Home | Arts + Culture

A week of events in Cambridge and Somerville, from Longy’s ‘Begin Here’ to stories from Poe

By Marc Levy

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Sunday, Oct. 9

Honk! bands perform Sundays at Oktoberfest in Harvard Square. (Photo: Harvard Square Business Association)

Forty-third Annual Oktoberfest from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in Harvard Square. Free. Food from all over the world, arts, crafts, vintage goods, free samples, sidewalk sales and one-of-a-kind gifts are packed in with beer gardens, the “Chalk on the Walk” art installation, music and dancing in the street. New this year is a wine garden hosted by the Commonwealth Wine School and complementary events: The Filipino American Festival and Grolier Poetry Book Shop’s 95th Anniversary Festival. The event has been known to draw as many as 200,000 people. Information is here.

Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands parade from noon to 2 p.m. from Davis Square, Somerville, to Harvard Square. The Honk! bands march, followed by performances on the main stage and other venues at Oktoberfest until 6 p.m. Information is here.

Cambridge Science Festival Carnival from noon to 4 p.m. adds to the festival’s all-day events, free in the festival zone around 292 Main St. There are more than 75 individual activities with hundreds of presenting partners, shows and events at a family-friendly extravaganza celebrating curiosity, diversity, ingenuity and innovation. Events include robot demonstrations, liquid nitrogen ice cream freeze-off competition, science improv with Harvard’s Hasty Pudding troupe, physics-themed circus shows, slime-making, solar-powered vehicles, giveaways, book readings, food trucks and more. Carnival information is here; overall festival information is here.

Bridgeside Cypher from 3 to 6 p.m. at Starlight Square, 84 Bishop Allen Drive, Central Square. Free. Artists and musicians – rappers, singers and a band – perform in an often improvised format; expect an open mic part of this season finale too. Information is here.

“Borealis” installation (continued) from 8 to 11 p.m. by The MIT Museum, 314 Main St., Kendall Square. Free. Information is here.

The Runway Witch Fashion Show at 8 p.m. at Somerville Theatre’s Crystal Ballroom, 55 Davis Square. Tickets are $40. A drag fashion show with looks made and designed by Binx, who will also offer 13 ways to camp up Halloween wardrobes, then offer tunes to dance the night away under the blood moon. Information is here.

Grolier 95th Anniversary Festival from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in front of Toscano, 52 Brattle St., Harvard Square. Free. Taking place as part of the square’s 43rd Annual Oktoberfest, this event features readings from Peter Balakian; Jennifer Barber; Stephanie Burt; Chen Chen; Martha Collins; Steven Cramer; Christina Davis; Richard Fein; Danielle Legros Georges; George Kalogeris; Joan Naviyuk Kane; Sandra Lim; Los Lorcas; Fred Marchant; Gail Mazur; Gloria Mindock; Porsha Olayiwola; Robert Pinsky; Anna Ross and Lloyd Schwartz. Information is here.

Harvard Square hosted Cambridge’s 43rd Annual Oktoberfest on Sunday, complete with beer, sausages, and music to entertain overflow crowds.

The event, which took place on Church St. and Brattle St., has been hosted in the Square every year since 1978, when it was first organized by Frank Cardullo.

The event coincided with the 17th Annual HONK! Parade, the first-ever Filipino American Festival in Harvard Square, and a poetry festival celebrating the 95th anniversary of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop.

The popular Harvard Square restaurants Alden and Harlow and Wusong Road hosted Oktoberfest outdoor beer gardens, along with the Commonwealth Wine School.

Several live music stages were set up throughout the Square, featuring an array of bands from Cambridge and beyond.

The weekend festivities began at 1 p.m. with the HONK! Parade, a brass street music performance that featured more than 20 bands.

Performers entertain HONK! Parade crowds from a stage set up in the Square. By Marina Qu

Many musical groups performed on the Oktoberfest main stage, including La Banda Internacional de Chelsea, the Jamaica Plain Honk Band, and the School of Honk.

Sunday’s festivities also included the Filipino American Festival, hosted by the Harvard Square Philippine American Alliance for the first time this year in honor of Filipino American History Month. Filipino artists and bands performed on a stage located in a Church St. parking lot, alongside booths set up by local Filipino-owned businesses.

The festival was headlined by a 5:30 p.m. performance by rapper EZ Mil, who was joined by other artists and dance troupes on the Church St. Stage.

The weekend also featured an art installation called “Chalk on the Walk,” which invited attendees to create chalk artwork on the Church St. pavement.

Acrobats wowed audiences in Brattle Square. By Joey Huang

The Grolier Poetry Book Shop, founded in 1927, joined Oktoberfest for the first time this year in celebration of its 95th anniversary. The shop hosted poetry readings, including from Boston Youth Poet Laureate Anjalequa Birkett and current Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola.

Revels, a Cambridge-based performance group, also joined the festivities on Sunday to promote its Midwinter Revels program, which will be held in Sanders Theatre in December.

Jennifer Sur, the organization’s administrative services manager, said Revels’ productions “look at different cultures and different time periods.”

“We look at the traditions around the solstice for those cultures, or Christmas, too, depending on the culture,” she said.

This year’s production will look at Mexican, Irish, and Jewish cultures set in Ellis Island in the 1920s, Sur said.

The celebration concluded at Grendel’s Den, which hosted an Oktoberfest after-party featuring the 20th annual keg tapping ceremony.

For the 17th year, Somerville and Cambridge streets from Davis Square to Harvard Square were taken over by the bright, percussive crowds for the final day of the 2022 HONK! Fest on Sunday.

“Every year it’s this same vibe, same positive energy,” said Bob Francois, who played with the Haitian street band Rara Bel Poze during Sunday’s parade. “We love to get the opportunity to participate in something with so much diversity and to expose our cultural tradition to everybody that’s here.”

The HONK! Festival lasts from Friday to Sunday, inviting brass bands from all across the country and providing a platform to local organizations, artists and activists. Since its start in 2006, the festival’s site boasts, the celebration has spread as far as Brazil and Australia.

Signs held high in Sunday’s parade ran the gambit of major national and local issues, from “Affordable Housing for All” to “Climate Justice Now” to “Yes on 4.”

“It’s only weeks away from the election, and we know that many folks won’t know about this Question 4,” said Roxana Rivera, the executive vice president of 32BJ SEIU, referencing the ballot question challenging undocumented immigrants’ ability to obtain driver’s licenses. “We want to make sure it’s given as much visibility as possible, given the short timeline.”

The festival, Rivera said, is a good forum to give issues like this one that type of visibility.

Many, largely organized by Vida Urbana, also used the parade to advocate for rent control and highlight skyrocketing housing costs across Massachusetts.

Wearing giant heads, carrying paper swords and shields and hoisting giant banners, housing advocate marchers pointed to tenants’ rights information and housing resources.

Nearly half of all renters face unaffordable housing cost burdens in Massachusetts, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the group said in a press release.

The messaging campaigns and brass bands blasting familiar rhythms blended seamlessly with performers on stilts, cultural groups, hula hoopers, bikers and more in the surprisingly warm, high-energy Sunday afternoon.

“My favorite part about HONK! is being incredibly exhausted,” one emcee yelled into a mic, “and finding the motivation to come back again.”

TheHONK! Festival. The worldwide activist street band movement. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Or perhaps, if not, you can catch-up by first checking out this wiki, since yes, HONK! does warrant its own wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HONK! While there, you will also discover that, yes, this movement all began right here in Somerville, Mass.

Instigated in October 2006, the very first ever HONK! Festival is now seventeen years strong, prevailing annually in early October, even in spite of the very recent tough years. HONK! has always been clear on its most basic premise, to literally blast out, musically loud and rhythmically direct, a call to come together. To gather outside in celebrating the many positive aspects of life – while also delivering a heads up if those positives take a negative turn.

During those aforementioned tough recent years, specifically 2020 and 2021, the local Somerville-based HONK! organizers just pivoted to present those particular annual HONK!s in ways that made sense given the obvious obstacles. In 2020, HONK! United was born, a very spirited international online collaboration. Through that endeavor, HONK! became increasingly aware of kindred spirit bands who are very active within their home fronts, some bands located as far afield as Antarctica, Nicaragua, and Brazil. It is a fact that HONK! is indeed a movement that keeps growing worldwide. At last count, there are now over 21 large HONK! gatherings that have been held throughout the world, several of which are held annually.

In 2021, Somerville-based HONK! turned its eye to championing very hyperlocal neighborhood causes, narrowing its programming date to a specific day, and within that, branching out to support even more Boston-area communities, which often encompass neighborhoods that are only a few city blocks wide. The bands who participated in 2021 also harkened from more local areas. In other words, bands who were able to head back and sleep in their own respective beds at the end of the HONK! 2021 day.

For 2022, the band participation will continue to include many local HONK!-related bands who have sprouted up over the years, inspired by the original HONK! efforts that all began in Somerville. But this year, there will also be a few bands coming in, as in physically coming in, from far outside New England, with Banda Rim Bam Bum traveling in from Santiago, Chile, and the NOLA-based Young Fellaz Brass Band returning to HONK! after a hiatus of several years.

This year the HONK! bands total 20 at current count, with many returning bands who have participated pretty regularly in HONK!, since it was propelled into motion by the Somerville-based HONK! founder and organizer Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, who this year will be joined by:
aNova Brazil (Boston, MA),
La Banda Internacional de Chelsea (Chelsea, MA),
Banda Rim Bam Bum (Santiago, Chile),
The Brass Balagan (Burlington, VT),
Bread and Puppet Circus Band (Glover, VT),
Dirty Water Brass Band (Boston, MA),
Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band (Somerville, MA),
Expandable Brass Band (Northampton, MA),
Extraordinary Rendition Band (Providence, RI),
Hartford Hot Several (Hartford, CT),
Ideal Maine Social Aid and Sanctuary Band (Portland, ME),
The Jamaica Plain Honk Band (Jamaica Plain, MA),
Leftist Marching Band (Portsmouth, NH),
The Party Band (Lowell, MA),
Rara Bel Poze (Boston, MA),
Rude Mechanical Orchestra (NYC, NY),
School of Honk (Somerville, MA),
Undertow Brass Band [FKA What Cheer? Brigade] (Providence, RI),
Young Fellaz Brass Band (New Orleans, LA).
The current list of band participants can also be found at honkfest.org/2022-festival/bands-2022.

This year’s HONK! also includes HONK! features that have compelled many to return year after year:
Friday early evening, Lantern Parades will light the way throughout Davis Square neighborhoods.

Saturday afternoon to evening, continuous HONK! band performances willhappenin Davis Square.
Sunday early afternoon, the venerable HONK! Parade willwend its waydown Massachusetts Avenue from Davis Square to Harvard Square, making HONK!’s formidable presence known at the Square’s Oktoberfest. The Parade’s mission is to “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Feet” and will include this year’s participating bands, plus many activist community groups. Interested community groups are welcome to contact parade@honkfest.org if they’d like to participate in the parade.
Sunday afternoon, the Parade will be followed by a HONK! mainstage in Harvard Square, featuring quick sets performed by many of the participating bands. Several HONK! bands will also have short sets taking place throughout the Square as well.

Sunday afternoon after the Parade, HONK! will give special focus to the good work that HONK!’s local community partners are doing. HONK! participants will gather in Harvard Square’s Winthrop Park, with band/community group discussions, public information sharing, art-making, and amplifying overall their social justice messages.
Sunday early evening, a collective HONK! call-to-action by visiting and local HONK! musicians will take place outside a local correctional facility in the Boston-area, to raise awareness about those who are being detained there, and to remind the detainees with music, that they have not been forgotten by many in the outside world.

Held outdoors rain or shine.

The HONK! Festival, a music fest originally conceived and presented in 2006 right here in Somerville, caught on immediately in the local area. Since then HONK! has also become an international phenomenon. Full details on how HONK! came to be, the philosophical and pragmatic approaches behind the HONK! movement, and what differentiates a HONK! band from other music-makers in the streets, can all be found at honkfest.org/about. Taking a deep dive into the HONK! Wiki can also reveal the far-reaching aspects of this particular progressive musical movement.

HONK! is a not-for-profit, all-volunteer project where many hands lighten the impressive list of festival to-dos. Visit honkfest.org/help for more information on volunteer opportunities and also to make a tax-deductible donation. No donation is too small, or too large!

For complete information and continuous updates on this year’s HONK! Festival, visit .honkfest.org, facebook.com/honkfestival, and twitter.com/honkfest.

On Sunday, October 9th, the last day of the Boston HONK! Festival, the parade of tenants, small owners, and allies will debut their support for rent control as elections approach in the state of Massachusetts and march from Davis Square, down Mass Ave, and into Harvard Square from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. 

The 17th annual HONK! Festival returns for Indigenous People’s Day weekend with 20 marching bands convening in Cambridge to promote music, community, and a sprinkle of local activism. Musical groups such as the Jamaica Plain Honk Band, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and Bread and Puppet Circus Band will partner with local nonprofit organizations to get the word out about various causes, from voter registration to gentrification.

The festival will kick off on Oct. 6 with Chilean band Rim Bam Bum, which will perform at the Main Branch of the Cambridge Public Library at 6:30 p.m., with a lantern parade through the streets of Davis Square the following evening. Most band performances will commence on Oct. 8, with the 20 brass bands performing at six locations around Davis Square. A concert featuring four performance venues around Harvard Square on Oct. 9 will coincide with the Harvard Square Business Association’s annual Oktoberfest celebration.

The festivities will take place Sunday, October 9th, 2022.

The Harvard Square Business Association has announced the return of the 43rd Annual Oktoberfest and slightly irrepressible and fabulously madcap 17th Annual HONK! Parade on Sunday, October 9th, 2022. Come be a part of this unique, irreverent, family-friendly annual tradition where musicians and spectators “reclaim the streets for horns, bikes and feet”!

New this year: The Filipino American Festival and The Grolier Poetry Book Shop 95th Anniversary Festival!

Harvard Square’s Oktoberfest features food from all over the world, arts, crafts, vintage goods, free samples, sidewalk sales and one-of-a-kind gifts. In addition, Oktoberfest boasts beer gardens hosted by Alden & Harlow and Wusong Road and a first this year, a wine garden hosted by Commonwealth Wine School.

This annual celebration of fall features live music, including a Passim stage and an all HONK! Review on the main stage. Dancing in the streets is encouraged!

One of the highlights of the festival is the HONK! Parade which arrives in the Square at approximately 1pm. In its 17th year, the HONK! movement has become a global phenomenon. This year, more than 20 HONK! bands from around the country will march from Davis Square to Harvard Square. Spectators will be treated to a horn-tooting, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, mind-blowing spectacle and everyone is welcome to join the back of the parade and make their way to Oktoberfest.

Brooklyn-based Home Studios has filled an Italian restaurant close to Harvard University with plush booths and banquettes to introduce colour and texture to the space.

Bar Enza is situated in a prime spot on Harvard Square next to the Ivy League college in Cambridge, Massachusetts – just across the Charles River from Boston.

Home Studios revamped Bar Enza to include a variety of soft seating

The project involved the revamp of an existing restaurant on the ground floor of The Charles Hotel.

To complement chef Mark Ladner’s menu, Home Studios pulled references from a range of regions and styles across Italy – from Rome’s trattorias to Milanese villas – and combined them to create interiors that feel elevated yet cosy.

The seasons and the shops may change, but the spirit and streets are ever-exciting

How to describe Harvard Square? Busy and bustling with bikes and buses, cars and crowds, trucks and kick-scooters fighting for space on streets and crossways. Intimate with its hidden alleys and entryways, venerable (quirky tobacconist Leavitt and Peirce), modern (a fine wine shop, a cannabis boutique), upscale (Harvest Restaurant), and working-class (late-night standby Charlie’s Kitchen). Preppies in polo shirts and grunge punks in ragged jeans, coffee-table books and counter-culture comics, tweedy professors and four-year drop-ins and the drop-outs who never left … in short, the Square epitomizes all that’s eclectic, and that is precisely why we like it. With stylistic contrasts at every corner, the energy here is catching, challenging us to understand how the pieces all fit.