READY TO ROLL: Manzelli’s SoniKart is a regular at protests. |
Flying machine
The first thing you notice upon entering Manzelli’s Mass Ave apartment isn’t the photo of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, or the garish pig mask (worn in a video on one of Manzelli’s Web sites by a dancing protester in a mock police uniform). It’s not Pepe, the cute black spaniel who loves to chew on wires, or the skull tricked out in Groucho glasses, or the inflatable moose, or the Mr. Clean doll. It’s the SoniKart.Manzelli’s own invention, it’s a clunky recording studio on wheels, outfitted with a mixing board, mp3 recorder, inputs for six microphones or guitars, attachments for bullhorns, a 12-volt battery, and a sawed-off bit of PVC pipe in which one can stick an umbrella for when it rains. “Nimble in a march and conveniently sophisticated and powerful at a standing rally,” Manzelli’s Web site crows, the contraption not only provides powerful amplification, but allows broadcast-quality recordings to be taken right off the mics.
Three months ago, Boston police confiscated the SoniKart while it was being used by Green Party gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross, citing city noise ordinances. Last month, the charges were dismissed by a magistrate and the mobile unit was returned — but not before, Manzelli alleges, “police dented it up . . . took it apart into 150 pieces, lost some of them, and put it in boxes, with half in Hyde Park and half in the police station downtown.”
Manzelli, 43, says he’s taken the SoniKart to nearly 100 rallies in recent years, from the 2001 FTAA protests in Quebec (where he was tear-gassed) to the Boston-hosted Democratic National Convention in 2004, to smaller protests of speeches given by Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. (The Kart’s 20-inch-diameter megaphone helped at the latter event. “The word is that people did hear chants of ‘shame! shame! shame!’ when she was getting her [Boston College honorary] degree, so we were really happy about that,” he says with a grin.)
The George Galloway and Noam Chomsky fliers tacked on the wall of Manzelli’s home recording studio leave no doubt where his politics lie. Nor do the media outlets to which he’s contributed recordings and photographs, often gratis: “Sounds of Dissent” and “Truth & Justice Radio” on WZBC, “No Censorship Radio” on WMBR, Peacework magazine. He photographed Doris “Granny D” Haddock — “we’re each fans of the other” — for the Utne Reader.
Manzelli who doesn’t have to work, devotes himself to doing reporting work full time. “My grandfather was a contractor,” he explains. “He built three buildings in Belmont on Concord Avenue, including one for Mr. [Robert] Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. The two other buildings bring me almost enough to live off of.”
While Manzelli has a modest background in media (he helped found a family magazine in West Virginia), it wasn’t until later in life, around age 35, that he “came to understand,” as he writes on one of his Web sites, 492cafe.org, “the disparity between events, and the media experience most of us are forced to substitute for the event.”
