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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...

 

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.

 

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.

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.

Berklee heads for Abbey Road

On Dec. 2, Berklee College of Music will offer Singers Showcase: The Other Side of Abbey Road. The annual student concert has featured the likes of alumnae Paula Cole, Lalah Hathaway, Susan Tedeschi and Gillian Welch. This year's bright lights will be belting tunes by Usher, Janelle Monae, John Legend, Joss Stone and others, then finishing up with selections from the Beatles' "Abbey Road," the first time the Showcase has focused on a specific album. The timing is good, because as these words are written, "Abbey Road" is #4 on the iTunes album chart, joined by "The Beatles" (aka "the White Album") at #8 and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at #10.

Steve Jobs on Tuesday debuted the Beatles catalog on iTunes, bringing a cascade of "long and winding road" comments from the media. It's not clear why it took so long to get the Beatles into the fold, with AC/DC among the few other remaining holdouts. Certainly doing anything businesswise with the feuding remnants of the Fab Four and their armies of lawyers and managers can't be easy.

But Paul and Yoko and the rest have always put Beatles-related projects through a pretty severe test of their effect on the Beatles' legacy - treating their music with respect. So I'm glad to see the albums selling well on iTunes, even though individual songs are available too. It gives me some hope that the album as an artform is not lost. As someone named Kit O'Toole raises in this piece, it's rather sad to think that young music fans will be able to just buy the songs they've heard of and skip the albums.

Of course, we could buy seven-inch 45 rpm singles of Beatles songs back in the day, but only of those few songs that the Beatles elected to release that way, usually in advance of an album's release, as a sort of appetizer. Occasionally there was a track that came out as a single without appearing immediately on an album - "Hey Jude" being the most famous example. But the idea was always to get to the albums.

As O'Toole puts it, "the Fab Four showed that albums could be considered complete works of art, a collection of songs that work together to create a mood or communicate a message." Most of their albums also changed the whole idea of what pop music could be, as did albums by Dylan and once or twice the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones; going country or psychedelic or orchestral was in each case a revolutionary idea back then.

Most Beatles albums were also simply masterpieces of sequencing, as one song led to another in a procession that was imprinted on the brains of fans. It's difficult to imagine the songs on "Sgt. Pepper" or "Abbey Road" in particular in any other order.

Which brings me back to Berklee. I'm told that the famous side-two medley on "Abbey Road" will be performed in order, but that the rest of the sequence will be broken up. I'm happy to hear that "Student vocalists, instrumentalists, and arrangers will be interpreting the music in their own unique ways." But it's just going to sound wrong if they don't start with "Come Together" and end with "Her Majesty."

Tickets to the 8:15 p.m. show at the Berklee Performance Center are $10-$15 general admission at the box office, ticketmaster.com or 617-931-2000.

Amanda Palmer discovers a teen idol for minimalists

Follow Amanda Palmer online and you never know what you're going to get. A few months back the Dresden Dolls and "Cabaret" star ran into some Berklee summer students in the Back Bay and asked to take their picture. One of them said he played piano, and she invited them back to her place for an impromptu performance. Once she heard Tristan Allen play, she decided she had to share it with the Internet. The live video stream (below) included just enough of the kid's hypnotic, Philip Glass-y playing (and photogenic mug) to make clear that he might be something. Palmer decided hell ya, let's make the kid's debut recording. They raised $8,000 from her fans via Kickstarter in 48 hours, and in September recorded an EP. On Dec. 12 they're having a record release show at the Berklee Performance Center, An Evening with Amanda Palmer and Tristan Allen. Ticket proceeds will fund a Berklee Five-Week Summer Performance Program scholarship.

The self-titled EP, recorded in September in Boston with engineer Owen Curtin, includes four of Allen's compositions and one four-handed piece that Palmer and Allen wrote and recorded together. He may or may not be the next Glass or Steve Reich, but he's got to be the most famous senior at Saratoga Springs High School.

The concert happens at 7 p.m. at the BPC. General admission tix are $10 at the box office and Ticketmaster. The concert will be streamed live at partyontheinternet.com. You can order the EP on CD or digital download on Kickstarter.com.

First Night Button is ... spacey

Usually the unveiling of the First Night button is one of those events that rates a big meh. You know, how radical are they going to get? The button is a utilitarian object, your $18 pass to all of the night's indoor events. The image is basically a marketing device that must be acceptable for embrace by city leaders, media outlets and children. Usually it's about fireworks and dancing and party hats. Examples from recent years are on the left. Now look at this year's button, right, by Somerville artist Scott Listfield.

Wish I'd gone to the party last night so I could have seen the puzzled looks on the faces of the local dignitaries when the button was unveiled at Brasserie Jo, during a reception for the Greater Boston Concierge Association. After pondering about it for a few minutes, though, I think it's kinda great. Because the 1960s space program once represented the bright future we're all still waiting for. Where's my flying car? Where's my jetpack? Listfield, who paints a lot of vintage astronauts, has chosen an image for the First Night of our future that comments on the whole notion of better days to come. It will be a perfectly acceptable if slightly baffling image to many. But it's actually kinda hip.

If you think I'm reading too much into this, read Listfield's artist statement. "...from Lost In Space to The Jetsons to Jurassic Park, it seems that popular culture craved and fomented this space-age perception of the future," he writes. From the vantage point of the present, the whole flying-car thing looks kinda hilarious. And yet, consider Starbucks, iPads and Kanye West. "The present is in fact a very unusual place," Listfield writes, "and it's strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted."

Huh. Turns out this year's button is more than a pretty picture, good graphic design, a commercial icon. It's actually art.

(The buttons, by the way, will be available all over town after Thanksgiving, but you can get a $3 discount by buying yours through www.firstnight.org.)

Afternoon reading: Palmdale, Big Red farewell, Esperanza, Amanda & more

Good piece in the Herald this morning by Brett Milano on Palmdale, Kay Hanley's latest musical venture. Sure do wish he'd gotten her to dish some of the Miley Cyris dirt, though, sounds like there's a lot... A fond farewell to Big Red & Shiny, which is shutting down its main web presence on Sept. 1. The art journal beat us to the web by a year and a half. ... Word up on the latest from Esperanza Spalding, Berklee phenom turned bigtime jazz hero. ... Amanda Palmer's latest web exploit: Finding a terminally cute, Phillip Glass-loving, 17-year-old Canadian piano prodigy loitering at Berklee after summer camp and taking him home for a webcast. We'll be hearing from Tristan sooner or later, I'd wager. ... Oh and here's an interview with Steven Bogart, Palmer's high-school teacher who's directing her in "Cabaret" at the ART. ... And ehre's a little something for my North Shore neighbors, a Newburyport Arts piece on Andrew Mungo, who runs our beloved little art house theater, The Screening Room, and is now on the big screen himself.