On the wild side

The thing about Rick Berlin is he never came in from the cold.

He's 61 and lives with two roommates in a graduate school-grade apartment above Aida Lopez's shop in Jamaica Plain's Hyde Square. He writes and plays music, puts out CDs, and has waited tables at Doyle's for 17 years. ("It was perfect for me. The customer is always wrong.")

Most of the people he drinks with at the Brendan Behan Pub are artists and musicians in their 20s. "I live in a time warp," he says happily.

Berlin appears oblivious to, if not downright dismissive of, the security so many crave in their seventh decade. Most men at his age talk prostates and putting. Not Berlin, born Richard Gustave Kinscherf III in Sioux City, Iowa, according to " The Awful Truth about Rick Berlin, " the bio on his website.

"My father played it safe, and it eviscerated him," he reasons.

Berlin is seditious and unhinged and extravagantly unrepentant for his many sins. He has always walked on the wild side. He graduated from Yale and later got a 4-F military deferment during Vietnam after a Peace Corps psychiatrist had deemed him suicidal and possibly homicidal. (He laughs gleefully delivering this news and adds he dropped acid the day of his physical in Denver.)

He and a group of desperados were busted for nudity and drugs while making a movie in Grenada. It was there that he encountered a woman named -- he swears this is the truth -- Helen of Troy Eleanor Roosevelt Nielson.

He taught school for a while and says he turned down full scholarships to Yale's architecture and drama schools. His plan to join the Peace Corps was nixed by the pesky diagnosis of that shrink. He has lived all over the country over the years but adores Jamaica Plain.

Which brings us to Jamaicaplainspoken.com, the website he and Todd Drogy, a fellow musician and a waiter at Zon's, another estimable JP eatery, have created to showcase the astonishing array of characters who live in the 'hood. We're talking 43 video interviews of folks in JP, with more coming, along with a documentary down the road.

The accompanying music ranges from the bloodcurdling to the sublime -- all compliments of musicians with JP connections. We're talking everything from a Haydn string quartet to Berlin's old band, The Shelley Winters Project.

The videos, wildly uneven in quality and interest, are a many splendored thing. Let's see, there's Rocky The Barber, who has been cutting hair in JP for 35 years. As he snips away, he recalls his decision at age 9 back in his native Italy to choose a trade.

There are John and Nancy Hanifin, who send their three kids to private school. John assumes he's one of perhaps two registered Republicans in JP. They love the area and abhor, as Nancy puts it, "the cookie-cutter communities" in the suburbs.

There are the Casilio Sisters, triplets who pursue art and social justice. And the Boehner Brothers, Woody and Freddy, now in their 80s. Freddy was wounded at Pearl Harbor, and Woody was shot during a holdup in the bar he used to own.

There are Chris and his compadres in The Swim, a video about the JP male rite of passage of swimming across Jamaica Pond in the dead of night. Utterly illegal, undeniably dangerous and, in the words of one swimmer, "euphoric."

There's Aida Lopez, "the Cuban mamacita of Hyde Square," says Berlin, who came here from Cuba more than 30 years ago. We see her at a family cookout -- food on the table, Cuban songs in the air, flowers growing in a discarded sink. Joyous.

There are Jeremy and Ryan, two young gay men who met in Arkansas and now write free lance. When asked about love, Ryan talks about trust. The man's right.

It goes on and on -- Flower Lady, Polaroid Kid, Fat Ram Pumpkin Tattoo + Family.

Berlin and Drogy dreamed up the project a couple of years ago in part because, says Drogy, 32, "The media give a very impoverished sense of the American soul."

They love JP for its diversity and tolerance, one of the bluest neighborhoods in one of the bluest states. But not to worry, all of you red states, says veteran social activist David Weinstein to the camera, "You don't have to be scared of us."

The pair began interviewing friends, and then friends of friends, and then friends of friends of friends. What they need to add is a new palette of voices if their portrait of JP is to be serious rather than merely charming. Whole demographic chunks of JP, like the flood of young, upscale professionals who have moved there, are essentially absent from the project, as is the friction rippling among the various tribes there.

Neighborhood is a funny thing. Rick Berlin has never heard of Sweet Finnish, the JP bakery at the other end of Centre Street. It offers wireless computer connections that draws people with laptops to work over coffee, and it is home to a monthly convocation of video bloggers.

Never mind. He is a JP denizen of distinction and a rare piece of work to boot. What he does isn't particularly special. That he is still doing it is. Long may he run.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com