HIZZONNAROO

Book excerpt: It was less than a month after the Boston Phoenix shuttered that iconic Mayor Tom Menino announced he wouldn't run for a sixth term. Though between publications at the time, former Phoenix staffer Chris Faraone wanted badly to weigh in on what promised to be an exhilarating scrum, and so he seized an opportunity to write a weekly rant on the race for the Jamaica Plain Gazette and its sister papers, the likes of which he considers rare beacons of independent integrity among mass media competitors. Though restricted from profanities for the first time in his career, Faraone ravaged the mayoral beat, eventually packing more than 30 “Politics as Unusual” with some of his most fiery work to date (all of which are featured in HIZZONNAROO). Digging deep to his progressive roots, he helped usher pressing and invisible issues like foreclosure into the public conversation, and did so long before most other journos and opinion mongers spoke up. From the talent of some candidates to the depravity of others, Faraone often fired the first shot. As implied by the arcane title – a mashup of Hizzoner, the generic moniker for municipal monarchs, and the annual cultural blowout Bonnaroo – HIZZONNAROO is Faraone's most local release to date. But while his writings and polemics on Hub politics are bitter bubble gum for local wonks and lefties, they're also fit for anybody – whether now or in several decades – tracing alternative explanations for how Boston picked its first new mayor in two decades. From the intro by Peter Kadzis (Boston Phoenix, WGBH) I don’t agree with all of what he says: in fact, during the final several weeks, my views and his diverged. But no one in his or her right mind reads Chris looking for consensus, or silky conventional wisdom. Faraone writes to stir things up, to inspire thought, to provoke reappraisals—agonizing or otherwise. If you are reading these words that means you are among the smart people who have bought Chris’s book. Some of you will be pissed off. Some of you will applaud. But none of you will be bored. From the intro by John Ruch (Jamaica Plain Gazette, Mission Hill Gazette) While neoliberal prophets held forth on op-ed pages, Chris exposed and neutered a stealth attempt by an “education reform” group to sway the race. While the dailies promoted spurious polls that got the results backward, and later both endorsed the candidate who lost, Chris hit street corners and lunch counters to report what real people really thought. While major media kept wrongly reporting that a white guy was the first candidate to enter the race, Chris reported the challenges of electing a mayor of color in a supposedly diversity-loving city. While the political establishment wailed, with some justification, about one candidate’s murky union money ties, Chris broke news on the other candidate’s murky evicting-poor-people ties.