HubArts.com

Not watching the Super Bowl? Passim offers an alternative

Very alternative. While the rest of us will be tuning in for the Patriots-Giants rematch, the Harvard Square folk landmark will feature Grammy-nominated producer/performer Nicolay and "exploratory jazz" trio The Hot at Nights performing the music from their recent "Shibuya Session" EP, which you can hear here. Nicolay is an electronica producer best known as half of The Foreign Exchange with rapper Phonte. North Carolina's The Hot at Nights feature 8-string guitar virtuoso Chris Boerner, with Matt Douglas on sax/woodwinds and Nick Baglio on drums. The EP features new versions of tracks from Nicolay's 2009 album "City Lights Vol. 2: Shibuya." It's pretty mellow, decidedly unlike Vince Wilfork slamming Eli Manning to the ground.The gig is scheduled for 8:00 pm, by which time I hope Wilfork will have done that at least twice, at Club Passim, 47 Palmer Street, Cambridge. Tix: $13 for Passim members, and $15 for non-members, at: www.passim.org or (617) 492-7679.

Eddie Coyle at the end

Only one show left, Sunday at 7:30pm, for "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" at Oberon. I've written about the theatrical adaptation of this Boston crime classic by Bill Doncaster a few times over the past year, including attending its first reading more than a year ago in the back room of the Burren. Thursday night I finally got to see the full version at Oberon - I brought my dad, who took me to the movie back in 1972, and we scarfed beers and burgers over at Charlie's  Kitchen first to get in the old-school mood.

The play was everything I expected, with its network of conspiratorial conversations staged all around Oberon and sometimes overlapping as the web of circumstance tightens around the characters. I don't review plays I write about, but this was dark fun. Special nod to Rick Park as the bartender/ex-con Dillon, whose seemingly genial, reasonable exterior is gradually revealed as a disguise. Peter Darrigo is also effectively real as a familiar kind of cranky, self-aggrandizing, working-class Masshole; it's just that Jimmy Scalise's gig involves guns and banks instead of power tools or paint brushes.

I'm still debating the depiction of Coyle himself by Doncaster, director Maria Silvaggi and actor Paulo Branco. Mind you, they deliver on their artistic intent - I'm just not sure I share their interpretation 100%. Sure, the movie's performance by Robert Mitchum gave the character more gravitas than author George V. Higgins may have intended, but the Coyle they give us in the play is a total mook.

Overall, this is a compelling restaging of the tale, and last I heard, there were only a couple of handfuls of tickets left for the final performance, at 866-811-4111 or cluboberon.com.

Work and play at MASSMoCA. And a boat.

Made one of my regular visits to MASSMoCA in North Adams last weekend and found that the current exhibits - at least the ones I could hit in a couple of hours - are as usual a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. At the sublime end of the spectrum of course is Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, which has its own building and its own web site and is expected to stick around through 2033. I've been through it perhaps half a dozen times since it opened in 2008, and the work still feels like genius.

The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility, on display through April 14, does something different for a MoCA show, tackling its subject head-on, almost polemically at times. The idea is to show how far labor has fallen from the days of Rosie the Riveter in our era of economic despair, outsourcing, migrancy and exploitation. A series of photos shows workers increasingly buried on a beach, in sight of distant factories, until there's nothing left of them. A nearby installation combines a workers' break room and a gallows, like a New Yorker cartoon that needs no caption.

Most compelling is Adrian Paci's tragicomic "Centro di permanenza temporanea," a large-screen video that shows solemn-faced  minority workers lining up to climb one of those wheeled airport staircases - but instead of boarding a plane, they are left standing stoically on the staircase in the middle of the airport, while the shiny jets of commerce taxi and take off all around them. (Image courtesy MASSMoCA.) The video is specifically intended to comment on the plight of undocumented workers, but the sense of abandonment seems to apply to pretty much everyone these days. This five-minute film was a kick in the head.

Upstairs in Building 4 is the exhibit Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum, running through February. This is one of those shows where the scale of the works is designed to take advantage of the huge spaces at MASSMoCA, so that they make an impact even if the curatorial explanations don't always convince. The centerpiece of Ward's show is "Nu Colossus," which features a fishing boat cut in sections and a giant, conical basket-woven fish trap of a kind used in Ward's native Jamaica. One's immediate impression is that the hunter has become the hunted. But of course such obvious interpretation is never correct here at MoCA, and the accompanying text informs us, "This duality of seduction and entrapment is key to Ward's idea of mirage, which as an image both distorts reality and points to a sense of need."

I sometimes feel as though I am insulting the artist when I talk about what's most affecting in these giant installations, as it's often different than the stated intent of the work. Does my sense of wonder at their immediate visceral impact trump the Moebius-strip curator-speak of the cerebral explanations? Disbelieving some of the airy conceptual constructions does not make one a Philistine, does it?

By itself, bringing a boat into the gallery no longer floats mine. But a look into the gaping maw of the fish trap - filled with broken furniture (more on that in a sec) and lit in sinister chiarscuro by the gaps in the basket weave - was a stunner. All I could see was an upsettingly intense still-life of a tornado's unholy inner chaos, looking up into the funnel as it sucked away me, Dorothy and Toto. My crappy cellphone pic can't do it justice, but perhaps it doesn't matter, as this interpretation is apparently an unintended consequence of the artist's craft and vision, and nowhere mentioned in the text. Thanks to eavesdropping, though, I know I'm not the only one who saw it immediately.

The furniture, as well as the foam rubber, resistors and capacitors making up Ward's giant "Mango Tourists" in an adjacent gallery, were sourced around the museum, which occupies the former Sprague Electric factory complex. A large installation in the Workers exhibit re-creates and comments on an "artwork" of disposable cups stuck in a chain link fence at the Sprague plant during a 1970 strike. To use a couple of verbs much favored by curators nowadays, it would be interesting to "unpack" the ways that these works "interrogate" the site's history. There are places in the museum where the workers' passages (in both senses of the word) remain vividly present.

Finally I wandered into the football-field sized Building 5 gallery, the site of MASSMoCA's most mind-blowing triumphs and its most hilarious misfires. The sheer size of the joint brings out artistic ambitions that raise the stakes so high even the misfires are must-sees. That, alas, was not the case with Katharina Grosse's one floor up more highly, an exhibit which ended, fortunately or unfortunately, on New Year's Day.

The main portion of the exhibit consists of truckloads of dirt heaped on the gallery floor, spray-painted in various colors and stuck with large, styrofoam rods that look like the icy wastes of Superman's home planet. It called to mind the el cheapo alien landscapes on the original "Star Trek." The exhibit text says that Grosse's work "opens up a new path for painting while rearranging conventions, hierarchy and our very habits of seeing." Also: "the anarchic work embraces a state of ambiguity that allows for alternative ways of processing what is seen." To which I can only say, uh huh.

MASSMoCA: You can get there from here

NORTH ADAMS -  MASSMoCA, the Clark Art Institute and other cultural attractions in the North Adams-Williamstown area are once again accessible to eastern Mass. residents without a long Mass Pike re-route or a detour through dueling banjos country in the Berkshires.

On Dec. 15 the state reopened the stretch of Route 2 that runs through Charlemont, Savoy, Florida and North Adams after $23 million in rapid-fire repairs. The road, a key-east west link in that corner of the state, was washed out in Tropical Storm Irene in late August.

Take it from someone with family in North Adams and an interest in MASSMoCA, the Clark, the Williams College art museum and various other attractions: doing without Route 2 would have made a winter trip here less than appealing. The state-recommended detour added considerably to the travel time. In November we took a shorter route recommended by MASSMoCA, which traversed some beautiful valleys and slopes in the backwoods north of Route 2, but also brought us to a near head-on with a convoy of giant dump trucks carrying fill for the Route 2 project, on a narrow two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. There were Trucks use lower gears signs and hair-raising descents.

I spent a night out on Interstate 93 during the Fast 14 bridge-replacement project for a story, and was flabbergasted by what they could do in the course of a week. I'm even more impressed by the Route 2 project, which we drove this week. We'd heard a bridge was out and some other areas might have seen a little washout, but in fact it looks like several hundreds yards of roadway have been replaced (in different stretches), in one of the most hilly and remote high-traffic stretches in the state, through steep hills, with precipitous dropoffs to the Cold River on the other side. Banks and long cement retaining walls are or will be rebuilt, entire stretches of river seem to have new channels, landslides have been cleared away, etc. We got our $23 million worth, although it looks like the project will continue through the winter.

It's safe to go back to MoCA, in other words, and now through Sunday is your last chance to see Katharina Grosse's "One Floor Up More Highly" (right) in the museum's ginormous Gallery 5. Strangely, it bears a certain resemblance to the piles of fill at the Route 2 constuction sites. A museum official said today that they didn't think the road closure had affected visitor traffic much, but that they've noticed more people coming through since Route 2 reopened on Dec. 15, so maybe it hurt a little bit after all.

One other note. If any of you are fond of stopping in the Mohawk Trail State Forest during the warm weather months to use the unofficial nude beach just downstream from the state campground, I have bad news. The trees that shielded the site from the road are gone.

Coldplay returns to Boston. It's like they never left.

Coldplay returns to Boston next July 29 for a gig at the TD Garden. It's part of a North American tour announced today and kicking off in Edmonton in April, in support of their debuted-at-No.-1 "Mylo Xyloto" album. Yes, they're coming back, but you're forgiven if you haven't exactly been missing them.

Adele and Lady Gaga can try, but no one has matched the ubiquity of Coldplay's music in this century. Briefly an underdog critical favorite, they're now everyband for the masses, sonic wallpaper lining our Starbucks world. I was at a church Christmas fair the other day, browsing a friend's photographs, and when some girl sat down at the piano in the corner to amuse herself, it was "Clocks" she picked out on the 88s. Of course. I just googled "I hate Coldplay" and got 23,000,000 results. That sort of backlash is inevitable these days of course. But who can really hear anything new that Coldplay does now, what with "Clocks" and "The Scientist" and "Yellow" and ten more soundalike hits rattling around in our brains - no, wait, it's not an ear worm, that girl's actually playing it. They're the band so popular that nobody listens to them anymore. Kind of a melancholy place to be, when you think about it.

But that doesn't mean the show won't sell out. An American Express cardholder presale for tix begins Monday at 10 am; sales to the general public begin Dec. 17 at 10 am.  Tickets are available at 1-800-745-3000, Ticketmaster.com and LiveNation.com. The band will also be seen on "Austin City Limits" on PBS on New Year's Eve.

"Under the Influence" of Boston studio

In Boston and later Cambridge in the 1980s and '90s, Fort Apache Studios recorded some of the biggest names in "alternative" music, including the Pixies, Radiohead, Weezer and Yo la Tengo, along with local faves gone national on the Pixies' trail, such as Juliana Hatfield, Buffalo Tom, Dinosaur Jr. and the Lemonheads.

Now Fort Apache co-founder Paul Kolderie, who turned the knobs on many of those recordings, has put some of the old mics and amps and other gear to work on behalf of Berklee students performing in tribute to those influences.

The "Under the Influence" album Berklee's student-run label Heavy Rotation Records has Berklee up-and-comers recording a pair of covers by big-time '80s and '90s bands and the acts that influenced them: Julia Easterlin (Pixies, Radiohead), Da'Rayia (Gang of Four, Red Hot Chili Peppers), David Pramik featuring Johnny Duke (Joy Division, U2), the Boston Boys featuring Emily Elbert (Hüsker Dü, Green Day), the Berklee String Metal Ensemble (My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins), and Pinn Panelle (Mission of Burma, REM). Previous releases on Heavy Rotation tend to feature previously recorded tracks submitted by the performers; this time Kolderie plugged in his equipment and recorded the artists himself. You can sample the tracks here: 

This Saturday at at the Berklee Performance Center, Heavy Rotation will host an album-release concert with the student performers plus a ringer, a solo - but electric - set by Roger Miller of Mission of Burma. Tix are $8 in advance ($12 day of show) at berkleebpc.com and at the box office. Call 617-747-2261 for more information.

WELDER is iPad crack for word nerds

Actually it's W.E.L.D.E.R., if you want to get technical about it, which stands for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. It's an iPhone and iPad game debuted this month by Ayopa Games and Highline Games, a startup from some of the Rockstar NYC people. And it has been the largest single time-suck in my life for about three weeks now. Gameplay combines elements of Scrabble, Tetris and an old-school Jumble. And the touch-screen interface is so well-designed that it's just about impossible to put down. All the uncool kids are doing it.

When you start playing, you face a 64-tile board, much like Scrabble, only it's filled with random letters and a few blank tiles. Tap one letter, then another, and they swap places. The idea is to move them around to make a four-letter or longer word, generally using as few swaps as possible. Double-tap a blank tile and a virtual keyboard appears so you can chose a letter to fill it.

In the first round, it's only adjacent tiles that you can swap, but in subsequent rounds more complicated parlays are available. Each word you make disappears from the board, and random letters slide down to fill in, sometimes forming words on their own, like a Webster's pachinko machine.

Each round you get only so many swaps to make so many words, and the more creative you are in your choices, using rarer letters, the higher you score. More scoring buys you more swaps...

Non-word people are glazing over about now. But what's really addicting about this game - what's making it spread like wildfire, at least among my Bay State tribe - is the interface. The skin is a subtle mid-century Cold War modern, with peeling paint and big red and green buttons, like a word game in a missile silo. Here and there are touches of steampunk, like the brass-framed ticker scoring your words across the bottom of the game board. (Tap a word there, and you get a definition.)

And the sound design features two tracks. While you're thinking, there's an ominous ambient hiss and flutter, like the sound of slow decay in that missile silo or on early first-person shooter games. Feedback arrives as a clanging, dinging clamor when you make a word, reminiscent of the doors and gates sliding down on the opening credits of "Get Smart" or "MST3K." Over all the sense is of being a cog in a machine, combined with a meaningless Pavlovian payout each time you score. Why this is so appealing, I can't say. The sounds also annoy the crap out of anyone in the room with you, which may or may not be desirable.

The game's only real flaw is the dictionary, which misses some obvious words and includes others, while mostly  skipping swears that would really come in handy sometimes. But they're taking dictionary suggestions at words@weldergame.com.

Last I looked, WELDER was $1.99 on the App Store, but it's sometimes discounted to 99 cents. My phone is an Android so I can't say how it would play on that smaller screen, but on iPad it's an addictive joy. I'm stuck on Level 8 at the moment, and my wife greeted the news that I'd scored 670 for PURRS thanks to bonus tiles with the same kind of cheerful but not actually excited "awesome" that she gives when I call her in to see a sports highlight on the news. But by then I was already on to the next word...

 

Kingsley Flood drops new EP

Kingsley Flood's "Dust Windows" was my favorite album of 2010 and stayed atop my charts until the Decemberists dropped "The King Is Dead." Now the Boston band is about to drop a new six-song EP, "Colder Still," that knocks the Decemberists' leftovers EP "Long Live The King" out of my personal Number 1 spot. Funny.

"Colder Still" is an interim step for Kingsley Flood, a bit of a stylistic grabbag. "I Don't Wanna Go Home" (not the Southside Johnny tune) has some power-poppy, almost glam touches behind a typically headlong vocal from frontman/songwriter Naseem Khuri. "Wonderland" opens with a single guitar picked behind a close-up, unadorned Khuri confessional ("Brother I've been lying all along/my collar's not as clean as I let on...") before Jenée Morgan's fiddle comes in and the tune begins to canter. "Mannequin Man" is a speedy guitar rager that evokes early Elvis Costello or Graham Parker and is gonna leave 'em drained when played live. Title track "Colder Still" is spooky and November-y as you can get, with Khuri's long, torchy syllables against spikey electric guitar on the chorus.

The EP has gobs of everything I loved about Kinglsey Flood in the first place, from Khuri's tumbling, Dylanesque lyrics to the collaborative unity of the band's playing and the surprising little fills and accents on every song. There's a reason the band got featured on NPR and won New Artist of the Year at the 2010 Boston Music Awards and Best Roots Act in the 2010 and 2011 Boston Phoenix Best Music Poll. (That was Khuri yowling about "the pulse of the nation" on those WBZ ads, too, another KF song placement.)

That said, "Dust Windows" was recorded as a piece in a rural Vermont retreat, which added subtly but immeasurably to its greatness, the way it held together. "Colder Still" shows it was recorded in Somerville and Brooklyn studios and I suspect at different times. Still, it will tide me over until the band's next full-length album, which I'm told is all of a piece and written but not yet recorded. Can hardly wait.

Kingsley Flood will release "Colder Still" with a three-night run at Lizard Lounge, in Cambridge, December 8, 9, and 10. Support acts include Balthrop, Alabama (NYC) and Son of the Sun (Buffalo) on Dec. 8; Swear and Shake (NYC) and Paper Thick Walls (Chicago) on Dec. 9; and Jamie Kent and the Options (Northampton) and This Way (Portland) on Dec. 10. Shows are 21+, doors at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 advance, $12 at the door; order online at Brown Paper Tickets. Copies of "Colder Still" will be available at the shows, though the EP's official release date is January 10, 2012.

Eddie Coyle hits the stage, tickets on sale now

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" comes to Oberon in Cambridge in December and January, and tickets are on sale now at the production's web site. Playwright Bill Doncaster's adaptation of the Boston crime classic drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd for a reading in the back room at the Burren some months back, with author George V. Higgins' widow in attendance. Higgins is enjoying something of a resurgence now, which also includes an upcoming Brad Pitt movie of "Cogan's Trade" (shot, alas, elsewhere). "Coyle" is, as Doncaster says in the video below, still the one against which "badass Boston crime stories are measured." Director Maria Silvaggi returns along with Paulo Branco as Coyle, Rick Park as Dillon and other cast members. Tickets are $20-$35, and the 11 performances take place between Dec. 8 and Jan. 15. I suggest getting yours now.

Breaking Bad finale was a blast

I was OMG-ing online like a little girl last night as the fourth-season finale of "Breaking Bad" exceeded even my high expectations. On most shows, the characters change in the tiniest increments if at all over an open-ended run, offering endless variations on essentially the same crime-solving exploits or sitcom capers. "Breaking Bad" has made good on creator Vince Gilligan's promise to turn its protagonist from a milquetoast into Scarface. Oh boy has it ever.

The series is one long, continuous arc charting the moral self-destruction of high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who turns to cooking crystal meth after a lung cancer diagnosis, in hopes of leaving his family some money when he's gone. His cancer is in remission, but his insides are still rotting.

Gilligan and AMC have promised that Walter's story will reach its conclusion after just 16 more episodes. If you have not watched the show, go get the freakin' DVDs today and start - but do not read the rest of this post because there are SPOILERS galore.

I've been thinking about "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" and "The Wire" a lot these last couple of weeks, as "Breaking Bad" is now routinely mentioned in their company as among the best dramas in TV history, the four stars of a current golden age that's mostly on cable. I think in particular of "The Sopranos," because it covered some of the same ground as "Breaking Bad," namely the intersection of 20th century suburban America with violent crime, the story of a man and his morals and how they affect his wife and kids and friends.

But "The Sopranos" had an open-ended run, had good seasons and less good ones, and plenty of slack time. Remember that horrible dream sequence? "Breaking Bad" more than any of those other three shows has kept its relentless momentum, as the bodies pile up and Walter and his sidekick Jesse keep cookin' meth and facing new consequences.

Particularly amazing is that last night's season finale tied up with a plot line begun way back at the beginning of season two. That's when Walt and Jesse first encountered Mexican drug lord turned pathetic bell-ringing stroke victim Tio Salamanca. Last night when Tio agreed to help Walt take down meth kingpin/fried chicken baron Gus Fring in a wheelchair suicide bombing at the hilariously misnamed Casa Tranquila nursing home, it was the sum of an equation that Gilligan began writing something like 30 episodes ago. And it was perfect.

The waiting, the explosion and the aftermath were as gripping a sequence as I've seen on TV. Fring trudged zombielike out of Tio's burning room, and the camera slowly came around from the left side of his face to the right, which was mostly...missing. He straightened his tie, then fell down dead. I'd wager there were more viewers screaming "Holy ----!" in their living rooms than at any time since, well, the Red Sox won the '04 series.

His horrible injuries - the condition already known as "Gus Face" on Twitter - reminded many viewers of the zombies in AMC's "Walking Dead," which had been advertised during the episode. And in an interview published online as the episode ended, Gilligan revealed that "Walking Dead" special effects mavens had indeed done the work. (A favorite tweet: @jhowardrmit's "Well they blew up the chicken man in Breaking Bad last night. #brucespringsteen #breakingbad.")

But to just focus on the big bang would totally misrepresent this series, which for all its pulp entertainment value is at heart a brilliant character study of Walter White - Bryan Cranston has won three Emmys in the role and should get a fourth now. The finale reached a second climax of sorts when his wife, on the phone, asked him what had happened, and he said, "I won." I'm not sure there's ever been a TV character whose arc covered as much ground as his.

But wait, there's more.

Much of the last couple of episodes has revolved around Walt's sidekick/partner/pseudo-son Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul (one Emmy), and his concern for a little boy named Brock. Brock lay at death's door in the hospital, apparently because he'd been served the poison - ricin - that Walt and Jesse had intended for Gus Fring. (Funny moment. Cops to Jesse: Where did you hear about ricin? Jesse: I think I saw it on "House.")

Walt had made the ricin and given it to Jesse, and it seemed that Gus had outsmarted them and fed it to the kid. This bonded Jesse more tightly with Walt against Gus. But as the episode wound down, we learned that the kid had actually been poisoned by lily of the valley. He'd probably found it in his yard.

Or at least that's what we all thought, until the final shot of the episode, a lovely look at the pool and patio behind Walt's house that ended with a slow zoom... to...a pot of...lily of the valley.

OMG! Walt poisoned the kid to win back Jesse! Walt poisoned the kid!

Several people quickly pointed out on Twitter and Facebook that Gilligan and Co. tipped it the week before, when Walt was sitting on his patio, brooding and spinning a gun on a tabletop. Look where the gun points in that screenshot up above, which many posted online. Walt wasn't just idly contemplating a thing of beauty amidst all the ugliness of his life. He was thinking of using it to poison a child. Holy...

Walt, the former teacher, outsmarted everyone. He killed five people in just the last couple of minutes of the finale (although Brock will survive). Walt has totally broken bad. Now there are 16 episodes left, starting next summer. He thinks he has won, but the karma must come back to get him. The question is whether it will be the cancer that finally kills him, or Jesse, or his DEA agent brother-in-law, or the remnants of the Fring organization, or ...

I think the one thing we can be sure of is that whatever happens will be totally fitting, and even more mindblowing than last night's season finale.

Bravo.

 

Winslow Homer studio opens September 2012

Boston art lovers might want to pencil in a trip to Maine on their calendars for next fall. Winslow Homer's studio at Prouts Neck will open to the public on Sept. 24, 2012 and should be a major new destination for cultural tourism and scholarship. The Boston-born painter, who is buried in Cambridge's Mt. Auburn Cemetery, lived and painted at the studio from 1883 until his death in 1910. It's already a National Historic Landmark.

The studio was purchased by the Portland Museum of Art in 2006 from Charles Homer Willauer, the great grand-nephew of Homer. The museum has raised $8.5 million toward a $10.5m goal to support the acquisition, preservation, and future of the Studio. It has been restoring the building to the period when Homer lived there.

“The opening of the Winslow Homer Studio will be a pivotal moment in American art history. For the first time, visitors will be able to experience the Studio as it was during Homer’s time and discover the actual location where he created his best-known paintings,” Museum Director Mark H. C. Bessire said in announcing the opening.

OK, "pivotal" might be a little much, but there's no question this is big news for art lovers.

Homer's work includes many iconic images of the New England coast (Gloucester figures prominently after Maine). To celebrate the opening, the museum will present Weatherbeaten: The Late Paintings of Winslow Homer, on view September 22 through December 30, 2012. Comprising more than 30 major oils and watercolors painted at the Studio, Weatherbeaten will feature works from museums including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston  and The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.

The Portland museum rightly boasts of its Homer collection. Homer first exhibited at the Museum in 1893, showing the painting "Signal of Distress." In 1976, philanthropist Charles Shipman Payson gave 17 Homer paintings  to the Museum and $8 million to build an addition to house the collection. The museum’s also holds his first oil painting, "Sharpshooter," and a nearly comprehensive collection of 400 illustrations.

Tickets for studio tours won't go on sale until next summer, but if you want to start making plans now, click to www.portlandmuseum.org.

Image credit: Winslow Homer
United States, 1836 - 1910
Weatherbeaten, 1894
oil on canvas
28 1/2 x 48 3/8 inches
Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson. Photo by Melville D. McLean.

Ellis Paul rolls through again

Longtime Massachusetts folk scene stalwart and singer-songwriter Ellis Paul has lived down south for a handful of years now, in Charlottesville, VA., to be exact. A lot has changed since he was a breakout performer in Boston back in the 1990s, with a high-profile name locally and a national record contract. The Maine native runs his own career now, which includes raising $100,000 from fans online to record last year's "The Day Everything Changed" CD and a collaboration with superstar country duo Sugarland, as well as a new sideline in family music. He's got gigs at the Iron Horse in Northampton on Friday night and the Circle of Friends Coffeehouse in Franklin on Saturday. (A Derry, N.H. gig was postponed.) We spoke by phone last week.

HubArts: Did moving to the South have anything to do with music?

Paul: My wife's parents live close, and I do a lot of traveling, and the kids were a too little much for my wife alone, so we wanted to have some backup.

HubArts: You recorded your last album in Nashville and you have this songwriting partnership with your old friend Kristian Bush of Sugarland. has living down there swung your songwriting or performing more in a country direction?

Paul: I think I'm a little more cover-able than I have been in the past, the songs are a little less wordy these days, but other than that, I don't know. I don't think so I think I'm whittling the fat out of the songs a little better, and that makes them able to be recorded by country people. But I don't have a twang in my voice or try to wear a cowboy hat. they're still folk songs, and I'm still writing about the things I would write about if I were living up there, I think.

HubArts: Is that change related to the move or ...?

Paul: I think it's just part of my natural development. There are a lot of songwriters that writes sparsely, like John Prine and Neil Young, that I am big fans of. It's a little less Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and a little more John Prine, I guess.

HubArts: You really focus on songwriting as a conscious process, and you teach it, correct?

Paul: I do. I don't necessarily writer every day with paper and pen, but I'm always working on songs, in my head or in the car. I'm an active musician and artist pretty much every hour of the day. There is some method to my madness. I think if you frame some good habits early on and you learn how to edit and you understand the importance of editing, those things are practical matters that I can teach people. ... I set up songwriting classes as I'm touring around the country. I did a couple at Club Passim the last time I was in boston. I don't have any set up right now, this fall, but I do five or six a year.

HubArts: You and Bush have written or co-written songs for each other's recent albums, and you've opened for them a few times. How has that affected your work, your day, your bank account?

Paul: Well, opening for them has been more of an eye-opening experience, because I'm traveling around in a car by myself, and they have eight tour buses and 15 trucks behind them, and they have a caterer, and occasionally yoga instructors and sometimes a masseuse on the road and the food's really great. So it's just fun to watch to see people I can about get a chance to live in that world. The last time I opened for them (earlier this summer), it was just me by myself and a guitar and it was really a challenge trying to make 15,000 people really focus. But it worked out really great, but I don't expect anything to change my life working with them. But Kristian's a really great songwriter and so is Jennifer (Nettles), and being able to write with them, they come in from a different perspective and it opens me up quite a lot.

HubArts: What is the actual experience of performing before them link, as compared to Passim or the Iron Horse?

Paul: They play to from 3,000 to 20,000 people a night, so it's like playing to a festival audiences, except it's not a folk festival, it's a country festival, so no one knows who I am. So you're going in there pretty cold. I have a few songs people sing along on and I figured if you can get people to sing you get get them focused on the moment and sucked into the song. I have songs that are a little bit more able to get people's attention, whereas at a folk festival or a club I just have to play because people are already focused.

HubArts: I would think at even the largest folk festival, though, you're not going to have the voltage at your disposal...

Paul: (Chuckling) Yeahhhh. It's like putting your voice in a catapult and throwing it to the back of 20,000 people. It brings out the Steve Perry in me, I guess. I end up sustaining notes a little bit longer and playing the guitar more like it's an electric. It's fun, it's just fun. The best thing that it does is, I'm just proud of them, and it's good to see them have that kind of success.

HubArts: How did you meet Kristian? He was booking some club...

Paul: Twenty years ago, he was booking a place called Eddie's Attic which is sort of the Passim's of the Atlanta area, and the owner asked him to help go through a box of cassette albums of people that wanted to get booked at the club, and he picked out mine.

HubArts: You did really well fan-sourcing your recording budget last year in this new world if independent artists...

Paul: Yeah, they've been great.

HubArts: You went through the old way, the whole showcase-record deal-sign on the dotted line-never earn back your advance deal, right?

Paul: (Laughing) Yes. two contract's worth. And then it became like, I have this audience I can sell a set amount of records that's truthworthy, and I have a fanbase that's trustworthy and no matter what I put out those people I can rely on to support me. So if the record label isn't selling outside of that group of fans, why I am giving them all the money? Using the Internet, I could do it. I had no idea they'd be as dependable as they were. That was a shock, the money just kept pouring in even though the economy was tanking. People were really eager to help out. That was thrilling and I'm probably going to be doing another one next year.

HubArts: Tell me about the next record. It's a followup to your family album, "The Dragonfly Races," correct?

Paul: I'm writing the new record. I was just listening to some of the early tracks when you called, actually. It's been really great. My kids are going to be more involved and my wife is going to be more involved in this one. It's kind of Von Trapp-ish (laughs). My wife is helping me write and the kids are going to sing on a lot of the tracks. It's really cool to suck them into the process because they're old enough now. (Paul is 46, his daughters are 7 and 4.) It's little 'Schoolhouse Rock'-style biographies of famous Americans...from Thomas Edison to Rosa Parks.

HubArts: Last I heard, this is coming out in November, and you're still writing for it?

Paul: I'm hoping to finish this month. This is another great things about doing it independently. Once a record label has it, the turnaround takes months and months...I can have it done in two weeks and have it out three weeks after that. It's great to be more in control of the whole process.

2011 Online New England Film Festival is up and running

 The 2011 Online New England Film Festival went live today with 20 short films chosen from recent regional festivals available for free viewing. An audience award will be given at the end of the festival for the most viewed film in each of four categories: animation/experimental, comedy, documentary and drama. The third annual online "festival" is put together by NewEnglandFilm.com with seven partner festivals from the Green Mountains to Woods Hole.

A sampling finds a wildly different set of approaches to our home region. Vermont writer-director William Peters delivered "Motel" (above), in which Brad and Roger think they've found bargain roadside accommodations only to learn that it's really "three motels, each one stranger than the last." Spooky-weird and funny. Emily Harrold's "Waves" focuses on the beauty of the Wellfleet area in a serious story of a jobless college grad trying to get back to her happy place. In other cases, the main connection to New England is off-screen. Jane Lynch of "Glee" plays a health-nut mom in Yalie writer-director Daniel Persitz's "Alex's Halloween," about a boy and his costumes and his imagination.

And then there's New Hampshire filmmaker Alfred Thomas Catalfo (right in picture, a David Random photo), who manages to connect Custer's Last Stand and the 2002 Super Bowl champion New England Patriots in "Bighorn." It's based on the apparently real fact that General Custer's bandmaster, Felix Vinatieri, was the great-great-grandfather of New England Patriots' Super Bowl-winning kicker Adam Vinatieri, and that he was ordered to stay behind at the fateful day for Custer, saving his life and the Pats' chances.

NewEnglandFilm.com is a web site for local film and video professionals, providing everything from personal profiles and classifieds to a state-by-state directory of filmmaking resources.

Gloucester's Fitz Henry Lane gets a walking tour

Gloucester native Fitz Henry Lane painted abundantly on Cape Ann in the 1800s, capturing both its natural beauty and its maritime bustle. This Saturday (27th), the Cape Ann Museum is offering a walking tour of "Fitz Henry Lane’s Gloucester," focused on his particular neighborhood.

After establishing himself as an artist in Boston, Lane returned to Gloucester in 1847 and eventually bought land at the crest of Duncan’s Point with a view of the harbor. There he built a seven-gabled granite house and studio. He took advantage of the sweeping views of Gloucester and the harbor, painting with both an attention to detail and command of of the intangibles of shore light. Though greats like Homer and Hopper painted here as well, Lane can be considered the essential Gloucester artist. The Cape Ann Museum’s Lane collection includes 40 paintings, a rare watercolor (his first known work) and 100 drawings, plus all three lithographs that he did of Gloucester.

The uncertainties around his name - he was born Nathaniel Rogers, changed it to Fitz Henry Lane for unclear reasons, and was mistakenly called Fitz Hugh Lane by the art world for a century or so - just add a layer of intrigue.

The walking tour, which includes his neighborhood and the museum's Lane collection, will be led rain or shine by museum docents on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. It's $10 for members; $20 nonmembers. Reservations are required. To make a reservation, call Jeanette Smith at 978-283-0455, x11 or email jeanettesmith@capeannmuseum.org. (As of 10 am today, pre-Irene forecasts haven't derailed the tour.)

Image courtesy Cape Ann Museum: Fitz Henry Lane, “Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point,” 1864, oil on canvas, 10” x 15” (Gift of Harold and Betty Bell, Accession #2007-10)

Paragon Park musical opens in Hull

I like many Bostonians spent happy hours of my youth at Paragon Park on Nantasket Beach in Hull, involved in such educational activities as miniature golf, pinball and Skee ball. It was hell trying to time a windmill shot while the roller coaster circled overhead, full of screaming teenagers. But like many of its brethren, Paragon faded away, closing in 1984 to be replaced by condo development, although the famous carousel has been saved and moved to a nearby location. This weekend and next bring the premiere of "Where the Fun Begins," an original full-length musical by Cinzi Lavin set in Paragon Park.

Actually, "Where The Fun Begins"is the conclusion of the Nantasket Trilogy - yep, that's a thing - by musician and writer Lavin. She brought her talents to Hull in 2007 and, well, let's let her tell it, via email: I approached the Hull Performing Arts, the town's community theatre, and broached the subject with them. They said that the Weir River Estuary (a state-designated Area of Critical Environmental Concern here in Hull) needed to raise funds and awareness. It was then that it occurred to me that I could do a lot of good for the town (whose primary income is tourism) by fostering its three major tourist attractions: The Weir River Estuary, the Hull Lifesaving Museum, and the Paragon Carousel, all of which needed money and publicity.

Her first musical, "On This River," was about the estuary. It premiered two years ago and, she says, won a state legislative citation for outstanding contribution to Massachusetts arts and culture. Last year brought "Toilers of the Sea: The Life of Joshua James," about famed Hull lifesaver and patron saint of the U.S. Coast Guard, Joshua James.

"Where the Fun Begins" finishes her work with the story of "charming pickpocket" Sully Sullivan, the crime lord Voland, and the Clare family. It's a story of hard times, faith and redemption. There's nothing about bumper cars, as far as I can tell, but with a cast of 40 from Hull Performing Arts and Lavin on piano, it ought to be a time. Directed by Lindsay Clinton, the show features a dozen songs plus choreography by Plymouth's Nicole Hoole.

Performances at the Fort Revere Amphitheater on Farina Road in Hull are this Saturday and Sunday (July 23-24) and next weekend (July 30-31), all at 4 p.m., and the top ticket is $10. For more information, call 781-925-2406 or visit www.hullperformingarts.org.

Surprisingly, or not, when I went to Wikipedia to rustle up that postcard, I learned that there's another Paragon Park music in the works. The Company Theatre in Norwell is planning a summer 2012 premiere for their "Paragon Park: The Musical," with Book By Zoe Bradford & Michael Hammond, Music & Lyrics by Adam Brooks.

If either of these shows are half as much fun as I had riding down to Nantasket on a hot summer weekend ca. 1972 with Aunt Nancy in her VW bug with the sunroof open, it will be a fine thing indeed.

Robin Lane documentary gets Kickstarted

I knew Robin Lane only as a name from the 1980s Boston music scene, as in Robin Lane and the Chartbusters and the great single "When Things Go Wrong." I've just learned that her dad was Dean Martin's pianist and that she spent her adolescence hanging out in L.A.'s canyons in the 1960s, that she sings on Neil Young's "Round & Round," that she was married to one of the guys in the Police who's not Sting, and that she now leads songwriting and music therapy workshops for abused women. And she's the subject of the documentary "A Woman's Voice: The Robin Lane Story," being made by Tim Jackson, the Chartbusters' drummer, who is now a filmmaker and an assistant professor at the New England Institute of Art in Boston. Here's a taste:

Jackson directed the documentaries, “Chaos and Order: Making American Theater” and “Radical Jesters." Besides Lane, he has drummed for a wildly assorted bunch of artists including LaVern Baker, Tom Rush and Vas Deferens. He's also a sometime actor. The film is promised to be a story about women, music and creativity. Also, Neil Young, Andy Summers, Owsley and members of the Manson family. Also marriage, the music business and starting over.

Now here's where you come in. Jackson's raising money for this project on Kickstarter. I'm late to this game, so they've already reached their $10,000 goal, which will go to pay an editor to do a working cut, as well as song- and image-licensing fees. But it's a safe bet they'll find a way to spend more than the $10K, and the fund drive is open until 7 am Monday July 25. There are a variety of bonus packs for those who give more than the $5 minimum. Pledge a grand and you get a house concert and a producer credit. So fish around under those couch cushions and see what you can come up with.

Fake Whitey Bulger tweets = comic edgework

 I write today to praise a Boston fake, and no, I'm not talking about the CBS July 4 fireworks telecast. It's the @James_W_Bulger Twitter feed, written as far as I know anonymously. It's often as funny and sharp as any comic writing around today, and by the nature of Twitter highly topical and time-sensitive.

Before anyone gets outraged, let's acknowledge that finding humor in anything Bulger is a twisted exercise. The circus atmosphere around his capture should not be allowed to obscure the corruption and horror that Bulger inflicted on Boston. Read Kevin Cullen or Peter Gelzinis to be reminded, or just this powerful Op Ed by Michael Patrick MacDonald. The people peddling FREE WHITEY t-shirts online are greedy, thoughtless idiots. I don't expect those touched by his Southie reign of terror to easily see the humor in tweets from @James_W_Bulger. Probably a lot of other people won't, either.

But someone was going to do this, of course, perhaps inspired when the FBI announced his capture via Twitter. What's surprising is how well @James_W_Bulger is done. The writer channels Bulger's flip arrogance and brutality in a way that satirizes the very infotainment culture that has sprung up around his capture (including, of course, the idea that he's on Twitter).

He called out several pretenders: @James_W_Bulger: Im seeing fake Twitter accounts pretending to be me...if they had a copy of my resume they'd think twice. ...

This Whitey is surprisingly tech-savvy. @James_W_Bulger: If anyone has the Twitter names for Zip, Stevie, Kevin, and John Morris, lemme know. Im wanna try this Google Hangouts with them.

And he's not afraid to tweak that other Bulger brother: @James_W_Bulger: Can someone help me post a Craigslist Ad? Here's the title: " WANTED: Non Chicken-s*** Attorney" & here's the body: "Contact Billy Bulger"

He even has a few things to say about the Red Sox vs. Orioles dustup. @James_W_Bulger: After watching last night's Red Sox game, I would like to extend an offer to Kevin Gregg to come work for me.

It's the best anonymous riff since Joe Klein was revealed as the author of "Primary Colors." I suspect the writer behind @James_W_Bulger is in the media too. In addition to a predictable hatred for Howie Carr, he has a very special feeling for a certain Fox 25 anchor. @James_W_Bulger: Doesnt matter what happens in court today bc @mariastephanos is now following me on Twitter. My day is complete.

This will lose its luster if the author is ID'd, of course. And soon it will start getting old. Probably best for him to fade away...at least until the trial. Less is more. But for the moment it's dark comedy gold. And one final irony. When I search his profile for tweets to use with this post, Twitter suggested some "similar" feeds I might want to follow. Yikes.

Whitey Bulger in jail. Eddie Coyle on stage.

I went to bed early Wednesday night. Before I went downstairs this morning, I picked up my phone to check email and saw a fresh message from playwright Bill Doncaster. “A little overwhelmed by the karma,” he wrote. “When I started this, would never have predicted Higgins' work would be back on the rise, the Bruins would win the cup again, and Whitey would  get pinched. A little surreal.”

 Wait, what? I read it again to make sure he wasn’t joking, then ran to turn on the TV. Sure enough, a couple of days after the start of a new FBI ad campaign, they’d finally caught Whitey Bulger.

Doncaster wrote a stage adaptation of George V. Higgins’ classic 1972 Boston crime novel, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” which limns the same Irish-and-Italian mob scene where James “Whitey” Bulger ruled before he went on the run 16 years ago.

“I was more shocked than when they got Bin Laden,” Doncaster said by phone later in the day. “I heard his name and thought, they’re not still reporting on that ad campaign are they? And then I heard the word arrest.”

Doncaster’s play was cheered in a staged reading at the Burren in Davis Square last November, with Higgins’ widow in the audience. And he recently announced that a full production of the play will begin performances Dec. 8-Jan. 15 at the ART’s Oberon venue on the edge of Harvard Square. (Doncaster notes that while Bulger was a Southie phenomenon, the fictional Coyle came from Cambridge's Central Square.)

The play is just one sign of a Higgins resurgence, the biggest being that Brad Pitt spent part of the last few months filming an adaptation of “Cogan’s Trade” in (alas) New Orleans. Doncaster is putting together a non-profit to finance his production and will sart raising money sometime next month. You can go to www.thefriendsofeddiecoyle.com and sign up for email updates.

Doncaster and I had already joked recently about the timing of the Bruins championship. One of the best remembered moments in Peter Yates’ acclaimed “Coyle” movie is when Robert Mitchum, as the drunken hood Coyle, cheers on “Number four! Bobby Orr!” The last Bruins’ Stanley Cup triumph was in… 1972. But the Whitey capture takes karma to a new level.

One of the key characters in “Coyle” is Dillon, a felon who is the silent owner of a bar (like Bulger and Triple O’s), a government informant playing both sides of the street (like Bulger) and, it turns out, a killer (like Bulger). Doncaster said that Higgins, although he’d been a federal prosecutor, always maintained that Dillon was an invention and not based on Bulger.

"I get asked about that pretty frequently,” Doncaster said. “With the similarities…it’s easy to jump to that conclusion.”

In Doncaster’s production, Rick Park plays Dillon. I’d recently asked Doncaster to put me in touch with Park on an unrelated matter, and when he emailed me this morning, his original intent was just to make sure I’d heard from Park.

“Very, very strange,” Doncaster said with a laugh.

Not as spooky as the real thing, though. Doncaster met Bulger “for two seconds” back in the 80s. “My girlfriend at the time lived in the neighborhood. Scary guy, even in a brief meeting.”

Bee film at MFA: Honey or doom?

Honeybee colony collapse disorder can seem like one more droplet in a deluge of bad environmental news. But a compelling new film that opens at the Museum of Fine Arts today suggests that losing the bees could bring global disaster a lot sooner than climate change, and that how we respond to its threat will be a measure of our future.

"Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?" from director Taggart Siegel is not the kind of documentary where both sides of an issue are considered with earnest even-handedness. There are no blustering Republican senators or industry-funded scientists here to denounce the film's assertions: that bee colonies are in trouble world-wide, that it's mostly man's fault, and that if we don't change soon, very bad things will happen. Instead a variety of often idiosyncratic beekeepers and other experts lament the industrial agriculture and chemical pesticides they blame for the loss of millions of hives in the U.S. and Europe.

"Colony collapse disorder is the bill we are getting for all we have done to the bees," one says. We have factory-farmed them just like pork and chicken, trucking them around the country to fertilize vast monocultures of agricultural products, subjected them to pesticides and genetically modified plants, and now ... the bees have had enough. And since they fertilize 40 percent of the world's food supply, according to the film, we had better begin reversing the damage.

The film is full of fascinating bee facts, some frightening - three-quarters of America's commercial bees spend Valentine's Day in California, fertilizing almonds - and some subtly beautiful. Bees like the same smells we do, for instance.

Some of the bee lovers are a bit out there - they seem to spend more time in the hives shirtless than wearing any kind of beekeeping gear - but their reverence for these insects and their role in what used to be our natural environment is inspiring.

If you're anything like me, most of your thinking about the environment these days is dominated by gloom about global warming, rising sea levels, increasing extreme weather, tornados and Japanese radiation leaks. "We're all gonna die" seems a reasonable conclusion, especially given the vast reservoirs of denial and inaction in the chambers of power.

"Queen of the Sun" will give you something new to worry about. But in the eyes of those beekeepers there is also hope.

The Globe's Mark Feeney reaches a slightly different conclusion about the film here. Information on movie tickets and showtimes at the MFA is here.

North Shore Jazz Project rolls on

The North Shore Jazz Project seemed a bit quixotic when I first wrote about it a couple of years ago, for the Globe. But founders Henry Perrini and Chava Hudson were bound and determined to bring the groove back to an area that had seemingly lost it with the closing of some great clubs years ago, notably Lenny's on the Turnpike. They've kept at it with concerts and other events, as well as workshops that reach tons of area high school students, 1,600 in the last year. Remember when grownups tried to keep kids out of jazz clubs? Why was that?

This Saturday, composer and pianist Donal Fox (pictured) will bring his signature blend of classical and jazz to a house concert in Danvers to benefit those educational clinics. Doors open at 6 p.m. at the home of John Archer, 10 North Street in Danvers, for a poolside cash bar. Music is set for 7-10 p.m. Tix are $22 in advance via the web site or $22 at the door.

The North Shore Jazz Project is also launching the NSJP All Stars student group, led by saxophonist, composer and teacher Mike Tucker. The group will meet 4 times for rehearsals the week of August 15th-19th at Ipswich High School and perform at the Salem Jazz and Soul Festival. They hope to round up enough funding so the group can meet three times a year for a week, then perform. The first auditions have already passed but if you know a high school student on the North Shore who's interested, have them contact Mike at tuckerjazz@tuckerjazz.com.

Natasha has her say. So does Natasha. And Natasha.

"The Natasha Plays" at Charlestown Working Theater, tonight through Saturday, comes with an intriguing back story. Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich is still in her early 20s, but has been produced several times in her homeland and Europe. This triptych of monologues by three different Natashas puts a spotlight on the youth of modern Russia, but at the same time it's universal, says Jennifer Johnson, one of CWT's three co-directors. Abandonment and identity, the price of celebrity, the worship of fame ... not so far from the America of reality TV, Lady Gaga and mall culture.

In "Natasha's Dream," the speaker is an orphan (Julia M. Smith, pictured) who attaches herself to an interested journalist with disastrous results. In "I Won," we hear from an upwardly mobile teen (Sarah Lloyd) who's not going to let anything interfere with her chance at fame. And in the short "Epilogue," recently added, another teen (Shannon McPhee) composes a love letter to a pop star.

"Each of the characters is named Natasha, but they are vastly different. The whole idea is that these young Russian women are products of their environment and their upbringing," she said. "It will be interesting to see how audiences correlate the same kind of themes to the American experience."

The actors are current or former masters students in the theater program at Towson University in Maryland, home to the New Russian Drama Project, and the production was developed there with The Center for International Theatre Development. Center director Philip Arnoult was aware of CWT's interest in international projects, and one thing led to another. The production is directed by Stephen Nunns, translated by John Freedman.

Of course, none of this would matter if CWT hadn't also found an audience that shares its interest. The best sign of that may be that CWT sold out three of last week's four performances of "Caesarian Section" by Poland's edgy Teatr Zar. That was a show of movement and meaning, but not especially linear. Johnson says "The Natasha Plays" is text-based narrative, more traditional in form. Despite the distance between Boston and these teenagers' lives, it should be quite accessible.

"Tons of people came to see Zar, they were very, very exciting events, made more exciting by the tornado on Wednesday night, which was their closing night. It was so crazy," Johnson said. "Weirdly and inexplicably our lights flickered...but it sort of went with the performance.

"The audience at CWT typically stays (after shows), we really try to make it an opportunity for people to talk to each other and the artists, particularly if we have artists from other countries," she said. "But it was such crazy weather, basically no one could leave. So we just were there forever, but we had a lot of wine, so that was OK."

Now that's my kind of theater.

"The Natasha Plays" runs tonight through Saturday at Charlestown Working Theater, 442 Bunker Hill Street, Charlestown. It's accessible by the Orange Line from Sullivan Station or Bus Lines #92 and #93. Tix are $10 tonight, $15-22 the rest of the week. Call 866-811-4111 or click to www.charlestownworkingtheater.org.

Photo: Jay Herzog.