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

Somerville Theatre

Christina Miller

Best and worst films and/or events you've seen here?
The best would be the Mulberry Tree, part of the IFFBoston 2011. I don't see bad movies.

After hitting a bump or two in the road, it's time for another installment in the Book Rat Project, the sustained experiment in which a book critic (Eugenia Williamson) attempts to act as a human algorithm for a willing subject (your humble neighborhood book rat, Will Delman).

After Eugenia handed me Chris Adrian's The Great Night (an unqualified success if ever there was one), she attempted to follow it with Jess Walter's new novel Beautiful Ruins (perhaps hoping to take advantage of my recent trip to Italy?).

Dark Night of the Soul, the 2009 masterstroke from SPARKLEHORSE, DANGER MOUSE (with some help from DAVID LYNCH), has been largely forgotten by pop culture at large aside from the notoriety surrounding its release. However, it seems someone named Torrey Meeks also remembers the stirring power of the record, and crafted this amazing video for Gruff Rhys’ contribution, “Just War,” from footage of a Soviet short film made in the '80s.

How do you know when you're truly internet-famous? When you glitter-bomb a famous homophobe on C-SPAN? When the C-SPAN clip gets autotuned into a song? When your call for free ponies is embraced by the Bronies? Or when your music video, "I Am A Meme," goes viral on YouTube?

Not sure. But for perennial long-shot Presidential candidate, Occupy ally, and longtime friend of the Phoenix VERMIN SUPREME, we'll say this: a Vice Magazine mini-documentary won't hurt.

In the Song of Ice and Fire series of books and HBO’s TV adaptation of them, Game of Thrones, lots of growly-voiced men drink heavily, often while talking about the macabre. On THE NATIONAL'S albums, a growly-voiced man sings about drinking heavily and presents us with humane, yet macabre, lyrics. It seems like a natural fit, then, for the band to do a version of an in-text song called “The Rains of Castamere” for the soundtrack to the show.

Has the ticket price for Radiohead’s show at the Comcast Center got you down? Is your rent paid but you don’t know what to do with all those quarters you’ve saved up from busking and they’re causing you to freak out? Bummed that you can’t listen to the new Walkmen CD because reminds you of that girl who looked like Mischa Barton that you never got with? Take a baton to the arm at the No NATO protest and need some musical band-aids? Well, grab your leather jacket and ready your throwing elbow, because Ghosts of Punks Past THE MOB are coming out to kick your asses this Memorial Day Monday at Great Scott.

I’m going to be completely honest, here. I’ve never been the world’s biggest BELLE & SEBASTIAN fan (my kind of sorrowful British twee-pop aligns itself with other artists better), but I’ve always had a tremendous soft spot for STEVIE JACKSON'S voice. He’s a lovely singer, and his voice, in contrast to Stuart Murdoch, has always had such feeling in it.

Previewing a niche festival like MOVEMENT -- some six states and 832 miles away -- only two days before it gets underway is always a rather moot effort. Either it's been on your radar for months and you're chomping at the bit to hit the road. Or you haven't got a clue what the fuck I'm talking about and you'll dutifully ignore everything that's forthcoming.

It's true! You'd never know if from the campaign trail, but WILLARD MITT ROMNEY was actually governor of Massachusetts for a number of years, a position he obtained by making a series of arguments to voters -- Bain Capital, business leadership, etc -- that are annoyingly similar to the ones he's made as an unsuccessful candidate for president.

My smarty-pants brother recently wrote at Salon that the average age of members of the United States Senate is rising, not so much because Senators hang around getting re-elected forever more than they used to, but because newly-elected Senators are older now than used to be the case. In additional commentary at his blog he ponders why this may be, but has no strong answer.

The xx are at the Wilbur on July 31

On Sale Thursday, May 24

AT NOON

Foxes | July 10 at Brighton Music Hall | $12 | On sale @ ticketmaster.com

Ana Tijouz | July 16 at Brighton Music Hall | $20 | On sale @ ticketmaster.com

Right Away, Great Captain! | July 19 at Brighton Music Hall | $15 | On sale @ ticketmaster.

There's a whole world of great movies out there that we'll probably never see, not even in a cinema-savvy town like Boston, unless we have the means to go to, say, the Locarno Film Festival or the Istanbul International Independent Film Festival. French director Valérie Massadian won top prizes at both of those events for her debut film Nana (2011), and thanks to ArtsEmerson's "Festival Focus" series you can see why.

The new Suffolk poll released late last night shows the US Senate race in Massachusetts as effectively dead-even, with Scott Brown at 48% and Elizabeth Warren at 47%. This is a big improvement for Warren over Suffolk's February poll, which had Brown ahead 49%-40%.

I'm going to make two quick arguments here: that the Cherokee-heritage story has helped Warren; and that the poll actually holds some good news for Brown.

In the four years since the Silver Jews toured with HALLELUJAH THE HILLS, Jews singer David Berman retired from the music biz to do whatever it is he does otherwise, and the erstwhile lo-fi stalwarts disbanded. Meanwhile, Jah Hills’ Ryan Walsh and Co. marinated in the latter half of the Jews’ oeuvre. The result is “Get Me in a Room,” the first track off new long-player No One Knows What Happens Next, Hallelujah the Hills’ first record since 2009’s Colonial Drones

I first heard about MEET YOUR BEAT several months ago, when co-founder AARON ESKEETS posted a video of Andre Obin's performance at Radio. It wasn't just a single-song video clip, shot by Flipcam or camera phone -- it was Obin's entire, 30-minute-long electronic-pop set, with quality audio and different angles to help break up the visual monotony.

The greatest revenge, in some ways, is persevering long enough to prove your detractors wrong. In the case of mid-'70s rock/punk/metal misfits The Dictators, they somehow went from being rock rejects to pre-punk legends, largely on the strength of their initial three-album run. 1975's Go Girl Crazy is a way-ahead-of-its-time juggernaut of riffs, jokes, and crushing rock.

The problem that most of the internet has with HBO’s Girls is that the showrunner, 24-year-old Lena Dunham, is the daughter of famous artist Laurie Simmons. Tons of the cast and crew are the children of people who are even more famous than her mom, and a lot of the angst regarding it has centered around charges of “nepotism” on the part of the network.

Success in rock and roll is often about being in the right place at the right time-- but sometimes it's also about adapting enough to eventually make your aesthetic matter in the ever-shifting tectonic surface of music culture. Ross Friedman, aka ROSS THE BOSS, is a Zelig-esque figure in the world of rock, in the sense that if people don't know his name, they know his influence: he not only changed punk with his way-ahead-of-their-time 70s project THE DICTATORS, but he switched to heavy metal and pushed it way way way over-the-top with 80s behemoths MANOWAR