Boulder Weekly 12.31.20 by Boulder Weekly

F R E E E v e r y T h u r s d a y F o r 2 6 Ye a r s / w w w. b o u l d e r w e e k l y. c o m / D e c . 3 1 - J a n 6 , 2 0 2 1

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essay:

We can discover the wonders of nature, rolling in the rushes down by the riverside by Stew Sallo, the Deadhead Cyclist

Stones of remembrance by Angela K. Evans

Composing music on the computer isn’t as easy as it looks, but maybe it’s easier than it ought to be by Dave Kirby

Swimming with whale sharks by Betsy Welch

That ain’t gospel by Caitlin Rockett

A food writer without a sense of taste is not a thing to be by Matt Cortina

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7th annual essay issue: A note from Matt Cortina, editor Letters: Signed, sealed, delivered, your views Savage Love: Lesbian drama Astrology: by Rob Brezsny Film: Top picks for a year like no other Weed Between the Lines: Feds crack down on bunk CBD claims

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DECEMBER 31, 2020

Publisher, Fran Zankowski Editor, Matt Cortina Circulation Manager, Cal Winn EDITORIAL Senior Editor, Angela K. Evans Arts and Culture Editor, Caitlin Rockett Contributing Writers, Peter Alexander, Dave Anderson, Emma Athena, Will Brendza, Rob Brezsny, Michael J. Casey, Sarah Haas, Jim Hightower, Dave Kirby, John Lehndorff, Rico Moore, Amanda Moutinho, Katie Rhodes, Leland Rucker, Dan Savage, Alan Sculley, Ryan Syrek, Christi Turner, Betsy Welch, Tom Winter, Gary Zeidner SALES AND MARKETING Market Development Manager, Kellie Robinson Account Executives, Matthew Fischer, Sami Wainscott Advertising Coordinator, Corey Basciano Mrs. Boulder Weekly, Mari Nevar PRODUCTION Art Director, Susan France Senior Graphic Designer, Mark Goodman Graphic Designer, Daisy Bauer CIRCULATION TEAM Dave Hastie, Dan Hill, George LaRoe, Jeffrey Lohrius, Elizabeth Ouslie, Rick Slama BUSINESS OFFICE Bookkeeper, Regina Campanella Founder/CEO, Stewart Sallo Editor-at-Large, Joel Dyer

December 31, 2020 Volume XXVIII, Number 20 As Boulder County's only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism and thought-provoking opinion writing. Free every Thursday since 1993, the Weekly also offers the county's most comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. Read the print version, or visit boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you're interested in writing for the paper, please send queries to: editorial@ boulderweekly.com. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper.

690 South Lashley Lane, Boulder, CO, 80305 p 303.494.5511 f 303.494.2585 editorial@boulderweekly.com www.boulderweekly.com Boulder Weekly is published every Thursday. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. © 2020 Boulder Weekly, Inc., all rights reserved.

Boulder Weekly welcomes your correspondence via email (letters@ boulderweekly.com) or the comments section of our website at www.boulderweekly.com. Preference will be given to short letters (under 300 words) that deal with recent stories or local issues, and letters may be edited for style, length and libel. Letters should include your name, address and telephone number for verification. We do not publish anonymous letters or those signed with pseudonyms. Letters become the property of Boulder Weekly and will be published on our website.

Seventh annual essay issue very year around this time, Boulder Weekly publishes a collection of essays written by the people — editors, publishers, contributors — who put out the paper every week. It’s a chance for us to reflect after another year of life; and, well, this was quite a year. In the six essay issues we published before this year, we hadn’t experienced a universally foundation-changing event like COVID-19. For us, and surely for you, the pandemic has challenged us inside and out in almost every aspect of our lives. Because of this event’s outsize impact on our lives, you’re liable to read a bit about it in some of this year’s essays. Consider it a time capsule that you may want to bury before revisiting it in, say, 50 years. But pandemic be damned, life went on anyway this year, and so this is not exclusively a collection of

coronavirus stories. We hope the essays in this issue bring you some perspective, levity, a chance to escape, moments for reflection and, more than anything, enjoyment as we head into a new year. A year, we hope, that is much better for everyone. It has to be, right? As a media organization, we take pride in the work we do to look outward into our community and share stories about others and about the issues that matter to people beyond the walls of our office (and virtual walls of our Zoom room). We appreciate you for indulging us as we take this one week to look inside and share what we see, and for checking out the work we do every other week of the year. Thanks, reader, for toughing out 2020 with us. We’ll see you in 2021. — Matt Cortina, Editor

DECEMBER 31, 2020

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What to do? Contact lawmakers Excellent suggestions for meaningful ways to beat pandemic boredom. (Re: “What to do when there’s ‘nothing’ to do,” Events, Dec. 17.) I would add a suggestion to contact your members of Congress to continue the dialogue of creating a safer and more equitable America. The recently past pandemic relief package is a down payment on this work, created by a bipartisan group. Thanking your representative and senators for this relief and the bipartisan work, while reminding them it is only a beginning, and continuing to contact them as time goes on will help make our country an equitable place for all. Willie Dickerson/via internet

GOP 2.0 Even though Trump has been defeated, there is still no home for Republicans committed to representative government, truth and the rule of law, nor is one likely to emerge anytime soon. So what’s next for Republicans who reject their party’s attempts to incinerate the Constitution and overthrow a free and fair election in the service of one man’s authoritarian power grabs? I wish I could tell you that the future looks bright. I wish I could tell you that with Trump no longer in power that they will return to their roots as being the Party of Lincoln, Reagan or even John McCain. While Trump may be temporarily vanquished, rest assured that he is still a kingmaker actively plotting his metaphorical escape from Elba Island for one last crack at taking over the world. For decades, Republicans rejected the science of climate change due to political inconvenience and now reject that their candidate lost the election. In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like. What Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do, whether it’s ignore a deadly disease or stay in power despite the voters’ verdict. Do you think these people are going to become more reasonable once Biden takes office? Not on your life. Over the next four years the Republican Party will be a roiling BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

cauldron of derangement, always skating the line that separates the merely clownish from the dangerous and even violent. The Tea Party that formed in the early days of the Obama administration was unruly and potentially threatening to Republican officeholders, since it produced primary challenges from the right that ousted some established members of Congress. The reaction of just about every Republican was to try to ride the Tea Party tiger without getting eaten. How will that process play out this time? Every force on the right will push it in the direction of being crazier. As extreme as the Tea Party was, it was nothing compared to the QAnon-inflected hysteria that now grips the GOP. Tea Partiers believed that Obama was born in Kenya; significant parts of today’s Republican Party believe that Obama and other Democrats are Satan-worshiping, child-sex-trafficking pedophilic cannibals. While 2020 saw the party nominate a bunch of QAnon supporters, 2022 could see a wave of these nutballs elected to Congress. Once they get there, they’ll pull the party not just further to the right but to places that will make the burn-it-all-down philosophy of the Tea Party seem like the height of responsible governance. Just as establishment Republicans used to say, “I’m a Tea Partier, too! Please don’t hurt me!,” in the coming years they’ll keep trying to demonstrate that they’re as deranged as their party’s base, maintaining the fantasy that the election was stolen and indulging every new conspiracy theory that finds purchase in the fevered minds of 2024 primary voters. And of course, the biggest difference will be the continuing presence of Trump himself, who will ensure that the opposition won’t ever calm down. The descent of the GOP did not begin with Trump’s ride down an escalator five years ago. It started with the party’s Faustian bargain with racism, along with its embrace of billionaire backers who fund elections, think tanks and media networks producing propaganda for extremists. All of this serves as a distraction from decades-long strategies to legalize I

voter suppression. As a result, the future of American democracy will not be resolved by Trump’s departure from the White House. It will require the party of Lincoln to again embrace democracy. The Republican Party must first hit bottom and burn to the ground, if only so that it can be born again. Like a phoenix that rises from its own ashes, so too can the Republican Party and grab the mantle of their original ideals and begin to take their first steps out of the wilderness. Brian Litwin/Longmont Throughout 2020, the mainstream media — until now — has steadfastly avoided reporting the awful truth that has become increasingly obvious and apparent to the American public, as the months pass and the disastrous death toll climbs from COVID-19. The failed far-right Trump regime’s unofficial policy all along in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic was the so-called public health strategy of herd immunity. This pathetic policy of complete surrender to the coronavirus is a direct result of the racist Republican Party’s malign neglect and “herd mentality,” as deranged Donald Trump himself put it in his now infamous and incredibly incriminating Freudian slip. Traitor Trump has made it perfectly clear over the course of this conservative-caused catastrophe that he wants, in his own words, a “herd

developed” solution to the crisis of his own making. How many times now has diabolical Donald insisted upon the efficacy and acted upon his apparent belief that purposefully increasing public infection rates (and consequently the death rate) is a laudable goal that Trump personally prefers? Videotape doesn’t lie; Donald Trump does. Over 300,000 Americans are dead, most of whom didn’t have to die! Delusional Donald Trump is directly to blame for this genocidal crime against humanity (not to mention his countless crimes against the Constitution), and this mindless monster Trump must be held accountable — one way or another. It’s up to you, people of America. Do what must be done. If the courts won’t act, we must. History is what we make it. Being voted out of office in a landslide is insufficient punishment for Vladimir Putin’s puppet Donald Trump. Traitor Trump deserves to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law upon the end of his pathological presidency on Jan. 20. The American people have already spoken and Donald Trump is done, son! No presidential pardon is going to save the Trump crime family from state civil and criminal prosecutions, which is why the state of New York will have the final word on the fate of these farcical fascists and their bogus business empire. Jacob Pickering/via internet

DECEMBER 31, 2020

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BOULDER WEEKLY

Seventh annual essay issue

Introducing: The Deadhead Cyclist I have been riding bikes since I raced up and down a dirt road in my neighborhood as a 4-year-old boy in rural Minnesota. I took to being on two wheels instantly, and can still recall the feeling of the cool, crisp upper Midwestern air in my face as I braved even the harshest conditions to fulfill my desire to ride. Fast forwarding some 15 years, I found myself attending college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, when I went to my first Grateful Dead concert at the Winterland Ballroom on October 19, 1974. That was the moment when I officially became a “Deadhead,” and the Grateful Dead has been the primary soundtrack to my life ever since. Over the years, athletic and musical pursuits have been the anchors I have relied upon to keep myself on course within the often turbulent tides of my life as a husband, a father and the owner of

Boulder Weekly — a small business doing a big job that never lets up. We all need “anchors” in our lives, and any anchors will do, as they all serve the same purpose of keeping us sane in a world that seems to have increasingly lost its head. A few years ago, I found myself riding the rugged desert trails outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, in between games of a baseball tournament, longing to find a way to convey the life lessons I have learned during my colorful journey, when the words “Deadhead Cyclist” came to me, seemingly out of nowhere. At my lookout spot, I dialed up GoDaddy and found that the web address, DeadheadCyclist.com was available. I took this as a sign, and it was at that moment that I adopted the

alter ego, Deadhead Cyclist. This past spring, during the stay-at-home period of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began writing a series of weekly blog posts, and am now 34 weeks into a 52-week project that will soon give birth to a book, called The Deadhead Cyclist. To be clear, though, The Deadhead Cyclist is not about the Grateful Dead or about cycling, so much as it is about embracing a powerful set of principles that apply to anyone trying to navigate a fulfilling path through life, no matter what your “anchors” might be. For there is a Deadhead Cyclist in all of us, and it is my hope that the piece I offer below, posted on Dec. 2 will help you find your inner Deadhead Cyclist.

We can discover the wonders of nature, rolling in the rushes down by the riverside by Stew Sallo here is one school of thought about the COVID-19 pandemic which suggests that we are all going to become infected with this virus at one point or another, and it seemed that my time had come. Ironically, it appeared that my buddy Bill and I had successfully dodged the Corona Bullet, as we were halfway through the final 800-mile drive back to Colorado, having played 34 games in six baseball tournaments in Arizona and Florida, spanning six weeks. Yes, we were about to slide into home plate, head first, with the winning run, our trusty mountain bikes safely secured behind my 4Runner, listening to my pick for T.W.I.G.D.H. (This Week in Grateful Dead History), the Nov. 24, 1974 Grateful Dead show from the Golden Hall Community Concourse in San Diego, California, when the concert was preempted with breaking news. Being the dutiful husbands that we are, and figuring that it would be the least we could do as a gesture of gratitude to our wives for letting us out of the house for most of October and November in the midst of a raging pandemic, we had decided to engage in the ostensibly academic exercise of getting ourselves tested for COVID-19 before coming home. My results had already come back negative, but I was about to be rudely awakened from the

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dream of a joyful reunion with my beloved, as we sped north on Highway 191, just south of Moab, Utah. Bill’s test, we suddenly learned, had come back positive! After six weeks of mandatory temperature checks, wearing masks to and from fields, fist and elbow bumping, waving at opposing teams across the diamond, setting up socially distanced chairs to avoid the dugouts, taking most meals in and eating out only where there was outdoor seating, and doing my part to jettison the hand sanitizer industry to a level of prosperity previously unimaginable, there I was two feet away from someone shedding the virus, with whom I had been living for six weeks, and sharing air with for six hours, with another six to go! In one of the most pathetic examples of “too little, too late” imaginable, we strapped on our masks, as we sat in stunned silence, contemplating our very limited options. Over the course of the next hour or so the path forward became obvious: finish I

the trip, quarantine myself, get tested the following morning, and hope for a positive — and by “positive” I mean negative — result. After sleeping on the couch in my basement home office for four nights, imposing on my innocent wife to deposit food and drink periodically on the floor outside my door, and obsessively checking the website where the test result had been promsee WONDERS Page 8

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ised, I found myself growing increasingly cranky. Despite my best efforts to maintain a positive attitude, to focus on the “first world” nature of my problem, and to make good use of my time by writing, reading and getting caught up with friends by phone, I had begun to lose my shit. Even my recollection of a meme that referred to quarantining as the “Drums and Space” part of life (referring to the traditional, experimental segment in the second set of a Dead concert) had lost its luster. But on the afternoon of Day 4, as temperatures rose from the wintry 30s and crossed into the 40s and low 50s, I decided to get out on two wheels, and I quickly came out of the Drums and Space portion of my life into a personal Sugar Magnolia, one of the Grateful Dead’s many songs that extols the virtues of a deep connection with nature. Literally within minutes, my mood improved, my mind cleared, and a general sense of well-being surrounded me. Almost miraculously, 25 miles and one hour and 38 minutes later, I was better prepared to resume my quarantine with a positive attitude and a renewed sense I

of optimism about my situation. While the herd immunity versus social distancing debate rages on, there is one thing we should all be able to agree on: Maintaining a healthy body and mind are of paramount importance as we face the emotional and potential physical challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no question that individuals with a strong immune system are better prepared to find themselves in the asymptomatic/ mildly symptomatic camp in the increasingly likely event of infection. And the starring role that a healthy frame of mind can play in building our immune systems and overall health is not only unmistakable but scientifically documented. Of course, this applies broadly to all illnesses, not just to COVID-19. In a culture that is notoriously focused far more on treatment than prevention — and that almost completely ignores natural, as opposed to medical prevention — it comes as no surprise that our approach to the COVID-19 crisis has been fixated on a one-size-fitsall protocol of social distancing, masking and testing, while falling woefully BOULDER WEEKLY

short on building our immune systems, general health and emotional wellbeing. Realistically, many of us will be infected with this virus regardless of how rigidly we follow the prescribed avoidance techniques, and we are welladvised to see The Great Pause (vimeo. com/411278238) as an opportunity to make some fundamental changes in our lives, starting with our own health. Here is a list of things we can do immediately to be better prepared for a COVID-19 infection that will also be of great benefit in every corner of our lives: week. fruits and vegetables.

boosting supplements, such as Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin A, Zinc, Selenium, Raw Honey, Garlic and Probiotics. ties, including going outside and communing with nature. Pausing on this final bullet point — hundreds of studies have shown that spending time in nature offers protection against myriad conditions, ranging from depression, obesity and ADHD to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. It is believed that the benefits lie in nature’s ability to improve the effectiveness of the body’s immune sysfight a COVID-19 infection. Whether or not Robert Hunter — who wrote the poetry that became the mind when he penned the phrase “wonders of nature,” the Grateful Dead’s continual focus on being connected to nature has proven to be prescient. Just in this week’s featured show we have references to nature in the songs China Cat Sunflower (“midnight sun,” “dream night wind,” “leaf of all colors”), I Know You Rider (“the sun will shine in my

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“cool Colorado rain”), Cassidy (“the wolf has slept by the silver stream,” “wash the nighttime clean,” “flight of the seabirds”), Passenger (“firefly, can you see me?, shine on, glowing brief and brightly,” “seasons have frozen us into our souls”), Terrapin Station (“winds both foul and fair all swarm”), Playing in the Band (“daybreak on the land”), Lost Sailor (“the sea is still as glass,” “the shorelines beckon,” “a ghost wind blowing”), and Saint of Circumstance (“driven by the wind, like the dust that blows around, and the rain fallin’ down”). And that’s just one concert! Which brings me back to the final song of the show (not counting the One hymn to the doctrine that being connected to nature is as fundamental a human need as food, water and shelter. Indeed, we are nature, and to neglect that truth, to live a life separate from the twined with, is to swing and miss at the pitch that is being delivered to each and every one of us as part of our birthright. The morning after my revelatory ride, I awoke in my quarantined state to test sample, informing me as follows: SARS-CoV-2 Not Detected Results are in. I’m negative. The question of whether Bill’s prior test result was a “false positive” may forever be filed under “unsolved mysteries,” as there remains much that we still don’t know, and may never know about this confounding virus. What we do know is that there is plenty we can and should do to strengthen our immune systems in anticipation of the possibility of an infection. What we also know is that the Grateful Dead urged us to “discover the

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the time to heed that advice is long past due. In one final reference to the song, rushes down by the riverside.” I

DECEMBER 31, 2020

ANGELA K. EVANS

Stones of remembrance by Angela K. Evans

he side table drawer in my grandparent’s Arizona living room was always full of playing cards. There was the deck with Van Gogh’s self-portrait, his ear cut off, and another with his wheat fields. There were decks from England and Germany and other far-off places my grandma traveled. There were multiple decks with sailboats, and the mini Snoopy deck that my mom had as a kid. But the deck I always looked for, the one I always wanted to use, was gold. Stored in a pristine cardboard box, the back of each card was shiny with “Au H2O” framed in a black diamond. The more

ing to the right. “He’s on the Queen too,” the friend pointed out. This time he doesn’t have glasses, his eyes are focused straight forward, meeting mine no matter where I moved, made more haunting by his smugness, captured by his slight smirk. The box gave no clues as to who this man was: Just a “Remembrance ® playing card” stamp, indicating these were a commemoration of someone or something. But the symbols encased in the black diamond: Au H2O... Goldwater. “Barry Goldwater? Wasn’t he a racist?” The first time I heard we had Pilgrim ancestors was sometime during college when I was mailed a flyer from the General Society of Mayflower Descendents, inviting me to join. “Do you know about those Pilgrims?” my aunt asked when I called recently to confirm. She said it somewhat cheekily, acknowledging the repercussions of their immigration to the “New World.” Four hundred years ago, exactly, these ancestors boarded a ship in Plymouth, England, and set sail west to escape religious persecution and find freedom — Probably? Supposedly? Maybe? Our ancestor, Richard Warren, was from Holland we know, but we’re unsure of his motivations for joining that day. As the folklore goes, the Pilgrims were welcomed by the Wampanoag tribe, they worked hard, they survived impossible odds, they are the very foundation of this country. Or so I was always taught in school — not necessarily the legacy of oppression, even

Seventh annual essay issue they were used, the more the edges of each card turned a slight hue of green, as if they really were made of gold, the oils from my cousins’ and my hands oxidizing them with each touch. When my grandma died several years ago, just a few years after my grandpa, I ended up with the deck of gold cards, storing them away in a desk drawer, refusing to use them and wear them out more. That is until this year, when iterations of stay-at-home orders and quarantine forced me into playing more cards than I have in a long time. “Is that an actual man’s face on the King?” a friend asked recently. Thick, black framed glasses highlight the square jaw and smile, teeth bared, as he looks off to the left. The Jack features the same face, the same glasses, but with a more serious gaze, look10

DECEMBER 31, 2020

tyranny, those first Europeans brought with them. But by college I knew better. I never signed up to be part of the Mayflower Society. Nor did any of my cousins. That I know of. My mom and her sisters, however, are a part of the society — something my grandparents made sure to do for them when they were young. My grandpa always spoke proudly of his lineage traced back to the signing of the Magna Carta, a framed replication of the document hung in his wood-paneled office among his model cars and painted life-size portrait of his mother. Sitting, regally, in a flowing white longsleeved dress and wide neckline, her hands are crossed on her lap. It’s based off a photo also displayed in my grandparent’s house growing up, taken the day my great-grandmother became chaplain general of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in 1950. It’s the highest position of the lineage society, a position my great-grandmother held for three years, starting a decade after Eleanor Roosevelt famously resigned when the society refused to allow singer Marian Anderson, who was black, to perform at its Constitution Hall auditorium. The family association with DAR died with my greatgrandmother, my aunt told me. The life-size portrait from my grandpa’s office is now wrapped in a box, stored underneath my bed. No one else wanted it. Amid catamaran rides, snorkeling and beach days, we toured the sugar cane plantations and Baldwin Missionary House as guests of honor. We were descendents of the BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Baldwins — my grandma’s maiden name — after all. The Baldwins — some of the first white missionaries on Maui two centuries ago. The Baldwins — subsequent generations of whom planted pineapple and sugarcane, oversaw schools where English replaced native Hawaiian languages, and ran some of the largest businesses on the island when Americans overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii, deposing Queen Lili‘uokalani in the late 19th century. Later generations became politicians in the territory, as the white population marched the islands toward statehood. We, all 25 of us descendents, rode a bus through the sugarcane fields, learning how our ancestors ran the mills and exported the sugar to the mainland. We toured the Missionary House, walking through the two-story building facing the harbor, the teacups laid out on the dining table. We learned about the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, tasked with preserving the heritage of these Protestant missionaries, and how we could all join. We posed for family photos on the steps out front, clad in Hawaiianprint shirts and dresses, crowded around our grandparents who sponsored this holiday vacation. It was 1998 — five years earlier Congress had issued an official apology recognizing the fact that Native Hawaiian people had never relinquished their right to the land. To this day (according to my aunt), the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society never has. Vintage books about the Baldwins are displayed on a shelf in my living room. I’ve never been back to the 50th state. When Arizona was first called for Joe Biden early during election week, I, like President Trump, didn’t believe it. This wasn’t my grandparents’ Arizona. And it certainly wasn’t Goldwater’s, whom they supported. The longtime senator and once-presidential candidate is known for luring Hollywood actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party with his ghostwritten manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative. When Goldwater lost the 1964 election to LBJ, it was by the largest margin in modern history. Albeit he solidified the Southern states’ Republican conversion, carrying some states with more than 80% of the votes, despite getting only 6% of the black vote nationwide. In his home state, he won by less than a percentage point. Goldwater was one of the 27 senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and his campaign slogan, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” according to the New Yorker’s Louis Menand in 2001, “was a clear allusion to a prejudice that BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

dared not speak its name.” But Goldwater wasn’t the quintessential racist of previous generations, or perhaps even the one his supporters supposed. His Civil Rights Act decision reportedly haunted him. He wasn’t a segregationist, rather a libertarian who didn’t believe the Constitution imbued Congress with the power to force states into recognizing its view of racial equality. Before becoming senator, as a Phoenix city councilman he led the effort to desegregate the city’s schools before Brown v Board of Education, and was a member of the NAACP. Perhaps he was merely a reflection of the culture he came from; perhaps he shaped it. Staring at Goldwater’s deck of cards recently, I can’t say I was surprised my grandparents owned them. I think I always knew (from the tidbits of history I gleaned over the years) that my ancestors were complicit, at points probably outwardly so, in creating the racial hierarchies that define this country. That was my family, those are my ancestors. No matter how many generations are between us, some part of that blood runs through my veins. It runs through my veins as I’ve reported from Standing Rock and immigration detention centers, observed BLMorganized protests and debated critical race theory with friends in private social media chats and text messages. It runs through my veins watching I Am Not Your Negro and reading Stamped from the Beginning. It runs through my veins now, my ancestral soul searching, hoping, pleading, to make up time, to concede and repent, to atone for my sins, to give up power. I like to think this pull is what motivated my grandma to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, although I’m pretty sure she never told anyone until after my grandpa passed in 2010. I only know because she voted for Obama again in 2012, less than six months before she passed herself. She never told me why. As history trudges along, these distinctions often blur and morph, nuance gets lost in extremes, acts of compassion are subtly marred by outward allegiances, people are seen as walking contradictions, they often get lost in labels. Perhaps, rightfully so. For now, the books about the white barons of Hawaii will stay on my shelf. I’ll keep using the Goldwater cards. The portrait of my great-grandmother will stay in its box under the bed. They are my stones of remembrance, remembrance of where I’ve come from, of how far I — we all — have left to go. I

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PHOTOS COURTESY DAVE KIRBY

Just a Dawdream

Composing music on the computer isn’t as easy as it looks, but maybe it’s easier than it ought to be

by Dave Kirby

ar 40 is assaulting my will to live. I’ve spent two hours clawing away at this brief descending figure in fifths, trying to harmonize and shade it against a minor key chord reflected in another track. The passage is about four seconds long. I tried a fourth — a nice sound by itself, kind of a poised buoyancy, but it’s out of context with Bar 39 and Bar 41. An octave sounds boomy and domineering. I tried splitting the bar between the root/fourth and root/natural third — a common major key guitar move, a sus4 gesture — but now it sounds (predictably) like a common major key guitar move and completely out of character for the passage. Bar 40 sits there, waiting. A fifth sounds better... but it’s flat and predictable, redundant padding, filling harmonized sound just for the hell of it. That’s not always a bad thing, but this track wasn’t meant for that. I take it out altogether; now it sounds bereft and unresolved, like Bar 39 left the baby at Starbucks. Screw it. In defiance of basic music theory and owing to my usually repressed rebel id, I throw a dissonant in there, a natural third paired with a flatted sixth, and it lands like a rusty bolt in a souffle. There’s “interesting wrong,” and there’s “dumb wrong,” and this is “dumb wrong.” Thelonious Monk or Cecil Taylor or Art Tatum might have liked it, but in another key and in another tune, and guys like them made “interesting wrong” sound like music. I can’t.

Your rabbit is undercooked, pilgrim. Like a lot of other people, I found myself gifted with an unwelcome abundance of free time over the second half of 2020, and for mostly the same reasons. Hungry for inspiration, I warmly embraced Ivanka’s suggestion to “try something new” (thank you, Dauphine) and revived a long-dormant interest in digital music production. It wouldn’t be wholly accurate to say this was a “new” pursuit; more than a decade ago, I fiddled haplessly with a cracked version of Reason 3, assembled some semi-structured noise casseroles masquerading as songs (pro tip: If it has

looking at someone else’s vacation pictures, I was satisfied with it. I uploaded it to YouTube. But the music I used (portions of Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn and more contemporary music by Ian Boddy/Mark Shreeve) was rights restricted, and while the lawyers didn’t tell me to whack it from the public arena, it got blocked in the U.K. We have some family and friends over there who may have liked it but couldn’t watch it. Rookie mistake. So earlier this summer, I tried my hand at another slide show, this time using an online music service provider called Epidemic Sound. Based in Stockholm, they curate hundreds of songlets from aspiring producers and offer them up for a $15 monthly subscription, licensedcleared for YouTube. One supposes that the service is marketed, in part, toward commercial video producers who want to frost their sales pitch with a little dazzle or drop some dope house beats to their product rollout. Ga-thump, ga-thump, ga-thump. The pieces I pulled down worked well enough, but the project didn’t quite feel like mine, soundtracked as it was by obscure (albeit talented) European producers. And mindful of my income-challenged station, I reasoned I couldn’t justify a monthly subscription for something I’d only use a few more times, and I dropped my account. Having now addicted myself to creating these slideshows, I now confronted the obvious. Make my own music. A quick bit of research into “best DAWs” led me to PreSonus Studio One

Seventh annual essay issue

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

a title, it’s a song), burned them to a CD, and lost the whole thing over a series of ill-managed PC upgrades. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I lost the CD, too. It belongs to the ages now. More recently, a friend shared with me a slide show of his photography tour to Patagonia, and it prompted me to create my own from some of the thousands of photos my wife and I have amassed over several trips to the U.K. (We would have gone this year, but Mother Nature was busy culling the herd.) I bought a license for some consumer-grade video software and selected a couple of musical tracks from my MP3 collection, spending hours syncing transitions and finessing cadences. Subject to the qualifier that most people have limited personal interest in I

DECEMBER 31, 2020

Prime, the free version of the digital music company’s flagship workstation platform (DAW, by the way, stands for Digital Audio Workstation). Though feature and instrument restricted, the free version was an absolute beast, orders of magnitude beyond the old Reason platform I had fumbled through years before. I had more or less mastered the basics when I started bumping up against the free version’s limitations, and decided to jump in and subscribe to the whole enchilada, the mothership, the penultimate DAW experience... the professional version. For... $15/month. So much for reason. I had managed to assemble a collection of pieces in Prime — the free version — and typically realized after the fact that I was doing a lot of things the hard way. While I have covered many contemporary electronic artists for this newspaper as a reporter/critic, and am generally sympathetic to that world, my aesthetic instincts toward electronic music are firmly rooted in the ancient. The pounding sequencers and improvised quasi-classical meanderings of early Tangerine Dream, the hypnotic subspace wanderings of Klaus Schulze, the goofy madness of Margouleff and Cecil, the rich and mysterious classical interpretations of Isao Tomita and Wendy Carlos, the cheerful twitchiness of Larry Fast. Most of this stuff was composed and performed on lumbering and ill-mannered analog equipment see DAW Page 14

DAW from Page 13

(Tangerine Dream’s modular Moogs would drift out of tune when their performance venue was too warm, or too cold), and some of it was the result of happy accidents in the recording or patching process. To some extent, that was part of the electronic music experience, not knowing precisely where a certain sound or phrase or gesture came from; once rendered, it might not ever come back. But for me, in front of my computer, with the uncertainties and ghosts-in-themachine digitized out, I start at the ground floor. I just want to lay a 16th note sequencer pattern down and drape a D major chord over it. I access the Pattern function, where I can punch in the notes I want (say, a Dmaj arpeggio), hit a button and it will just play this pattern forever. Open up another track, find a nice pad patch. Hit record, and there it is. Except, yeah, it gets pretty old, pretty fast. At Bar 17, I want to modulate to another key. Up a fifth, to Amaj. Swell... except the Pattern function doesn’t allow you to transpose. The notes are fixed. So I track to the bar where I want to transpose up, open up the pattern editor and punch in all the triggers to Amaj... essentially recreate the pattern, in another key. Run it... nope, missed a note, go back in and fix it. Run it again. Nope, fix it again. Does that sound right? A little right-click magic and I learn that the pattern track can be converted to an instrument track, where the notes become editable as instrument trig14

gers, rather than raw tone triggers. Once it’s an instrument track, a simple right-click allows for transposing by inputting a semitone value. Recreating the pattern from scratch in another key, and getting it right, took 30 minutes. Two mouse clicks to get the same result, eight seconds. Subsequently, of course, I learned that the professional version offers a note effect plug-in called the Arpeggiator, which frees you from the tedium of making patterns altogether... but that has its own learning curve and may well lead you to a place where you didn’t know you wanted to be. That happens a lot. Similarly, we want to fade in a passage, dovetailing against another passage as it fades out. Ham and cheese sandwich here, shouldn’t take a comp sci degree. Well, I couldn’t figure it out. I would have gone out to the community forum, access to which my subscription has granted me, but my ID is oddly borked and I can’t post out there, so I fumble. Aha. Take both instrument tracks, convert them to audio tracks, and then you can drag down the corners of the track image to lower the gain. Once it’s an audio track, though, it’s just a sound. You can’t edit the notes anymore. So if you need to fix the harmony, you’re screwed... unless you convert it back to an instrument track. But then you can’t fade. I spent hours on that. Until, duh, you activate automation, bring up the mixing console and mouseslide your respective faders. I’m glad I DECEMBER 31, 2020

can’t access the community forum — a dysfunctional ID stopped me from publicly beclowning myself. By this time, after a lot of right-clicking, squinting at the glossary and manual, doing dumb things, watching awkward YouTube demos, pushing buttons and ctl-z’ing, I’ve gotten to the point of knowing more or less enough to be dangerous. My $15/month is now a bargain. Now, pilgrim... make some actual music. Well, OK. Let’s be real here — despite my music theory references tossed out earlier in this piece, I’m basically a hack guitar player with only the most rudimentary grounding in music theory. I’m soundtracking images of 12th century castles and Gothic cathedrals, so big orchestration, soaring progressions, grand gestures... Game of Thrones-type deal. Ambitious. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s that... well, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m dancing across the out-of-phase sine waves of two learning curves: composing keyboard-driven music and trying to get this bewildering software to render what’s in my head. I know what a bolt in a souffle sounds like, and I know it doesn’t belong there. The software brims with patches of sounds and clever loops, some distinctly wedded to harmony or BPM, some less obviously so. It is clearly designed to appeal to the contemporary EDM producer, which is where the commercial center of gravity of electronic music has settled these days. No one really

wants to sound like Jean-Michel Jarre circa 1978 anymore, and why would they? Who the hell is Jean MichelJarre? Or Alex Paterson or Aphex Twin or Toby Marx or Kraftwerk or the KLF or FSOL or Autechre? Or, for that matter, Morton Subotnik, often cited as the godfather of modern electronic music... unless you favor Karlheinz Stockhausen, who’s probably the real godfather of electronic music, and we’ll wager not many amateur DAW pikers use Studio One to sound or compose like Stockhausen. But here is where we face the crossroad. Crudely, you can make the distinction between music created electronically and electronic music. The earliest guys — Stockhausen, Subotnik — composed music that really could only be rendered by patch cords and oscillator knobs, exploiting the technology’s freedoms and embracing its limitations. But Wendy Carlos, in her early years (late 1960s), was known for interpreting the classics, rendered on the Moog but musically available to any competent pianist, organist or string section. Her landmark album Switched-On Bach (1969) topped the Billboard Classical Albums charts for almost three years. Similarly, Isao Tomita released a series of sonically dazzling classical interpretations (Stravinsky, Holst, Debussy) in the mid-’70s on the Moog that completely grossed out classical music critics but were great fun to listen to and incor-

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porated soundscapes that even modern electronic artists, 40 years or more later, can’t decipher technically. So what do I want to do? Borrow the aesthetic of deep-thinking, conventiondefying composers... lamely ape the Berlin School stuff I listened to obsessively years ago... teach myself Bach... create pleasant soundtrack music that an inexplicably enthralled YouTube audience can tolerate while looking at my vacation pictures? Am I creating music to support the images, or do the images give substance to the music? Is the music worth listening by itself? Software can do a lot, but it can’t answer fundamental questions about creating art. It just awaits its next mouse click. SoundCloud is lousy with digitally produced stuff. Hundreds, thousands of hours of trap or dubstep or hip-hop or ambient or chill or space. As lovers of music, all of us, we have it in the front of our minds that more music is better for us, better for the world, better for humanity, better for music itself. Everybody jump in, the water’s just fine. But the fact is, an awful lot of it (the instrumental stuff anyway) is facile and passive. Nice textures draped over digitized beats. Not everything needs to be a Brandenburg Concerto, but a musical equivalent of paint-by-numbers often struggles to find its depth, and usually fails. So there’s a little guilt involved in composing on this software. A simple function in the software allows me to drop a thoughtless doodle on my midi keyboard, bring up the Chord Follow function, define a key, and the software then contours my meaningless five-note dingle — something my cat might have produced walking across the keys — into a harmonically consonant melody, rendered in the key I just selected. This is what you meant, right? Is that melody mine, or did I merely give permission to the software to include it in my piece? The software doesn’t care that I haven’t done the heavy lifting to learn and apply harmony the old-fashioned way. So the guilt comes in knowing that some of the music came from my own head, and some of it — harmony I wouldn’t know how to produce if I were writing for a string quartet — came merely from cleverly written computer code. Sure, a schooled and musically fluent composer can produce lofty, engaging and stirring music with this software without using the harmonyhelper functions at all, and plenty do. BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

But hacks like me can also produce perfectly palatable music that rides nicely with pictures of cathedrals. That’s the triumph, and the malign seduction, of DAW software. It can help you sound like you know what you’re doing, even (and especially) if you don’t. The software even has a “humanize” function, that gently tweaks a note’s attack, rendering it as if played by an actual person, to compensate for the

machine’s pitiless precision and, presumably, fool the listener into thinking he’s hearing an actual person playing rather than a machine. Artificially applied imperfection in the service of authenticity. Think about that. Anyway, I grow weary of fighting with Bar 40. I didn’t like what the Chord Follow automation gave me, but I liked my edits to it even less, so I leave the fifth in place, mix down the

piece and slap it onto its assigned passage in my next slide show, specifically St Lawrence Church in Cumbria, England. The whole piece is a minute and 20 seconds long; I’ve probably spent 11 hours on it. I run it along with our photographs, tweak the transitions to align with the musical cadences, and it makes me smile. It sounds OK. It works. The pictures look different now. You cook good rabbit, pilgrim.

Cheers to Turning 21!

DECEMBER 31, 2020

Swimming with whale sharks by Betsy Welch ’ve been riding my bike a lot, and we had tens of thousands of cycling miles between us, but I haven’t had the feeling that he’s that golden eagle or one of those deer whose big muley ears barely tremble as I pass. When someone dies, even if you didn’t believe in signs before, you begin to consider each sunrise and sunset, and even the doe-eyed rabbit chewing grass in the yard.

We traveled a lot together, and it typically went the same frustrating way: After a brief conversation about where to go (“Let’s use your Spanish!”), we’d book tickets, at the last minute, and then any planning would be left to me (“But you’re so much better at it!”). It was true, I speak fluent Spanish and have a way with making travel spontaneous and fun. Baja would of course be no different — once we loaded up the van with our sleeping bags and surfboards in Cabo, he would drive, I would spread open the map on my lap, and when I said, “Stop there!” we’d suddenly be having an experience, buying and slurping down a kilo of prickly pear fruit, or taking a muchneeded walk on an empty stretch of beach. It was different with the whale sharks. I had been to Baja before, on a sea kayaking trip with girlfriends, so I took him to the place where we rented kayaks, just in case he wanted to do the same. When he saw that they offered swimming with whale

Seventh annual essay issue

Exactly two years ago we went to Baja to pick up a car. When people asked us about the trip, it was much more satisfying to watch their expressions after the short story — we bought a mini-van in Mexico — than to explain the more boring truth that it belonged to a family member who just wanted it back in the States.

DECEMBER 31, 2020

sharks, he made the decision, easily, without needing to consult me at all. It almost didn’t happen because no one else had signed up for the tour. But this was Mexico, bless her heart. We will take just you two! The boat ride out to the bay was a pleasure in itself. Although we both loved the water, we lived nowhere near it and made most of our memories among big mountains covered with wildflowers or snow. When the captain stopped in the spot where the whale sharks should have been, everyone became nervously quiet. What if they didn’t come today?

It sounds silly and exaggerated, but there is no other way to say it: One night on that trip, we almost drove off a bridge. We didn’t intend to drive at night, not for fear (although people loved to try and make us afraid of everything in Mexico), but because the roads were just so dark. The daytime driving had been mostly dreamy. Initially, we weren’t sure if the highBOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

way would take us through landscapes that highways often do — barren, scruffy, sad — but it didn’t, and we motored through tunnels of ocotillos and explosions of tiny pink desert flowers creeping over the dunes. So it had likely bolstered our confidence a bit, knowing that the road was good, that my Spanish and savvy could get us through the checkpoints quickly. It was just a case of unlucky timing that we decided to push on after 6 p.m. on a stretch of road that had been decimated by a hurricane two months before. It was very literally just he and I on the road that night, and thank god we had each other. Together, we had cracked the code of rural Baja’s rudimentary road work symbols; a simple pyramidal pile of rocks meant stop, and if we were lucky, an arrangement of stones in the form of an arrow would guide us gently down through an arroyo and up the other side, around the broken bridge. When we got to the severed piece of roadway that we nearly flew off of, someone had moved the warning pile of rocks, or there simply wasn’t one there to begin with. We stopped just as we noticed the color in the beam of the headlights abruptly switch from pale cement to pitch black. Usually, we didn’t feel close calls on the same scale — his palms never seemed to sweat like mine when we were scrambling or skiing big backcountry lines. But on that broken stretch of highway south of San Felipe, we both knew that it could have been really, really bad. We silently stepped out of the car, just inches from the edge. I took a picture, which turned out blurry and horrible, the fuzzy crescent moon doing nothing to illuminate the jagged edge no one had seen us almost go over.

One by one, the whale sharks began to appear. Even the boat captain and the guide seemed surprised by how many of them there were. Están comiendo — baby, they’re eating! When whale sharks eat, they suspend themselves vertically and suction water into their mouths at high velocities. It’s the moment to jump in the water beside them because they’re not moving. We were instructed to pull on our fins and wetsuits; he couldn’t help and ask if the gear was really necessary. How were those guys supposed to know he’d spent his entire life in the water, teaching others how to swim?

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The highlight of the northern portion of the drive from Baja to Boulder was undoubtedly the Grand Canyon. Surprisingly neither of us had ever been; I think the proximity of Canyonlands and Arches had kept us from ever driving further west. Since he had torn his ACL and had surgery four months earlier, the plan was to take in the national park like most people do, slowly and from the surface. But there was one small caveat: First, I would run to the bottom and back. It was frigid when he dropped me at the top of the South Kaibab Trail, and in the pictures he took of me

descending the first switchbacks, the trail stands out like a red Christmas ribbon amid a dusting of snow. What a sweet soul, to send me off on an adventure he couldn’t go on and then meet me at the top, wanting to know how it had gone. After my run, we took a blistering hot bath and finished off the last of the resposado we’d slowly been working our way through since La Paz, some 1,200 miles south. Buzzed and aglow, we wandered to all of the gift shops in every historic building. He bought me three turquoise necklaces because I couldn’t decide and because the clerk was having so much fun with us that he offered his 40 percent-off employee discount. We were both finding it hard to leave, and we spent our last morning doing one of the scenic drives along the South Rim. We pulled off at all of the pulloffs, snapping pictures of each other in the early morning pastels. As we were walking back to the car on a path surrounded by pinyon pine, a huge whoosh disturbed the silent sky above us. A California Condor, with a tiny bracelet affixed to its left leg, soared overhead. He looked at me with eyes nearly as childlike as the ones that danced behind his sunglasses after swimming with the whale sharks. Of course I thought I

the sight of the endangered avian giant was special. But, seeing him see it is really what I remember.

When it was finally time, he couldn’t have jumped in the water any faster, and he was surprised to look up and see me still fumbling with my snorkel and mask. Baby, wait! Baby, let’s go! It always worked, that look that said, “You’re being silly, you’re not afraid,” and so I awkwardly tumbled off the edge of the boat, my only confidence in following him, just as I’d done so many nervewracking times before. Even though they weren’t moving quickly — whale sharks can only reach speeds of three miles per hour — I became almost immediately disoriented in the water. He took off, and for the next hour, I would really only see him as he circled back to find another shark. By then, I had latched onto our guide Angel — it was the only way I could stay afloat — and as he dragged me along, I got the sense that we weren’t just chasing fish, we were trying to keep up with him. Later, he told me that he broke all of the rules: He swam too close, he slipped underneath, he practically rode atop one from above. He’d touched them, too, on their enormous, polka-dotted sides. When Angel said we were done, he of course pretended not to hear. We eventually brought the boat over to him. Then, I had Angel take our picture — it’s the only one I have from that day. We are both grinning stupidly, his smile the expression of a childhood dream realized, and mine simply big because of his.

Now, I am riding my bike alone on a broken road — there was no warning pile of rocks. Even so, I have been looking for him everywhere, but none of the signs are right. The magpies are too loud and coarse, and the telephone pole-top eagles look too stern. The bobcat I ask for never comes, the sunrises and mountains are for everyone. And really, when I think about it, I know there is no place he’d rather be. I don’t need him here right now when he could be swimming with the whale sharks in the sea.

DECEMBER 31, 2020

Seventh annual essay issue

That ain’t gospel by Caitlin Rockett

any moons ago, I had a mentor who liked to tell a story about an intern they’d once worked with. So talented was this young reporter, so driven, that no one at the paper knew for months that the intern was living in a van. As far as I can remember, the van was voluntary and temporary, a way for the intern to save money while finishing college. The point of my mentor’s story was determination... passion. The story was meant to celebrate this budding journalist’s willingness to sacrifice — humbly — for what they wanted. But the story never felt right to me. I didn’t feel inspired. On its face, the intended moral of the story felt... misplaced. Sure, the intern was passionate... but is that the lesson here? Is foregoing a basic need like housing — even voluntarily — something we should find inspiring? Even if the intern wanted to live in a van, did eschewing stable housing make them more... passionate? Virtuous? That story gave me the same feeling I get when I see a “human interest” feature about an elementary school kid who organizes a bake sale to raise funds to pay off their classmates’ unpaid lunch fees. It gives me the same feeling as a “feel-good” piece about someone who’s able to pay for astronomical medical bills because a Kickstarter campaign took off. In all of these stories — including the intern in the van — the headline is, “Look at the ingenuity/resiliency/kindness of humans,” when it should be, “Look at how hard capitalism screwed these people.” I’m sure I took the story far too seriously, overly earnest creature that I am, and construed it in a way my mentor never intended. Maybe the intern liked living in a

DECEMBER 31, 2020

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

van. I’m sure it was temporary. Determination in the face of adversity is a virtue. And I know my mentor — someone I learned a lot from, and who I still deeply respect — never meant any harm. But the story wouldn’t go away for me. There’s something inherently wrong in the notion that we should humbly forego — even temporarily — basic needs to achieve our dreams. There’s nothing inspiring in that for me. It just feels sad, like an obvious sign that our society is flawed... and cruel... with a flair for the dramatic. (If that was the point of the story, it was never conveyed.) There’s also something inherently American about mythologizing someone’s ruggedly individualistic struggle (if it even was a struggle for this intern). And there’s something inherently masculine about glorifying struggle. Journalism is rife with this crap, from the way we tell stories to the way many of us live our lives. And not everyone can do it; not everyone can live in a van... or not get paid for months or go without health insurance or work from home. How much can a single parent, with little to no outside help, sacrifice in the name of passion? What about someone with a chronic medical condition who requires medication and regular doctor’s appointments? How many talented people are denied access to their dreams because they just won’t — or can’t — sacrifice anything else? It doesn’t matter how much you want something, having it is worthless if you can’t meet your basic needs. It’s one thing to remind young folks they shouldn’t let their passions be wholly driven by money, but it’s quite another to perpetuate the dramatized notion of the “starving artist.” And it’s just like a damn journalist to play up the wrong angle in the headline. As this hexed year drug on, the gap between the haves and the have-nots got even bigger. Maybe that’s part of what dredged this story up for me now, for the hundredth time. Doomscrolling through Twitter one evening, my eye caught a post by Rana Abdelhamid, a healing justice activist out of New York: “Mutual aid networks, food pantries, good neighbors, organizers, activists, families, mothers, educators and their unpaid labor are what’s holding down this whole country right now.” Their unpaid labor. Amen. The pandemic laid bare this country’s gross inequities, just how much people are expected to “bootstrap” or “grin and bear it” or “take personal responsibility.” When the cost of living keeps going up and the cost of wages continues to stagnate, just how much personal responsibility can the average American assume for not having a large savings account? Just how much are they required to sacrifice in the name of pursuing the busted promise of the American dream? Who gets to sacrifice things like housing, and who can’t? Should anyone ever have to do that? No. The answer is no. Not any American, not any human on this planet. I was hesitant to write this essay because I fear judgment: that I’m lazy or entitled, that I don’t understand how good I have it in this country, that I misunderstood the story. But that’s part of why I wrote it. I’m tired of politely listening to stories that don’t resonate with my experience, or the experiences of those around me. I’m tired (and ashamed) of turning a deaf ear in order to not deal with the discomfort of confronting someone. And I’m white. People of color know way more about this than I do. Men, in particular — but by no means exclusively — seem quite at ease with sharing a story and calling it gospel. The truth. Well, that ain’t gospel, friend, it’s just your perspective. And this is mine. It matters how we talk to one another. The stories we tell ourselves and others matter. We should pay attention to how stories do and don’t represent lived realities. A good journalist knows that a story’s power comes from providing context. Sure, a white guy voluntarily living in a van to launch his journalism career might be really inspiring to another white guy who also once voluntarily lived in a van to launch a career in journalism, but that’s not everyone’s experience, nor should it be. I’m not knocking the intern’s determination; they clearly loved journalism more than me, because even if I had a van, I’m not going to live in it for journalism. That’s just my job, just one piece of my identity as a person. I am much more than a profession. And until we break the bonds of capitalism, I have to survive in this system. Maybe the story was meant to help me understand how far I would go for this profession. In that regard it succeeded.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

DECEMBER 31, 2020

WE ARE BOULDER COUNTY!

ROMAN ROBINSON

INDEPENDENT & LOCALLY OWNED SINCE 1993

BY DAN SAVAGE

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DECEMBER 31, 2020

Dar Dan: I’m a 35-year-old gay cis woman in New Jersey. I’ve been in a wonderful relationship with an amazing woman since April. In typical lesbian fashion, she moved in over the summer and we’ve been inseparable ever since. My problem is that my sister and her 9-year-old son have been living in my home for the last four years. She has a ton of drama with her ex — her son’s father — and just this past week my girlfriend had her first interaction with the Department of Children and Family Services because of their drama. I’m used to it at this point but it freaked my girlfriend out. When I purchased my home, I invited my sister to move in to help her get on her feet. It also meant I could try for a closer relationship to my nephew. She was going to finish her nursing degree so she could support herself and her son. Four years later, she’s still an LPN and still living in my home with her bad attitude and so much drama. Last night, she had a huge argument with my girlfriend while I was at work — I’m an ICU nurse and I work overnight — and she told my GF that I don’t spend enough time with her or her son since we started dating and she’s sad because she has no help, no friends, no blah blah blah. I need to cut the cord! I want a family and kids of my own and I’m planning to propose in the next few months. I love my sister, I do, and for years I’ve been there to help pick up the pieces from her shitty choices, but now is my time to prioritize myself and my happiness. How do I make her see that without making her I

feel like I’m abandoning her and her son? —Worried And Perplexed Dear WAP: Even if there was some way to ask your sister to move out that didn’t make her feel like you were abandoning her and her son, WAP, she would still do everything in her power to make you feel like you were abandoning them. She knows that if she can make you feel bad enough, and if she can sow enough discord between you and your girlfriend, she won’t have to get her own place or stand on her own two feet. So brace yourself for a lot of drama, WAP, and be unambiguous and firm: Set a reasonable date for her to find her own place, offer whatever financial help you reasonably can, and make sure your nephew has your number. It sounds like he’s going to need someplace safe to run away to in a year or two — or in a month or two — and here’s hoping your girlfriend has it in her heart to be there for him the way you have. Cameron Esposito is hosting an online party on Dec. 31 at 6 p.m. (PST) — Cameron Esposito’s New Year’s Steve — with special sets, guests and an early ball drop! It’s free but donations are welcome. For more info and tickets to Cameron’s show, head over to dynastytypewriter.com. Send questions to mail@savagelove. net, follow Dan on Twitter @fakedansavage and visit savagelovecast.com. BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

the coming months, Virgo. As you carry out the project of relocating or crumbling a certain mountain, be robust and spirited — and, if necessary, very loud.

BY ROB BREZSNY ARIES

MARCH 21-APRIL 19: Author Jorge Luis Borges (1899–

1986) carried on a long love affair with books. He read thousands of them, wrote more than 20 of them, and further postulated the existence of numerous imaginary books that were never actually written. Of all the writers who roused his adoration, a certain Russian novelist was among the most beloved. Borges wrote, “Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Fyodor Dostoevsky marks an important date in one’s life.” I’m wondering if you will experience one of these pivotal discoveries in 2021. I strongly suspect so. It may not be the work of Dostoevsky, but I bet it will have an impact close to those of your original discoveries of love and the sea.

TAURUS

APRIL 20-MAY 20: Vietnamese-American novelist Viet

Thanh Nguyen has won numerous awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize. Here are his views about the nature of accomplishment: “We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.” I bring these thoughts to your attention, Taurus, because I think that in 2021 you will have an extraordinary potential to enhance your understanding of how the world works and what you must do to take advantage of that. This could be the year you become both smarter and wiser.

GEMINI

MAY 21-JUNE 20: Modern civilization has not spread to

every corner of the planet. There are at least 100 tribes that inhabit their own private realms, isolated from the invasive sprawl of our manic, frantic influence. Among these enclaves, many are in the Amazon rain forests, West Papua and the Andaman Islands. I have a theory that many of us civilized people would love to nurture inner qualities akin to those expressed by indigenous people: hidden away from the mad world; content to be free of the noise and frenzy; and living in attunement with natural rhythms. In 2021, I hope you will give special care and attention to cultivating this part of you.

CANCER

JUNE 21-JULY 22: Hurricane Maria struck the Caribbean

island of Dominica in 2016. Scientists studied two local species of anole lizards both before and after the natural disaster. They were amazed to find that the lizards after the hurricane had superstrong grips compared to their predecessors. The creatures were better able to hold on to rocks and perches so as to avoid being swept away by high winds. The researchers’ conclusion? It’s an example of one of the most rapid rates of evolutionary change ever recorded. I bring this to your attention, Cancerian, because I suspect that you, too, will have the power to evolve and transform at an expedited pace in 2021 — in response to positive events as much as to challenging events.

LEO

JULY 23-AUG. 22: I hope that in 2021 you will spend a lot

of time meditating on your strongest longings. Are they in harmony with your highest ideals, or not? Do they energize you or drain you? Are they healthy and holy, or are they unhealthy or unholy — or somewhere in between those two extremes? You’ll be wise to re-evaluate all your burning, churning yearnings, Leo — and decide which ones are in most righteous service to your life goals. And as for those that are in fact noble and liberating and invigorating: Nurture them with all your tender ingenuity!

VIRGO

AUG. 23-SEPT. 22: “You can’t move mountains by whispering at them,” says singer-songwriter Pink. Strictly speaking, you can’t move mountains by shouting at them, either. But in a metaphorical sense, Pink is exactly right. Mild-mannered, low-key requests are not likely to precipitate movement in obstacles that resemble solid rock. And that’s my oracle for you in

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LIBRA

SEPT. 23-OCT. 22: In his masterpiece the “Mona Lisa,” Leonardo da Vinci applied 30 layers of paint that were no thicker than a single human hair. Can you imagine the patience and concentration that required? I’m going to propose that you be inspired by his approach as you carry out your big projects in the coming year. I think you will have the potential to create at least one labor of love that’s monumentally subtle and soulful.

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SCORPIO

OCT. 23-NOV. 21: Climate change is proceeding with such

speed in central Mexico that entire forests are in danger of perishing. In the hills near Ejido La Mesa, for instance, the weather is getting too hot for the fir trees that shelter millions of monarch butterflies every fall. In response, local people have joined with scientists to physically move the fir forest to a higher, cooler elevation. What might be your personal equivalent, Scorpio: an ambitious plan to carry out an idealistic yet practical project? According to my analysis of your astrological potentials, you’ll have a lot of energy to work on such a scheme in 2021.

SAGITTARIUS

NOV. 22-DEC. 21: Author Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855)

made the following observation: “I do not ask of God that he should change anything in events themselves, but that he should change me in regard to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe, to govern my dreams, instead of enduring them.” If you have a relationship with the Divine Wow, that will be a perfect prayer for you to say on a regular basis in 2021. If you don’t have a connection to the Supreme Intelligence, I suggest you address the same prayer to your Higher Self or Future Beauty or whatever source of sublime inspiration you hold most dear.

CAPRICORN

DEC. 22-JAN. 19: The mathematically oriented website

WaitButWhy.com says that the odds of winning a mega lottery can be compared to this scenario: You know that a certain hedgehog will sneeze just one time in the next six years, and you place a big bet that this sneeze will take place at exactly the 36th second of 12:05 p.m. next Jan. 20. In other words, WaitButWhy.com declares, your chances of winning that lottery are very small. But while their analysis is true in general, it may not be completely applicable to you in 2021. The likelihood of you choosing the precise moment for the hedgehog’s sneeze will be higher than usual. More realistically and importantly, your chances for generating positive financial luck through hard work and foresight will be much higher than usual.

AQUARIUS

JAN. 20-FEB. 18: Author Anais Nin was supremely

adaptable, eager to keep growing and receptive when life nudged her to leave the past behind and expand her understanding. At the same time, she was clear about what she wanted and determined to get what she wanted. Her complex attitude is summed up in the following quote: “If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.” I hope you will heed her counsel throughout 2021. (Here’s another quote from Nin: “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”)

PISCES

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FEB. 19-MARCH 20: In 2013, workers at a clothing manu-

facturing plant in Gazipur, Bangladesh, staged a mass protest. Did they demand a pay raise or better health benefits? Were they lobbying for air conditioning or longer lunch breaks? None of the above. In fact, they had just one urgent stipulation: to dispel the ghost that was haunting the factory. I’ve got a similar entreaty for you in 2021, Pisces. I request that you exorcise any and all ghosts that have been preventing you from fully welcoming in and embracing the future. These ghosts may be purely metaphorical in nature, but you still need to be forceful in banishing them.

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

2020 in movies

Top picks for a year like no other

by Michael J. Casey

020 was the year I watched more but understood less. With a rotating series of crises to consider, rare were the instances where I found myself lost in someone else’s story for two hours. Empathy has its limits: When you’re adrift in your own story, the world talks to you on mute. And yet, the movies persisted. A few brought joy, while the rest confronted the darkness head-on. But all provided illumination in their own way. Only one did I have the pleasure of seeing on a big screen. The rest I wait with anticipation to revisit on a screen so large I will once again feel small. Dick Johnson is Dead — A father is dying, so his daughter decides to kill him: again and again and again. Along the way, they conquer the future by immortalizing the past. Heartbreaking and funny, Kirsten Johnson’s documentary/fantasy about her father is one of the most compassionate movies about loss in a long time. And it has an all-timer of a closing shot. Streaming on Netflix. David Byrne’s American Utopia — In a year when we couldn’t go to the stage for live music and bask in live performances, Spike Lee brought the stage home with a filmed document of David Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, American Utopia. Backed by 12 musicians and dancers, Byrne leads the audience through personal histories, international and philosophical musical styling, a delightful rendition of “This Must Be The Place,” a rousing performance of Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout,” and the joy of making music and telling stories. It’s like a breath of fresh air in a musty room. Streaming on HBO Max. Soul — What do you know: another movie about music and death. Both are treated with care and celebration, but of all

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

the ideas buzzing around writer/director Pete Docter’s brain, the reasons for living — pizza, lollipops, trees in autumn — might be the most convincing. It’ll make you want to take a walk, inhale deeply and live. Streaming on Disney+.

spent decades observing governmental bodies at work with curiosity, and his mosaic of Boston’s City Hall is among his best. Plus, the trash-collecting scene might be one of the best things I’ve seen all year. Look for it on PBS.

First Cow — A rich man loves oily cakes but can’t cook. A poor man can cook, but he doesn’t have the milk to make the cakes. So the poor man steals the milk from the rich man’s cow, cooks the cakes and sells them to the rich man, who pays good money for the heavenly treat. And while the rich man devours those delectable oily cakes, he wonders: Why doesn’t that cow make any milk? Oh, what poetry Kelly Reichardt finds in the weird roots of American capitalism. Streaming on Hulu.

Nomadland — Fern isn’t homeless; she’s houseless. There’s a difference, and when Frances McDormand says it, you believe it. Based on the 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, writer/director Chloé Zhao drops McDormand into a world of drifters and non-actors and uncovers something from the last recession that might inform the coming one. The movie played festivals and a virtual theater or two in 2020, but won’t see a wider release until theaters open en masse. Probably February.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always — The abortion clinic intake questionnaire at the heart of Eliza Hittman’s third feature is so raw, so tender, it’ll crumble any preconceptions you might have about such a place. Sometimes the most intimate portraits are also the most profound. Streaming on HBO Max. I’m Thinking of Ending Things — Spending any amount of time in Charlie Kaufman’s brain can be a dicey proposition. It can also be a lot of fun. You’ll find both here, including two excellent performances (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) and a dance number that’ll stop the world. Streaming on Netflix. City Hall — If Frederick Wiseman isn’t a national institution, then his documentaries are. He’s

Martin Eden — Filmmaker Pietro Marcello takes Jack London’s 1909 novel and sets it adrift in 20th century Italy, and gives us a leading man through and through with Luca Marinelli. Not to mention, the movie was shot on Super 16mm stock, making it the best looking film of 2020. Playing at CU-Boulder’s International Film Series’ virtual theater. The Climb — Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin are old friends and incapable of separating themselves — no matter how toxic one of them is for the other. It’s a comedy, one of the funniest of 2020, and ingenious in its use of long takes. Available for rent or purchase starting Jan. 19, 2021.

DECEMBER 31, 2020

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DECEMBER 31, 2020

BOULDER WEEKLY

Seventh annual essay issue

It’s a wonderful, er… tongue

A food writer without a sense of taste is not a thing to be

by Matt Cortina hat I’m hoping for is that I’m George Bailey and COVID-19 is Clarence Odbody. When you write about food, as I have, every week for the last five years or so, you can get a little jaded if you’re not careful. You start to think thoughts like, “I can make this at home,” and, “This is $15?,” and, “Why are people lined up here?” As it turns out, “Do what you love” has a little caveat: Don’t do it so much it becomes an obligation. And so then a pandemic hits and drastically changes how restaurants can serve food, and you think, “Maybe I don’t miss going out to eat as much as I should.” You look at your bank account and there’s the money sitting there that you would’ve spent out. You use it to buy weird Italian yeast that makes the snap of your pizza dough just a little snappier. Then you get COVID-19. And you lose your sense of taste and smell entirely. And you face the specter of being someone who writes about food for a living who might not ever taste food again. You blame yourself for taking for granted Frasca’s frico caldo or a sub from Your Butcher Frank or duck betel leaves from Chez Thuy or charred broccoli with

see TASTE Page 27

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

DECEMBER 31, 2020

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BOULDER WEEKLY

TASTE from Page 25

sriracha aioli from Gastronauts. You live in a world where, suddenly, food is unenjoyable. You live in a world where pita chips and Ritz crackers, chocolate and cheese, vodka and water, are indiscernible. You get just an inclination whether something is salty or sweet or spicy, and the only insight you can really offer into anything you consume is how much water is in it — oranges, a lot of water; granola bars, more than you’d think; ginger snaps... like munching on wood chips. You see a raspberry on the table and think, “I’d like to eat a raspberry” and then it tastes like water and you don’t have another one. You have nothing but cravings you can’t satisfy. And so I’m hoping some spirits in the galaxy got together to show me I’ve been taking the gift of taste and smell — and the ability to write about what I taste and smell — for granted, and that they sent down an angel, COVID, to rekindle my appreciation for food — everything about it and everyone who makes it. I’m on the right trajectory. It took me about as long as George Bailey to realize something was different and that the difference was real. After testing positive for COVID, I carried on eating as if nothing was different. Nothing was; I could still taste. Then my wife handed me some essential oils and asked if I could name the scent. Of course, I could, I thought. But, of course, I couldn’t. Couldn’t tell the difference between peppermint, orange and tea tree oils. It all smelled like nothing. So then I ate and drank everything we had: fruit, meat, chips, tea, cheese, candy. It all tasted like nothing. In an instant, it was all gone. I doomscrolled articles on how and when taste and smell returns to COVID patients; it was not as reassuring as I’d hoped — about a quarter of people get their senses back within a month, I read in articles with some links to support groups for those with anosmia and ageusia. I hopescrolled for articles that indicated most get a full return of those senses quickly, and then just cast the worry out of my brain. What else could I do? The point had been made. My wife made steak the next day; I said, what’s the point? We were planning to make sauerbraten (beef marinated in vinegar) with pungent red cabbage for Christmas, our family’s traditional meal. Rum cake for dessert. What’s the point of any of that if I can’t taste the vibrant meat and instantly recall family dinners at my grandparents’ house? If my head doesn’t snap to the right when I get a bite of sweet yellow cake saturated with piquant liquor? It was George seeing Mary as (gasp) a spinster. BOULDER WEEKLY

Clarence, I’m ready to go back now. Bring me back. So much of my life, outside of its importance in my work, is tied up in food. When I give gifts, I give unique whiskeys and bottarga (cured roe sacks) and squid ink. When I get gifts, I get ’nduja (spicy sausage spread), culinary smoke guns, ravioli tablets and cookbooks. When I get home from work, I cook. It’s meditative. And I do it so often (and so often cook the same meals), I can smell when the butter’s burning or taste to see if the chili needs more cumin. If there’s no payoff on the tongue, there’s no benefit to full-body kneading fresh pasta dough for 20 minutes. What’s the point in tending to tomato plants and building cages around backyard corn stalks? What do I do when I visit a new city? Where do I go to celebrate special occasions? Food is not only part of my present identity, it’s a link to the past and future. A cup of Dunkin’ coffee — that paragon of culinary achievement — always reminds me of when I was younger, starting my career, waiting for the train on an NJ Transit platform, headed into the city to be part of something bigger than myself. And since they nixed the styrofoam cups, there’s nothing tactile anymore to recall that association. In fact, the more I sit with this, the more I realize, this is all a lot closer to It’s a Wonderful Life than just losing the ability to taste food. Now, I don’t equate this to anyone who really lost life’s most precious gift, life itself, and those who love those unfortunate souls, but the fabric of life, what makes it worth living, is woven with things you can only sense through your mouth and nose. That marshy aroma when the snow thaws on the first warm day of spring. The scent of my children’s hair after a bath. The familiar smell of my parent’s house, my childhood home, when I go back to visit. Petrichor, the unique scent of rain after a dry spell. Fresh-cut grass, Home Depot, the gas pump when you get too close, dead leaves. This drafty old house, er, sweaty clothes hung in the mudroom after shoveling snow. As I write this, I still don’t have my taste and smell back — there’s no “Zuzu’s petals” moment at the end of this essay. But good, bad, whatever, just give me not nothing. I want it all back. I’ll pay double for food from local restaurants as long as I can taste it. You can serve it in a shoe. I don’t care. I’ll write odes to it. Until then, every time I hear a bell ring, I’ll reach for something tasty with fingers crossed. I

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Feds crack down on bunk CBD claims by Seymour

f there’s any product or substance that has benefitted from the ongoing relaxation of cannabis laws across the county — outside of medical and recreational marijuana itself — it’s cannabidiol, or CBD. CBD, a derivative of the hemp plant, may very well be a part of your wellness routine. People used it to help reduce everything from seizures to sleeplessness to inflammation, and it shows up in salves, ointments, beverages,

foodstuffs and much more. But the marketing around what it can do has maybe gone too far, at least according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). On Dec. 17, the FTC announced it was cracking down, for the first time, on CBD sellers who have made claims the agency says they can’t fully back up. The FTC is now taking action against six CBD sellers who have claimed their products can do things they haven’t

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

supported with science. The sellers in question have purportedly made a wide range of claims about their CBD products, saying they can treat cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s and other serious diseases. These complaints lobbied by the FTC will result in de facto settlements with the companies, and will require them to cease their allegedly dubious marketing and prevent them from making similar claims in the future — unless they have the science to support their assertions. “The six settlements announced today send a clear message to the burgeoning CBD industry: Don’t make spurious health claims that are unsupported by medical science,” said Andrew Smith, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. “Otherwise, don’t be surprised if you hear from the FTC.” The companies include Utah’s Bionatrol Health (which the FTC says made claims that its products were “medically proven” to treat certain diseases, and which the agency alleges changed orders of one CBD product to five products without the orderer’s consent); Epichouse LLC (which the FTC says claimed that its products could stop cognitive decline); and CBD Meds Inc (which the FTC says claimed that its products could treat, prevent or mitigate disorders like autism and schizophrenia). HempmeCBD, Reef Industries Inc. and Steves Distributing LLC were also on the FTC’s list of violators, with the agency claiming each had made similar health claims it found dubious. The FTC only issues complaints when it has “reason to believe” a law is being violated, and that it’d be in the public interest for the agency to intervene. Subsequent violations of this enforcement could result in hefty fines for these companies. CBD is legal in all 50 states, with varying levels of regulation. There has been a growing movement from governmental agencies and lawmakers to better monitor the booming industry. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) called on federal agencies last year to enact stricter laws so the good actors in the CBD sphere have a level playing field with those that might be taking liberties in their marketing materials.

DECEMBER 31, 2020

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