HubArts.com

Two museum items of note

In the Globe today, on page one, Geoff Edgers breaks the news that the MFA will be opening its Fenway entrance this June, two years ahead of schedule. And on the front of the North section, I have a feature about subtle changes in approach at Strawbery Banke up in Portsmouth.

Boston, movies and crime in two books by ex-Herald-ites

My duties at the Herald sometimes included editing film freelancer Paul Sherman's copy. This week he's out with a book, "Big Screen Boston," looking at some 80 films that were filmed in and around the Hub. Today the Globe gives him a double pump: in the Shelf Life column in the Books section, and a larger item, with a nice pic from "Gone Baby Gone," in the Movies section. If the Herald has run a story, I can't find it on their web site. In 2006, long after I'd departed, Sherman reportedly got jammed up for selling advance DVD screeners of upcoming films. The Loaded Gun blog has the tale, along with another brief look at the book. But Paul emails to says that he was done writing for the Herald by the time of his legal troubles.

Read excerpts from the book at Sherman's Big Screen Boston blog. You can read, for instance, about William Friedkin's 1978 heist flick, "The Brinks Job," which starred Peter Falk. Coincidentally, I spent part of yesterday at the Newburyport Literary Festival listening to another ex-Herald colleague, former staff writer Stephanie Schorow, talking about her new book, which is on the real-life Brinks Job, "The Crime of the Century." And one of the things she said, ironically enough, is that in conducting interviews for the book, she found that many Bostonians had conflated their memories of the actual heist with scenes from the movie.

(Want to know what's shooting around Boston now, in this busy tax-incentive era? Boston Movie Tours' Hollywood in the Hub blog has all the info, including regular production updates like this one.)

Among the events tied to Sherman's book is a June 5 Coolidge Corner screening of Peter Yates' 1973 crime flick "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," based on former federal prosecutor (and Globe and Herald writer) George V. Higgins' novel. It stars Robert Mitchum as a low-level Boston hood jammed up between the cops, a bank robbery gang and a gun dealer connected to radicals. Terrific performances - by Mitchum first and foremost - and lots of authentic Boston color - make this in Sherman's opinion and mine the best feature ever shot here. Take a look at the trailer:

Carbo loading for Boston Theater Marathon

Four new troupes have been added to the lineup for the10th annual Boston Theater Marathon: Spontaneous Theatre Project, Orfeo Theatre Company, Gurnet Theatre Project and Theatre On Fire. They'll be among 50 theatre companies performing 50 ten-minute plays in 10 hours on May 11 at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion in Boston's South End. The charity event benefits the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, which "provides financial relief in a confidential, respectful manner" to members of the theater community facing a variety of personal catastrophes. More info about the marathon is at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre site. The $25 advance tickets are available here.  And more deets on who's performing what when are here.

Conservatory To Honor Three

Tony-winning director and choreographer Susan Stroman, BSO bassist James Orleans and the late Thommie Walsh (right) will be honored at the Boston Conservatory commencement on May 17. Orleans is a Conservatory grad ('81) and Walsh, a Broadway director and choreographer who died last year, attended the school in the 1970s. Stroman gets an honorary degree, Orleans the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, and Walsh the Conservatory's first posthumous lifetime achievement award.

Time travel behind the scenes at the seraglio

You ever have one of those moments of shuffle-play synchronicity with your iTunes? A few weeks back as I was loading the very bottom CD shelf into the computer, I ripped a promo disc of TV theme songs that the SciFi Channel sent out years ago. Flash forward to this morning when I finally checked out the press release from the Boston Lyric Opera, about their "reimagining" of Mozart's "The Abduction From The Seraglio," which opens Friday.

It offered up a video of workers constructing the set for the show, featuring a train car that's supposed to be from the Orient Express. And while I was watching the time-lapse video, my iTunes started playing the theme to "Time Tunnel." Sweet.

To watch the video, click here and then click on “How do you get a train onstage at the Shubert Theatre?” in the right-hand sidebar. You'll have to handle iTunes on your own, though.

EarthFest lineup announced

Cake will headline the free Radio 92.9 EarthFest at the Hatch Shell on May 24, backed up by Cracker, the BoDeans and the English Beat. I'm just old enough to be most interested in the Beat, which according to this interview is just founder Dave Wakeling and some other guys now. A fifth act will be a local musician chosen via the 929 EarthFest Channel on OurStage.com. And take the T and recycle and stuff, 'K?

Record Store Day is Saturday!

So as I sit here listening to iTunes, I just thought I ought to tell you that Saturday is Record Store Day, organized to salute those purveyors of vinyl and CDs who have managed to survive the onslaught of Napster and BitTorrent, iTunes and Rhapsody. There's a nice piece in the Times today, and because I saw the poster, I happen to know that my local store - Dyno Records here in Newburyport - will host one of many in-store performances nationwide tomorrow. Newbury Comics will have events at most of its stores, it appears, including the Dresden Dolls and Dennis Brennan at the Harvard Square location.

I was going to give you all the lowdown on Boston-area events, but the recordstoreday.com web site, perhaps ironically, sucks in several ways. Worst: It doesn't offer a way to sort in-store performances by location. So if you want to find out what's happening at your local record stores, you have to search the entire listing of hundreds of stores alphabetically and then click to each store's site. Or you can search a separate index listing performances by band name, which makes no sense at all. But you can't search to find the stores in your area, which seems like it ought to be the point. And the listings load incredibly slowly. And my local store, Dyno, isn't listed anyway. Sigh. Oh and if you click on the Record Store Day press release .pdf link, you get a 404 not found error.

The home page is filled up with celebrity quotes, some of which seem real ("You can't roll a joint on an iPod - buy vinyl!" - Shelby Lynne) and some of which were clearly hatched by publicists. Nothing can make me believe that  Chuck Berry actually said, "Music is an important part of our culture, and record stores play a vital part in keeping the power of music alive."

ICA plans for summer fun (You were expecting symposia?)

One of the most talked-about features of the new ICA on the waterfront when it opened in Dec. 2006 was the harborwalk/staircase area under the giant cantilever. With a great view of downtown and the harbor, it ought to be a great place to hang out on a summer night. This summer's lineup of free Berklee student, faculty and alumni performances in world music, jazz and other genres sounds like fun (Thursdays, 6-8:30, free). The 13-week series begins June 19 with Maeve Gilchrist, who's listed as world/jazz/Celtic. Also outside, You Dance Fridays return Aug. 1 at 6 p.m. for four weeks, with an hour of dance instruction at six followed by 90 minutes of live music for you to try out your newfound skillz. It sounds more fun than serious, although the music is high-quality, beginning with swing dancing to Either/Orchestra founder Russ Gershon's Swing Vote.

Inside, primarily in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, the ICA will feature  dancer/choreographer Sara Rudner, artist-in-residence at Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy, who brings Dancing-on-View: The ICA Variations, a new "dance installation," to the ICA on July 26 and 27. The public is invited to wander in and out during the four hour performances, which begin at noon. The work "celebrates dance as an ongoing activity that occurs sometimes publicly, and always in studio practice."

A program on two Boston documentary films (featuring Ross McElwee) and the International Bike Film Festival will also take place inside. And there will also be a free talk on June 19 by poet Joyce Peseroff, whose poem Summer Communion will be installed on the Harborwalk this summer.

Talks and book-signings by Chris Schlesinger, Jody Adams and Barbara Lynch will certainly be mouth-watering, especially with sample tastes, but what they're not is...unusual. You could get that at the Barnes & Noble at Burlington Mall pretty much anytime.

Most (but not all) of these events are free with museum admission. Details on these and more are here.

Arts coverage on TV, not quite as rare as the snow leopard

Say what you will about WBZ's Joyce Kulhawik - I may have made a few cracks about the outfits over the years, and her reports ranged from mildly caustic reviews to, well, huggy celeb interviews - but in an era of continuous cutbacks, Kulhawik lasted longer than the arts reporters on WHDH or WCVB. She was the last one covering the arts on local newscasts, unless you count those shabby "American Idol" cross-promotions now masquerading as news on WFXT; I suggest trepanning if you do.

With Kulhawik's departure, the hugely important cultural scene here in Boston now will go mostly uncovered on Boston TV news, except for under-watched NECN stories and those momentous occasions (MFA openings, "The Nutcracker") when one or more of the big four stations will send a news reporter to grab gushing soundbites from a couple of patrons for a 45-second report telling us absolutely nothing that we didn't already get from the promo. Or they'll run the closing credits over B roll of James Levine conducting Beethoven...

There are a couple of exceptions worth noting. I was mulling Kulhawik's departure last week when I stumbled on an edition of WCVB's "Chronicle" with a story about arts funding and a profile of the Revolving Museum in Lowell. "Chronicle" has the time, if not abundant resources, to do the arts reasonably well for their audience, which I would wager is older and more suburban. And arts reports by Jared Bowen on WGBH's "Greater Boston" this week blossom into three straight nights of stories - which is the reason I finally got around to writing this item.

Tuesday Bowen interviews Placido Domingo, who will pop up for brief nice-nice chats on other stations but might actually say something interesting to Bowen. Wednesday Bowen hosts the show, which will focus on his interview with Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen - let's hope topics like dancer departures and the company's exit from the Citi Center are on the agenda. And Thursday, with Bowen hosting again, he and my former  Herald colleague Terry Byrne eyeball several local theater productions. It's rare for anyone anywhere to recommend the tube for arts coverage - it's still TV, y'know? - but these shows could offer the only arts coverage that many viewers will get in a time of economic difficulties and shrinking coverage in all media.

A calling for page one

Gotta toot our own horn once in a while, right? Today the Globe runs my feature on Allston artist Rob Pettit, who works in a new medium - discarded cellphones. And they liked it enough to put it on the front page.