Paradise (2009)

Michael Almereyda made a big indie stir with his 1994 vampire movie Nadja followed up in 2000 with his post-modern version of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke. Since then he has kept a low profile making non-fiction films, including Paradise (2009), which is essentially a visual diary recording everyday epiphanies.

Welcome to "Meet the Mayor," a segment in which we interview local Foursquare Mayors in their natural habitats.

Crack House
Sarah Ahearn

So you've labeled your apartment building the "Crack House"?
Yeah. It's just kind of sketchy-looking from the outside, and the floors in the elevator are cracked.

This reporter may have shirked a few responsibilities to keep an unmoving eye on the Twitter feed of Guchi's Midnight Ramen all the live long day. Like a hawk. Curiously, .0005 seconds after tickets were released, this was the result. Hopefuls are now crying foul across the Twitterverse.

Damn, ramen be (magically? impossibly?) sellin' like hot cakes. Or like hot ramen.

Whomp, whump.

In his curious new response to my previous disembowelings of his columns on copyright, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller suggests that the Times somehow did not engage in copyright infringement by uploading a pirated PDF of a Real Paper story last week. "I leave to lawyers – if any care to waste the time – to argue whether making that PDF available crossed any line in the copyright law," he writes.

It's saddened many of us around the hip-hop world when Audible Mainframe announced a few months back that they're done gigging for the moment. Anyone who's familiar with their regular shows in Boston (or, more recently, Los Angeles) would likely agree that they're one of rap music's great and consistent organic outfits - whether rocking their own tracks, or backing such esteemed legends as Slick Rick and Smif-N-Wessun (the latter of whom they re-made Dah Shinin' with a few years ago).

Church of the Absurd

Hey, you there. Are you fat? Unimaginative? Aggressively tacky? Maybe you're just plain awful. All of the above? Are you looking to get hitched to someone with similar attributes? Then has Pizza Hut got the Valentine's Day promo for you!

Just when we thought that the world had run out of cheesy (GET IT?!) proposal stunts for terrible people who love other terrible people, there's this

The late SETH PUTNAM, who died last June of a heart attack, was the focal point of the legendary Boston grindcore mess Anal Cunt. But drummer Tim Morse was often the glue, and has been the band's most entertaining and reliable curator of institutional wisdom. At Putnam's funeral last year, he reeled off hours of stories -- funny, sad, incomprehensible -- about AC's career, and not a few people came away thinking that Morse ought to write a book.

Any film with Udo Kier in it is, de facto, a must-see. In the portmanteau horror film The Theater Bizarre (2011) he plays the creepy puppet man - is he a muppet or a man? - who introduces the six tales of terror presented at the title venue. Among the committee of directors is George Romero collaborator Tom Savini, whose episode " Wet Dreams" involves a wronged wife's oneiric revenge, and Canadian filmmaker Karim Hussain's "Vision Stains," which investigates the nature of memory by means of hypodermic needles and eyeballs.

If “graveyard-pop” was a legitimate genre, British band VERONICA FALLS wouldn’t be so hard to classify. Their self-titled debut, which came out last fall on Slumberland Records, flaunts a wide array of classic indie influences; it’s packed with surf-pop hooks, gloomy harmonies, guitars saturated in reverb.

Between the couch surfing, sweet choreographed dance moves, and getting busted for izm, there's a lot of Real Life in the FAT CREEPS' new music video for their still-hyptno single "Nancy Drew." Toss in some fancy clog footwork, liberating head-banging, and some good old fashioned murder, and that's all more than enough to drape an << awesome video alert >> medallion around the Creeps' collective necks.

Et tu: Boston Review content, posted on New York Times servers without permission

[UPDATE] NEW POST: Bill Keller responds [Friday, Feb 10]

Yesterday, I wrote an open letter to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, as a response to two smug columns about copyright that he wrote on the same weekend that the Times poached an article from our company's archives.

Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz is at BC on Wednesday

Match reception | Reception for new exhibit featuring works from local artist couples at the Lincoln Arts Project on Friday, February 10 @ 7 pm [exhibit runs through March 10] | lincolnartsproject.com

"FREE Day at Mass MoCA" | Free admission to the museum all day, with a full schedule of free activities including performances, tours, a ‘Mermaid Parade', and Elevator Music Festival.

Indie bands with conspicuous reverences for ‘60s girl groups started to bore me six months ago, but DUM DUM GIRLS more than justified their continued existence Wednesday night at the Paradise.

I once didn't understand why songstress Kristin Gundred codenamed herself “Dee Dee.” But DDG's live show packed a distinctive Ramones-y “oomph” that's present but understated on their day-dreamy second record, Only in Dreams

The 37th Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, like past editions, offers a treasure trove of classic, new, and unknown gems, including premieres like Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Thread, a period flick set in the '20s about a scientist determined to live one moment of time over and over again (director Sloane U'Ren and screenwriter Ant Neely will attend).

Within the first few chilled-out electronic-pop chimes of GRAND RESORT’s riveting debut single “Microscopic,” you can almost huff the fumes of the Fung Wah carrying Andres M. Pichardo away from Boston and into the bloggy-buzz clutches of New York City. The 19-year-old Brookline lad and native of the Dominican Republic was already splitting time between education here at the New England Institute of Art and an internship at Manhattan’s Flux recording and mixing facility before making the permanent Dirty Apple leap just last week.

Muckrock has done it again. The FOIA-filing journalists' best friend that brought you, among other docs, the FBI's file on Ol Dirty Bastard, has now made public the late STEVE JOBS's FBI file, which reveals that Jobs was considered for a presidential appoinment in the Bush White House. The background check conducted on the occasion of that potential appointment digs into Jobs's past use of hallucinogens and weed, his lawsuits, allegations that he "abandoned" his estranged daughter, he of touches on his past drug use, and a possible presidential appointment in the early 90s.

 
It's baaack....

Those who didn't land a coveted invite to the much-anticipated arrival of ramen pop-up Guchi's Midnight Ramen last month can breathe easy. The elusive bowls are returning on February 13, according to the team's Twitter. The location is still hush hush, of course (can't give away all the good bits at once!), which gives us all one more reason to stay glued to our Twitter and Facebook feeds all day watching for movement.

The masterminds behind the midnight noodles are considerably less elusive in real life, though. I caught up with Mark Leary, Yukihiro Kawaguchi (Guchi himself) and Tracy Chang for an afternoon downtown.

Dom are at the Brighton Music Hall on May 11

On Sale Thursday, February 9

Darius Rucker | August 31 at the Cape Cod Melody Tent | $66.25 | On sale @ ticketmaster.com

AT NOON

The Feelies | May 12 at the Paradise Rock Club | $20 | On sale @ ticketmaster.com

On Sale Friday, February 10