If an afternoon perfecting the art of Medieval Carpentry sounds to you like time well spent, you should probably be at the seventh-annual Boston Skillshare at MIT this weekend. Run by an entirely-volunteer organizing collective, the two-day event features workshops ranging from the somewhat esoteric (“Wild Carrot as a Natural Method of Contraception,” “Making Milk out of Nuts and Seeds,” or “Spoon Carving”) to the practical (the simply-titled “Time Management”).

Common Art, a weekly faith-based open studios, provides poor and homeless folks space and materials to make art. Each week between 10 am and 2 pm on Wednesday, these artists gather at the studio space in Emmanuel Church in Boston. The time serves as a reprieve for its participants: a chance to concentrate fully on a drawing, an acrylic or perhaps a puppet construction.

Before Bono made himself king -- or at least crowned himself rock and roll's official ambassador to the Universe -- the most internationally influential rock star, on a policy level at least, was Lou Reed. If there'd been a Secretary of State for 20th-century "alternative" rock, it woulda been Lou, since the Velvet Underground, as everyone knew, had helped topple Communism in the Czech Republic, where they seemed to have held a cultural sway that was vastly out of proportion to what they held such cultural backwaters as, say, the United States.