Boston Phoenix - thePhoenix.com

Battling Scientology

CHRIS FARAONE — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:47:49 GMT

Anonymous's Gregg Housh is committed to bringing down the Church of Scientology. Is he a gadfly or a goon?
In a world wracked with uncertainty, there is at least one thing you can bet on: pick a fight with the Church of Scientology, and its leaders will fight back — always with vigor, often with a vengeance, and sometimes with litigation that can be long and costly.

In a world wracked with uncertainty, there is at least one thing you can bet on: pick a fight with the Church of Scientology (CoS), and its leaders will fight back — always with vigor, often with a vengeance, and sometimes with litigation that can be long and costly.

The idea of locking legal horns with the CoS might be enough to cool the ardor of some critics. But that is not Gregg Housh’s style. Housh, an Internet activist and provocateur, is not an easy guy to characterize. A member of a group that calls itself “Anonymous,” Housh is pitted in what appears to be an escalating rift with the CoS. Core constitutional issues such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion are central to the dispute.

Almost 10 months ago, Housh helped launch a protest group that he now describes as the world’s fastest-growing grassroots movement (mobilizing several thousand people in less than one month). The group formed as a response to the removal of a video from YouTube and other sites that featured Tom Cruise describing CoS doctrines and principles. From a few simple mouse clicks, a mighty battle has grown.

Housh is himself a rather casual, almost random sort of activist. A seventh-grade dropout, devout atheist, and proud computer troll, he claims to loathe all political parties equally, and could give a damn about Greenpeace, PETA, or any other picket-happy causes. In fact, had the CoS not “messed” with what he thinks of as his Internets, Housh would probably be wasting his spare time sparking Web mischief instead of dedicating approximately 40 hours every week to Anonymous, his now infamously masked group, whose mission seems to be toying with L. Ron Hubbard’s minions.

Born in Dallas in 1976, Housh deserted middle school to pursue technological endeavors. He’s been a hacker, a programmer, and a hardware technician, leaving one city for another every time he got bored and found an attractive new job offer. In 2002, he moved from the Florida Keys to Boston for a gig in financial analytics, but quit after finding cubicle life to be impossibly tedious. He still lives in the Boston area and still works with computers (his current job is one of two things he won’t discuss, the other being the three months he served in federal prison for copyright infringement via software piracy), but Housh is hardly blinging off the Commonwealth’s supposed tech boom. On January 21 — the day he and four other Anonymous members (or Anons, as they call themselves) posted their “Message to Scientology” video on YouTube — he reports having had just $144 in the bank. Less than one year later, he describes his account as negative-$1400 and plummeting.

Going on sale: October 17, 2008

GOING ON SALE — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:04:04 GMT

Breaking news from the concert ticket trade
Mighty Mystic, Constantines, Christmas Revels, Anthony Hamilton and more

Dance, Monkey: Dan Sally

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:11:00 GMT

Is he the father of Clay Aiken’s child?

What Just Happened

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:14:16 GMT

Half-baked insider parody
“There isn’t a film there,” Ben tells the screenwriter. Sounds like What Just Happened .

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:30:42 GMT

A slight but sometimes affecting trifle
The relationship between fathers and daughters is complicated enough without being further strained by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Sex Drive

TOM MEEK — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:40:23 GMT

The usual preoccupation with nut sacks and virgins
Sex Drive doesn’t venture anywhere new, but it makes the same old scenery amusing again.

Saving Marriage

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:39:04 GMT

Dramatic moments of the gay-and-lesbian struggle that escaped our newspapers
Roth and Henning, dedicated partisans, were everywhere with their cameras in those historic years 2003–2006.

Quarantine

TOM MEEK — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:45:13 GMT

About as scary as a creaky door
Every second horror film these days seems to be shot by some desperate character with a hand-held digital camera who half the time is running for his or her life.

City of Ember

MARK BAZER — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:53:00 GMT

Outdated, passable entertainment
Kids who see the truth when adults cannot is a central idea in children’s stories, but today’s kids would hardly recognize the grown-ups in Ember’s totalitarian society.

Still crazy after all these years

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:39:00 GMT

The Force is with Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show Wishful Drinking
Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive.

SURVIVOR: Fisher’s saving grace is her scathing wit.

Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive. Really, she’s as funny as Dame Edna Everage and as screwed-up as Britney Spears crossed with Sylvia Plath. In her one-woman show Wishful Drinking (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through October 26), this scion of Hollywood royalty lets her pimpled personal history hang out, from a childhood caught in the winds of scandal to an adolescence as a Star Wars icon in hairmuffs to an adulthood spent in the lusty embrace of drugs, alcohol, manic depression, and Paul Simon. Lumpy, candid, and caustic at 52, the artist formerly known as Princess Leia sprinkles wry humor like heavy pixie dust across her cautionary tale of a life that “if it weren’t funny would just be true — and that is unacceptable.”

Not only is Fisher’s on-stage memoir immensely entertaining, it’s been trumped up with multimedia accouterments uncommon in a one-person show. There is a contemporary living-room set backed by roiling orange and a montage of projections. Fisher enters warbling “Happy Days Are Here Again” as newspaper headlines fly behind her chronicling events from the severing of America’s sweethearts — her parents, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — to her own hospitalizations and bad reviews. (She’s declared “bovine and unappealing” by infamously misogynistic critic John Simon.)

The writer/performer breaks the ice by recalling the moment when she woke up with a dead friend in her bed. (“He not only died in his sleep, he died in mine.”) Then she backtracks to the beginning of an existence that’s been equal parts celebrity and absurdity. The events and relationships revisited in Wishful Drinking may be twisted, but Fisher’s ironic celebration of the success-studded train wreck of her life will keep you doubled over for two hours. It’s only in the aftermath that you worry about this poster girl for bi-polar disorder, who apologizes early on for any memory lapses she may suffer as a result of recent shock therapy — which she heartily recommends. (If Wishful Drinking has a serious purpose, it is to destigmatize mental illness.)

Interview: Billy Bragg

JIM SULLIVAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:56:25 GMT

Mr. Love & Justice on the Clash, the Queen, and preaching to the choir
English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg once called himself “a one-man band who thinks he’s the Clash.”

“Many people in the UK have given up on the US, but by nominating a black man for president, you’ve really got our attention.”

English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg once called himself “a one-man band who thinks he’s the Clash.” There was the boldness, the brashness, the English-ness, the mix of punk and politics. Over the years, Bragg has crafted a persuasive body of music, merging the personal and the political, and he’s advocated socialism and worker solidarity from the stage. With Wilco, he composed two albums of songs from Woody Guthrie’s unpublished lyrics. He released his latest CD, Mr. Love & Justice (Anti-), this spring, and he plays Somerville Theatre this Tuesday and Wednesday.

Let’s start with the Clash — a force throughout your creative life.
I managed to get to the age of 20 without doing anything political, and they were the catalyst, the band that politicized me, really made me see how music and politics could be mixed. They played Rock Against Racism, and that induced me to take my first political action, going to the march in 1978. [Organized by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, the march, in April, from Trafalgar Square to the East End, culminated in a huge concert featuring the Clash and others.] I realized this was the issue that was going to define my generation: opposition to discrimination of all kinds. The Clash was a band full of contradictions. They didn’t change the world. You can’t change the world through music, but you can give people a different perspective on the world. By evoking the Clash, I make people realize we’re not alone trying to do this.

With the program “Jail Guitar Doors,” you’re helping to get guitars into prisons. Why?
You can take ’em back to your cell; you can use it as therapy. That’s how I use the guitar. When I’m feeling a bit low, I’ll sit down and have a strum, and it gets me to another place. And that’s what we’re trying to facilitate.

You always seem to show up in America before our Presidential elections.
It really gives me an opportunity to make a contribution to the debate. I’m a foreigner, I don’t have a vote, but I can add my voice, and over the years I’ve said, “When you vote for president, you vote a president for all of us, so be careful next time.”

Morning Light

TOM MEEK — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:51:32 GMT

A curio of a documentary
If it weren’t for the ritzy camera work and the trumped-up soundtrack orchestrated by directors Paul Crowder and Mark Monroe, this tub would be dead in the water.

It takes a pillage

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:15:06 GMT

Amon Amarth lead the Viking death-metal pack
When I finally get Amon Amarth vocalist Johan Hegg on the phone, I feel as if I’d woken a giant.

CREDO: “I’m not a religious guy,” says Hegg, “but the whole idea and the whole way of thinking that Vikings had became almost a philosophy of life.”

Ragnarök and roll: Great moments in culturally appropriated Viking history. By Daniel Brockman.

When I finally get Amon Amarth vocalist Johan Hegg on the phone, I feel as if I’d woken a giant. It has taken several intrepid attempts by the band’s tour manager, Wolfgang, to summon him from slumber, but when he saunters to the phone to discuss his band’s sacking and pillaging of North America on their current tour with Ensiferum, Belphegor, and the Absence (it comes to the Palladium this Saturday), the towering and intimidatingly bearded frontman is soft-spoken and contemplative. Does he perceive a growing trend of myth-metallers in the last few years, what with bands like High on Fire and the Sword Americanizing myth-laden European truncheon metal? “In a way, yes. There’s a lot of bands out there doing this, and there’s been an increase in the last couple of years. It’s not a problem, though, for us: we know who we are and where we come from, so we’re going to continue to do what we do, and we hope people will remember that.”

You can see where Hegg gets this peace of mind: Amon Amarth have been at it for 16 years, weathering two decades of metal trends. Although they faltered slightly with their aborted first release, 1993’s Thor Arise (which included a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” that is significantly less awesome than fellow Swedes the Cardigans’ 1995 version), they went on to perfect their particular brand of epic, mythically accurate chug metal over the course of eight full-lengths, crystallizing their precision and attack on this year’s presciently titled (in this time of financial and socio-political ruination) Metal Blade release Twilight of the Thunder Gods.

Deriving their name from an Elvish-language name for Lord of the Rings’ Mount Doom, Amon Amarth have always catered to a metal audience that craves, along with the bluster and aggression, big sounds and bigger myths. How crucial is the mythology to the music? “I don’t know if the myth is so crucial to it. There’s a lot of interesting subjects in mythology to bring into metal, but I think that ultimately it’s about writing good songs. I never really wanted to preach to anybody when writing our lyrics, or tell anybody what to think, so I try to write metaphorically instead, using mythology to make interesting stories so that people can get something out of it. I get inspired by this stuff; if somebody else gets inspired or gets something out of it, that’s fine. If they just think it’s a cool song, that’s fine as well.”

Mad dissent

CHRIS FARAONE — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:33:03 GMT

NYOIL at Northeastern
Few rappers practice what they teach, but Staten Island’s NYOIL — a former member of the early-’90s outfit the U.M.C.’s and current revolutionary rap stalwart — acts as loudly as he rhymes.

Ladyhawke | Ladyhawke

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:28:19 GMT

Modular (2008)
Multi-instrumentalist Ladyhawke presents us with a treasure trove of found blips, as if the 1980s had been nothing but a mirror ball to smash and paste back together

Pedal | Pedal

DEVIN KING — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:27:04 GMT

Staubgold (2008)
Any undergrad who has a few Satie discs in his or her collection — for studying and making out! — would find the same passive ambiance on this album.

MF Doom & Madlib | Madvillainy 2

GUSTAVO TURNER — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:23:43 GMT

Stones Throw (2008)
Madvillainy 2, not the much expected follow-up to the groundbreaking Madlib + Doom 2004 collaboration but a radical remix of the original album.

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.

Soup to completely nuts

BARRY THOMPSON — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:34:05 GMT

Rise Against at T.T. the Bear's, October 7, 2008
I half-expected Rise Against to play their obligatory hits for 20 minutes and say “goodnight”; instead, they tore it up for well over an hour.

Roots Manuva | Slime and Reason

ANDREW GRAHAM — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:35:54 GMT

Big Dada/Ninja Tune (2008)
The richest fruit of British rap’s gestation period is the growing catalogue of Roots Manuva.