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Boston Pops' Kennedy tribute with DeNiro will hit iTunes, TV

The Boston Pops Orchestra’s world premiere performances of "The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers" on Tuesday and Wednesday with guest narrators including Robert De Niro, will be recorded for CD and download via iTunes and the Pops' own website. WCVB (Ch. 5) will also feature a full-length performance of the work as part of a Memorial Day television special, "An American Salute: The Pops at 125," on May 31. Written by composer Peter Boyer and lyricist Lynn Ahrens and commissioned by Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops, "The Dream Lives On" pays tribute to the legacies of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy. The performers also include Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and Cherry Jones, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, under the direction of Keith Lockhart. The recording will be available as a CD at the Symphony Shop. Online, the recording will be sold in 320 kbps open MP3 formatting and an HD Stereo option sold in Apple or PC format. The recording will also be made available on iTunes, CDBaby, and Amazon.com.

Winslow Homer in season at Portland Museum

This summer the Portland Museum of Art will showcase 20 works from the its collection of Homer watercolors and oils on canvas. It's the first time since 1988 that all of the works will be on view together in the Charles Shipman Payson Building, due to their sensitivity to light. And there's lots more Homer on tap.

@BobDylanSays tells it like it is on Twitter

Say what you will about his aching croak of a singing voice, but at 68 Bob Dylan is still relevant, even on Twitter. For some time now I've been following @BobDylanSays, which delivers his lyrics as hourly one-liners that seem to comment with oracular brilliance on the tweets I receive before or after them.

Consider, for example, this week's juxtaposition of an update on health care reform from Boston.com chief @dabeard with a comment from the bard:

As usual, Bob takes the long view.

Dylan can be concise ("Blowing in the Wind") or verbose ("Desolation Row"), but I would not have predicted him to be at home in the 140-characters-at-a-time format of Twitter. And in fact his official  @bobdylan feed has not been updated since Jan. 30.

@BobDylanSays describes its method thusly: "Every Bob Dylan song line-by-line. 1 line/hr until all have been tweeted. After each song, BobDylanSays-bot chooses next one at random." At the moment, it has almost 10,500 followers, compared to 15,200 for @bobdylan.

Like any great artist, Dylan can shine his brilliance on even the most mundane topics, such as the Red Sox and their problems aligning their current corps of position players...

Yo-Yo to the Ma-x

The CD is slowly dying even with the classical audience, as Jeremy Eichler wrote in the Globe yesterday, but, um, holy crap! Look at this! Sony pinged me the other day looking for some PR for "Yo-Yo Ma: 30 Years Outside the Box," a massive collection of music from the world-renowned cellist who calls Cambridge home. Usually I ignore such requests, but this thing is the classical music equivalent of the alien ship hovering over Manhattan in "V." The set includes 90 CDs – every original album Ma has recorded to date, plus two bonus discs with the first release of John Williams’ Suite from Memoirs of a Geisha for Cello and Orchestra. It's all been remastered with "DSD technology," whatever that is, and the numbered, limited-edition set comes in a velvet-lined box and features a 312-page book. The perfect Christmas gift for the classical music fan on your list, eh? Ready to hear how much it costs? Better sit down. The set lists for $632.99, but shop around: Amazon.com offers a link to one vendor  selling it for $499.40, while Borders.com wants $754.99. In fact, Ma's own web site started selling the first 200 numbered editions in late September, for $789. And there are higher prices out there. I've emailed to ask how many sold.

Morning reading: BMAs, NH arts center and (groan) journalism

Check out all the Boston Music Awards winners at Boston.com as neither On The Download nor RSL have anything up yet. For my southern NH posse, I have a story in Globe North today about plans moving forward for a new arts center in pastoral downtown Newfields. ... My old friend Ted Bale reviews STREB at the ICA in Dance Magazine. ... Amanda Palmer gets a nice write up on the Huffington Post. ... I've been thinking a lot about this piece about millennials and how they relate to brands. There's a million dollars in there somewhere. ... On the downside, this is a really depressing and really accurate assessment of the state of the journalism market.

Blog news: Congrats NEJAR! And well said, RSL!

Congratulations to Greg Cook and The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research! Greg sent out an email late last night announcing that he and his blog has won a $30,000 grant from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant Program. The ad-free NEJAR is one of just three blogs awarded the Arts Writers Grant this year "and notably the only one of these blogs that currently exists," Greg notes. The grant "will allow the team at The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to heat our headquarters and eat this winter." Feel free to celebrate by clicking POST  FLYER over there on the right to help HubArts do the same when we sober up. No, we're happy for you Greg, really we are. Hic.

... and while we're at it, high-five to Ryan Spaulding of Ryan's Smashing Life, who is quoted in the Globe this morning righteously refusing to comply with the Federal Trade Commission's outrageous new rules that bloggers must disclose freebies when reviewing products. This insane piece of government meddling doesn't apply to the mainstream media, not newspapers or magazines or TV, but somehow Ryan and Greg and I are supposedly required to include an FTC-penned disclaimer when reviewing, if we were sent a review copy of the CD or handed press tix to the play, as is standard practice. I understand they're trying to stop astroturf marketing - advertising masquerading as editorial content via social media - but there's no way this rule passes constitutional muster, at least until they require Oprah and "The Today Show" and the fashion and food mags to do the same. Nuh uh.

A little more Boston arts online at Tripvine

Today AOL launches a new travel brand/site/blog called Tripvine, and I'm the arts & culture blogger for their Boston Insider pages. The official launch is today, but we've been posting items on there for some days now, so check us out. Of course we're aimed primarily at people planning on traveling here from elsewhere, but there are arts, food, family and nightlife bloggers now, and more to come. And for the many HubArts readers who work in the Boston arts community, hey, it's one more place I might write about your event/venue/work. Folks from the Peabody Essex Museum, A.R.T. and others will find your stuff already there.

Wednesday evening notes

Jury duty continues to play hell with the blogging schedule...but you should know that Bob Dylan met some old friends backstage in Boston the other night ... and Museum of Fine Arts Director Malcolm Rogers is a cover dude. ... And Greg Cook, days after being touted by the Globe's Geoff Edgers, tries valiantly to stir up some shit about the state of visual arts coverage in Boston, in the Globe and elsewhere. I'd try to have an opinion about what he wrote, but I've been in court all day, and my priority at the moment has three olives in it. Tomorrow is a half-day, so maybe I'll have more for you then. ...

First Night highlights: The Neats! Kaiju Big Battel!

The Neats reunite for a gig at the Orpheum and Kaiju Big Battel takes over the Hynes Convention Center - this year sounds like one of the cooler First Nights lately, that's for sure. More than 1,000 artists are involved, and there are performances at 35 locations.

The annual free Boston New Year's Eve festivities include the 1980s faves The Neats on a bill at the Orpheum with Buffalo Tom and the Lyres. Most excellent. The Army of Broken Toys and Kristin Hersh are among the other rockers playing around the city (although Hersh is on a bill playing old country blues tunes). The jazz and world music side is topped by Berklee alum Anat Cohen, who will be playing her sax and clarinet at the Berklee Performance Center and broadcast live on WGBH FM 89.7 and across the country as part of NPR’s annual “Toast of the Nation" broadcast. Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and the New England Conservatory will collaborate on a program of songs from or inspired by the works of Shakespeare. And Kaiju will bring its live monster mash to the Hynes. Whew! There's lots more too, including regular events like the grand procession and the fireworks. For more info, visit www.firstnight.org. The complete program book is here.

All First Night outdoor events are free, though supported by sales of the First Night button, which is the ticket for admission to all indoor events. This year's button is above; the artwork is by Ekua Holmes. Buttons are $18 (children under 4 admitted free) and will be available beginning Nov. 27 and many retail locations or the web site (where it's just $15 online through Dec. 26).

BSO, James Levine, Google, music, death: Morning reading

I write for them, so it's not without self-interest that I say I like it when the Globe puts an arts story on the front page. Today that's Geoff's interview with James Levine addressing the topics of the maestro's health and his demanding schedule. ... I DM'd a link to our friends over at Musicians for Music 2.0 this morning: Google is getting into the music search business. .... And finally, if you missed it yesterday, read this a fascinating little piece about a Texas reporter whose death-chamber beat is becoming lonelier than ever with the problems facing the newspaper business. Hell of a kicker, too.