GEORGIANA COHEN

Boston boy

GEORGIANA COHEN — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:03:05 GMT

Brian Sullivan is Dylan in the Movies
For a brief moment recently, Brian Sullivan’s musical career came full circle.

For a brief moment recently, Brian Sullivan’s musical career came full circle. Sullivan, who operates under the Belle and Sebastian–inspired moniker Dylan in the Movies, had just been listening to tracks from the Breeders’ Mountain Battles, which is due in April.

“So good,” he says almost breathlessly, settling into a table at Somerville’s Diesel Café. “Nothing better than driving around on a Saturday listening to the Breeders.”

It was listening to Breeder Kim Deal’s bass on MTV’s 120 Minutes in the ’80s, as she and the rest of the Pixies ripped into “Here Comes Your Man,” that captivated a teenage Sullivan. Growing up in “idyllic” but “stifling” Needham, seeing a band from Boston rocking out on MTV, he decided that he could do it too.

“It just stopped me in my tracks,” says the 35-year-old. “Up till then every band was from LA or England. They were never from Boston. That was like, wow, I can do this.”

Despite a brief stint in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2000, Boston has defined Sullivan’s work. There’s the inspiration he’s drawn from bands he connected with while working at the legendary Fort Apache studios from 1996 to 1997, and friendships with artists like Tanya Donelly, who sang back-up vocals on two tracks from his 2005 EP Feel the Pull (Gentleman’s Recording Company), and with whom he’s collaborating on a new project. And then there’s the spirits he says hang over the city like a fog.

“There are a lot of ghosts here that keep me company. I think when I moved out to LA, I was trying to wean myself off them. Then realized that I kind of needed them.”

Indeed, his songs seem haunted — lush, melancholy works befitting late-night walks on the Esplanade or, perhaps, rainy evenings at home in Chelsea. “Massachusetts Avenue,” from his as-yet-untitled full-length (it’ll also be on an on-line split single with the Douglas Fir due in mid April), begins with hushed, æthereal tones that give way to energetic riffs, driving piano, and Sullivan’s mournful cry of “I’m sorry.” Low and at times weary, his voice is taut with emotion.

Although it turned out this Boston boy wasn’t made for the West Coast, Hollywood did pay some dividends. Thanks to a friend who was the music supervisor for Dawson’s Creek, he landed a couple of songs from his independently released 2000 debut disc, Don’t Postpone Joy, on that show and on the WB’s Summerland.

What is Filk?

GEORGIANA COHEN — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:42:20 GMT

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the DIURNAL atmospheric DISEQUILIBRIUM
Filk’s not so much a genre as a state of being.

DR. SNARK, a/k/a Newton South High School teacher Paul Estin (with guitar), is one of many locals carrying on the proud filking tradition.

It’s 3:30 pm on a dreary Sunday, and the 45th running of Boskone is coming to a close. For three days, the area’s oldest sci-fi convention has filled the function rooms of the Westin Waterfront with panel discussions ranging from “Space War: How Would It Really Be Waged — and Why?” to “It’s All Downhill from Tolkien,” and a bedraggled but lively group of geeks is planning on finishing thing up in style. It’s time to filk.

Filk is commonly defined as the music of science-fiction fandom, but there’s more to it than that. “Filk is the music made by filkers,” says 37-year-old Cambridge resident and long-time filker Lara Ortiz de Montellano. “What’s a filker? A person who calls themselves a filker.”

De Montellano is not isolated in her filkitude. Whether it’s at conventions, gatherings of regional groups like MASSFILC, or on countless online message boards, filkers are a vibrant, if niche, global community of nerds devoted to making music in a fun and freeing environment. For them, filk’s not so much a genre as a state of being.

What is it really?
Let’s go back to the beginning. Filk, the story goes, emerged from the first science-fiction conventions of the 1950s, when attendees would huddle in stairwells until the wee hours, singing folk-style songs about their favorite books, space travel, silly monsters, or anything at all, really. A misspelling of “folk” in an early write-up about this phenomenon spawned the term “filk,” and it stuck — like a Tribble on a Trekkie.

In explaining filk, Victor Stevko — president of MASSFILC and de Montellano’s husband — cites fantasy classics such as The Hobbit, in which J.R.R. Tolkien would include the words of a song that Bilbo sang, without, of course, a melody. “So the impulse,” he says, “is to write some music.”

But while an interest in works of science fiction and fantasy may be the filk community’s common denominator, that doesn’t limit the art form’s scope. Filk songs can be completely original or adapted from the tunes of “real” songs. They can be about hobbits, zombies, lost love, dragons, video games, space travel, computers, even about filking and fandom itself. One classic, filker Tom Smith’s “A Boy and His Frog,” is an ode to the late Jim Henson sung from Kermit’s perspective.

Henson’s death “was an event that affected the community strongly,” notes de Montellano.

Indie invasion

GEORGIANA COHEN — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:49:49 GMT

Blogs like Swedesplease.net
Green living and government-subsidized health care and education are breeding smart indie-pop acts by the dozen.

Free your nerd

GEORGIANA COHEN — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:07:16 GMT

Dancing stupid
When “I’m Too Sexy” comes on, 28-year-old Rachel Marks has a flashback. “Oh my God,” she says. “My bat mitzvah.”

LIBERATED: Marianne Bayard hopes to inspire other women to be as ridiculous as she can be.

When “I’m Too Sexy” comes on, 28-year-old Rachel Marks has a flashback. “Oh my God,” she says. “My bat mitzvah.” It’s early on a Saturday afternoon, and while her peers sleep off the previous night’s partying, Marks and seven other women are gettin’ busy at Central Square’s Green Street Dance Studios with Right Said Fred.

Welcome to the Boston chapter of Dance Dance Party Party (DDPP), a 14-city international organization for women who love to dance but hate the dance-club scene. There are no rules and, notably, no men — just 90 minutes, 600 square feet, and an iPod full of cheesy dance tunes. The only instructions that 28-year-old organizer Marianne Bayard offers are, “Just have fun, feel free to sing along, be a fool, and do whatever.”

A Wayland native and Emerson grad, Bayard moved to Cambridge in July after studying at a clown school in Paris. It was there where she was inspired to pursue “nerdy freedom.”

“I think I’ve always been a closeted nerd,” says Bayard. “When I got through clown school, it was like, just be the nerd that you are. Life’s way more fun that way.”

Bayard attended one DDPP event when she lived in New York City a few years ago. Upon returning to Boston, she wanted to give other women a space to, as her 29-year-old friend Meredith Smith put it, “free their nerd.” The first DDPP get-together was held on January 5.

At the Green Street studio, some newcomers look a little unsure at first, but when Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” comes on, all bets are off. Soon, people are jogging laps, bobbing heads, and doing the Robot. No one is shy about posing in the mirror, singing along, or breaking into the running man.

“It’s like being in your own music video,” says Smith.

While the studio lacks ambience, and the music could be a bit louder, energy remains high throughout the 90 minutes. When the vibe hits a momentary lull, Bayard briefly brings everyone into a dance circle. Then, mojo restored, it’s back to the free-for-all.

“My role is to be as ridiculous as I can,” says Bayard, “so that everybody else can be like, ‘Ah, she looks like an idiot, so can I.’ ”

Boston’s DDPP branch is barely six weeks old, and Bayard admits she’s been more focused on playlists than promotion. But it’s beginning to catch on.

Beauty and the geeks

GEORGIANA COHEN — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:04:15 GMT

I, Dorkbot
The idea? A shooting gallery where the goal is to hit the ducks — and avoid bagging Dick Cheney’s hunting partner.

E-TRASH ART: Dorkbot artists find beauty in the remains of electronic gadgets and common household objects.

The idea? A shooting gallery where the goal is to hit the ducks — and avoid bagging Dick Cheney’s hunting partner. The problem? How to make the targets move.

This is a job for the Dorkbots. Dorkbot Boston is the local branch of a global organization that bills itself as “people doing strange things with electricity,” uniting geeks interested in melding engineering with art. Think MythBusters meets the ICA.

The week of Presidents’ Day, the group will feature a politically themed exhibition at Somerville’s Willoughby and Baltic Gallery, owned by so-called Dorkbot overlord and shooting-gallery creator Meredith Garniss.

Garniss received an art degree from Northeastern in 1989 but got derailed into developing desktop-publishing technology for several years before returning to her painting roots. That’s when she began making robotic puppets — and connecting her creative with her analytical side.

After a slow start since its launch a couple of years ago, Dorkbot Boston now boasts 65 members. Their first exhibit, this past Halloween, featured a blood-spurting Furby, and Garniss’s large-scale version of the board game Operation, renamed “Autopsy.”

Dorkbot, as Garniss puts it, brings together people who “just want to learn things from each other” — and are maybe just a little bit twisted. For Ed Poznysz, a 36-year-old chemical engineer from Somerville who has worked as a technical director in community theatre, Dorkbot fits his innate need to tinker.

“I was one of those kids who would play with a toy for 10 minutes before I said, ‘Mom, where’s the Phillips head?’ ” says Poznysz. He created the aforementioned death Furby, whose parts were culled from an inkjet printer, a VCR, and an aquarium. “I’d rather have something that’s really cool and broken than something new.”

Originally, there were fears Dorkbot would overlap with Collision Collective, an MIT group formed in 2002 that similarly bridges art and technology. But as Garniss puts it, “If Collision Collective is fine art, we’re folk art. Not everybody is schooled in the engineering part of it or the art part of it, but we have fun doing it, and that’s really our thing.”

At a recent meeting, members bandied about ideas for getting the shooting gallery targets to cycle through. Compressed air? Tilt sensors? A solution is elusive, for now. Garniss has one thing figured out, though — she’s already bought both a cork gun and a rubber-band gun for the shooting part of the game. The group debates the merits of each — Garniss has priorities, after all.

Dirty dancing

GEORGIANA COHEN — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:25:25 GMT

A fitting opening for 'Inappropriate Touching'
The exhibit is called “Inappropriate Touching,” and whether you wanted it or not, that’s what you got at the packed opening reception.

Twee time

GEORGIANA COHEN — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:33:24 GMT

The warm and fuzzy pop of the Smittens
In the cold climes of maple country, the Smittens are sentimental saps and proud of it. Militant, even.

UNDERREPRESENTED? The Smittens formed around a name — and a desire to fill the twee void in Burlington, Vermont.

In the cold climes of maple country, the Smittens are sentimental saps and proud of it. Militant, even. They went so far as to print the phrase “Being nice is a political act” in the liner notes of their two albums, the first of which was called Gentlefication Now! (North of January). In this cruel world, the odds are against the Burlington (Vermont) quintet. But they press on.

“You’re like Frodo climbing up Mount Doom, one little hobbit versus the entire army of all evil,” says guitarist Colin Clary. The rest of the line-up is keyboardist Max Andrucki (currently pursuing a master’s in geography at Leeds College), drummer Holly Chagnon, guitarist/keyboardist Dana Kaplan, and bassist and Newburyport native David Zacharis. But their roles in the band take a back seat to their roles in one another’s lives. “It wasn’t about the music first. It was about forming this group of friends,” says Kaplan. “That’s really what Gentlefication was all about. That’s been our grounding value.”

The Smittens were born in 2002 from, of all things, a driving game. While traveling for hours around New England going to shows, Zacharis and Andrucki would make up band names. When they came up with the Snowpants, they called Clary and told him the name of the band they wanted to form. Then they called back with a new name — the Smittens. Kaplan and Chagnon were soon brought on board. No matter that Chagnon didn’t play drums and Zacharis had never touched a bass. Details, details.

The Smittens formed around a name but also around a desire to fill the twee void in Burlington, that jam-band capital of the North. “We wanted to do the music that we wanted to hear,” says Zacharis. “We were feeling underrepresented.” Their first album came out in March 2004; its follow-up, A Little Revolution (North of January), arrived 18 months later. They remain mysterious about the title and the release date of their third album, but they expect it to come out on the Happy Happy Birthday to Me label in the next few months.

L_w su_t

GEORGIANA COHEN — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:13:12 GMT

Hasbro vs. Scrabulous
For Scrabble fans, there are few bigger dilemmas than how to play a Q without a U.

Electronic spin

GEORGIANA COHEN — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:22:35 GMT

Jason Drakes stakes his own claim
Drake has posted a free download-only covers EP.

Public-service announcements

GEORGIANA COHEN — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:35:51 GMT

Chris Marstall brings Tourfilter to life
How do you take a Web site and make it come alive?

Of Montreal: Reissue

GEORGIANA COHEN — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:13:27 GMT

If He Is Protecting Our Nation, Then Who Will Protect Big Oil, Our Children | Polyvinyl
Remember back when Of Montreal couldn’t be heard in commercials for Outback Steakhouse?

Friends of John

GEORGIANA COHEN — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:51:54 GMT

Ra Ra Riot head up a benefit for their fallen Drummer
Most people at the Middle East downstairs on December 15 probably didn’t know John Pike, the 23-year-old drummer of New York’s Ra Ra Riot who drowned on June 1.

She's crafty

GEORGIANA COHEN — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:16:05 GMT

Indie music and the internet have fueled an arts-and-crafts renaissance that would puzzle your grandmother
What would Grandma say?

THE NAME SAYS IT ALL: Somerville’s Magpie stocks everything Grandma never imagined.

The framed items look familiar enough — the quaint curlicues of cross-stitch evoke memories of your grandmother’s living-room wall, charming phrases wreathed in chains of flowers. Upon closer examination, though, these picturesque patterns bear unexpected messages: “Home Crap Home,” “Bitch Is the New Black,” “What Would Leonard Nimoy Do?”

Heck, what would Grandma say?

Amberly Stewart — a/k/a “Spamberly” — has been doing counted cross-stitch for years but now creates and sells samplers that depart, somewhat radically, from the traditional country-kitchen designs.

“This is my kind of cute,” says the 28-year-old Somerville resident. Stewart is not flying her freak flag alone: a new generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings are picking up the needles and the glue guns where their grandparents left off. As increasingly socially conscious consumers flock to handmade goods, crafters are finding a glut of outlets for selling their products. And Greater Boston — with stores such as Somerville’s Magpie and prominent events such as the annual Bazaar Bizarre craft fair — is emerging as a crafting hub.

Crafting’s nothing new, of course. And most of its current practitioners have been at it for a long time. But it wasn’t until recently that a full-fledged crafting movement congealed, perhaps most publicly embodied by the “Stitch ’N Bitch” book series and subsequent knitting craze. Some believe “post-9/11 nesting” and the need for community-building was a contributing factor. Others cite a powerful counter-consumerist trend, with young adults rebelling against the alienation of big-box culture.

This past year, Milwaukee-area crafter Faythe Levine decided to hit the road and document this movement. Fifteen cities (including Boston) later, her documentary film, Handmade Nation, is slated for release in 2009, and a book of the same title is coming out next year.

“This is not just a trend. This is a lifestyle for a lot of people,” Levine says. “I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.”

Humble beginnings
The handmade movement represents a convergence of progressive ideals — eco-friendliness, buying local, arts patronage — combined with a funky aesthetic. Various shakers in the national crafting scene have even banded together to form buyhandmade.org, a Web site where people can take a pledge to buy and request handmade gifts this holiday season. “DIY or die!” pledges one. Yes, they are that serious.

The wisdom of crowds

GEORGIANA COHEN — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:04:19 GMT

Comic timing
Well before the appointed hour, nearly a thousand people had gathered at tiny Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park in North Cambridge, waiting for . . . well, no one really knew.

Well before the appointed hour, exactly 2:38 pm on September 23, nearly a thousand people had gathered at tiny Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park in North Cambridge, waiting for . . . well, no one really knew. But with 20 seconds to go, they started counting down.

“Redonkulous,” is how 19-year-old Olin College sophomore Katherine Elliott explained it. Bound by a spirit of adventure that drew them from Arlington, Cleveland, Calgary, Moscow, and elsewhere, fans of xkcd — which bills itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”; the letters “xkcd” meaning nothing in particular — came to this place, at this time, to see what exactly would happen.

“Something’s already happened,” said 28-year-old Jesse Raymond, who’d traveled from upstate New York. “We’re all here.”

Fans of xkcd (go to xkcd.com), which is drawn in simple stick-figure form, are your romantic brand of geek, who see a challenge both in sorting through lines of code and in affairs of the heart. “[xkcd is about] computers, physics, mathematics, and what it’s like trying to be someone having relationships with people while being good at all those things,” said 53-year-old David Bass, a North Cambridge resident who brought his wife and three kids — all fans — to the gathering. Around him, people wore T-shirts sporting equations, traded in-jokes about velociraptors, engaged in spontaneous foam-sword duels, and hauled a mattress to the top of a jungle gym they had overtaken.

Randall Munroe, the 22-year-old creator of the comic, moved to the area in June. A former NASA scientist with a degree in physics, he can appeal to his fans’ unique sense of humor. And they thank him for it.

“One of my friends characterized it very well as, ‘Oh my God, there’s someone in my head reading my thoughts and making a webcomic about them,’ ” said John Ostwald, a 27-year-old software developer from Newton.

The meet-up was prompted by a March comic entitled “Dream Girl,” in which Munroe’s stick-figure narrator recounts meeting a girl in a dream who urgently whispered a date and time and the mapping coordinates — 42.39561, -71.13051 — of Williams Park in his ear. The narrator goes there at the appointed moment but, as he sadly concludes, “It turns out wanting something doesn’t make it real.”

But hundreds of people decided to make it just that. “Dream Girl” was enough to bring Alex Norris here all the way from England.