CAITLIN E. CURRAN

Never Say Smile

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:45:22 GMT

Annie Leibovitz highlights her career
Could there be anyone cooler to have for a photography teacher than Annie Leibovitz?

Mixed Media at the Papercut

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:49:19 GMT

Cultural staples
Last Saturday's mixed-bill affair at the Papercut Zine Library was a strange hybrid of contemporary salon, multimedia talent show, and impromptu modern-dance class (with instructions to move our bodies "like fire").

San Francisco treat

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:41:47 GMT

Deerhoof at the Middle East Downstairs, October 23, 2008
The SF-based Deerhoof performed at the Middle East a week ago Thursday with the amusingly repetitive precision of a puppet show or an assembly of wind-up toys.

Juana Molina | Un Día

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:38:10 GMT

Domino (2008)
Un Día shows Molina’s music in its weirdest, most mesmerizing, ideal version of itself.

Scarlet letters

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:23:03 GMT

The uptight killjoy in us
Sarah Vowell’s fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead) — released on October 7 — examines New England Puritans with a meticulously researched, critical-yet-comical eye.

Couple of Mavericks

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:16:03 GMT

The Dodos at the MFA, October 2, 2008
Whereas Sarah Palin spewed folksy, confused verbiage, the Dodos played endearingly folk-y music for a stuffed Remis Auditorium.

Mobile-home game

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:57:13 GMT

Cross the Mayor of Lansdowne Street at your peril, Sox fans: you might be jinxing your team in the process
The intersection of Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street, in the hours before, during, and after a Red Sox game, is not unlike a trading floor on pre-crash Wall Street: it’s chaotic, teeming with people, and everyone’s trying to make a buck.

The intersection of Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street, in the hours before, during, and after a Red Sox game, is not unlike a trading floor on pre-crash Wall Street: it’s chaotic, teeming with people, and everyone’s trying to make a buck. Scalpers aggressively push tickets; vendors hawk T-shirts, programs, and meat products. For a pedestrian weaving through swarms of such in-your-face salesmen and pulsating, beer-fueled Fenway faithful, it can be overwhelming.

Curious, then — suspicious, even — is the leprechaun-looking man approaching passers-by from his post (a beat-up, neon-green canvas chair placed in front of the Sausage Guy’s cart), saying he wants nothing but to take their photo. (He posts the shots on the multiple albums he keeps on his MySpace page.) On a chilly, gray Monday night outside Fenway, just before the Sox threw out the first pitch of a game against the Cleveland Indians — and the day before Boston clinched a playoff berth — the man waves his small, silver digital camera, and asks an approaching couple: “Can I take your picture?” They hesitate, as though considering his offer (perhaps they’re simply considering eating sausage). Eventually, the round, white-haired woman shakes her head firmly as they walk away. “We’re from Cleveland!” she protests.

The wandering photographer is David Allen Millette, a 52-year-old Middleboro native who calls himself “the Mayor of Lansdowne Street.” In 1995, Millette called it quits on Boston’s brutal winters and escaped to Florida to live in an RV near various beaches. For the past 13 years, however, he’s returned for Red Sox season. While he may be the very definition of a fair-weather friend to Boston, he’s thick-and-thin for its baseball team, and his vehicle — which also doubles as his living space — is a testament to that.

It’s a 1980 Dodge Xplorer RV, the fifth camper he’s owned, and the first that’s become a mobile artistic homage to Boston’s baseball nine. Stickers reading things like IS IT 7:05 YET? collide and overlap on its bumper. Inside, Red Sox flags and blankets are draped neatly across the couches and doorway, and a plastic packet hangs from the windshield, safely protecting tickets from every game Millette’s attended in the past three years (as well as a Ted Williams baseball card he’s had since he was a kid).

A friend helped Millette find the RV in a small town in rural New York in March. Impressed with its cyclopean size (“It’s like a spaceship, almost!”) and its only-used-for-the-occasional-road-trip condition, he bargained with the seller, and bought it for $4500 — a bargain at roughly the equivalent of one Manny Ramirez at bat.

Ask me anything

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:50:30 GMT

A free instant answer to any question is just a text away. But what do ChaCha’s guides have that , say, librarians don’t?
It used to be that, if you had a burning question, you had to a) ask your mom; b) consult a Magic 8 Ball; or c) trek to the top of a mountain to seek out a sagacious, all-knowing guru.

It used to be that, if you had a burning question (depending on the degree of difficulty), you had to a) ask your mom; b) consult a Magic 8 Ball; or c) trek to the top of a mountain to seek out a sagacious, all-knowing guru. Now all you have to do is search the Interwebs.

But while most knowledge seekers turn to Google and other search engines, newer sites like Yahoo Answers utilize an approach that’s so archaic, it’s practically Luddite: they employ actual people to answer your questions, via wiki-style community contribution. ChaCha, a new company that launched this past January, is taking that idea one step further, by having employees (ChaCha calls them “guides”) personally research your questions online, and text message you an answer. It’s like having a smart cabana boy. And it’s free.

Here’s how it works: anyone in the US with a cell phone can send a text message to 242-242 (“ChaCha,” get it?), asking any question: will it rain today? What’s in hummus? When will Guns N’ Roses release Chinese Democracy? Within about 10 minutes, a guide should text back the answer. (Probably. Mainly chickpeas, tahini, and olive oil. Maybe never.)

“Most services out there just take what’s on the Web and refit it for a text message,” says Susan Marshall, vice-president of marketing for ChaCha, on the phone from their Indiana headquarters, in reference to similar, but automated, question-answering services, such as Google SMS. Hence the often frustrating and irrelevant answers Google SMS can return — like wrong places or “no results” — when all you want is the name of that damn pizza place on Brighton Avenue. “People want simple answers to questions, and with the guides, we’re able to give them that.”

Marshall says ChaCha currently employs approximately 15,000 guides, who field millions of calls each month — about 500 answer questions each hour. Typically, a guide earns 20 cents per text-message answer, though ChaCha seems to be in a constant state of re-valuating its payment system and its guide-training process, and restructuring its Web site. The whole operation is funded by advertising sponsors (whose one-line ads appear at the bottom of some of Cha Cha’s texts) covetous of an aggressive text-messaging demo.

I texted ChaCha on a Thursday afternoon. “What’s the best strategy for kickball?” I queried, smart-assedly. Moments later, my phone buzzed to life with a text reply: “Surprisingly, it’s best to kick low toward third base, as outfielders will catch most harder kicks.” It was almost like texting with a very wise friend — except that my friends don’t usually send advertisements for Coke Zero with their messages.

Unhinging the binge

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:58:27 GMT

Some drinks are just too good to chug
I have a possible solution for the binge-drinking quandary: be more discerning about what you pour down your throat.

America has a tendency to dangle alcohol in front of its youth like a freshly baked forbidden brownie: booze is all over highway billboards, in the windows of the fluorescent-lit liquor stores that line our streets, and at the core of nearly any MTV or VH1 reality show.

But it’s the same old story: old enough to die in uniform, too young to drink. In August, former Middlebury College president John McCardell enlisted more than 100 university leaders, including Lawrence S. Bacow from Tufts and Jack M. Wilson from the UMass system, to form the Amethyst Initiative — a group calling for nationwide “re-examination” of the age when people can legally buy or consume alcohol. The Amethyst campaign implies, but never states directly, that the United States should once again lower the drinking age to 18, as it was in many states until 1984, when the feds blackmailed states with federal highway funds to raise it to 21.

“Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries, and enlisting in the military,” reads a statement on the Amethyst Initiative’s official Web site (amethystinitiative.org). “But are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.”

The fairly obvious argument goes that the illegality of alcohol makes it more appealing to those under 21, the same way that Prohibition did. And the fact that it’s against the law isn’t really stopping anyone, anyway. In Europe, offering a glass of wine to a teenager at dinner is no big thing; in America, it’s almost grounds for accusations of child abuse. Consequently, the first two or three years of college for Americans are usually spent scheming to find that sweet, prohibited nectar — an older (and willing) sibling or a fake ID suddenly become vital to one’s partying existence — and then consuming it as quickly as possible.

Binge drinking, that nasty frat-house habit that college presidents are also seeking to abolish, may indeed have something to do with the fear of being caught — an attempt to consume as much as possible and get rid of any incriminating evidence before dawn. My theory, though, is that students chug because their drinks-of-choice taste so bad. Anyone who’s ever imbibed cheapo light beer or, god forbid, malt liquor will agree: that stuff’s not easy to get down. And the mixed-drink options at your average college party are even worse: gin mixed with Pepsi, vodka mixed with Diet Coke (for those avoiding that freshman 15), and, on special occasions, the syrupy TGI Fridays–brand strawberry daiquiri mix paired with suntan-lotion-flavored rum.

Three’s a charm

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:12:12 GMT

The 802 Tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, August 24, 2008
Muhly, Amidon, and Bartlett are all VT-to-NY transplants and long-time collaborators.

White walls, black paint

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:31:11 GMT

Street art looking fine
Not long after walking into the Distillery Gallery on a Monday evening, Thomas Buildmore removes two painted-over NO PARKING signs that had been screwed into the wall. “This show isn’t about street art,” he says.

Not long after walking into the Distillery Gallery on a Monday evening, Thomas Buildmore removes two painted-over NO PARKING signs that had been screwed into the wall. “This show isn’t about street art,” he says.

If it were, “we’d have some cliché conversation about street art versus fine art.” Moments prior, I’d had that cliché conversation, with Cantabridgian artist Morgan Thomas. We agreed that “Paint It Now” — the show that opens tonight at the first-floor alt-gallery in the Distillery, South Boston’s living space-cum-artistic haven — is street art moved into the fine-art world. It’s just a change of location, with the added luxury of time, which most street artists — who are constantly looking over their shoulders — lack.

Buildmore’s sentiment is a surprising one, given that the show features a dozen or so artists, many of whom use city walls as their canvases. He and Thomas, who are part of a collective called Overkill Studio that’s based in the same building, organized the show with Scott Chase, the director of the Distillery Gallery.

The idea behind “Paint It Now” is simple: give two white walls and an unending supply of black paint to several of Boston and New York’s young artistic talents, and see what happens. In addition to Buildmore, Thomas, and Chase, those chosen talented contributors will include Kenji Nakayama, Dark Clouds, Noir Boston, Hargo, and Alphabet Soup — whose work, if not names, anyone who walks around Boston enough should recognize.

Artists will gradually add paint to the walls until October 2, when the show closes. The idea for the walls to be entirely black and white, says Thomas, is a limiting factor meant to both unite and challenge the artists.

As for Buildmore, he’s not disparaging street art with his entry-way comment. In fact, when the kind folks at Central Kitchen in Cambridge decided to make their alleyway wall a street-art free-for-all this past fall, they asked him to help recruit talent. But Buildmore doesn’t want the contributing group to be defined by one type of media they use.

“What we’re trying to show is a juxtaposition of styles of painting,” he says. “It’s a collision of all of the different influences we draw from. It’s like bringing all of art history right to the surface.”

BarCasting about

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:42:01 GMT

Beer and Cheesecake
The inside of the Silhouette Lounge in Allston is a bit like a pinball machine.

The inside of the Silhouette Lounge in Allston is a bit like a pinball machine: it’s a tiny space packed with an abundance of competing sensory stimulants. There’s the clacking sound of a billiard ball in the corner, the alluring lights of the ever-popular erotic-photo-hunt machine, the buttery scent of popcorn, the flash of neon message boards, which seem to display only run-on sentences. And there are 10 televisions of various sizes and qualities (one is dead) that occupy every inch of wall near the ceiling, simultaneously blasting sports games, Keno numbers, and late-night news.

A few months ago, the Silhouette added its 10th TV, a flat-screen vertical set provided by Somerville-based company BarCast, which is described on its Web site as “an interactive network of high-def flat-panel displays.” According to Evan Steiner, BarCast’s vice-president of business development, it’s just one of 55 Boston watering holes that the company has attracted since January.

“It’s all about interactivity,” says Steiner, on the phone from Somerville. “It’s a new medium. You can text the screen and it’ll show up in all bars across the Boston network. It’s sort of the same as the mentality behind JumboTron screens at sporting events,” he says, meaning that just as you might glance up at the screen at Fenway and see yourself or a friend, you can now glance up at a bar and see you or your friend’s text message (or blurry texted photo) — with the occasional advertisement in between. This pays BarCast’s bills, so they’re able to place their screens above beer taps around town at no cost to either the bar or the company.

The Silhouette is one of many drinking institutions around town that Steiner and his partners deemed “young, hip,” and BarCast-worthy. On a recent, rain-soaked Tuesday night, a group of twentysomethings passing a pitcher of PBR around a booth is momentarily mesmerized by a game called Jumbly, which involves assembling words from disassembled letters as they float across the screen. Suddenly, the broadcast transitions — rather unsmoothly — to an ad for Brubaker (a woman shown from behind, with a bottle of the beer resting snugly in her thong strap), then to a photo of a thin woman in a tight green tank top and a BarCast hat, whose image recurs throughout the evening.

Fast and dirty

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:20:13 GMT

No Age at the Middle East Downstairs, July 14, 2008
Experienced live, No Age’s songs feel like quick jabs of noise penned for the type of careless, rebellious summers that exist only in movies like Dazed and Confused .

Socks appeal

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:13:56 GMT

Drag kings flip the script on gender impersonation. We go undercover to get to the meat of the matter.
Rico swaggers down the aisle of the Art House Theatre in Provincetown, oozing confidence and brazenly flirting with the cheering women who’ve claimed every available seat for the sold-out show.

VIDEO: All The King's Men performs 'N Sync's "Bye Bye Bye" at Pride 2008

Slideshow: Boston's drag kings

Rico swaggers down the aisle of the Art House Theatre in Provincetown, oozing confidence and brazenly flirting with the cheering women who’ve claimed every available seat (plus a few folding chairs at the back) for the sold-out show. Clad in aviator sunglasses and an army-green T-shirt, with a thin, carefully clipped mustache on his upper lip and a cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth, he struts with the bravado of an enormously plumed male bird during mating season.

When he reaches the stage, he gradually removes pieces of his ensemble. Off come the sunglasses and the mustache, ripped free in one quick tug, and on go a dainty black-lace glove and crimson lipstick. Next, Rico removes his boxer shorts and “package,” in this case a balled-up sock. Underneath his guy undies he’s wearing tight black ladies underwear with tassels. He steps into a pair of matching red stiletto heels.

Rico’s body language slowly but visibly becomes more feminine (less boastful, more graceful) as he dons a nice-girl pigtailed wig and moves fluidly around the stage. Finally, he removes his tank top — and the ace bandages used to bind his . . . breasts? — then dances playfully back up the aisle and out of the theater, the same way he came in, leaving the audience with only a brief glimpse of his final feminine ensemble. In mere moments, Rico transformed before the audience’s eyes, from a macho “man’s man” to a coy, female erotic dancer, thus giving life to stereotypes, both male and female, which the audience happily lapped up.

The fact that “Rico” is actually a woman named Karin Webb only feeds the vacationing crowd’s enthusiasm.

Webb is one of eight members of All the Kings Men, one of the best-known drag-king theater troupes in Boston. If you’re not familiar with them, or their peers in such smaller troupes as Queer Soup Kings and Unsuspecting Females, you may want to start asking for IDs before locking lips in a bar.

VIDEO: Heywood Wakefield performing at IDKE in Vancouver

King leer
There is no prototypical woman who chooses to perform in drag. Many are lesbians, though certainly not all of them are. Some are actors, whereas others seek out the thrill of completely transforming their identity, flip-flopping genders as easily as John McCain changes his stance on tax cuts.

Slideshow: Reflections in Exile at the NCAAA

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:43:45 GMT

"Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice"
Artwork from "Reflections In Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond To Social Injustice" at the National Center for Afro-American Artists.

Medals of dishonor, inkjet poster, by Chaz Maviyane-Davies

Blouse party

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:24:58 GMT

White Williams stops by Urban Outfitters
Joe Williams, the waify mastermind, is childlike in performance, all long eyelashes and restless feet.

Don't go there

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:40:15 GMT

Local bike-mapping web sites help riders navigate Boston's treacherous traffic
Biking in Boston is a venture rife with obstacles — my daily, 2.4 mile commute between home in Cambridge and work near Fenway is proof of that.

Slideshow: MassArt Bicycle Bible Cover Submissions

Biking in Boston is a venture rife with obstacles — my daily, 2.4 mile commute between home in Cambridge and work near Fenway is proof of that. It's like a video game, only with more dire consequences, in which you have to share the narrow street space with never-ending construction projects (ride on the sidewalk for one block, minus two points), honking trucks, and the 47 bus (pull over to let them pass, minus three points). Memorize the locations of many crater-size potholes near the BU Bridge, and exactly when to swerve left (plus four points). Avoid flying over the handlebars (Game Over!).

These hindrances are moderately manageable on familiar routes, but visiting other parts of town is tricky, even for more experienced bikers. Google Maps and other Internet mapping programs lend directions, but even the No Highways option won't necessarily display the best biking paths.

"It can put you on some scary routes," says Andrew Conway, who bikes from Arlington to South Station for work every day, and writes a cycling blog, andrewbikes.blogspot.com. "The pothole thing is diabolical at this time of year." Conway typically uses Google Maps or Andrew Rubel's legendary Boston's Bikemap, which has been the go-to for area cyclists since 1978. His ideal map, he says, "would also tell you what the surface of the road is like."

With rising gas costs, as well as concerns about the environment, biking is quickly becoming the most logical way to travel within Boston, not to mention that it's fun — and comparatively cheaper than driving or taking public transportation. So, what are the city's ambitious bikers to do? Several Web sites, including MapMyRide, TheRightRide, Bikely, and the City of Boston's bike-committee-planned site (still in it's planning stages) are seeking to solve this problem, by providing online mapping programs specifically geared (no pun intended) toward bikers.

"We talked to bikers in other cities, to see what's been successful for them," says Nicole Freedman, a former pro bike racer, on the phone from her office at City Hall. Freedman is the city's "bike czar" — the unofficial title for Boston's Director of Bike Programs — who's helming Boston's bike-mapping project. Freedman cites New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and especially Santa Clara, California, as role models for her project. She also consulted Rubel himself. "It's been clear from the start that the more information and feedback we can get, the better," says Freedman.

LOL in the family

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:20:45 GMT

Post-roflcon antics at the East
Rick Rolling made real before our eyes? This truly was a special night.

Tweens of yore

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:57:50 GMT

Blogging the Baby-Sitters Club
At age eight, Kimberly Hutt sent a manuscript to Scholastic Corporation.

White Hinterland

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:56:57 GMT

Phylactery Factory | Dead Oceans
In January, Scituate native Casey Dienel blogged: “For the present and foreseeable future, there won’t be any more Casey Dienel.”