that kind of thing.

Top Left Corner: Oh, for sure. For absolute sure. I tend to I tend to lean toward the doom and gloom and that’s, you know, not always conducive to to recognizing what we’ve what we should celebrate. So I will I’ll work on that. I’ll work on being a bit more of a a bit more of a banner that sort of waves for, for the good stuff because there’s plenty of it. I would like.

Andy Hogeland: Just, you know, there’s plenty of both. Yeah, that’s a reason to be worried and there’s a reason to be proud of what’s happened.

Top Left Corner: Well, let me give you a chance to sort of wrap up. I know I sort of drove this bus here, but I would like to give you an opportunity to let people know why, you know, why should they give you another term? I think personally, you’re you’re a brave man for for wanting to do it. I don’t know how you manage it. It’s a it’s a tough job. But why should the voters send you to that back to that seat for another term?

Andy Hogeland: Guess it kind of goes back to the beginning. I kind of believe in this kind of work. And I feel as though I have worked for this town for a while and the results have been productive. So it matches my personality. I’m interested in the topics, you know, some wisdom I got from someone long time ago was if you want to know what you want to do, try to figure out how do you spend your time? And I spend my time going back to, you know, town hall issues on a regular basis. I feel as though the amount of work I’ve done over the course of a lot of years gives me a lot of more experience than anybody else who’s running. And my particular interest is housing, which I think is one of the biggest issues for for us. I believe in local government. So I’m doing this charter review committee. I wrote the guide to the Select Board, which is available on the website. I did a lot of work on the air audit. I spent hours editing the manual, which I know is not exciting to anybody, but it’s something we needed to do in order to, um, you know, turn the page. When we have this, we have a shared manager arrangement with Adams North Adams. I made sure that the contract had in it they’d be working on diversity, equity and inclusiveness work.

Andy Hogeland: So all that and the other part that we haven’t touched on, which I think is important for people to understand because it’s invisible to them, is that for the last five years being a select board member has allowed me to be take on roles in two statewide organizations, which means I can advocate for our interest in Boston. This year I’m president of the Massachusetts Select Board Association. Like the name says it all, it’s the Association of Select Boards. And for several years I’ve been a member of the Governor’s Local Government Advisory Commission. And again, the name says it all. It’s a commission that advise the governor and local government governor on local government issues. And so for these, we meet with the lieutenant governor and cabinet officials for most months of the year, and I’ve used these positions to speak up for rural towns like Williamstown and for towns like us, like throughout the state. And these include topics like asking for more rural school aid because we are not funded adequately for that. So that’s where Mount Greylock I want. More transportation funding for regional schools like Mount Greylock. More funding for local road projects in this Chapter 90 program, which needs needs fixing. Part of the problem with that program is the formula is really biased towards communities with large populations and large jobs. So over the course of time that formula has been disadvantaging small towns like ours.

Andy Hogeland: So I’ve advocated for that for me to be changed. And a recent success is we’ve been advocating for several years for the creation of a director of rural affairs, which would be a point person in the administration to look out for small towns like us and just about to go. They agreed they would do that. So the job is not filled yet, but this would be someone who would look at state programs to make sure they’re fair to small towns. When you develop new programs, make sure they’re fair. Look at the formulas, you know, a variety of issues. It’s a big job for somebody. So I hope they find a competent person to do it. But for me, I like doing the local work. But this has given me the chance to do statewide work, which actually help our local towns, a lot of other local towns. So if I get reelected, of course I can continue to do both of those, serve directly, work on love on the Selectboard, but also using these other positions to do things for us and towns like us across the state. So it’s I feel really lucky to have been able to grow into this other universe. I think most people leave town don’t even know what I do, but it’s been actually a lot of time on it.

Top Left Corner: Well, clearly it takes a lot of dedication and a lot of hours. I don’t think anybody who doesn’t follow civic life understands just the kind of commitment and the kind of sacrifice, frankly, that that officials make. And so I know that a lot of people do, myself included, appreciate all that you’ve done so far. Where can people go to find out? Do you have a Facebook page? Do you have anything?

Andy Hogeland: There is a Facebook page under my name. I just I’ve never been on Facebook until like five days ago. So there’s not much there. There’s a there’s a two page flier which talks about me. The more informative place to go is Andy hoagland.com catchy title. I’m sure you appreciate that I do and that has there’s there’s ten parts to that which kind of go through everything I’m doing and doing so it includes housing good government transportation which you and I didn’t get a chance to really talk about.

Top Left Corner: Could spend the entire we could spend the entire hour on transportation. You and I. I’m sure you and I have similar feelings about it.

Andy Hogeland: I did a lot of work at the Spruces. I advocated persistently for the bike path, which is there. Happily, I was on another governor’s commission on the Future of Transportation where I was advocating for all kinds of things for Western Mass. There’s a northern tier rail service. I’m not on the committee, but I’m in the room. Yeah. Are you incur them to try to get rail passenger rail service through Greenfield and North Adams.

Top Left Corner: So that would be something else. Yeah.

Andy Hogeland: Well it’s it’s not a pipe dream and I think there’s a lot of attention being paid to the east west Rail, which will go from Springfield to Pittsfield. And that’s that’s great. But that’s billions of dollars in many, many years. I think we get rail service to North Adams in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the expense. Right. It wouldn’t be high speed, but you could get to Boston in a decent amount of time and have Wi-Fi on the train while you go. So I’m in favor of that one, but it’s really competing with East West Rail and that’s kind of a problem for me.

Top Left Corner: No, I think look, being able to like, you know, I drive in Boston, I don’t love it, but I can tell you that there are there are people who would be happy to spend, say, three hours on the train to go to Boston now that a lot of people are working in hybrid positions, they could work in Boston like three days a week and then work at home two days a week. And that would do worlds of good for our economy here because people would then be able to basically bring out-of-town money back to the to the area.

Andy Hogeland: Exactly. And part of my pitch to them is, well, first of all, it’s not just Western Mass. It’s also serves southern Vermont and southern New Hampshire. Right? So the ridership numbers need to pull in those populations. And it looked like in the first round they weren’t going to do that. The map just kind of stopped with the mass was the border. So that’s one thing. And the job commuting thing you talk about, you’re totally right. The other thing is, because we’re partly a tourist economy, the train service needs to be tweaked around. When will people want to come visit us?

Andy Hogeland: At Mass MoCA. Or the clerk or the theater festival or whatever else we have going on out here. Um, know they need to look at schedules, which would do kind of like what the brochure flier is doing. Yeah. A train not designed for commuting business purposes, but for entertainment purposes, for people to come here and for us to go to Boston for that. So yeah, it’s going to be a multi year thing and who knows where it’s going to go. But I like that you probably picked up. I like working on these issues. Know this is not for me, a job where I sit in a boardroom for 90 minutes once or twice a month. This is a lot of hours outside there.

Speaker3: No, and and and.

Top Left Corner: And I and I hope that people understand that they that their energies are needed. I mean, it isn’t just, you know, it isn’t just money that you that you, you know, are voting, you know, giving money to a campaign or voting. It’s sometimes it’s sometimes showing up at meetings, sometimes it’s writing letters, sometimes it is just spreading the word. I mean, honestly, just spreading the word, for example, about, you know, about, you know, commuter rail, commuter rail. But, you know, rail service, you know, people they don’t know. I talk to people all the time. They don’t even know what was achieved. You know, that in the area that that has, you know, like, for example, you know, the we’ve got train service to Pittsfield. It’s not great. But you know, some people don’t even realize that you can take a train down to the city. And so I feel like people need to just sort of be. They need to be cheerleaders for their own for their own area, because that is what keeps the enthusiasm going to work on the next project and the next project and the next project.

Andy Hogeland: I’m totally with you on that. That’s why I do this work. That’s why I love the state work, because it allows me to influence things in a broader scale than just within Northern Berkshires. So that’s good for me. Good for the town, I think, as well.

Top Left Corner: Well, I’m going to make sure I have your address, your web address in the show notes for this episode. Andy, I want to thank you so much for all this time. I think we went way over, but I appreciate it. And as I said, all my candidate guests. Good luck. And and we’ll talk to you after the election.

Andy Hogeland: I’m to just remind them of the elections on Tuesday May 9th.

Top Left Corner: All righty. Hey, Andy, have a good weekend. Take care.

Andy Hogeland: Take care. Bye.

(Rough Transcript!)

We speak with Andrea Belair, co-owner of Belltower Records, in the NORAD Mill, North Adams

Hours:
Saturday: 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Sunday: 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Monday: Closed
Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Thursday: 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Friday: 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Phone: (413) 398-5569

Unknown Liberty, Grawlixes, Red Herrings

Unknown Liberty, Grawlixes, and Red Herrings play at the shop!
7:00 p.m. , $10, BYO

Greylock Glass: And with me on the line is Andrea Belair, co owner of Belltower Records. Andrea, it has been too long that we’ve been waiting to get you on. Thanks so much for joining us on the Top Left Corner.

Andrea Belair: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Greylock Glass: So let’s start with some of the basics before we get into the the juicy what’s coming up. Talk to us. You’re over at NORAD Mill. You’ve been there for how long?

Andrea Belair: About four and a half years, I think, or pretty close to five years, it seems.

Greylock Glass: Yeah, it seems like it’s been a while now. It has been. Were you ever were you did you have a place before that or is this the first shop of its kind that you and Wes have run?

Andrea Belair: Oh, we this is the first shop of its kind that we ran together. We actually it was an existing business before, um, Toonerville Trolley was located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Toonerville was around for about 40 years. So. So we took it on when the owner sort of retired and we purchased it from him and moved it a little bit over to North Adams and so, and changed it to Bell Tower. So Bell Tower Records. Mhm.

Greylock Glass: Now vinyl is a lot heavier to move than mp3’s. You actually have to put them in sturdy boxes and ship them over there. And I’ve moved my own record collection a number of times and I really don’t want to move it too often. How much of what you carry is vinyl.

Andrea Belair: Uh, probably around. Well, most of it’s vinyl. I mean, 85 to 80 5 to 90%. And it’s definitely, yeah. Heavy to move. It’s not something that’s very fun to do.

Greylock Glass: So no, but.

Andrea Belair: We have, we’ve moved a couple times and it’s, it’s never a but it is something you get better at planning.

Greylock Glass: I’m sure. I’m sure. Now here’s here’s the obvious question. You know, it’s 2023. And while it is certainly the case that vinyl has made a comeback in terms of sort of specialty printings pressings, you’ll have somebody who puts out a, you know, their their CD, but then they have a limited edition vinyl. But it’s not a huge market. What made you to decide that this was the time was right for for literal platters that you drop the needle on?

Andrea Belair: Well, we didn’t really it wasn’t necessarily our choosing timing. I mean, we had I had seen that Toonerville was going to be up for sale and we had sort of wanted to move back to western Massachusetts area. We were in New Haven, Connecticut, and, um, I’d been, you know, sort of missing the mountains and everything. I am from Western Mass originally. So and I wanted to be a little bit closer to family, that sort of thing. And so it just seemed like kind of a good time. I also was moving up for a job and not too far away, so we were thinking it might be just timely there. But both Wes and I have always sort of listened to vinyl, whether or not it was popular or, you know, um, it’s not something that necessarily they’re like people who collect it or people who listen to it. Um, probably have. For a long time, we were in the music community. We were touring, you know, and performing. So, so it was sort of always a part of something we did or were involved in. So it seemed like a natural extension. So it wasn’t really necessarily about, um, about whether or not it would do well. I mean, obviously we would hope that it would do okay. But, but yeah.

Greylock Glass: Well, let me ask you this. Now I have my own personal feelings and I won’t say what side of the argument they fall on, but there are people who claim that vinyl, if you have a pristine, you know, vinyl with no scratches, no scuffs, and you have a quality needle and quality sound system, that vinyl is a much warmer, richer sound. Do you believe that to be the case? And if so, why do you suppose that is?

Andrea Belair: Well, I mean, there can be a lot there are, you know, audio files or people who have a really quality stereo system. Um. And, you know, keep everything in pristine condition and that sort of what they do. And you really have to have sort of the means to be able to keep things in that condition and to, you know, we’ve moved a bunch. Our stereo systems are good, you know, but they they’re not the best. And for me, I. Prefer to have it as a delivery of content. You know, like I’m happy with a less expensive repress of something than like, the original, you know, because I’m probably going to destroy the original or it’s probably I just wouldn’t, you know, not destroy it, but it’s it would be a little harder. But in terms of sound, I do think that it that there is a difference in sound between vinyl and maybe something like Spotify or a MP3 streaming, right? For sure. I even I worked at a school and I even brought in a record player and a lot of the students were like amazed They’d never heard it, heard an album they love on a record before. And they were like, Wow. The difference I mean, there is a difference, you know.

Greylock Glass: I’ve always I’ve always thought so to be, you know, to, you know, I’ll come right out and admit that that has been my my feeling for a long time. And I know the audio files will give you technical explanations of why, as you said, an MP3 at 128kB per second, which is about what you get over the radio. It’s just not as it doesn’t have as full a range. That’s what I’ve been told anyway. And, and I think.

Andrea Belair: It’s the whole tactile experience too. I mean, would you prefer reading a book with pages and turning a page or, you know. Reading it on your phone. A book on your phone. Like it’s. Yeah, I can’t. I mean, there are a bunch of things that sort of can be applied to the experience. You know.

Greylock Glass: It’s really almost a ritual.

Andrea Belair: Yeah.

Greylock Glass: You know, you you get it out and you put it on the turntable and you you sort of inspect it. If you’ve got a record cleaner, you know, you let that roll a couple of couple of rotations and then you very carefully. Yeah, it’s almost like a sort of an incantation or some sort of magic magic act.

Andrea Belair: Yeah, but I would assume that something to do with the groove of the vinyl to actually. There’s a there is a difference in the sound that it creates. But who knows how much you can really tell?

Greylock Glass: Well, even if I’m even if I’m fooling myself, I’ll go on believing that because, yeah, I’m a curmudgeon and I like your I like your attitude that you you’re using the, the record to to play it. I mean you’re it is to be used just the way people did in 19 you know 50, 60, 70 into the 80 seconds. They just that was like you said, the delivery, the content delivery device I had I’ll admit I was kind of obsessive about my record collection. And I would buy Chrome like Maxell. I think it was Maxell Xl2 or Xl2 SS or something. And I would record I would play the record only once, and that was to record it. And then I wouldn’t touch the record again. And so I had a lot of very expensive, you know, high quality cassette tapes. And of course that was in the days when you could actually count on having a cassette player handy or we.

Andrea Belair: Love I love cassette cassette tapes myself, you know, my handy.

Greylock Glass: Is anything.

Andrea Belair: And so they’re durable. They’re like not not that expensive to produce I. Wish wish that cassette players would. And, you know, a lot of cassette players do hold up, you know.

Greylock Glass: Yeah. And when you make somebody a mix tape and you spend hours picking out just the right songs to follow one after the other, it’s I think it’s there’s more that you put into it than just slapping a Spotify playlist together although that’s nice to have too. But you know when you actually hand somebody a cassette tape and say, I recorded this for you.

Andrea Belair: Oh well of course.

Greylock Glass: Yeah. So the. The the shop and and I’ve been it and in it and it’s a cozy shop. It’s a very it’s got a really nice vibe. It’s got a very sort of retro vibe which I love. Of course. It kind of has to, I suppose, with, with vinyl all over the place. But what, what made you decide that the treadmill was a good place and has it worked out?

Andrea Belair: Well, I mean, again, it was just one of those things. They were under construction or they were undergoing construction. We, um, you know, took a look at the space. It had these really nice high ceilings and everything. And at the time. We moved. We were first on the third floor, now we’re on the first floor. But it was sort of under renovation. But you could see what they were doing on the floors that they’d already completed. And it looked really beautiful. And they have been great. You know, there are like, for example, restrooms. There’s like now there’s a cafe right there. So, um, it’s sort of very self-contained and very pleasant that way. And we have been lucky too, because sometimes we do have shows and everything there. We can even have them outside. So the courtyard space is really great to have shows. It’s really awesome when it’s warm enough or weather permitting.

Greylock Glass: So Right, right. No, that’s that’s it is a it is a an under-visited location. I think. I think more people need to just go in there and just sort of check out all the different shops. And like you said, the cafe there is now there. Um, I. I just find it to be a really, you know, a very welcoming space, I guess, is how I’d put it. Um, yeah. So the the. Shows since you broached that subject, which is kind of where I wanted to go. The shows have obviously started again now that people are sort of getting together for events. More or less. You really picked kind of a rough time to get started. I mean, it was before the pandemic, but not much before. So did you. Did you really have to kind of make decisions about whether or not you could keep it going or or did you manage to have enough sort of a trickle of of business coming in during the pandemic?

Andrea Belair: Oh, we were fine during the pandemic. We actually had kind of a backlog of what we did. We had to close, of course, the store, the shop location for a while, but we did find online, um, and West was actually delivering a little bit to doing, delivering to people locally in North Adams, which was kind of fun. But for him I think he kind of enjoyed, you know, with sort of contactless. Delivery, however you call it. But we did. We actually had a backlog of things like posters and everything that we had were part of what we purchased from Toonerville. Um, and so we, we sold a lot of that because it had just sort of been moving with us and we were keeping it in our basement in storage, these rolled up posters, some of which were really amazing, Um, but we’d never really been able to go through it. So we did actually, we were able to go through a lot of that back stock and sort of sell it online. Nice. I think probably, yeah. I mean, for better or worse, people were probably also stuck in their homes and like thinking about what to put on their walls. So, you know, it helped a little bit. I mean, it’s not the same at all, but. You know, we could have stuff at home like that.

Greylock Glass: Well, I mean, let’s face it. We a lot of us spend a lot more time at home than we ever had. And we’re listening to music and yeah, we’re looking and saying, well, yeah, you know, that wall. I didn’t really notice it because I haven’t been here much, but it’s looking a little bare. It could use something. So yeah, I can totally see how, you know, obviously nobody, nobody wants the pandemic to return for any reason, but there are certain businesses, I suppose, that are going to be less immediately impacted. The shows, of course. How long has it been since you’ve been doing shows again?

Andrea Belair: Um, well, let’s see. When we had the first one, I know when we first started having them again, um, we were having them only out exclusively outdoors for a while. We were requiring even masks and proof of vaccination if they were indoors. And sometimes that, um, we were doing that. But also that was a lot of times at the specific request of the musicians or people that were coming to the shows, they might have had some immune system issues. Sure. So sometimes that was actually a specific request and we just made sure that we actually did that to try to protect everyone attending. Um, but I don’t even remember when we started having them again. And, and we did require masks for a while. Now it’s optional. Um, but um, so yeah, I don’t remember specifically when they, when we started having them again.

Greylock Glass: Right. So it sounds like you sort of gradually, you know, getting back to, to a normal, a normal kind of. Yeah. You know, presentation. Now you, um, you said that you are, you and Wes are musicians as well. What is your history there and have you been playing?

Andrea Belair: Oh, I mean, I am not really actively playing now. Wes is in a band and. Right. And he it’s a, you know, they perform, they’re called Luxor Rentals. So, um, yeah. And he sometimes he plays mostly bass guitar. Um. But yeah, I’m not actively performing anything right now, but we both have experience as like touring and everything, so we sort of. Like to support that. Sure. Absolutely.

Greylock Glass: But yeah. What what kind of what is what is your I mean, obviously you’ve got a record, so you probably have plenty of genres that you love. But if you’re looking to cue up a record on a Friday night, you’re feeling kind of festive. What’s what’s your genre? What do you reach for?

Andrea Belair: Oh, it’s really hard. That’s really hard to say because for me it’s so it depends so much on like the season, my general emotion, you know, Friday night. I do. Um. I don’t know. A lot of times to what I really like to do is listen to something new. Right. So it’s hard to pin it down. Um. Because I’ll find myself listening to something that. That just comes across. I do listen to a lot of new artists on Bandcamp, you know. Um, so if there’s a new collaboration I was just looking at, I was just listening to one today. Tashi Dorji You know, these a lot of times it tends to be experimental, but on a Friday night. It might be more celebratory. It’s so hard to say. I knew it.

Greylock Glass: Was. I knew it was going to be an almost impossible question to answer. I should have.

Andrea Belair: Thought that that was coming and prepared.

Greylock Glass: More for it. No, I mean, the answer is you love music and and, you know, just like, you know, radio free Berkshires. I only have two shows that are new music shows that are genre based and even they are pretty loose. One of them, the Cornbread Cafe, is American Roots music, and that’s everything from gospel to blues to Dixieland to you name it. It’s if it’s in that that large tent of American roots music, you’re going to hear it. And indecent exposure is has been although I have to I have to narrow that down because it’s been everything from world music to experimental, you know, sort of, you know, noise noise, which is, you know, sometimes you’ll hear some experimental stuff, you know, right on the heels of some reggae, which does sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Yeah. But so it’s one of those things. I get it. I, I can’t really be pinned down hour by hour even sometimes what I’m in the mood for.

Andrea Belair: Yeah, well, a lot of times too, we get, like, some interesting collection that walks in and I’m like, That sounds really cool. Let me explore that. I want to listen to some of those artists like, so sometimes it’s not just internal circumstances, it’s just external something, you know?

Greylock Glass: I get it. Yeah.

Andrea Belair: Or that I heard I overheard in a shop that reminded me like, Oh yeah, I want to hear, you know.

Greylock Glass: So, yeah, no, I imagine it must be even kind of tough some days because you’ve got so many choices. Well, let’s switch gears and let’s talk about that live music you’ve got there. Go back to that, to that gear. You’ve got live music. You’ve got some shows coming up and they sound really great and and such a breath of fresh air. And now that people it is I think it’s is it spring finally does it seem like maybe has it.

Andrea Belair: I think technically it’s spring.

Greylock Glass: Technically I don’t know. Yeah it’s still. But the weather is getting a little warmer. People are starting to think about going outside. Certainly they’re going to want to be seeing shows in the courtyard whenever they can. Why don’t you give us a rundown of what you’ve got coming up? And we will include those dates in the show notes to this episode.

Andrea Belair: Sure. Well, we have really we’ve been actually doing a few really cool collaborations. Um, actually, April 22nd, which is a record store day, we’ll have it just happens to be Record Store Day. We have a show, um, that’s going to be in our shop, so in store and it’s a punk show. It’s with unknown liberty. Grawlix is there and they’re touring. They’re from upstate New York. I think the Hudson Valley and Albany region. And they’ll be playing with red herrings which who are based out of Western Mass. And so that’ll be a punk show. That’ll be really cool. Um, that’ll be in the shop May 6th. We actually are having one at a show at a chapel, the Stone Chapel at 39 Commercial Street in Adams, Massachusetts. Uh, so it’s being run there. Um, it’s the promoter we’re sort of working with is called they’re calling it the Dusk Chapel. Okay. So and that’s at that this really awesome stone church. It was Saint Mark’s Church in Adams, Massachusetts. And it’s really an amazing space to be able to host a show. So that’ll be sort of punk too. But more gothy or, you know, sort of we’ve been putting some shows there that are really interesting to sort of go.

Andrea Belair: It’ll have sort of more of a dark ish vibe that’s with a mirrored hell out of Boston, which Slap, which is a band out of New York City and Clock Serum, who’s a musician out of Amherst, Massachusetts. So that’ll be really exciting. Um, that’s May 6th. And then after that we have more. Yeah, hopefully in the courtyard we have some really cool ones. Josephine Foster and Grace Smith, actually. Stella Cola. Yeah. We’ll be playing May 13th. Um, and that I think will try to have outside. We’ll see how the weather is. So it’s one of those things. Sure. Um, we’ll be collaborating with the Clark Art Institute again to be doing regular shows there. And so we’ll be doing those outside at the Londoner Center at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, you know, very good. And yeah, so definitely I’ve been trying to keep these things updated on our website and. And on social media, and the clerk has been putting them as they go along. So, yeah.

Greylock Glass: And we’re going to make sure that they are in The Greylock Glass Events calendar. Yeah. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that they can add events themselves. I pay for this pro version of a calendar where people can add events themselves. I obviously have to approve them because naughty little people will do naughty little things on my calendar if I don’t keep an eye on them. But yeah, it’s you can add events. It’s perfectly completely free and I’ll make sure that we get these these dates on there as well. Andrea What’s the secret to putting on a good show?

Andrea Belair: I don’t know if there was a secret. I mean, I think since it’s helpful, like Wes and I were touring musicians, so sometimes, like I said, so sometimes. I don’t know that I try to be a good host because I know that touring can be hard. You know, so I try to like, give food, but I don’t know how much it helps, but I know that like it was always when we were touring. You can be really tired and really, you know, moving equipment in all day, driving, you know, 13 hours and then have to play a show. So like it can be really helpful to have someone say, here’s a. A nice, comfortable place to sleep or I don’t know. I mean, a lot of it’s hosting, but putting on a good show. I mean, we try to have a good vibe. We definitely try to have a diverse range of shows, like a lot of different kinds of music, but make people feel comfortable and welcome, you know? Yeah, if people can’t afford to pay, we have a small cover, but if they can’t afford to pay, we’re not going to say you can’t come in, you know, or whatever. But.

Greylock Glass: Well, that that sounds like actually a pretty good recipe. I know I have with different bands walked into venues that really sucked at being good hosts and you kind of wonder why they’re even in the business. And I walked into other places where the hospitality was was remarkable. And I’m like, Wow, you like, really care about the musicians. I know that’s one of the reasons I was really hoping that in North Adams that Halo would actually take off because they had I don’t know if they ever finished renovating it, but they had a green room upstairs, which was a really nice sort of lounge area. And they also had like a little apartment. So if the band or artist didn’t have a place or maybe couldn’t afford a place, they could stash them upstairs. And and that would have been, you know, the sort of hospitality that that, you know, you’re talking about making sure they felt welcome and so forth. But obviously, you’re one of the only games in town now because there’s not a lot of venues locally.

Andrea Belair: I know. Yeah, we’ve heard that a lot, you know, So that’s because it is sort of work to have these shows and everything. Um, but it’s worth it and we want to keep doing it. But yeah, we’ve definitely heard people say there’s really nowhere to play. There aren’t a lot of spaces in the Berkshires even so, or maybe at least not the northern.

Greylock Glass: Not south South County. If you want to hear like folky music, there’s all of that. I mean, you can get that. I mean, you can get that everywhere from the lion’s den at, you know, the Red Lion Inn to the barn or the Egremont barn to race Brook Lodge. There’s a ton of places in South County, but it’s a certain crowd and it’s yeah, you know, and it’s not a bad crowd. I mean, some great musicians play there, but it’s a certain crowd, you know, Not a lot of punk, not a lot of experimental. It was really now, I would say in South County, um, probably the foundry in West Stockbridge is, is the only thing that comes close to what you’re doing. And I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it’s it’s a fantastic venue. It’s a beleaguered venue because the town is stupid and doesn’t want to make it easy on on Amy Brentano who runs that. Um, but if you get a chance to go down there, please make sure you do because they I think, I think you and Amy would get along. You certainly have. Okay. Yeah. You have very similar outlooks on on how to treat the musicians that are coming into your space because she she likes to make them feel welcome as well. Um, so you’ve got some great shows coming up. Um, do me a favor. Tell me you said you’re still doing online sales, right? It’s not over because the pandemic, you’re still doing them, right?

Andrea Belair: Oh, yeah. Well, we we lift a lot of our stuff online anyway. So.

Greylock Glass: Nice. What’s. What’s the address? Where do you. Is it your website or, or do you use it on our website.

Andrea Belair: We we put a lot of stuff on discogs. Our username is tuner t o r that’s inherited from toonerville trolley. So and so. Yeah, we list a lot of stuff on there. Um, if you can’t come in. Yeah. Well we also have A0I should mention we also have a label Bandcamp, half a million records that we press and tapes we, you know, and stuff keep that’s where we post it. But yeah, all of that is available on our website too. We have links, but half a million on our Bandcamp is our label site. So we do have a little label of our own.

Greylock Glass: Nice. See, I knew that it would just keep unfolding and unfolding and unfolding.

Andrea Belair: Yeah, I almost forgot that. And that’s important.

Greylock Glass: No, and that’s great. And I think the. Well, I should probably talk to you off the air. I was actually considering there’s a space in North Adams that was it was perfect because it used to have four studios, soundproofed studios and it’s available for sale for purchase. And I would love to buy it and do a recording studio there. Oh yeah, because we don’t really have much in this area either for recording studios.

Speaker3: Yeah.

Andrea Belair: And solid sound and stuff. You get a lot of mass. You get a lot of people coming through that potentially could, you know, use that space. Yeah.

Greylock Glass: Well, I you know, I just keep rolling and rolling the dice when I see that the Powerball is up above 500 million. You know, I don’t bother playing if it’s less than 500 million because I could spend that in a weekend. But. Okay. Well, but but good luck. Right. No, the I think that there is a true hunger for local music for more venues, different kinds of venues. And I’m just not sure what the obstacles are. Do you have any thoughts on on why it’s so hard to keep the venues open when so many people say that they want to go out to see music?

Andrea Belair: Well, as a yeah, as a venue. I mean, I don’t know, but there’s a lot that goes into it. Um, and it doesn’t we don’t charge much because all the money goes to the musicians when we have a show, you know. So, um, so it’s a lot of work and it’s we don’t take home anything. So, um, that would be hard for people to do, especially if they’re trying to rent, to rent a venue for a, a venue, you know?

Greylock Glass: Right, right.

Andrea Belair: A lot with licensing, you know, there are always concerns, noise concerns in areas that have, you know, a lot of these things. Um, if you have people, you know, if the community isn’t necessarily welcoming either some of the spaces people don’t want people coming in so to. Or they might feel private about their face and they don’t want loud noise and everything nearby. And that’s sort of understandable, you know.

Speaker3: Well, but.

Greylock Glass: West Stockbridge is is just that way. They have determined that they have to that Amy has to keep any events in the in the foundry under a ridiculously low threshold of decibels. Basically, I mean, it’s insane. And she. She’s allowed to do it to continue doing shows. But, you know, the community is not it doesn’t get the the fact that this is culture, too. Sure, it might not be the music that you listen to, but, you know, people are coming in and they’re paying to see it. And when they show up, they come to the restaurants, they get gas, they go shopping, they hit you know, they hit the little cutesy boutiques on on Main Street. And it brings it brings income in. And I sometimes forget or I sometimes think that they forget that, you know, the people were coming in to see music. They do other things, too. And it’s it’s a driver of an economy, just like theater, just like art. Just like dance. Um, so that’s my little soapbox that I get up on pretty regularly there. No, for sure. And I’m sure the people of West Stockbridge probably will run me out of town on a rail if they catch me there. But whatever. Um, the. So the. We didn’t say it, but the web address for Bell Tower Records is actually Bell Tower RECs. And spell that for me.

Andrea Belair: Blt o w e. Rr x.com.

Greylock Glass: X.com. And we’ll have a link. Yeah, we’ll have a link to the. To that in the show notes. But what we’re going to do is. We are going to try to get at least one of the musicians that you’re going to have in the next, well, really month here or Yeah, a little over a month. We’re going to try to get them on the horn as well and see what they have to say about their their shows coming up and what we hope to do. And I guess I’m announcing this for the first time is the our radio or online streaming radio component, Radio Free Berkshires is going to be starting a show. And I’m not sure what night it’s going to be, but it’s going to be only local musicians and it’s going to be if we can find an hour of local music to to put together, it’ll be an hour and that can be. That can be Massachusetts anywhere in Massachusetts or 100 mile radius. So that would that would include Albany. That would include certainly up into Vermont, down pretty much to even into the Connecticut border and and certainly the Hudson Valley.

Greylock Glass: So we’re going to be trying to get as much local music here. And that way people can hear these things. And when I can get them on the show before they’re here playing at Bell Tower Records, then people can get to sample what they what they sound like and and and hear their band’s story as well. So I’m looking forward to promoting some of your, your favorites. So if you have any favorite bands in the area, you just let me know and we’ll get in touch with them. Andrew it has been such a pleasure and I thank you so much for what you’re doing. I know running a small business is not an easy feat, and when you have your heart into it the way you and Wes do, I think that that is the sort of that’s the sort of endeavor that the town that the area really needs to get behind. So I’m really hoping that this is a continuous success and anything that Greylock Glass can do to help out, we definitely will.

Andrea Belair: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Greylock Glass: All right. Well, I’ll see you at that event and I’ll send you a link when the show is live. Till then, have a great week and stay warm.

Speaker3: You, too.

Greylock Glass: Thank you. Thanks.

Andrea Belair: Bye bye.